Animation Fun Facts for March 16, 2017

Birthdays: James Madison, Conrad Nagel, Dr. Josef Mengele the Angel of Death, Teresa Berganza, Christa Ludwig, Pat Nixon, Alice Bonheur, Harper Goff, Gore Verbinsky, Jerry Lewis is 91, Bernardo Bertolucci is 77, Eric Estrada, Kate Nelligan, Isabelle Huppert is 64, Lauren Graham is 50

1850- Nathaniel Hawthorne's novel The Scarlet Letter published.

1898- Artist Aubrey Beardsley died of tuberculosis at 25. Having a religious conversion at the end of his life, but still the stickler for detail, his last words were :" Destroy all my erotic drawings...all the bad ones too...." Luckily for history his friends did neither.

1934- Disney’s short The Three Little Pigs won an Oscar for best animated short.

1961- Walt Disney comedy The Absent Minded Professor with Fred MacMurray premiered.

2007- Author Michael Crichton was the author of classics like The Andromeda Strain and Jurassic Park. He had been called the H.G. Wells of modern times. But today he shocked the scientific community by denouncing the theory of Global Warming.

Animation Fun Facts for March 15, 2017

Birthdays: Andrew Jackson, Lee Schubert-one of Broadways Shubert Brothers, Ry Cooder, Sly Stone, Harry James, Lightnin' Hopkins, Rev. Jimmy Swaggart, Judd Hirsch, Norm Van Brocklin, Sabu, Fabio, Reni Harlin, David Cronenburg is 74, Eva Longoria is 42, Simpsons director David Silverman

1915- Universal Studios formed. Carl Laemmele bought a huge track of Burbank farmland and set up his studio. Laemmele had wooden bleachers built next to the movie sets where he charged people a nickel to come watch the filming. Universal actually had been operating as a film company since 1912 but the company counts today as its birthday.

1933- Young animator Chuck Jones first hired at Leon Schlesingers Looney Tunes cartoon studio.

1941- The daughter of Cecil B. DeMille, Katherine DeMille, had married actor Anthony Quinn. This day tragedy struck the family. On a visit to Cecil B.’s estate the couple’s three year old son Christopher walked off into neighbor W.C. Fields yard where he fell into Fields unsupervised swimming pool and drowned. The parents were so shattered they divorced afterward. Anthony Quinn refused to talk about the rest of his long life. Fields was so depressed he had the pool filled in and landscaped so no reminder of the tragedy would remain.

1944- The DeHAVILAND CASE- A judge ruled actress Olivia DeHaviland free of her exclusive seven year personal contract to Warner Bros.. For years movie stars like Bette Davis, Barbara Stanwyck and James Cagney had been fighting in court the system of exclusive contracts the studios used to keep them under control. They had no choice in the type of films they did, no residuals and studios could rent them out to other studios for higher fees and keep the money. 

If the actor complained they were put on disciplinary leave by the studio without pay and the penalty time added onto the end of their contract. Garbo called it the closest thing to White Slavery. Some contracts even ordered some stars not to get married for fear it would erode their sex appeal. The DeHaviland Case broke that system and allowed actors to make their own deals.

1956- Lerner & Lowe’s musical "My Fair Lady" premiered.

1977- Television sitcom Threes Company debuted.

1985- Symbolic.com is assigned the first registered private domain site on the Internet.

2002- Blue Sky’s hit animated film Ice Age premiered.

Animation Fun Facts for March 8, 2017

Birthdays: Sophocles, Carl Phillip Emmanuel Bach, Hannah Hoes Van Beuren- the First Lady for Martin Van Beuren, Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr., Alan Hovhannes, Kenneth Grahame the author of the Wind in the Willows, Cyd Charisse, Charlie Pride, Mickey Dolenz, Alan Hale Jr., Jim Rice, Aiden Quinn is 58, Freddy Prinze Jr is 41, Jim Bouton- baseball player, author, and inventor of Big League Chew bubble gum

1941- Writer and playwright Sherwood Anderson dies from pterioteritus- internal bleeding- after swallowing a toothpick at a cocktail party.

1941- The National Television System Committee set up by the FCC to standardize television technology recommended an industry standard of 525 scan lines at 30 frames a second- what we now call after their name- NTSC. England later adopted the PAL (Phase Alernation Line) of 625 lines, 25 frames per second and France the SECAM System (Systeme Electronique Couleur Avec Memoire).which is also a 625 line, 25fps system.  This is why British t.v. shows like the Prisoner always looked so grainy on American sets and American shows look so garish on British sets. By garish I mean the color, not the content.

It also speeds up the film during video from 24 frames to 25fps (i.e. 4%)...which is why in England and the rest of Europe, all Hollywood movies are 4% shorter and the voices of the actors all sound a little squeaky. The way to remember NTSC is "Never-The-Same-Color'. DVD and BluRay went to a thousand- scan lines. The invention of digital screens is making most of this irrelevant.

1973- Paul McCartney was fined 100 pounds for growing marijuana on his farm Mull of Kintyre.

1977- Ralph Bakshi’s film Wizards premiered.

1994- Don Ku invented the ubiquitous little wheeled black suitcase with collapsible handle that bumps into your legs at airports today.

