Tom Sito's Animation Almanac for Dec 8, 2021

Birthdays: Horace (Quintus Horatius) 65BC, Mary Queen of Scots, Gustavus Adolphus, Queen Christina, Jean Sibelius, Camille Claudel, George Melies the father of Motion Picture Special Effects 1861, Elzie C. Segar (Popeye), Joel Chandler Harris (Uncle Remus), James Thurber, Richard Fleischer, Eli Whitney, Jim Morrison, Diego Rivera, Emile Reynaud, Sammy Davis Jr, Maximillian Schell, Flip Wilson, Sam Kinison, Teri Hatcher is 57, Sinead O’Connor is 55, Kim Basinger is 68

1660- Mrs. Margaret “Peg” Hughes played Desdemona in Shakespeare’s Othello at the Vere St Theatre in London. Mrs. Hughes was the first woman to appear on an English stage. All during the Elizabethan Era, boys substituted for women on stage. Legend has it when a play which King Charles II was watching suddenly stopped. When he sent servants to see what the problem was, it was found that the man that was supposed to play one of the female parts was still shaving. Odds Fish! sayeth the King. And lo, the ban was lifted.

1868- According to Jules Verne’s novel Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, tonight is the night Captain Nemo’s fantastic submarine the Nautilus attacked and sank a US warship and captured Professor Aronax and harpooner Ned Land.

1881- RINGSTRASSE THEATER FIRE IN VIENNA. Two hundred people were killed when fire broke out during a performance of Offenbach's "Duchess du Gerolstein". 

1913- Ground broken for the construction of San Francisco’s Palace of Fine Arts.

1923- Developer S.H. Woodruff flipped the switch to illuminate the completed Hollywood Sign. Originally Hollywoodland, the “land” fell off eventually, as did the light bulbs.

1891- George O'Brien invented the electric tattooing needle, making modern tattooing possible.

1940- Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo remarry. The two great Mexican artists had been married for ten years but divorced for a year because of their mutual infidelities. Diego also wanted to protect Frida from fallout from his political activities. But after a year apart that decided they couldn’t live without one another and remarried. 

1958- THIS IS JAZZ- Landmark live CBS television broadcast of jazz greats Billie Holiday, Count Basie, Lester Young , Coleman Hawkins and Thelonius Monk .

1961-"Surfin’" the first record by the Beach Boys started to climb the local LA pop charts.

1963- Frank Sinatra Jr was kidnapped in Lake Tahoe. After four tense days he was released unharmed.

1980- The Bravo Channel began. 

1980- JOHN LENNON MURDERED.  As he went in to his apartment building the Dakota in New York City, Beatle-composer John Lennon was stopped by a fan named Mark David Chapman for an autograph. A few hours later Lennon emerged from the building on another errand. Chapman was still there, except this time he pulled out a gun and shot Lennon 4 times in the back. John Lennon was 40. The area of Central Park across from the apartment was dedicated to him as Strawberry Fields. 

1991- Steven Spielberg’s Hook premiered. 

Tom Sito's Animation Almanac for Dec 7, 2021

Birthdays: Willa Cather, Larry Bird, Piero Mascagni, Madame Tussaud-1761, Johnny Bench, Louis Prima, Ted Knight –real name Wladsyslaw Konopka, Victor Kiam II, Noam Chomsky, Ellen Burstyn-real name Edna Mae Gilhooley, Harry Chapin, Clarence Nash the voice of Donald Duck, Eli Wallach, Tom Waits is 72, Jeffrey Wright is 57 

  

1842- The New York Philharmonic, the oldest symphony orchestra in the U.S., gave its first concert, performing works of Beethoven under the baton of Ureli Corelli Hill.

1872- The Los Angeles Library Association formed.

1919- “Blind Husbands” premiered, the first film by Erich Von Stroheim. Originally a Viennese hat salesman, Stroheim cultivated his Germanic aristocratic image on the silver screen. The premiere issue of the New Yorker in 1923 glibly noted how “Mr. Stroheim has grown a very stylish “Von” in the Southern California Sun”.

1942- An RAF bomber pilot named Lumsden filed a report about seeing a UFO following his plane in the night skies over the English Channel. British pilots nicknamed the unexplained lights Foo Fighters, after a phrase in a comic strip.

1945- The microwave oven patented.

1964- Height of student uprising at Berkeley College in California. Students won more liberalized curriculum and open teaching and created the first major student protest of the tumultuous 1960's and earned Berkeley the national reputation of the nations most radicalized school. The Oakland police were later nicknamed the Blue Meanies after the villains in the Beatles cartoon Yellow Submarine.

1974- The disco song “Kung Fu Fighting” by Carl Douglas hit #1 in the pop charts.

