October

OCTOBER 1ST
1945 - Looney Tunes director Frank Tashlin left animation to work full time at Paramount doing live action movies. He wrote for the Marx Brothers and later directed the Dean Martin Jerry Lewis comedies.
1992 - The Cartoon Network cable channel starts.

OCTOBER 2ND
1950 - THE BIRTH OF "PEANUTS" - Charles Schulz's "Peanuts" comic strip debuts. Good ol' Charlie Brown was the name of a fellow post office worker all the guy's liked to play jokes on. Schulz's idea 'little folks' was initially rejected by all the major comic syndicates. Three months before the strip was accepted his girlfriend broke off their engagement. He had left his job at the postoffice and she was convinced he would never amount to anything. Today Charles Schulz has mountains on the moon named for his characters and is arguably the richest artist on earth.
1958 - "The Huckleberry Hound Show" premieres.

OCTOBER 4TH
1955 - "The Mickey Mouse Club" TV show debuts.

OCTOBER 6TH
1927 - JOLSON SPEAKS! "The Jazz Singer" brings in the era of Talking Pictures. Although not the first talkie, it was the first sound movie to be really successful. The first sound film appeared in 1924, and in 1926 a film called "Footlights of New York" was released with sound. But it was the combination of Al Jolson and a Hollywood-style premeire at the Egyptian Theater on Hollywood Blvd that marks the begining of the sound era.

OCTOBER 12TH
1937 - Under pressure from Paramount, Max Fleischer signs the first animation union contract and settles the Cartoonist strike begun May 8th.
1994 - Steven Spielberg, Jeffrey Katzenberg and David Geffen announce their new partnership in a studio later to be called Dreamworks SKG.

OCTOBER 13TH
1978 - Mickey Mouse is awarded a star on Hollywood Blvd's Walk of Fame.

OCTOBER 16TH
1923 - Walt and Roy Disney sign a contract with M.J. Winkler for six Alice in Cartoonland shorts. The Walt Disney Studio is born.
1982 - Citywide animation strike is defeated and producers send most Saturday morning cartoons to be done overseas.

OCTOBER 17TH
1954 - The "Disneyland" television show premiered. Disney became the first major Hollywood studio to break ranks with the studios boycotting television production.

OCTOBER 24TH
1947 - UNCLE WALT GOES TO WASHINGTON - Walt Disney headed a list of "friendly" witnesses testifying to the first House Un-American Activities Committee investigation on Communist subversion in Hollywood. Others that week included Gary Cooper, Robert Taylor and Ginger Rodgers mother. Disney accused reds in the cartoonists union and the League of Women Voters with trying to "subvert the spirit of Mickey Mouse."
*just a note: Is this where the term "rat bastard" got started ?

OCTOBER 30TH
1938 - THE WAR OF THE WORLDS PANIC - Orson Welles' "War of the Worlds" radio broadcast panicked American radio listeners who thought that it was actually happening. Welles adapted H.G. Wells' story to radio by presenting it as a live news broadcast of the unfolding alien invasion from Mars. His favorite story was when John Barrymore heard the broadcast, he boozily opened up his kennels and let all his prize racing greyhounds go, saying "Fend for yourselves!"