Writer of Pop Culture

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This Day in Pop Culture

This Day in Pop Culture for January 25

The very first Emmy Awards, Spirograph and 101 Dalmatians.

January 25, 2020

2–3 minutes

1949: The Very First Emmy Awards

On this day in 1949, the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences held the very first Emmy awards ceremony. It was held at the Hollywood Athletic Club in Los Angeles. Television was still fairly new as it is estimated that only about 50,000 households in the US had TV sets. The Emmy statue was created to represent art (a muse) and science (the atom) and the name “Emmy” was a “feminized version” of “immy,” the slang term for the image orthicon tube that was used in TV cameras at the time. Go figure. The first award went to Shirley Dinsdal , a ventriloquist who starred in the children’s show, Judy Splinters. (Image: Wikimedia)

1966: Spirograph Received a Patent

The story of Spirograph goes way back to 1827, when Peter Hubert Desvignes, an architect and engineer created what was known as a “Speiragraph”, a device to create elaborate spiral drawings.

Originally, the device was created to prevent banknote forgeries with variations of roulette patterns. However, it was British engineer Denys Fisher who is credited with inventing the Spirograph. After building the earliest versions of the mechanism using Meccano (a popular model construction toy in the UK similar to an Erector set), Fisher’s children encouraged him to market it as a toy. He applied for a patent in 1964 and received one two years later. Since that time, kids have been making crazy designs with Spirograph ever since.

1961: ‘One Hundred and One Dalmatians’ is Released

Based on the book with the same name, the animated film 101 Dalmatians opened in theaters. The movie was Walt Disney Animation Studios’ 17th animated film. It just might have saved the studio. Disney’s last film, Sleeping Beauty was beautiful but very expensive to make and unfortunately, audiences didn’t flock to it.

Dalmatians was cheaper to make because Disney used xerography during the inking stage of the filmmaking and the movie was very popular. It was the tenth top grossing film of that year. The film has been so popular, it was re-released in theaters four times, a direct to video movie was created, an animated television series was done, two live action movies have been made and a third one focused on villain Cruella De Vil.

Fun fact: It is estimated that the movie included 6,469,952 spots from the Dalmatian pups.