This Day in Pop Culture for December 5

1901: Happy Birthday Walt Disney

Walter Elias Disney was born on this day in Chicago. Not surprisingly, he had a strong interest in drawing and one of his first jobs was working as a commercial illustrator when he was 18 years of age. He then became fascinated with animation and with the help of a borrowed book on the subject and a camera, he began to experiment with the medium at home.

This new fascination led to the creation of Laugh-O-Grams, but those short cartoons didn’t provide enough income to keep the project going, so Walt then created Alice’s Adventure in Wonderland which were a mix of live action and animation which starred Virginia Davis in the main role.

Although at the time New York was the place to be for the cartoon industry, Walt moved to Los Angeles in 1923 because his brother Roy was recuperating from tuberculosis there. Soon after, the two created the Disney Brothers Studio and produced more Alice comedies.

In 1925, Walt hired Lillian Bounds as an ink artist. The next year they were married. In 1927, Walt and Ub Iwerks created Oswald the Lucky Rabbit shorts for Charles Mintz to be distributed through Universal Pictures. By 1928, Disney tried to negotiate a larger fee for producing the Lucky Rabbit cartoons, but instead, Mintz wanted to reduce the payments. When Walt refused, he not only lost most of his staff but also the rights to Oswald forcing him to start all over again with a new character; a little character we now know as Mickey Mouse.

Walt and Lillian had two daughters, Diane and Sharon born in 1933 and 1936. Walt created numerous cartoon shorts, full-length animation pictures, live actions movies and a theme park (with another one near completion) by the time he passed away on December 15, 1966 at the age of 65. (Image TVDB)

2017: Bravo Took It All Off

In 2015, the Danish reality TV series Stripped debuted in Denmark where the contestants would be left with nothing but their birthday suits. The show was based on the documentary My Stuff. Essentially, these people were “stripped” of everything that they owned – including the shirts off their backs (among other things) which were being held in a shipping container not far way. Living alone, each player was required to retrieve one item only from the shipping container.

To date, ten versions of this show have been made with airing in different countries and often with different names including Starting from Scratch (Israel), Experiment 21 (Czech Republic) and The Container (Spain). On this day in 2017, Bravo debuted their own version of Stripped. The series ended on January 30, 2018.

1942: The First Jump Scare

Commonplace now in modern movies, but 1942’s B-movie, Cat People is often credited for being the first to feature a “jump scare” when it opened on this day in 1942.

Produced by Val Lewton, Cat People dealt with Irena Dubrovna, a woman who feared that she could change into black panthers when aroused. It was the first movie of its kind to bring about a “false scare” making audiences “jump” only to find that they were startled at the wrong thing.

In this case, there is a scene in the movie when a woman is walking home at night and suddenly, a loud screeching sound is heard only to reveal that a bus has pulled up, and the woman jumps on. The scene has been dubbed, “The Lewton Bus”. The scene really caught on and today, many scary movies feature jump scares involving hissing cats.

2010: The Hoff’s Hassle

On this day, actor, singer and reality competition show judge David Hasselhoff and his daughters starred in their own American reality TV series, The Hasselhoffs. Perhaps A&E was hoping for the next Kardashians series, but it didn’t work out that way. However, this wasn’t exactly a bad idea. The trio had starred in the limited UK series, Meet the Hasslehoffs which had aired the year prior.

David shared the spotlight of sorts with his daughters Taylor-Ann and Hayley who were trying to launch their own careers in the first series, but for this series, the series aimed to show more of their home life. America wasn’t interested.

The Hasslehoffds debuted with back-to-back episodes on this day. 718,000 viewers watched the first show, but that number dropped down to 505,000 when the second episode aired. Just five days later, A&E announced that the series had been cancelled.