April 26, 1935 -
The Tod Browning MGM comedy-horror film Mark of the Vampire, starring Lionel Barrymore, Elizabeth Allan, Bela Lugosi, Lionel Atwill, and Jean Hersholt, premiered in the US on this date.
Throughout the film, Count Mora (Bela Lugosi) has an unexplained bullet wound on his temple. In the original script Mora was supposed to have had an incestuous relationship with his daughter Luna, and to have committed suicide. After filming began, however, MGM deleted references to the crime (and any remaining references may have been deleted when 20 minutes of footage was removed after the film's preview).
April 26, 1941 -
The Merrie Melodies short, The Trial of Mr. Wolf, directed by Friz Freleng, debuted on this date.
The Wolf's compass has directions to Grandma's House, the Three Bears House, the House That Jack Built, and the Three Little Pigs.
April 26, 1945 -
United Artists wartime drama, Blood On The Sun, starring James Cagney and Sylvia Sidney, premiered in the US on this date.
The Tokyo Imperial Hotel bar seen at the start of the movie is apparently an exact replica of the actual bar situated in the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo which was designed by Frank Lloyd Wright.
April 26, 1950 -
Twentieth Century-Fox released the Cold War drama, shot on location in Berlin, The Big Lift, starring, Montgomery Clift, and Paul Douglas, on this date.
With the exception of Montgomery Clift and Paul Douglas, all military personnel in the film were actual members of the US military on duty in Germany at the time.
April 26, 1954 -
72 years ago, one of the greatest films in world cinema, Akira Kurosawa's iconic Seven Samurai, starring Toshiro Mifune, was released in Japan on this date. A technical and creative marvel, it became Japan’s highest-grossing movie but also was highly influential among Hollywood filmmakers like Martin Scorsese and George Lucas.
This was the first film on which Akira Kurosawa used multiple cameras, so he wouldn't interrupt the flow of the scenes and could edit the film as he pleased in post-production. He used the multiple-camera set-up on every subsequent film.
April 26, 1956 -
Godzilla debuted in America on this date. (Gojira premiered in Japan on November 3, 1954.)
The American version of the film had 40 minutes of the original excised (mostly the content dealing with World War II or the anti-nuclear message,) and had 20 minutes of the masterful deadpan stylings of Raymond Burr. The American version was released in Japan with Japanese subtitles and did very well.
April 26, 1958 -
The Looney Tunes short, A Waggily Tale, directed by Friz Freleng, debuted on this date.
Rabies in dogs was still a health concern at the time of this short. Modern vaccines have reduced the threat, though the disease continues to be found in bats, skunks, squirrels and other creatures. The sight of a dog foaming at the mouth in 1958 would have created quite a calamitous scene.
April 26, 1967 -
CBS broadcast the documentary, Inside Pop - The Rock Revolution, with the host Leonard Bernstein, on this date.
The program marked the first time that television presented pop music as a legitimate art form.
April 26, 1975 -
B. J. Thomas' song, (Hey Won’t You Play) Another Somebody Done Somebody Wrong Song, was No. 1 on the charts on this date. It is the longest-titled #1 charting song to date.
(Hey Won't You Play) Another Somebody Done Somebody Wrong Song was B. J. Thomas' second #1 hit on the Billboard Hot 100 chart, his other being Raindrops Keep Falling On My Head. I really apologize for this song being stuck in your head for the rest of the day.
April 26, 1978 -
The concert billed as The Band's "farewell concert appearance", was held on November 25, 1976, at Winterland Ballroom in San Francisco. The concert film, The Last Waltz, directed by Martin Scorsese, starring members of the band and many of their friends, premiered in the US on this date.
The Band's management had overbooked the show. Two days before the show, they tried to have Muddy Waters taken off the bill. Levon Helm, The Band's drummer, threatened not to play the show if Muddy Waters was asked to leave. Muddy Waters is in the final cut of the film. Every camera but one ran out of film during his performance of Mannish Boy. It resulted in the longest shot of the film, while Martin Scorsese scrambled to get the film cans reloaded.
April 26, 1978 –
NBC aired a a musical version of The Prince and the Pauper, Ringo, starring Ringo, Art Carney, Angie Dickinson, Carrie Fisher, Vincent Price, John Ritter, and George Harrison narrating, on this date.
Really, don't feel you have to watch the whole thing (it's not very good.)
April 26, 1988 -
We were back in Nam (again) when the pilot episode of China Beach, starring Dana Delaney, Nan Woods, Michael Boatman, and Marg Helgenberger, premiered on ABC TV on this date. (For some reason this series has almost faded into obscurity.)
