Since 1994, I have been helping organize an annual memorial for ASIFA/Hollywood and the GUILD to honor all those who have passed away that year. One ancillary result of my efforts is it enables me to learn about facets of the Animation industry I had not known of before.

This year, one of the revelations to my parochial American eyes is the depth of emotion caused by the passing of Oliver Postgate.



Oliver Postgate 1925-2008 was the son of a British MP, a conscientious objector and anti-nuclear protestor who in his soft, gentle way made some of the most memorable British children's programming ever.
IVOR THE ENGINE, BAGPUSS and the CLANGERS.

In 1959 he and his partner Peter Fermin turned an old cowshed into an animation studio. Oliver wrote the stories and did the voices and articulated the cuttouts under a 16mm camera, and Fermin did the visuals. They could sometimes finish up to two minutes of footage a day! For this the BBC paid them 3O pounds an episode.

To many a child growing up in the British Isles in the 60s and 70s, these programs are the warmest of childhood memories.

Check out this video retrospective on U-Tube, and read all the tributes from around the world below. Do a GOOGLE search and check out all the articles about him.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/organgrinder/2008/dec/09/television-television

Shelley Page of Dreamworks wrote me: I don't know who or what was the voice of your childhood - but for Brits of my and Jan's (Pinkava) generation it will always be Oliver Postgate's unforgettable voice - warm, witty and reassuring. He stirred the imagination of a generation as no other animator (with the possible exception of Walt Disney) ever has or will do.

In the Hollywood animation business we endlessly stress over money, status, union contracts and job security. But every once and awhile, we need to step back and be reminded what a wonderful thing we've been allowed to do - that we can touch the hearts of children, and create memories for them that will be there long after we too are gone.

Sometimes, just knowing that is compensation enough.

Thank you Oliver Postgate, for reminding this dumb Colonial what really matters. Congratulations for your amazing career.
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{The ASIFA/TAG sponsored AFTERNOON OF REMEMBRANCE will be held Saturday Feb 7th at the HOLLYWOOD STUDIO MUSEUM at 1:30PM. It is a non-religious program where the animation community remembers their friends and colleagues. Among the 40 other honorees will be Ollie Johnston, Bill Melendez and Eartha Kitt. admission is free and all are welcome}

Quiz: In the discussions of Hilary’s Secretary of State hearings, an analyst casually mentioned Clauswitz. He was a long dead German General from Napoleon’s time. What could possibly be relevant?

Yesterday’s Quiz answered below: With Obama and Gov. Rod Blagoyevich, we are witnessing the spectacle of a new reformist President going to Washington and trying to govern while leaving behind in his home state a petty scandal involving a crooked colleague. Has this ever happened to any earlier presidents?
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History for 1/14 /2009
Birthdays: Dr. Albert Schweitzer, Benedict Arnold, Faye Dunaway is 67, Hal Roach, Raymond Outcault, Cecil Beaton, John Dos Passos, Lawrence Kasdan, Andy Rooney, Julian Bond, Steven Soderbergh is 46, LL Cool J, T. Bone Burnet, Emily Watson

350 a.d.- The feast day of Saint Hilary of Poitiers- Saint Hilary may have been the father of church music. In exile in Phyrgia he noticed pagans sang hymns to their deities, so he composed the first Christian musical hymns. The Halleluiah Chorus, Ave Maria and “Drop Kick Me Jesus Through the Goalposts of Heaven” would follow in due time.

1699- The Puritans of Salem hold a day of fasting and prayer to atone for any people they may have unjustly tortured and executed as witches. Well, at least they said they were sorry.

1900- Puccini's opera "Tosca" debuts in Rome.

1952-The NBC "Today" show debuts with Dave Garroway, Jim Fleming and J. Fred Muggs the chimp.

1954- actress Marilyn Monroe married baseball great Joe DiMaggio.

1957- Humphrey Bogart died of esophageal cancer at age 57. When he was buried at Forrest Lawn, wife Lauren Bacall put in with his ashes a solid gold whistle inscribed with the famous line from "To Have and To Have Not"- 'If you ever need me, just whistle.' The group of friends around Bogie and Bacall were nicknamed ‘The Rat Pack” . After Bogart’s death Frank Sinatra made the Rat Pack famous.

