Variety (July 27) and IMDB are reporting officially what insiders have been talking about for months: namely that John Lassiter has given the greenlight to John Musker and Ron Clements to create a hand-drawn animated feature at the Walt Disney Studios. They will develop the Frog Princess, and Alan Menken, the composer of the Little Mermaid and Beauty and the Beast, will provide the music. Gloria en Excelsis Deo! The trades are already pooh-poohing the effort, restating the latest corporate-think that traditional films will fail to draw audiences ( pun, I know...). But I think by the time the film will be done, in serveral years time, it would have been long enough from the days of the big 1990s musicals that this will seem novel. And like Leonard Maltin has said " The problem is nothing that another Lion King couldn't fix."
Not that I am against all CG animation, I'm directing a CGI film right now. It just would be good to see some balance. Let artists instead of the market have the choice of whether to tell a story 2D or 3D.
I salute Walt Disney management for their courage and wish Ron & John all the luck!

Birthdays: Confucius, Enrique Granados, Hillaire Belloc, Norman Lear, Maureen McGovern,, Keenan Wynn, Leo Durocher, Peggy Fleming, Bobby Gentry, Jerry Van Dyke, Vincent Canby, Betty Thomas, Jonathan Rhys-Meyers, Ilya Salkind the producer of the Superman movies in the 70s. , David Swift –former Disney animation assistant became the director of the Haley Mills Disney films like The Parent Trap

1880-BATTLE OF MAIWAND: The Afghan leader Ayub Khan's tribesmen destroy a British invasion force. Dr. Watson told Sherlock Holmes he was there . One of the heroes of the battle was a little terrier named Bobbie who was a regimental mascot and was wounded several times. He was brought to London and received a medal from Queen Victoria, but was later run over by a London taxi . I guess Afghanistan was safer.

1940- HAPPY BIRTHDAY BUGS BUNNY. Warners short-"A Wild Hare”-There were several earlier prototypes of the famous rabbit, white with a different voice, but this is the short that launched his career. Bugs says “Whats Up Doc?” for the first time, co-opting a line uttered by Clark Gable while chewing a carrot in the Frank Capra film “It Happened One Night”. Interestingly enough Mel Blanc, the creator of his voice was terribly allergic to carrots. He found he couldn’t recreate the crisp sound of chewing with any other vegetable. So he kept a bucket next to his microphone to quickly spit out the carrots after chewing.

Well, I'm back from vacation, sand on the brain and surf 1n the ear. I heard from Tina Price and my friends at Creative Talent Network that I'm scheduled to do the first booksigning for DRAWING THE LINE on lucky friday the 13th of October at the Gordon Biersch on San Fernando Road in Burbank. These are fun events that CTN does for all us little animation folk. A lot of industry folks show up. More events and signings to follow, in LA as well as in San Francisco and New York City.

Birthdays: Salvador Allende, Serge Koussevitsky, George Bernard Shaw, Gracie Allen,
Carl Jung, Stanley Kubrick, Blake Edwards, George Grosz, Pearl Buck, Jason Robards Jr, Wannabe Disney screenwriter Aldous Huxley, One of my favorite writers- Jean Shepard whos stories were the basis for the film A Christmas Story, Vivian Vance, Emil Jannings, Sandra Bullock is 41, Kevin Spacey is 46, Kate Beckinsdale, Mick Jagger is 62,

1656 – Rembrandt van Rijn declared bankruptcy.

1903 –FIRST TRANSCONTINENTAL AUTO TRIP- Dr. Horatio Nelson Jackson, mechanic Sewell J. Crocker and Bud the Wonderdog in their Winton Touring Car rode into New York City, having left San Francisco sixty-three days before. They are the first to cross the United States by automobile. They did it to win a $50 bet that you could cross the country by auto in 90 days. Jackson won the bet but spent $8,000 of his own money to do it. He was hailed as the Great Automobilist and his car was put on display bedecked with flags.

1951- Charlie Chaplin driven into exile by red-baiters. He was on a holiday to Britain when he learned his visa had been revoked by the U.S. government. He didn't return until 1972. Despite his immense achivements in Hollywood History, when the Hollywood Walk of Fame was dedicated later that year, Chaplin’s name was deliberately excluded.

1959- KPFK , Los Angeles lefty alternative radio of the Pacifica Network, starts up.

1984- Edward Gein died peacefully in a prison for the criminally insane.
Gein was arrested in 1957 and sentenced to life for mass murder. Police found his farm in Wisconsin decorated with human body parts and heads in the freezer and in the stove, and the dried cadaver of his mother. His story inspired "Psycho, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and Silence of the Lambs".

1991 – Childrens comic Paul Reubens aka Pee Wee Herman was arrested in Florida for masterbating in an adult movie theater. The film was Naughty Nurse Nancy. In 2003 he was busted a second time for collecting kiddy porn. Paul Reubens was a graduate of the Disney program character animation department of the Cal Institute of the Arts, the same program that graduated Tim Burton and John Lassiter

1995- After a year of investigation the General Accounting Office noted that all documents pertaining to the Rosswell UFO Incident of 1947 had disappeared or been destroyed. Hmmm.

