Today is National Ceral Day. On this date in March of 1897, Dr. John Kellogg served corn flakes for the first time to his patients at his hospital in Battle Creek, Michigan. They wouldn’t be sold commercially until 1906.
In honor of National Cereal Day remember to have the true Breakfast of Champions in celebration today!
March 7, 1936 -
Walt Disney's Mickey's Grand Opera, premiered on this date.
I'm not a big Disney fan (especially Mickey Mouse) but this one is pretty funny. Donald Duck underwent a major face lift after this cartoon.
March 7, 1955 -
Peter Pan, the first full-length Broadway production broadcast in color, (starring Mary Martin and the show's original cast) was broadcast on this date.
It was so well received that the musical was restaged again live for television on January 9, 1956. Both of these broadcasts were produced in color, but only black-and-white kinescope recordings survive.
March 7, 1960 -
After a month’s absence, Jack Paar had re-appeared as the host on The Tonight Show on this date.
He had walked off in protest against censorship before returning to his position as host of this production. He had made a joke about a “water closet” (European bathroom), which most likely would have been considered mild according to the standards set today.
March 7, 1962 -
The Alain Resnais' enigmatic masterpiece, L'Année dernière à Marienbad (Last Year at Marienbad), opened in the US on this date.
I'll tell you the plot - a man meets a woman at a European spa and tries to convince her (and himself) that they met one year ago. According to screenwriter Alain Robbe-Grillet, the movie is a pure construction, without a frame of reference outside of its own existence - just watch it.
March 7, 1964 -
John Frankenheimer's under- appreciated almost documentary-like thriller set set during WWII, The Train, premiered on this date.
In reality, the museum's paintings were indeed loaded into a train for shipment to Germany, but fortunately the elaborate deception seen in the movie was not really required. The train was merely routed onto a ring railway and circled around and around Paris until the Allies arrived.
March 7, 1975 -
Felix finally moves out of Oscar's apartment at 1049 Park Ave. when The Odd Couple aired the final episode Felix Remarries, on this date.
While this was the final first-run episode that aired, Your Mother Wears Army Boots was the last episode that was filmed.
March 7, 1980 -
Michael Apted's Loretta Lynn biopic, Coal Miner's Daughter, starring Sissy Spacek, Beverly D'Angelo, Tommy Lee Jones and Levon Helms premiered in US theatres on this date.
Beverly D'Angelo and Sissy Spacek did all their own singing. Director Michael Apted also wanted Spacek to sing all of the songs live, feeling he could capture the realism in all of the performing scenes. Luckily Sissy Spacek and Beverly D'angelo were both accomplished singers in their own right and could easily handle this request.
March 7, 1983 -
New Order released their song Blue Monday, as a 12-inch on the Factory Records label on this date.
The track, one of the longest charting singles ever, at 7:25, went on to become the biggest-selling 12-inch single of all time.
March 7, 1986 -
This was a Red Letter Day for Daniel Day Lewis.
Lewis was relatively unknown in the US at that time and critics raved about how great the range of his talent was to play such vastly different characters. (It's called acting)
March 7, 2014 -
Another home movie by Wes Anderson and his pals, The Grand Budapest Hotel, starring Ralph Fiennes, F. Murray Abraham, Adrien Brody, Willem Dafoe, Jeff Goldblum, Harvey Keitel, Jude Law, Bill Murray, Edward Norton, Saoirse Ronan, Jason Schwartzman, Tilda Swinton, and Owen Wilson, when into limited release worldwide on this date.
According to Wes Anderson, the cast stayed in the same hotel, the Hotel Börse in Görlitz, Germany during principal photography. He insisted all make-up and costume fittings happen in the hotel lobby to speed up filming. The owner of the hotel appeared in this movie as an extra working the front desk of The Grand Budapest Hotel. After filming ended for the day, the crew often returned to find him at the front desk of their own hotel.
Word of the Day
Today in History:
March 7, 1876 -
Alexander Graham Bell receives US Patent #174,465 for his revolutionary new invention - the telephone.
Another episode of The Crazy Mixed-Up Russian Revolution
March 7, 1917 -
Russia's 1917 February Revolution began on March 7, which was then the middle of February, in the city of St. Petersburg, which was then Petrograd, in what was then Russia, but would soon be the Soviet Union.
Russia's peasants and workers had become exhausted by the war and its attendant famine and were exasperated by the Tsarina's indifference to their suffering. They were furious with the government, which had become two governments and therefore twice as bad. And they were tired of all this nonsense about March being February, St. Petersburg being Petrograd, the Czar being Tsar, and all those crazy, mixed-up fronts.
In short, the peasants were revolting. And so these poor bastards began a series of riots and strikes that eventually led to what is now known as the February Revolution.
It was a bleak moment for the House of Romanov, which like most monarchies had endured through the centuries largely as a result of its soldiers' willingness to shoot people.
One Year later:
On March 7, 1918 the Bolsheviks changed their name to the Russian Communist Party.
Bolsheviks is Russian for majority, as opposed to Mensheviks, which means minority. The Mensheviks, however, were in fact the majority party in 1918, and the Bolsheviks the minority, so the name change helped ease the work of journalists, who had become so confused they'd begun writing stories about children and ducks.
March 7, 1923 -
... The only other sound's the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake ....
The popular poem by Robert Frost, Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Evening, was first published on this day in The New Republic.
March 7, 1933 -
Charles Darrow, for some reason claims that he invented The Monopoly board game on this date. Thank your rich Uncle Pennybags.
(Quite truthfully, the history of the Monopoly game is so complicated, for legal reasons, just go with this date, don't ask about Elizabeth Magie's 'The Landlord Game' and her patent of March 23, 1903.)
March 7, 1964 -
I knew I was outspoken when I was a kid because, whenever my parents had company coming over, they would pay me to leave. 'Go see your grandmother. Get out of here.' That was my first paying gig.
Wanda Sykes, actress, comedian, and writer, was born on this date.
March 7, 1945 -
Gen. George Patton urinated in the Rhine after the U.S. Third Army took the bridge at Remagen on this date.
March 7, 1965 -
Protesting the shooting death of Jimmie Lee Jackson (a 26-year-old church deacon from Marion,) by an Alabama State Trooper, a group of more than 600 Civil Rights marchers trying to get to the state capitol in Montgomery, was broken up in Selma, Alabama, on this date.
Coverage of the riot, which was broken up by state troopers with tear gas and whips, was one of the first to get major coverage in the Civil Rights movement and put the national spotlight on the issue.
March 7, 1988 -
Trans actress Divine (Harris Glenn Milstead,) who appeared in several John Waters films, died from sleep apnea on this date. Divine was about to join the cast of Married with Children when she unexpected stopped breathing.
The producers of Married With Children sent flowers to the funeral, along with a humorous card that read, If you didn't want to do the show, you could have just SAID something!
March 7, 1999 -
Anyone who has ever been privileged to direct a film also knows that, although it can be like trying to write 'War and Peace' in a bumper car in an amusement park, when you finally get it right, there are not many joys in life that can equal the feeling.
Stanley Kubrick, who directed 13 films, including Dr. Strangelove, A Clockwork Orange and 2001: A Space Odyssey, died in Hertfordshire, England, at age 70 on this date.
And so it goes.
1 comment:
the peasants were revolting, indeed
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