1964- Hanna & Barbera's ' The Magilla Gorilla' cartoon show.

1967- HIPPIES! The first “ Human Be-In” in Golden Gate Park. The Jefferson Airplane and Grateful Dead performed. Allan Ginsburg, Ram Dass and Timothy Leary spoke. LSD was laced into turkey sandwiches, and soon the crowd of 30,000 was stoned. The national media played up the event, and the rest of America first saw the power of the Hippy youth culture, and heard the word like “psychedelic” and Timothy Leary saying “ Tune in, Turn on, Drop out.” It was the prelude to the Summer of Love.

1972- Norman Lear’s hit comedy series Sanford & Son premiered. Starring Red Fox, it was based on the English show Steptoe & Son.

1990-Matt Groenings the Simpsons, which had been run as a series of blackout vignettes on the Tracey Ullman Show, now debuted as its own regular prime time series. Cowabunga!

2004- President George W. Bush declared his resolve to return America to the Moon and make a manned landing on Mars by 2030. To do this he gave NASA only one billion dollars more than their normal budget, while at the same time allocating $1.5 billion to fight Gay marriage initiatives.

2005- The Cassini-Huygens Probe landed on Saturn’s moon Titan.
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Yesterday’s Quiz: With Obama and Gov. Rod Blagoyevich, we are witnessing the spectacle of a new reformist President going to Washington and trying to govern while leaving behind in his home state a petty scandal involving a crooked colleague. Has this ever happened to any earlier presidents?

Answer: BLEEPIN yeah! Franklin Roosevelt was Governor of New York, and just as he was running for the presidency to unseat Hoover, the Mayor of New York City was Jimmy Walker, a loveable rogue that historians agree was” as crooked as a dog’s leg.” Walkers’ corruption finally led to his resignation, and FDR supported the Republican candidate- Fiorello LaGuardia.
The reason why it took awhile for anyone in Congress to take Harry Truman seriously, was he was seen as the protégé of a corrupt Kansas City political boss, Tom Pendergast.
Teddy Roosevelt had the whole corrupt NY Tammany Machine behind him when he became Vice President. When President McKinley was assassinated, Political boss Paul Crocker moaned” Oh no! Now that crazy cowboy is president!”

Quiz: With Obama and Gov. Rod Blagoyevich, we are witnessing the spectacle of a new reformist President going to Washington and trying to govern while leaving behind in his home state a petty scandal involving a crooked colleague. Has this ever happened to any earlier presidents?

Answer to yesterday’s question below; Who is ROY GBIV?
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HISTORY FOR 1/13/2009
Birthdays: Salmon P. Chase, Horatio Alger-1834, Sophie Tucker, Gwen Verdon, Robert Stack, Charles Nelson Reilly, Rip Taylor, Brandon Tartikoff, Armie Archerd, Julie Louise Dreyfus is 48, T.Bone Burnett is 61, Patrick Dempsey, Orlando Bloom is 32

565A.D. THE NIKA SEDITION- In ancient Byzantium like Rome before her, the big spectator sport was chariot racing. Fans went crazy, lots of money wagered and charioteers were celebrities. The choice seats at the Hippodrome and Circus Maximus were not at the finish lines but on the turns because that’s where the most crashes were. Chariots were raced in teams like modern race cars ( Team Unser, Team Ferrari etc.) and were distinguished by their colors. The big teams were the Blues and Greens. The Whites and the Reds were always kind of second rate. They even had their own booster clubs who carried the arguments over races into the streets and beat each other up. On this day the hooliganism of the booster clubs got so out of hand that they rioted in the streets and burned down half of Constantinople. Emperor Justinian had to bring in the legions to restore order. The clubs were called in Latin FACTIOS from where we get the words "fan, factions and fanatic".