Animation Fun Facts for March 7, 2017

Birthdays: Maurice Ravel, Piet Mondrian, Roman Emperor Geta, Luther Burbank, Tammy Fae Baker, Willard Scott, Lynn Swann, Franco Harris, Daniel D. Travanti, Rachel Weisz is 46, Michael Eisner is 75, Wanda Sykes is 53, Peter Saarsgard is 46, Bryan Cranston is 61

1988- 300 pound female impersonator Harry Milstead, better known as Divine in the John Waters films, died of sleep apnea.

1999- Film director Stanley Kubrick died just five days after completing his final film Eyes Wide Shut.

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Animation Fun Facts for March 6, 2017

Birthdays: Michelangelo Buonnarotti, Cyrano De Bergerac, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Phil Sheridan, Lou Costello, Ivan Boesky, Ring Lardner, Gabriele Garcia-Marquez, Valentina Tereschkova the first woman in space, Tom Arnold, Kiri Te Kanawa, Rob Reiner is 70, Alan Greenspan, DC Mayor Marion Barry, Stephen Schwartz is 69, Ed McMahon, Shaquille O’Neal is 45, Will Eisner would be 100!

1921- The film Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse premiered. The first Hollywood film to earn over one million dollars, and it made a major star out of Rudolf Valentino..

1978- Hustler Magazine publisher Larry Flynt was shot and crippled by a lunatic.

1979- The film The China Syndrome premiered. It was about an accident at an American nuclear power plant. Three weeks later the real Three Mile Island accident occurred, boosting the box office. " It's spooky, it's enough to make you religious" said star Michael Douglas.

1989- Time Inc. merged with Warner Communications to become Time Warner, the largest media conglomerate in the world. They were bought by AOL in 2000 but AOL proved to be dead weight and they resumed control as TimeWarner in 2003.

1992- The film The Lawnmower Man premiered. It featured early motion-capture CGI imagery, and claimed to have the first virtual reality sex scene.

1998- The Big Lebowski opened in theaters. The Dude Abides…

ANIMATION FUN FACTS FOR MARCH 5, 2017

Birthdays: Henry III of England, Giovanni Batista Tiepolo, Explorer Le Sieur de Cadillac the founder of Detroit, Hector Villa-Lobos, Howard Pyle, William Oughtred 1574- inventor of the Slide Rule, Red Rosa Luxemburg, Rex Harrison, Dean Stockwell, Paolo Pasolini, Andy Gibb, Samantha Eggar, Andrej Wajda, Fred Williamson, Penn Gillette is 61, Eva Mendes is 42, Kevin Connolly is 42

1717- Giovanni Tiepolo joined the Guild of Saint Lawrence, the artists union in Rome.

1868- Englishman C.H. Gould patented the first stapler.

1922- F.W. Murnau’s eerie film Nosferatu premiered in Berlin.

1963- Country star Patsy Cline died in plane crash near Camden Tenn. Also killed were singers Cowboy Copas and Hacksaw Hawkins.

1982 - John Belushi died of drug overdose at Chateau Marmont hotel on Sunset Strip. He had done twenty heroin-cocaine speedballs in just 24 hours. A woman named Cathy Smith was charged with administering to him the fatal dose. Robin Williams was with him that night partying also but left early. Belushi was 31. Someone scrawled on Belushi’s tombstone:" You could have given us more laughs.....But  NNNOOOO!

1995- Vivian Stanstall, lead singer for the Bonzo Dog Band, died in a fire in his London flat. He had been smoking in bed.

Animation Fun Facts for March 4, 2017

Birthdays: King Henry II Plantagenet, Antonio Vivaldi, Prince Henry the Navigator of Portugal, Count Pulaski, Miriam Makeba, Nancy Wilson, Bernard Haittink, John Garfield, Knute Rockne, Chastity Bono, prizefighter Ray Boom-Boom Mancini, Patsy Kensit. Katherine O’Hara is 63, James Ellroy, Mykleti Williamson. Ward Kimball, Ken Duncan

1924- The song “Happy Birthday to You” copyrighted by Claydon Sunny.

  

1936- Screenwriter Dudley Nichols publicly refuses the Best Screenplay Oscar for John Ford’s “The Informer” as protest in support of the struggling Writer’s Guild.

1946- Alex Raymond's comic strip 'Rip Kirby" premiered.

1952- Ronald Reagan married Nancy Davis at the Little Red Church on Coldwater Canyon blvd. in L.A. William Holden was their best man.

1952- Ernest Hemingway wrote a letter to his publisher:" I've completed a new novel. I think it's my best one to date." The Old Man and the Sea.

1956- Burger King introduced their signature hamburger the Whopper.

1960-Famed American opera baritone Leonard Warren collapsed and died on the stage of the Metropolitan Opera in the 2nd act of Verdi's La Forza Del Destino.

1961- In the early stages of filming Cleopatra in London, actress Elizabeth Taylor developed pneumonia and slipped into a coma. She would have died, had not doctors at a convention at London’s Dorchester Hotel performed and emergency tracheotomy. When you seen the film today you can still see the tracheotomy scar at the base of her throat.

1994- 375 pound comedian John Candy died of apnea in his sleep. He was 43.

2000- The Japanese launch of Sony Playstation 2. The most anticipated videogame launch in history. 600,000 units were sold. One store in Tokyo’s Ginza had 4,000 people lined up at their door.  It remained a hot for 13 years.