Month: April 2007

It was 1814, and the United States and Great Britain had been at war for two years. The city of Baltimore had been preparing for an eventual attack, but sitting in the way of the British was Major George Armistead, commander of Fort McHenry ¹Named after James McHenry, a Scotch-Irish immigrant and surgeon-soldier who became Secretary of War under President George Washington, Fort McHenry was built to defend the port of Baltimore from future enemy attacks after America had won its independence. It was positioned on the Locust Point peninsula which juts into the opening of Baltimore Harbor, and was constructed in the form of a five-pointed star surrounded by a dry moat. and his bunkered forces in Chesapeake Bay. Knowing that an attack would come from the sea, Major Armistead commissioned Mary Young Pickersgill, a local Baltimore flag maker, to sew a flag for the fort “so large that the British will have no difficulty seeing it from a distance.”

Pickersgill had learned flag making from her mother, Rebecca Young, who made ensigns ²An ensign is a distinguishing flag of a ship or a military unit, or a distinguishing token, emblem, or badge, such as a symbol of office. and continental standards during and after American Revolution. After marrying and moving to Philadelphia, Mary returned to Baltimore, widowed and with a small child. She established a flag-making business out of her home. Through her trade she supported her family by designing, sewing, and selling “silk standards, cavalry and division colours of every description.” She created signal and house flags for the U.S. Army, U.S. Navy, and merchant ships that visited Baltimore’s harbor.

When asked by Major Armistead to sew the flag, she created in just 6 weeks an American flag measuring 30×42 feet with the help of her daughter, two nieces, and two servants. Each stripe was two feet wide and each star was two feet from tip to tip. As a result the flag could be seen from several miles away from the fort.

When the British attacked Baltimore, Francis Scott Key, a lawyer aboard the British ship HMS Tonnant, saw Pickersgill’s flag while he was held captive and was inspired to compose the poem that became the national anthem of the United States. Pickersgill’s flag, being restored, is the centerpiece of the redesigned National Museum of American History at the Smithsonian Institution. ³The material for this piece came from the Maryland Women’s Hall of Fame and Wikipedia.

Bwana Devil, a 1952 film written, directed, and produced by Arch Oboler, is considered to be the first color, American 3-D feature film. It starred Robert Stack (of “Unsolved Mysteries” fame), Barbara Britton, and Nigel Bruce. And on top of all that it started the 3-D film boom!

Some legacy, huh?

Screen writer Milton Gunzburg and his brother Julian thought they had a solution for the declining attendance with their Natural Vision 3-D ¹Natural Vision 3-D is shot with a special camera rig comprised of two cameras, producing a “left eye view” and a “right eye view.” The two resulting film strips are put together to form one film strip. film process. They tried to shop it around Hollywood, but no one really had any interest. Columbia and Paramount passed on Gunzberg’s pitch. 20th Century Fox introducing CinemaScope and weren’t interested in throwing another viewing experience into the mix . Only one man, John Arnold, who headed the MGM camera department, liked it enough to convince his bosses to purchase an option on the technology, but they let their option lapse.

To the Gunzbergs, it appeared that the Natural Vision technique of filming was doomed and they were back to square one until a man named Arch Oboler wanted a meeting with the them. Oboler, producer and writer of the popular radio show, Lights Out ²Lights Out was a radio program featuring “tales of the supernatural and the supernormal.” At the time it was immensely popular, and was one of the first horror programs., was impressed enough to option it for his next film, The Lions of Gulu.

The film was based on a well-known event at the time, the killing of more than 120 workers building the Uganda Railway for the British at the turn of the century. The incident was also the basis for “The Man-eaters of Tsavo“, a story written in 1907 by J.H. Patterson, the hunter who tracked and killed the animals.

Bwana Devil premiered on November 26, 1952 at the Paramount Theatres in Hollywood and Los Angeles, CA. The critics hated it but it was a smash with audiences. Local premieres followed in San Francisco on December 13, Philadelphia, Dallas, Houston and San Antonio openings on December 25 and New York on February 18, 1953.

United Artists bought the rights to Bwana Devil from Oboler for $500,000 and a share of the profits put the film into wide release in March. After other studios saw the big profits that UA was bringing in with Bwana Devil, other studios raced to release their own 3-D films and a cool, albeit short lived, trend was begun. ³An explanation of the Natural Vision 3-D process came from Dimension 3 and the rest of the information for this piece came from Wikipedia.

Schoolhouse Rock, the series of 41 cartoon shorts that used catchy tunes and repetition to teach kids watching Saturday morning cartoons about math, American history, grammar and science, began as a brainstorm of David McCall when, in 1971, he noticed that his son could sing popular song lyrics but couldn’t handle simple multiplication tables. His solution was simple: Create a catchy way to learn math by fusing it with contemporary music and, he reckoned, the kids would be able to memorize their math through songs.

McCall was chairman of the New York ad agency McCaffrey & McCall, and he put the problem to his underlings. They suggested he hire Bob Dorough, a Texas jazz musician known for creating catchy music to create the songs. Dorough was willing to give the idea a shot, and he plowed through his daughter’s math books, making up tunes on his piano until he’d created the trippy ballad “Three Is a Magic Number.”

McCall loved Dorough’s song, and the tune was eventually released as a record by Capitol Records under the title Multiplication Rock. A workbook deal fell through, but Tom Yohe, McCaffrey & McCall’s creative director, thought that the songs would go well with animation, so, after doodling some pictures, which McCall once again loved, they put together a 3 minute film to accompany “Three Is a Magic Number”, which they showed to ABC’s head of children’s programming, Michael Eisner. Eisner was receptive to the idea and gave McCaffrey & McCall the go ahead to create films for the rest of the multiplication tables. General Mills was brought on as the sole sponsor of Schoolhouse Rock.

Eisner also demanded that the big animation studios of Hollywood that made their Saturday morning cartoons cut 3 minutes from each show so that the animated shorts could be run. The studios were not too eager to comply, but after prodding by Eisner that it made good business sense, the relented.

Schoolhouse Rock premiered on the weekend of January 6-7, 1973, with the play list being “My Hero Zero,” “Elementary, My Dear,” “Three Is a Magic Number” and “The Four-Legged Zoo.” The shorts were aired for 12 years, ending in 1985. ¹The information for this piece came from the omnipresent Wikipedia and the totally great School House Rock Site.