1687- Father Eusebio Kino began his missionary work in the Spanish Southwest. He founded several missions in Arizona and helped introduce the horse, pairs of whom were brought over from Spain and released around Santa Fe New Mexico to multiply in the wild. The Italian born Jesuit’s travels also proved that California was not an island as previously thought.

1733- James Oglethorpe reached Charles Town South Carolina with a large contingent of colonists plucked from prisons back in England. His goal was to sail down to the Savannah River and create a new colony to stand as a buffer state between Spanish Florida and the English holdings. He intended to call the new colony after King George,- Georgia.

1847- Gen. Andres Pico signed the capitulation of Campo de Cahuenga (the little park across from Universal studios today), surrendering the Mexican state of Alta-California to U.S. General John Fremont. Fremont, nicknamed "The Pathfinder" was the first Republican candidate for President in 1856 and when the Civil War began he was a General until the confederates made a fool of him and he dropped from public view. During the Civil War Andres Pico served in the Yankee force that defeated an attempted Confederate invasion of California. I guess he figured one change of flag in a lifetime was enough.

1849- Battle of Chillianwalah. The British army under Lord Hugh Gough defeated the Sikh army of Sher Singh and conquered the Punjab. Gough was a blunt old style soldier. When his second mentioned the army was almost out of cannonballs Gough responded:” Good! Then we shall be at them with the bayonet!” This was the first battle where common soldiers’s bravery was “mentioned in dispatches” by the commander. At one point a befuddled major issued the wrong orders to a key troop of cavalry who would have galloped away from the battle but they were rallied by their chaplain. Lord Gough recommended for his initiative the chaplain be raised to Brevet-Bishop.

1854- The Accordion is patented. Polka fans rejoice!

1864-Stephen Foster, the composer of "Old Kentucky Home" and "Camptown Races" was found dead, a penniless drunk in New York's Bowery slum. In his hands was a piece of paper with the words "Dear friends and gentle hearts... ". A Pennsylvania Yankee, despite writing a lot of music about the South, he only visited it once, to New Orleans in 1852.

1872- GRANDDUKE ALEXIS BUFFALO HUNT. Grand Duke Alexis the son of the Czar of Russia visited America. A sportsman, He expressed a desire to go out West and hunt buffalo. The US Government ordered General Custer and Buffalo Bill to afford him every courtesy. Buffalo Bill even talked Sioux Chief Spotted Tail to move his tribes winter encampment 100 miles south so Alexis could visit real wild Indians. Starting today the hunting party hunted and feasted for two weeks leaving behind a trail of champagne bottles and buffalo carcasses. The trip was a great success and Buffalo Bill realized there was big money to be made in showing city slickers and foreigners a taste of the Wild West…

1874- Chang and Eng Bunker were the original Siamese Twins joined at the chest and sharing one liver. Since leaving Thailand they traveled the world with P.T. Barnum showing off their unique physique to paying crowds. They married two women and produced 21 offspring. As they aged they made a deal that they wouldn’t be physically separated until one of them died. This day Chang awoke to discover his brother Eng had died. He frantically called for the doctor to come and separate them. But the doctor was late, and when he arrived Chang had died as well. They were 62.

1895- Oscar Wilde’s play The Ideal Husband, premiered in London.

1898- Under the banner headline "J'Accuse !" a Paris newspaper printed writer Emile Zola's stinging criticism of the French government's handling of the Dreyfus scandal, blowing the whole thing wide open. The army sued Zola for libel, and he went into exile to avoid imprisonment. He returned to France after Dreyfus was pardoned in 1899.

1906- The first ad for a radio appeared in an American Science Magazine. It boasted an effective range of over one mile !

1910- Dr. Lee Deforrest experimenting with his new radio vacuum tubes broadcast singers from New York's Metropolitan Opera for the first time. The regular Texaco 'Live from the Met' broadcasts wouldn't get going until 1934.

1914- Folksinging union organizer Joe Hill was arrested in Utah on trumped up murder charges.

1925- THE FIRST CALIFORNIA GURU- Indian spiritual teacher Abrahamansa Yogananda , then called “The Swami” settled in Los Angeles and gave his first lecture to an audience in LA Philharmonic Hall. He founded the Malibu Self-Realization Center in 1950.

