QUIZ: Was A Charlie Brown Christmas (1965), the first animated TV special?

Yesterdays Question answered below: What was Newman’s Laugh-O-Grams?
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History for 12/18/2007
Birthdays: Antonio Stradivari, Karl Maria Von Weber, Czarina Elizabeth-1709, Ty Cobb, George Stevens, Ozzie Davis, Diane Disney-Miller, Anita O¹Day, Paul Klee, Betty Grable, Willy Brandt, Keith Richards, Leonard Maltin, Alyssia Sanchez-Vaccario, Rachel Griffiths, Ray Liotta is 53, Katie Holmes is 29, Steven Spielberg is 61, Brad Pitt is 44, Christina Aguilera is 27

1679- THE ROSE ALLEY AMBUSCADE- Writer and critic John Dryden was walking in the Rose Alley in Covent Garden when a group of thugs jumped him and beat him up. They had been hired by The Earl of Rochester because of a satirical essay making fun of him was attributed to Dryden. Other writers like Voltaire suffered similar attacks from aristocrats who couldn’t take a joke.

1783- The American Revolution now over, George Washington appeared before Congress in Philadelphia to resign his army commission and go home to Mount Vernon. The president of Congress was Thomas Mifflin, his former aide who was removed after trying to politic behind Washington’s back to have him removed for incompetence. This moment was when George Washington parts company with most conquerors like Cromwell, Napoleon and Castro. He had power, but then walked away. Kings George III and Louis XVI were amazed when they heard the news: That Washington, the great generalissimo, the most powerful man in the Americas, would give up his power so lightly in order to return to his farm like some legendary Roman -Cinncinnatus, to be exact. Washington was called out of retirement five years later to be the first U.S. president.

1787- New Jersey named the third state.

1812-NAPOLEON'S RETREAT FROM MOSCOW ENDS -Napoleon reached Paris by sled after racing ahead of his shattered army to prop up his tottering regime.
Of Napoleon's 600,000 troops that invaded Russia less than 60,000 frozen wretches came out. Insanely brave Marshal Ney was the last invader to recross the border. Alone with bullets whistling past his ears, he calmly crossed the burning Neiman River bridge stopping to pick up abandoned muskets to fire them at the Russians. After he fired a last shot he threw the empty rifle at them. When Napoleon got to his palace at Saint Cloud he was so dirty from the trip the guards didn't recognize him and wouldn't let him in. His first official acts after the public announcement of the Russian Campaign’s disaster was ordering the Paris ballet dancers to dance barelegged instead of in tights. While that topic dominated gossip his second act was to give the French people a big tax cut. Watching Louis XVI lose his head in the Revolution gave Nappy a healthy if cynical respect for the anger of the average citizen.

1890-The first electric powered subway train opened in London. This allowed the subways to be built in closed tunnels (or tubes) under buildings. The older steam engine tube trains operating since 1863 needed an open trench for the coal smoke to be let out.

1912- THE PILTDOWN MAN- An announcement was made, of a find, in a peat pit, in England, of the remains of a human ancestor between ape and man, the so-called "Missing Link". The skull had canine teeth like an animal but it had an enlarged cranium like a man and was buried with primitive tools. This find was made at the time Darwin’s Evolutionary theories were being hotly debated. The authenticity of the Piltdown Man was thrown into question in 1949. When modern dating techniques were perfected, by 1953, the Piltdown Man was officially declared a hoax. The remains were too modern to be ancient and the canine teeth had filed down by tiny files. It is generally believed that a practical joker named Martin Hinton at the British Museum of Natural History may have been the perpetrator.



1919- in France Composer Cole Porter married divorcee Linda Thomas. They stayed together all their long lives even though she knew from the outset that he preferred male companionship.

1931- Gangster Jacky "Legs" Diamond had a penchant for recovering after being shot repeatedly by pistols and shotguns. It was said he had so much lead in him he could attract a magnet. Today someone finally shot him down and he didn't get up.