Tom Sito's Animation Almanac for Dec 6, 2021

Birthdays: King Henry VI of England-1422, English Puritan General George Monck-1608, John Eberhard 1822, builder of the first large pencil factory in the US, John Singleton-Mosby the Grey Ghost, Henry Jarecki, Baby Face Nelson, William S. Hart, Ira Gershwin, Dave Brubeck, Agnes Moorehead, Tom Hulce is 68, Wally Cox, Lynn Fontaine, Steven Wright, JoBeth Williams, Judd Apatow is 53, Nick Park is 64

1877- First edition of the Washington Post.

1915- MAX FLEISCHER PATENTED THE ROTOSCOPE- This system enables you to film an actor then draw the cartoons over the still frames of the live action to achieve a realistic motion. (an early form of Motion Capture) Max would film his brother Dave in a clown suit then draw Koko the Clown over him. Dave had already owned the clown suit because he had been seriously considering a change in careers. The Fleischer's New York studio would be Disney's chief rival for most of the 1920's-30's.

1933- U.S. Federal Judge Woolsey decides James Joyce's "ULYSSES" is not a dirty book and can be published in the U.S by Viking Press. The book had been out in Europe since 1922. 

1942- Val Lewton’s movie The Cat People with Simon-Simon premiered.

1960- Baseball’s American League granted an expansion franchise team to old cowboy singer Gene Autry, the California Angels.

1964- The first concert at the Los Angeles Music Center.

1964- Rankin Bass' TV special 'Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer' first broadcast. And it has run every year since.

1969- The Rolling Stones do the last big rock festival of the 60s in Altamont California. The festival turned ugly when Hells Angels motorcyclists, hired to guard the stage, started fighting with fans. One man, Meredith Hunter, was killed. 

Animation Fun Facts for Dec 5, 2021

Birthdays: Pope Julius II, Martin Van Buren, Walt Disney would be 120, Fritz Lang, Eugene Debs,  George Armstrong Custer, Little Richard Penniman, Strom Thurmond, Otto Preminger, Lin Piao, Calvin Trillin, Joan Didion, Jim Plunkett, Jose Carrerras, Margaret Cho is 54

1704- In Hamburg, towards the end of the opera Cleopatre, composer Georg Frederich Handel and soloist Johann Mattheson started bickering over who should bow and receive the audiences applause.  As the curtain came down and the cheers rang out, Handel and Mattheson began furiously wrestling over the harpsichord. Finally they rushed out into the snowy public square and fought with swords. The audience followed them and cheered on this unique encore. Neither was hurt in the end, and they even made up over their next opera.

1766- London auction house Christies held it’s first auction.

1791-MOZART DIED- The 35 year old composer was slaving away on a commission for a Requiem Mass when he died of scarlet fever and kidney failure complicated by exhaustion and alcoholism (and he didn't work in animation ). His last words was telling his student Sussmeyer how to form the percussion for the Requiem.  Mozart was buried in a pauper's grave, and when his wife came to mourn him a few days later nobody could recall where he was buried. 

1837- Hector Berlioz chorale Requiem premiered.

1854- Aaron Allen of Boston patented the theater chair that folded up so you could exit.

1912- New York Hat directed by D.W. Griffith starring Mary Pickford and Lionel Barrymore premiered. The first movie script written by 19 year old Anita Loos to be produced. The first American women to be a staff screenwriter, she became one of the finest Hollywood screenwriters and Broadway playwright, who penned films like Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and Gigi. She helped discover Douglas Fairbanks and Audrey Hepburn. She died in 1981 at age 93.

1938- The FCC concludes there was no malicious intent in Orson Welles Halloween broadcast of The War of the Worlds, and no fines would be imposed.

1947- Paramount’s “Santa’s Surprise” the first Little Audrey cartoon. The short was directed by Bill Tytla for Famous Studios. He designed Little Audrey based on his own daughter Tammy.

1952- The Abbott & Costello Television Show premiered. Hilary, Mr Fields and Stinky. “ Niagara Falls! Slooowwlly I turn! Step by Step! Step by Step!” 

1953- Russian Composer Sergei Prokoviev died, but the news was overshadowed by the death of Stalin.

1974- The Seattle Seahawks football team formed.

1974- The BBC aired the last Monty Python show.. 

2002- Peter Jackson’s second part of his Lord of the Rings trilogy “ The Two Towers” opened.