1929- Wyatt Earp died at 81 of prostate cancer in Los Angeles. After careers as a gunfighter, buffalo hunter, Dodge City marshal, prizefight referee, Yukon gold prospector and faroe dealer he finished in L.A. speculating in real estate. He liked to stroll onto Hollywood western movie sets to give advice to Tom Mix and William S. Hart on how they did it in the Old West. He was buried in San Francisco's Jewish Cemetery because his third wife, ex-saloon hooker Sadie Marcus was of that faith. On the subject of the Gunfight of the OK Corral in 1881 he told so many different versions of what happened that his account is considered unreliable.

Wyatt Earp would have died totally forgotten but in his last years he was interviewed by a journalist named Stuart Lake who published a best selling biography in 1931 called Wyatt Earp, Frontier Marshal. After that the movies and TV took up his name to make him the most famous lawman in western history, which would have been a surprise to him.

1930- The Mickey Mouse comic strip first appeared in US newspapers.

1942- In the dead of night the German U-Boat U-123 crept into New York Harbor. The German captain was amazed that although they were at war, the Americans had made no defensive arrangements. The city wasn’t even blacked out, but still illuminated brightly.

1943- Movie starlet Frances Farmer was dragged screaming in a straightjacket out of a Hollywood Hotel and committed. She screamed Rats! Rats! and listed her occupation on her arrest record as “c**ksucker”. Her career was ruined and she spent years in asylums but it’s inconclusive whether she had actually suffered mental illness or it was her mother overreacting to her sullen, temperamental nature.

1945- Sergei Prokoviev’s 5th Symphony ( Classical) premiered in Moscow.

1953-" The Doctor's Plot"- Elderly Soviet dictator Josef Stalin decided life had been dull of late so he decided to launch a new purge and shoot and imprison thousands of people. So today he announced he had uncovered a conspiracy of counter revolutionists and spies to bribe doctors to poison top Soviet officials. Luckily Stalin died before he could kick off his new terror campaign. As he lay stricken with a stroke on his deathbed his doctor was too afraid to treat him.

1957-THE FRISBEE- Two former World War Two pilots, Warren Fransconi and Walter Morrison invented the plastic platter in a San Luis Obisbo home. Originally called Flying Saucers and Pluto’s Platters they got the name Frisbee when they demonstrated it at Yale University. The students there were used to flipping pie platters at each other from the local Frisbee Pie Company, so when they played with the new disc they cried “Frisbee, Frisbee!” which seemed to Warren & Walter a better name. When Morrison died in 2002 his family obeyed his last request- and I’m not making this up- to have his body cremated, his ashes mixed with plastic, and molded into a Frisbee.

1958- Actress Jayne Mansfield married weightlifter Mickey Hargitay. Their daughter was Marisa Hargitay

1985- Carol Wayne, an actress who played bimbo blonde roles on shows like Johnny Carson, drowned while swimming in Mexico. She was 41.

2002- Pres. G.W. Bush almost choked on a pretzel, alone watching football on TV.
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Yesterday’s Question: Who is ROY GBIV?

Answer: He is the way art and science students are taught to remember the colors of the spectrum- Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Indigo, Violet.

Okay, now that the Golden Globes are over, I renew my plea. If you're going to spend the money on glitz and TV, please REDESIGN THE STATUE.



The Golden GLobe got to be the lamest award given. When you see it up close, it's even uglier. You can practically find the seam around the mold, like it was a WORLD'S GREATEST GOLFER statuette at the Hallmark Store in the Mall. Keep the idea of a film strip going around the world, just get a better quality execution of the statue.

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QUIZ: Who is ROY GBIV?

Answer to yesterdays question below. Who said:” This is not the End, nor even the Beginning of the End; it may however, be the End of the Beginning.”…? And what the heck is he talking about..?
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History for 1/12/2009
Birthdays: Pilgrim leader John Winthrop, John Hancock, Edmund Burke, John Singer Sargent, Jack London , Charles Perrault (Mother Goose), James Farmer the founder of CORE, Herman Goering, "Smokin'Joe"Frazier, Tex Ritter, Martin Agronsky, Howard Stern is 54, Rush Limbaugh, Oliver Platt, Wayne Wang, Tiffany, Kirstie Alley is 53, Rob Zombie is 44, John Lasseter is 52

1519-Vasco Nunez de Balboa, discoverer of the Pacific, was convicted of treason and mistreatment of Indians and beheaded.