Birthdays: Artists Thomas Eakins and Maxfield Parrish, Walter Brennan,
David Belasco, Adnan Khashoggi, Imam, Jack Gilford, Illeana Douglas, Estelle Getty,
Matt LeBlanc, Louise Brown the first "test-tube" baby-1978

1788- Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart completed his Symphony #40 in G minor.

1871- Samuel Colt patents the "peacemaker", the most famous Western sixgun.
Gunfighters filed off the barrel sight so it wouldn't catch on your clothes
during a quickdraw, and carried it "5 beans in
the wheel" meaning while walking they kept it set at the one empty chamber,
so it doesn't accidentally go off in the holster and shoot you in the foot,
which might look embarrassing. Most shootists
carried it in their belts or a waist high holster. Wild Bill Hickok carried his
1860 Navy Colts backwards in a red sash. The familiar low-on-the-hip two gun holsters
didn't become common until cowboys
saw them in the Buffalo Bill Wild West Show in the 1880¹s. Colonel Colt got very
rich from his invention, and had an annoying habit of shooting his guns off in courtrooms
and restaurants like Yosemite Sam. His private collection of sixguns is on exhibit at the Gene Autry
Western Museum.

1909-THE WRISTWATCH- Frenchman Charles Bleriot flew the English Channel.
Bleriot had no fuel gauge in his plane. He knew the rate that his plane burned fuel
so he kept a clock in his cockpit to mark the time. But a problem was the engines
vibrations would rattle the clock to uselessness. So he asked his friend
Charles Cartier the jeweler to make him a reliable timepiece free from
vibrations. Cartier created a pocketwatch that you could strap to your wrist
with the clockface showing- the Wristwatch. By World War One wristwatches
supplanted pocketwatches as the standard male accessory.

1940- In Nazi occupied Paris a Gestapo agent walks into the French offices of MGM
studios and confiscates the release prints of "Gone With The Wind." They
are taken to Berlin for a screening for top Nazis officials. Gone with the Wind was one of Hitler¹s favorite movies.

1943- The Birth of L.A. Smog! A newspaper headline from this date mentions a 'gas-attack'
of exhaust and haze that reduced visibility to three short blocks.

1951- CBS conducts the first broadcast of color television. Still NBC made color
tv popular in the mid 1960's.

1953-Chuck Jone's "Duck Dodgers in the 24 and 1/2 Century".

1953- New York City Subway fares rise from 10cents to 15 cents. Subway tokens are
issued for the first time.

1965 ­ Folk Music star Bob Dylan was booed off stage at the Newport Folk Festival
for using an electric guitar. Alan Lomax the great Smithsonian Folk Music historian
got into a fistfight over it and Pete Seeger threatened to pull the electric plugs.

This week we have to honor French Premier Leon Blum, who 70 years ago passed legislation mandating for all French workers a manditory three weeks paid vacation. It later was expanded to six weeks in August. In our current studios where Americans feel guilty about taking even a few days off, six weeks sounds heavenly. And since then the French economy has still blossomed, and companies made profits.

History for 7/23/2006
Birthdays: Ethiopian Emperor Rastafari Halie Selassie "the Lion of Judah", Raymond Chandler, Raymond Booth, Don Drysdale, Gloria DeHaven, Arthur Treacher, Woody Harrelson, Pee Wee Reese, Bob Fosse,
Harry Cohn, Don Imus, Phillip Seymour Hoffman, Charisma Carpenter, Slash, MarlonWayans, Monica Lewinsky , Daniel Radcliffe the Harry Potter star is 17

1599- Michel Caravaggio received his first commission for a painting.

1866- The Cincinnatti Reds Baseball club formed. The oldest continual professional
baseball team in the U.S.

1886- This was the day Bowery saloonkeeper Steve Brodie claimed he jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge, inspiring a great Bugs Bunny cartoon.

1904 ­ The Ice Cream Cone created by Charles E Menches during the LA Purchase Expo.

1908 -Turkish Sultan Abdul Hamid IV is deposed by a group of militant army officers demanding modern reforms called the Young Turks.

1932-The Birthday of Fritos. Texas ice cream maker Elmer Doolin buys a recipe for corn chips from a Mexican fry cook for $100 dollars and starts the Frito-Lay Company.

1962- The first simultaneous television broadcast via the new TelStar communications satellite from America to Europe.

1968- Fred Blasie won an unprecedented fifth World Wrestling Championship belt. Blasie later gained more fame for recording the comedy song "Pencil Necked Geeks".

2004 ­ two armed men enter the Munch Museum in Norway and steal Edvard Munch¹s masterpiece. The Scream at gunpoint. Several of the culprits have been apprehended, but the Scream is still missing.
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