Dumbo, the animated film about an elephant who could fly, premiered in American movie theaters 75 years ago today.

Only 64 minutes long, the film is the shortest of the Walt Disney Studios’ animated features. Dumbo was created in part to recoup financial losses incurred in producing Fantasia, which cost more than $2 million to produce and required Disney Studios to invest in sound equipment that it installed in the movie theaters that showed the film. Fantasia did not earn back its budget in its first release. Disney needed a hit, and a hit that did not cost too much to make.

Dumbo‘s animation is less complex than Fantasia‘s, and it is a much shorter movie. The film cost $950,000 to make and it earned almost double that on its first run release. Dumbo remains a beloved film.

“When I See an Elephant Fly” from Dumbo (after the jump):
Read More

The International Meridian Conference of 1884 established on this date that year the Greenwich Meridian as an international standard for zero degrees longitude so that time zones around the globe could be established.

* * * *
Harry Houdini (above) broke his ankle while performing his famous Water-Torture Escape in Albany, New York, in October 1926, but he did not allow this injury to keep him from an engagement he had scheduled in Montreal, Canada.

Ninety years ago today, some art students from McGill University met with Houdini backstage so that one of the students could draw a sketch of the magician and the students and he could discuss one of his lecture topics: exposing frauds, especially fraudulent spiritualists.
Read More

Within the next generation I believe that the world’s rulers will discover that infant conditioning and narco-hypnosis are more efficient, as instruments of government, than clubs and prisons, and that the lust for power can be just as completely satisfied by suggesting people into loving their servitude as by flogging and kicking them into obedience. In other words, I feel that the nightmare of Nineteen Eighty-Four is destined to modulate into the nightmare of a world having more resemblance to that which I imagined in Brave New World. The change will be brought about as a result of a felt need for increased efficiency. Meanwhile, of course, there may be a large scale biological and atomic war—in which case we shall have nightmares of other and scarcely imaginable kinds.—Aldous Huxley, a letter to George Orwell

Aldous Huxley and George Orwell not only wrote two of the twentieth century’s best-regarded dystopian novels—Brave New World and Nineteen Eighty-Four—but they knew each other as well: Huxley, a decade older than Orwell, taught French at Eton when Orwell was a student there and Orwell was one of his pupils.
Read More