Several of the storylines, and even some of the dialogue were taken directly from the experiences and recollections of actual Vietnam era military nurses.
April 26, 1991 -
For some reason ABC TV fulfilled Jim Henson dying wish of creating a TV series about puppet anthropomorphic dinosaurs when Dinosaurs aired on this date.
Jim Henson originally got the idea of a live-action show featuring animatronic dinosaurs after he was impressed by the technology his Creature Shop was developing for Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. When this show went into production, the same technology was used to create the Dinosaurs. Many of the Ninja Turtle suit actors worked as various Dinosaur suit actors for the series.
Another album from the discount bin at The ACME Record Shoppe
Today in History:
April 26, 1865 -
Discovered hiding in a farmer's tobacco shed, John Wilkes Booth was shot in the neck by a complete lunatic. Dying and paralyzed from the neck down, he whispers: Tell my mother I did it for my country.
As his hands are held up to his face, Booth mutters "useless...useless..."
They were his last words.
On April 26, 1923 (almost 88 years previously to the date of his great-grandson's nuptials,) the Duke of York married Lady Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon in Westminster Abbey.
This wedding might have slipped into the ephemera of time had the Duke's brother not wanted to marry a woman reported so ugly, many thought her a man in drag. And calling a woman ugly in England is really saying something, as many of the British upper crust often marry their horses out of confusion.
That's British royalty.
Count Basie died on April 26, 1984; Duke Ellington was born on April 29, 1899; Ella Fitzgerald, the "First Lady of Song," was born on April 25, 1917.
That's American royalty.
April 26, 1933 -
Hermann Goering founded the Geheime Staatspolizei, otherwise known as the Gestapo on this date.
The original purpose of this "Secret State Police" is to disrupt and harass opponents of National Socialism, but it will later come to adopt many additional responsibilities.
April 26, 1933 -
When I was in college at UCLA, I took a playwriting course. I was all set to be a writer. But I had to take this acting class as a theater arts major. I had to do this scene in a one-act comedy. I just said this line, and then... this laugh happened. I thought, 'Whoa. This is a really good feeling. What have I been missing?'
Carol Creighton Burnett, the funniest woman in America was born on this day - don't argue with me, I will come to your home and hurt you. I was forced to watch The Carol Burnett Show in my bedroom and not with my family because I laughed so loudly and so hard, no one could hear it.
April 26, 1937 -
It was a beautiful Monday afternoon in Guernica, Spain on this date. At about 3:30 pm the day took a tragic turn. For over three hours, twenty-five or more of Germany's best-equipped bombers, accompanied by at least 20 more Messerschmitt and Fiat Fighters, dumped one hundred thousand pounds of high-explosive and incendiary bombs on the village, slowly and systematically pounding it to rubble.
Guernica had served as the testing ground for a new Nazi military tactic - blanket-bombing a civilian population to demoralize the enemy. It was wanton, man-made holocaust.
The bombing was the subject of a famous anti-war painting by Pablo Picasso.
April 26, 1937 -
Due to a publishing error, LIFE magazine was printed without the word "LIFE" on the cover on this date.
April 26, 1962 -
The NASA Ranger 4 spacecraft crashes into the Moon after sixty-four hours of flight, on this date.
The probe’s mission was to rough-land a seismometer capsule on the Moon, to collect gamma-ray data in flight, to study the radar reflectivity of the lunar surface, and to continue testing the Ranger program for development of lunar and interplanetary spacecraft.
So now you know, (this may be on the test.)
April 26, 1977 -
Steve Rubell and Ian Schrager open Studio 54 the world famous New York nightclub, renowned for being extremely difficult to get in unless you were famous / well known or considered one of the beautiful people over the years.
Studio 54 closed with a final party on February 4, 1980.
April 26, 1986 -
44 seconds into a late-night experiment at the Chernobyl nuclear power station, reactor number four sustains two large explosions. The exploded at Chernobyl burned for 10 days. About 70% of the fallout fell in Belarus. Damage was estimated to be up to $130 billion. The Soviet news agency TASS held off reporting the incident for almost 48 hours.
A 300-hundred-square-mile area was evacuated and 31 people died as unknown thousands were exposed to radioactive material that spread in the atmosphere throughout the world. By 1998, 10,000 Russian liquidators involved in the cleanup had died and thousands more became invalids. It was later estimated that the released radioactivity was 200 times the combined bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It was later found that Soviet scientists were authorized to carry out experiments that required the reactor to be pushed to or beyond its limits, with safety features disabled.
Oops.
And so it goes.
