Today in History: Oct. 23

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

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):
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Just a Volunteer Here Myself

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

One can not, or one ought not, nickname oneself. This is not a hard-and-fast social rule, but it is similar to the unspoken rule about not declaring oneself humble. The person who volunteers that he or she is humble often is not at all humble. An exception comes when the humble person is speaking self-deprecatingly.

Every once in a while, I have desired a cool nickname, a moniker that precedes me wherever I roam. “Lefty” is a great nickname—Steve Carlton and Phil Mickelson both carry that name with distinction, but I am right-handed. No one goes by the name “Righty.” “Write-y”? No. No one needs a nickname that is a pun, a rhyme no less, and would always need a follow-up explanation: “‘Cause he calls himself a writer, get it?”

“No. No, I don’t.”
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Today in History: Oct. 22

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

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.
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