1669- Buccaneer Henry Morgan convened a meeting of the Captains of the Coast, a council of pirates on board his frigate the Oxford. In their meeting they resolved to attack Cartagena Columbia, a rich Spanish port and staging area for the great treasure fleets. During the drunken celebrations someone fired a gun off in the Oxford’s powder magazine and the ensuing explosion killed 200. Arrrg..Mateys!

1809- A group of Viennese businessmen convince Ludwig Van Beethoven not to move to another city by paying him a yearly allowance. Beethoven continually worried about money and pleaded poverty, yet after his death people found thousands of silver coins hidden in little pots and cupboards throughout his home. He used to charge people three marks to come and look at him through his window while he composed.

1928- Police raid the prestigious women’s college Radcliffe Hall and seize 800 copies of the novel “The Well of Loneliness” because it was considered to promote lesbianism.

1928- Henry Grey and Ruth Snyder are electrocuted in Sing-Sing Prison for the murder of Mrs. Snyder's husband. The love triangle was the inspiration for the films 'Double Indemnity, The Postman Always Rings Twice' and 'Body Heat". Press photographer Thomas Howard taped a small camera to his ankle and snapped a photo of Mrs Snyder frying in the chair. The New York Daily News published the photo on its front page.

1960-” The Scent of Mystery”- the first film in Smell-O-Vision.

1962- President John F. Kennedy signed Executive order 10988, mandating federal workers had the right to join unions and bargain collectively.

1966- Holy Campy Classic ! The t.v. show "Batman" with Adam West and Burt Ward premiered.

1970- The Boeing 747 makes it’s first flight.

1971- “ ALL IN THE FAMILY” Norman Lear's t.v. sitcom about racism and the 60's,
debuts. Based on a successful British show it broke new ground for American sitcoms by frankly discussing prejudice, menopause, rape and other taboo subjects. It’s first show featured the sound of a toilet flushing. The networks were so worried about its explosive content ABC rejected the show twice and CBS ran the first episodes with a long apologetic disclaimer. Carrol O’Connor, the actor who played Archie Bunker was so convinced the show would flop he demanded as part of his contract a round trip plane ticket home. The show ran for 13 years, a bushel of Emmy Awards and made Archie Bunker a folk-hero.

1992-According to Arthur C. Clarkes "2001, a Space Odyssey", the HAL-9000 computer was booted up today.

1987-No mystery, Agatha Christie dies at 88 of natural causes.

1995- Steven Speilberg, Jeffrey Katzenberg and David Geffen announced the name of their new partnership would be 'Dreamworks SKG'. Someone in Florida immediately bought the domain name “Dreamworks.com” and waited for their buyout offer. I heard it was $5,000

1998-The LEWINSKY SCANDAL- Former White House staffer Linda Tripp was frustrated her career in the Bill Clinton Administration was going nowhere. This day she appeared in the office of independent special prosecutor Kenneth Starr with tape recordings she secretly made of her friend Monica Lewinsky, admitting to a sexual affair with the President. Conservative stalwart Starr had been investigating Slick-Willie Clinton for years and after spending $54 million tax dollars hadn’t found much, so he immediately leapt at this opportunity and asked the Attorney General for an extension of his mandate.
Ms. Lewinsky had meant to keep her affair a secret, despite her telling 11 friends. By autumn the resultant scandal brought Washington to a standstill and only the second presidential impeachment trial in U.S. history. President Clinton admitted to the affair but was acquitted and served out his term anyway. Later Ms. Tripp asked the public for donations for her legal defense fund for her violating federal wiretap laws “I am one of you...a David against a Goliath...Even $1,000 dollars would do..” She took the money and got a facelift.