Tom Sito's Animation Almanac for Dec 4, 2021

Birthdays: Chief Crazy Horse, Samuel Butler*, Thomas Carlyle, Lillian Russell, Vasilly Kandinsky, Buck Jones, Wink Martindale, Max Baer Jr., Robert Vesco, Charles Keating, Wally George, Deanna Durbin, Pappy Boyington, Horst Bucholtz, Rainer Maria Rilke, Jeff Bridges is 72, Marisa Tomei is 57, Tyrah Banks is 48, Johnny Lyon of the band Southside Johnny and the Asbury Jukes, Jay-Z is 52, Fred Armisen is 55

*"Life is one long process of getting tired."- Samuel Butler.

1791- The London Observer, called the oldest continually published newspaper in the world, first published. True, the Times was begun in 1788 but it had a spotty release it’s first few years while its publisher would be thrown in prison for libel.

1875- William Marcy “Boss Tweed” escaped Ludlow Street jail and fled to Cuba. He had been the corrupt boss of New York City politics throughout the 1860s and 70s.  He was rearrested in Spain by a Spanish policeman who spoke no English. When asked by American diplomats why, the Spaniard said he saw a newspaper cartoon by Thomas Nast of Tweed in prison garb with his hands on two young boys. So, he thought he was a kidnapper! Tweed was brought to justice by the one crime he probably never did.

1881- First issue of the Los Angeles Times.

1909- The first Canadian Football League championship the Grey Cup, U of Toronto defeated Toronto Parkdale 26-6

1927- The Cotton Club opened as a speakeasy nightclub in Harlem. Owners were New York gangsters Owney “The Killer” Madden and George “Big Frenchy” DeMange. Duke Ellington’s orchestra highlighted the opening night. When other gangsters tried to open a rival The Plantation Club, Owney had his hoods firebomb the place. The Cotton Club was one of the great centers of the Harlem Renaissance, but African Americans were banned from eating or drinking at the tables. Even W.C. Handy was turned away.

1931- “ Its alive! Its alive!” James Whale’s macabre masterpiece film “Frankenstein” opened at the Mayfair theater in NY.  English actor William Henry Pratt renamed Boris Karloff played the monster.

1932- “Good Evening Mr & Mrs. North and South America and All the Ships at Sea! Let’s Go To Press!” Newspaper columnist Walter Winchell began his famous radio broadcasts on the NBC Blue Network. Winchell became one of the most powerful voices in American society and politics for 23 years.

1941- The animated film “ Hoppity Goes to Town"-opened. Max Fleischer's last gamble to keep up with Walt Disney and keep his studio alive. Songs written by top pop song writer Hoagy Carmichael. However the events of Pearl Harbor three days later not only sink the American Navy, but also Hoppity's box office and put Max and Dave out of a job. 

1948- “Hey...Stella!!  A Streetcar Named Desire opened on Broadway with Marlon Brando and Jessica Tandy.

1954- Jim McLamore and Dave Edgerton attended a demonstration of fast food serving techniques by two California brothers named MacDonald. This day in Miami, McLamore and Edgerton opened the first Insta-Burger, later renamed Burger King.

1955- French mime Marcel Marceau appeared on American TV for the first time.

1958- Cocoa Puffs cereal invented.

1961- Someone at the Museum of Modern Art in NY noticed that they had hung Henri Matisse’s painting Le Bateau upside down. It had been that way for two months, and until now nobody had noticed.

1963- The first Instant Replay camera used at a football game. It was an Army-Navy game.

1965 - Jerry Garcia, Bob, Phil, Bill, and Pigpen first convened as the Grateful Dead to play as the house band for Ken Kesey and the Prankster's Acid Test in San Jose, California. The Dead went on to break records, bend minds, and build a community that continued on for many years.

1985- The first Cray X-MP Supercomputer booted up. 

1985- Steven Spielberg’s production Young Sherlock Holmes, directed by Barry Levinson premiered. It featured the CG breakthrough Stain Glass Knight animated by John Lasseter. Despite this, the film failed, and its failure made Disney change its movie title Basil of Baker Street to The Great Mouse Detective.  

1988- Actor Gary Busey almost died in a motorcycle accident on Olympic Blvd. In Los Angeles. He was not wearing a helmet and suffered massive head trauma. He later claimed to have an out-of-the-body experience at the scene. 

1993- Rocker Frank Zappa died of prostate cancer at age 52.

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Tom Sito's Animation Almanac for Dec 3, 2021

Birthdays:  French King Charles VI the Well-Served 1380, Gilbert Stuart, Sven Nykvist, Joseph Conrad- real name Josef Korzeniowski, Jean Luc Godard, Nino Rota, Jim Backus, Maria Callas, Larry Parks, Charles Pillsbury, Mitsuo Fuchida the Japanese pilot who led the attack on Pearl Harbor, Darryl Hannah is 61, Katerina Witt, Brendan Fraser is 53,  Marisa Tomei, Julianne Moore is 61, Andrew Stanton, Amanda Seyfried is 36

749AD- This is the Feast of Saint John Damascene. He’s the saint who’s called the Father of Christian Art, because he theologically argued a way for artists to avoid the “No Graven Images “ hitch in the Ten Commandments, so we could make paintings of Jesus and the Saints.

