“This Is The Way It Was,” read the tagline for the Hammer Film Productions movie One Million Years B.C. Well, no. The film, which opened in British theaters fifty years ago today, showed Ray Harryhausen-animated dinosaur dolls attacking humans, but it also offered Raquel Welch in a strategically creative (or creatively strategic) fur bikini. (The film opened in American movie theaters in 1967.)

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The Pirates of Penzance; or, The Slave of Duty was performed for the first time on this date in 1879 at the Royal Bijou Theatre in Paignton, Devon, in England. (Poster at top.)
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“I can see that something else died there in the bloody mud, and was buried in the blizzard. A people’s dream died there. It was a beautiful dream … the nation’s hope is broken and scattered. There is no center any longer, and the sacred tree is dead.”—Black Elk, speaking about the Massacre at Wounded Knee

The Massacre at Wounded Knee took place on this date in 1890. A detachment of the U.S. 7th Cavalry opened fire while disarming two Lakota groups at Wounded Knee, South Dakota. The detachment, some 500 strong, quickly killed 90 Lakota men and 200 women and children. (By some estimates many more were killed.) After a three-day blizzard, the dead, scattered where each man, woman, and child fell and died and now frozen to the ground, were buried without ceremony in a mass grave.
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Many years later, Stan Lee told an interviewer that he had been, “The ultimate hack. I was probably the hackiest hack that ever lived. I wrote whatever they told me to write the way they told me to write it. It didn’t matter: War stories, crime, Westerns, horror, humor; I wrote everything.” The “they” for whom he was writing everything was Atlas Comics (previously Timely Publications). He grew fed up and vowed to quit.

His wife Joan suggested that if he was going to quit, why not go out on his own terms and write a comic that he could be proud of. He and artist Jack Kirby created the Fantastic Four, superheroes that retained the “human” part of “superhuman.” He did not quit Atlas Comics, not was he fired. The company eventually changed its name to Marvel Comics, and Lee continued to create characters and story lines that are now a deep part of our culture.

He is even a big enough star in his own right that there are one-sixth scale action figures of Stan Lee available (see in the photo at top).

Stan Lee is 94 today. That is sufficient reason to share this video from 2012 of Mr. Lee reading “Twas the Night Before Christmas” (after the jump):
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