2002-The Refusenik Movement began in Israel when 53 Israeli Army officers announced they refused to enforce the Likud Government’s policy in the West Bank & Gaza.
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Yesterdays’ Question: Who said:” This is not the End, nor even the Beginning of the End; it may however, be the End of the Beginning.”…? And what the heck is he talking about..?

Answer: That was Winston Churchill the last of the great Victorian wordsmiths, on November 10, 1942. He was addressing the nation about the victory of Montgomery in El Alamein, over Rommel, winning the battle for Egypt and turning the tide of WWII.

Quiz: Who said:” This is not the End, nor even the Beginning of the End; it may however, be the End of the Beginning.”…? And what the heck is he talking about..?

Yesterday’s question answered below. Quiz: When you toast someone, why do we raise our glasses or cups and tap them together?
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History for 1/11/2009
Birthdays: Roman Emperor Theodosius 1st, Alexander Hamilton, Gliere, Domenico Ghirlandaio, Mr. Selfridge the London department store guy, Rod Taylor, David Wolper, Lyle Lovett, Ben Crenshaw, Naomi Judd, Stanley Tucci, Amanda Peet is 35

Roman festival Carmentalia, or the Feast of the Nine Muses

1775- Frances Salvador, a South Carolina plantation owner was elected to the colony’s legislature. This makes him the first person of the Jewish faith to ever hold office in America. He was known as the Paul Revere of the South, because he raised the alarm through the countryside when the redcoats approached Charleston. One year later he was killed by British armed Cherokees.

1803 –U.S. diplomats James Monroe and Robert Livingston sailed for France to try and make a deal with Napoleon for the city of New Orleans. Napoleon sells them the entire U.S. Midwest, from Mexico to Montana. Such a deal!

1862- Abraham Lincoln accepted the resignation of Simon Cameron as Secretary of War. Lincoln said:” The only thing that man never stole was a red hot stove.”He replaced him with Edwin Stanton, a lawyer who was the first to get a client off a murder charge with a plea of temporary insanity.

1874- Gail Borden, the inventor of condensed milk, died and was buried beneath a tombstone made to look like one of his milk cans.

1892- French impressionist painter Paul Gaughin, aged 46, married a 13 year old Tahitian girl named Tehura.

1908- President Teddy Roosevelt declared the entire Grand Canyon a National Monument. “The Ages have been at work at it and Man can only mar it.”

1944- Mussolini has his foreign minister Count Ciano and his army chief Marshal De Bono, shot by firing squad. Count Ciano was his own son-in-law.

1948- President Harry Truman called for the creation of free, two year community colleges for all those who desired a college education.

1949- The first recorded snowfall in Los Angeles.

1958- the TV show Seahunt permiered. It made a star out of Lloyd Bridges, the father of Jeff and Beau.

1964- U.S. Surgeon General Luther Terry gave the first warnings against smoking. Which government agency was the first to declare smoking caused lung cancer? The Nazi Government in 1939.

1965- Whiskey-A-Go-Go, the first Disco opened on Sunset Strip in Los Angeles. Discotecque is French for record library.

1995- Warner Bros purchased a dozen metromedia television stations around the US and this day started them off as the WB Network.

2000- America On Line announced its takeover of the worlds largest media conglomerate Time Warner Inc who had earlier merged with Ted Turner. The Walt Disney Company, who had just purchased ABC/Cap Cities, ESPN and Jim Henson, complained to the US Government that Time Warner was creating a monopoly. Uh- huh. After three years of plunging stock prices, Time Warner regained control of itself and reduced AOL to a subsidiary, and will probably sell it off.
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Yesterday’ Question: Quiz: When you toast someone, why do we raise our glasses or cups and tap them together.

Answer: in Dark Ages Europe, political enemies sometimes resorted to poison to get rid of one another. When warchiefs or kings paid a visit to one another, ale or wine was drunk from cups dipped into a big bowl. The host would demonstrate the drink was safe by dipping his own cup at the same time as his guests. He would hold it up as proof, and to show his cup was not empty and he was faking, he clanked them to the others before drinking.