Part of coming to the end of a year is looking back at where we’ve come from. Part of that is also remembering the animation people who left us in 2006. Here, in no particular order, are a few of the ones I’m thinking of.

Joe Barbera- Story artist, director and co-creator of the Hanna & Barbera pantheon of characters.

Ed Benedict- The character designer who created the Flintstones, Yogi and Boo Boo, Quick Draw McGraw and BabaLouie. I once realized how much intelligence went into those characters when I got to handle some of them in 1978 for a show called Yogi's Galaxy Goofups. In fifteen minutes you can draw Yogi like you’ve draw him all you’re life. You can animate him on ones or limited. None of this is an accident, a lot of thinking went into those designs.

Alex Toth- the master comic book artist of DC comics, who I knew as the designer of the Superfriends, Space Ghost and the Herculoids. I still recall working on scenes with the Toth Batman, drawing the back of his head with that one bold, straight line from the base of the neck to the tip of his bat ears. If you were trying to make quota, you hoped for Batmans because they were so easy to draw.

Myron Waldman and Berny Wolf- the last two surviving Max Fleischer animators and probably the last two living animators from the silent era. Myron directed a few of the Fleischer Supermans and Berny animated the ghost dancing to Cab Calloway’s voice singing the Saint James Infirmary Blues.

Bill Kovacs- A programmer on Disney’s TRON, he was one of the developers of MAYA, the worlds leading animation tool.

Sid Raymond- who gave voice for Paramount cartoons like Baby Huey and Katnip.

Norm McCabe- Gentle, funny Norm, with his long Beatles cut hair. Looney Tunes animator and director of the wartime spoof the Ducktator.

Walerian Borowczyk- Polish surrealist animator who made films that influenced Terry Gilliam and Jan Svankmajer. In the 1970s he moved to Paris and directed high quality porn.

Jan Svochak- stalwart NY animator who did Punchy, the Hawaiian Punch character.

And my two old animation friends John Collins in Toronto and John McCartney in London.

We miss them and we hope that if is there is a Valhalla for animation people, they are taking their places among the illustrious of our curious field . Like Robert Howard the creator of Conan the Barbarian wrote:

All done, all fled, now lift me upon the pyre, the feast is over and let the lamps expire….

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Birthdays: Woodrow Wilson, Robert Sessions, Earl "Fatha" Hines, Maggie Smith, Edgar Winter , Stan “The Man” Lee, Martin Branner the creator of Winnie Winkle, Denzel Washington is 52, Johnny Otis, Martin Milner (1-Adam-12),Lew Ayres, Lou Jacobi,

Feast of the Innocents-commemorates the Massacre of the Innocents, when King Herod the Great ordered the first born of Nazareth slain. In Spain and many Latin American countries this is a kind of April Fools Day, the victim of a practical joke being proclaimed an "innocent".

1869- CHEWING GUM- William Semple of Mount Vernon Ohio received a patent for chewing gum. Since early times frontiersmen and Indians had the habit of chewing on a piece of pine resin or sap. The oldest chewed piece of gum was found in Sweden in a glacier in 1993. It is 9,000 years old and no, it wasn’t found under a theater seat. As early as 1842 Charles Curtis was selling spruce chewing gum from his home in Bangor Maine.
In 1869 a Staten Island photographer named Thomas Adams made friends with exiled Mexican dictator Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna, he of the Alamo fame. Adams noticed the old general didn’t smoke but liked to chew a plug of tree sap he called “Chicle”. Adams took the chicle and put a candy shell around it, getting rich on the invention of Gum Balls. Santa Anna hoped the invention would finance his return to power in Mexico City but that never occured. Gumball machines appeared in 1918, Bubble Gum in 1928.

1895- THE BIRTHDAY OF CINEMA- In Paris at the Grande Cafe des Capuchines the Lumiere brothers combined Edison's kinetoscope using George Eastman’s roll film with a magic lantern projector and showed a motion picture to an audience in a theater. Back in the U.S. Thomas Edison thought the idea of projecting film in a theater was foolish and would never catch on. They called their device a Cinematograph, hence the word Cinema is born. The screening included dancers and people leaving a factory, but the biggest reaction out of the audience was from shots of waves crashing on a rocky beach. The audience jumped for fear of getting wet. In the audience was a magician named George Melies who was inspired to use the new device to invent motion picture special effects.

1897- Edmond Rostands famous play CYRANO DE BERGERAC premiered in Paris. There really was a poet-duelist in the 1640’s named Cyrano de Bergerac-Servigan but little was known about him. Rostand created the hopelessly big nosed hero, who helps another man romance his true love. DEGUISE: “Have you read Don Quixote? Reread the part about tilting the windmills. One who tilts with windmills can be cast down into the mud.” CYRANO:” Or up into the stars!”

1914- THE FIRST TRUE CHARACTER ANIMATION- Windsor McCay's "Gertie the Dinosaur" premieres as part of a vaudeville act. Up to then most U.S. animations were attempts to bring popular newspaper comic characters to life, but Gertie was a new character never before seen. Some critics had wondered if animated characters weren’t some kind of man in a special suit, so McCay drew a dinosaur, a character that couldn’t possibly be impersonated by a living thing. The brilliant draftsmanship and timing of this film would inspire the generation of Animation artists of the Golden Age of the 1930's-40s.

1928- Last recording of Ma Rainey, The Mother of the Blues.

1928- Louis Armstrong recorded West End Blues.

1944- ON THE TOWN a musical written by Betty Comden & Adolf Green, and young composer Leonard Bernstein premiered in NY.