1890- A small British army marches into Uganda, and camping on a hilltop called Kampala informs the local chief Mwanga that he is now part of the British Empire, whether he liked it or not. The British officer even made Mwanga sign the treaty twice, because he felt his first ink splotch was done insincerely. Uganda remained a British colony until 1956.

1894- In Samoa, writer Robert Louis Stevenson was opening a bottle of wine, when he paused and cried “ What’s that?”, then he looked at his wife and said “ Does my face look strange?” Then he collapsed and died of a cerebral hemorrhage. He was 44.

1919- Impressionist painter Pierre August Renoir died at age 79. Suffering from rheumatoid arthritis, when he could no longer paint with his hands, Renoir used a bit that held the brush in his teeth.

1925- GEORGE GERSHWIN PLAYED CARNEGIE HALL. Gershwin always wanted to be taken seriously as a composer, and not just a Tin Pan Alley songwriter. While in Paris he met Maurice Ravel, but instead of giving him advice, Ravel said: "You make HOW much from your songs? Maybe I should learn from you!" When he asked to be Arnold Schoenberg's pupil, Schoenburg told him :" Why do you want to be a bad Schoenburg, when you're already such a good Gershwin?"

1931- Happy Birthday Alka Seltzer! The fizzy tablet was invented by chemist Maurice Treener for the Dr. Miles Medicine Company of Indiana.

1934- Lee Blair, Disney artist and brother of Preston Blair, Disney artist, married Mary Browne Robinson, Disney artist. She became the most famous of them as Mary Blair.

1948- Happy Ozzy Day! Ozzie Ozbourne is 72- ”I never set out to be a businessman. I just wanted to have fun, f—k chicks, and do drugs.”

1948- Walt Disney’s Mickey and the Seal, debuted. Directed by Charles Nichols.

1965- The Beatles release the album Rubber Soul.

1968- Elvis Presley opened in Las Vegas to rave reviews and packed houses. It marks the beginning of his comeback and his transition from thin, black leather-jacketed youth to fat, rhinestone jumpsuit, half tinted sunglasses, karate-swinging middle age. 

1976- During a photo shoot for a Pink Floyd album cover at London’s Battersea Power Station, a 40 foot long inflated pig broke away from its’ tether and floated away to become a hazard to civil aviation. The AeroPork was lost to radar at 8,000 feet.

1991- Hulk Hogan defeated Undertaker to become WWF champ for the 4th time.

1997 – 56 year old Darlene Gillespie, an original member of the Mickey Mouse Club, was busted in LA for a securities fraud scheme.

Tom Sito's Animation Almanac for Dec 2, 2021

Birthdays: George Seurat, Charles Ringling, Julie Harris, Gianni Verasce, Monica Seles, Cathy Lee Crosby, Lucy Liu is 54, Britney Spears is 41

1697- Saint Paul’s Cathedral in London reopened. It was rebuilt by Sir Christopher Wren after being destroyed in the Great Fire of 1666.

1877- Camille Saint Saens opera “Samson & Delilah” premiered in Weimar.

1896- We remember Wyatt Earp as the marshal of Dodge City and gunfighter of the 1881 OK Corral gunfight. He was better known to his people of his own generation as the referee of the Fitzsimmons-Sharkey Heavyweight Championship prizefight in San Francisco. After leaving Tombstone Arizona, Wyatt Earp drifted to San Francisco where his skills as a fight referee were called upon for this last of the big bare-knuckle bouts. He enraged the public when he declared the fight for Sharkey in the 3rd round after Big-Bob Fitzsimmons couldn't stop bleeding. More people were out to kill him over this decision than were ever out to get him over the OK Corral. He quickly pulled up stakes and went to the Yukon for the gold rush.  He was all but forgotten until a little book called Wyatt Earp Frontier Marshal published in 1920 made him famous. 

1933- Voice actor Clarence “Ducky” Nash began working at Walt Disney. He would create the voice for Donald Duck and his nephews.

1935- Animator Marc Davis first day at Walt Disney Studios. He retired in 1978.

1965- Walt Disney live action comedy That Darned Cat, with Dean Jones and Hayley Mills, opened.

1982- Wild-eyed British comedian Marty Feldman (Igor in Young Frankenstein) suddenly died of a heart attack in Mexico while filming the comedy YellowBeard. He was 48.

1982- The full 13 minute video version of Michael Jackson’s song Thriller, premiered on MTV.