1937- Mae West does a comedy routine on national broadcast radio with Don Ameche about Adam and Eve that was considered so racy CBS banned her from their network.
At the same time she got fined by the networks for joking about ventriloquist puppet Charlie McCarthy:" Hmmm…he’s all wood and a yard long!"

1939-Max Fleischer's animated classic “Gulliver's Travels”. To many animators, the best use of motion capture to date.

1944- MOE BERG AND THE NAZI EINSTEIN. Head of the German atomic program, Prof. Werner Heisenberg gives a lecture on S-matrix physics in Zurich, Switzerland. In the audience was Moe Berg, allied spy, amateur physicist and catcher for the Washington Senators (sounds ridiculous but true). Before the war Berg and Heisenberg were both friends with Danish physicist Neils Bohr, hence his invitation. The U.S. intelligence officers gave Berg a pistol and instructed him to stand up and shoot Heisenberg dead on the spot if he felt from the talk that the Nazis were close to finishing their Atomic Bomb. Moe Berg coolly schmoozed Heisenberg at the reception afterwards and even walked him home but did nothing. In the 1950's Berg was a frequent contestant on quiz shows. Recent scholarship claimed Heisenberg deliberately delayed and sabotaged his experiments because he was anti-Nazi but letters from Heisenberg to Bohr found in 2002 show he was trying as hard as he could to give Hitler nuclear weapons.

1956- TV Game show To Tell the Truth made its debut. Bud Collier hosting, and panelists like Kitty Carlisle, Bennett Cerf, Orson Bean and Dorothy Killgallen as panelists.

1960- An eccentric man named Jerry Garcia was dishonorably discharged from the army. He had done things like drive a tank into a field then walk away. He was AWOL 8 times in one year. After leaving the army Jerry Garcia became a hippie musician in San Francisco and in 1966 formed the rock band the Grateful Dead.

1961-" In the Jungle, the mighty jungle, the lion sleeps to-night…a winoweh, etc. " this song by the Tokens goes to #1 in pop charts.

1966- Chuck Jone's 'How the Grinch Stole Christmas' premiered.

1970- An atomic leak, at a Nevada weapons stockpile, caused hundreds to flee.

1972- President Nixon announced that despite all the war protestors and outcry he would continue to carpet-bomb North Vietnam and Laos until he got the negotiated settlement he wanted.

1975- Rod Stewart announced he was leaving the band Faces for a solo singing career.

1978- SAG strikes Hollywood again for residuals. (again...)

1984- Chris Guest married Jamie Lee Curtis at Rob Reiner’s house .

1997- Saturday Night Live Comedian Chris Farley was found dead in his Chicago apartment in the Sears Tower, surrounded by empty food containers and porn magazines. The chubby 31-year-old had been partying for 17 straight hours doing cocaine, heroin, vodka and crystal-meth. His last words were to an exhausted prostitute:" Please don’t leave me."Chris Farley was scheduled to be the voice of the character Shrek; Mike Myers now took over.

1998- Dreamworks feature cartoon the “Prince of Egypt”, or, as it was known in Hollywood,"The Zion King".

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Yesterdays Question: What was Newman’s Laugh-O-Grams? ( the Answer was so nicely put by reader Frank Gladstone, I reprint it with his kind permission).

ANSWER: Newman Laugh-0-Grams was Walt Disney's first animation company (in association with the Newman chain of movie theatres then in Kansas and environs). It developed from Walt's working partnership with Ub Iwerks, after the two of them met at the Kansas City Slide and began doing animation at Kansas City Film Ad Company. The Laff-O-Grams were animated short films, take-offs on well known fairy tales with modern sensibilities, designed to be shown in the Newman theatres before the feature film and other vaudeville fare. The last film in the series, made before Walt's little company packed up and moved to California, was a precursor to the "Alice in Cartoonland” series.

I might add there is currently an effort in Kansas City to restore and preserve the original building.