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History of Phantom of the Opera
Most film and stage play enthusiasts are familiar with the Phantom of the Opera. The French writer Gaston Leroux wrote the novel, whose original title is Le Fantôme de l’Opéra. It first appeared as a series in the French newspaper Le Gaulois in 1909. Other countries that published the original work were those in Europe and North America. Alexander Teixeira de Mattos did the first English translation in 1911.
Initial Publication
The initial publication of the work did not go well, and the novel became popular only various adaptations became available. It was adapted in different musical and stage plays, children’s books and television and comic series. The most famous of these is the 1925 film and the stage musical adaptation by Andrew Lloyd Webber in 1986.
The 1925 film, which starred Lon Chaney and Mary Philbin, brought the novel to limelight. The movie artfully depicted the powerful love of the solitary phantom to a young singer Mary Philbin. The suspense brought about by the unveiling of the mask of the phantom made the movie quite popular.
Phantom of the Opera the Musical
As a classic remake of the children’s story Beauty and the Beast, The Phantom of the Opera is the longest running musical play in history. The original production opened on Oct. 9, 1986. Andrew Lloyd Webber, a British composer, created it with Richard Stilgoe and Charles Hart as writer and lyricist. To date, there is no musical play in history as lucrative as the 1986 adaptation of The Phantom of the Opera. This version premiered in London with Michael Crawford playing the phantom and Sarah Brightman as his love interest. It captured the hearts of fans with its display of classic love and romance.
Now on its twenty-third year of production, the musical entertainment showcase has earned approximately $5 billion worldwide. The musical continues to play in London, Las Vegas, New York and in some parts of the Asia Pacific.
The plot of the story also evolved over time. Versions exist wherein Erik secludes himself in an opera house to find freedom from constant criticism of being a victim of torture. Susan Kay’s novel version in 1990 provided an in-depth examination of Erik’s life. In all versions, Erik falls deeply in love with Christiane Daaé to the point of arranging the deaths of people to help advance her career. Disheartened with the refusal of the young woman to marry him, the traditional novel ends with Erik’s death.
Phantom of the Opera the Movie
The latest adaptation of this classic love story is the 2004 movie by Joel Schumacher. It featured Gerard Butler and Emmy Rossum.
Gaston Leroux wrote several other novels of mystery, horror, romance, fantasy and adventure. However, none surpasses the fame of The Phantom of the Opera. The story continues to captivate many. Additionally, to this day there remains controversy as to whether or not the phantom existed in real life. On his death, some quoted Gaston Leroux to say, “”Opera Ghost really did exist.” However, for most of the millions who love the novel, this is no longer of importance. The magic of the story is enough to charm the minds and hearts of people all over the world.
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History of Mickey Mouse
Mickey Mouse is a cartoon character of a talking mouse owned by The Walt Disney Company, and a very strong franchise for the company as well as its main character for promoting the company’s television channel, the various Disney theme parks, and merchandising opportunities. Mickey Mouse is distinctive and quite unique amongst cartoon characters with large black ears and a pointy nose, red shorts with white buttons, and large yellow construction boots. The silhouette of Mickey’s ears and nose are the logo of The Walt Disney Company.
The origins of the Mickey Mouse character are clouded in history, with different stories appearing to suit the whims of publishers, copyright holders, and those looking for a mystery, and with all of the original parties to his creation having passed away we may never know the real truth. The Walt Disney Company claims that the characters was of course created by Walt Disney (1901-1966) himself, the founder of the company, and that Walt based his original drawings on the humanized antics of a mouse Walt adopted while living in Kansas City and working for the Kansas City Film Ad Company in the early 1920s.
Disney recollected in later interviews that he drew a series of sketches of a cartoon mouse, and that long time friend and colleague Ub Iwerks reworked the sketches into a form that would make the characters easier and faster to draw, by all accounts simplifying the character into a series of straight lines and curves. Walt provided the voice, and the attitude and personality of Mickey Mouse, leading many of Disney’s animation colleagues of the time to describe Walt as the real life father of Mickey Mouse, as well as the rightful designer of the character.
An opposing story tells that a mouse character had originally been drawn by Hugh Harman around a photograph of Walt Disney in 1925, and that these were subsequently used as the idea for a new character when Disney went his separate ways from Universal Studios where he was contracted to provide shorts based on a character named “Oswald the Lucky Rabbit”. Disney needed to create a new character since he had signed over the rights for Oswald to Universal, so asked Ub Iwerks to come up with some ideas, some of which included cats, dogs, frogs, horses, and cows.
It wasn’t until after Iwerks was nearly at his wits end that he remembered seeing Harman’s mouse sketches around the photo of Walt that both he and Walt Disney finally agreed they were on to a winner with a mouse character with big ears and wearing a pair of shorts. They envisaged the mouse being human like, a bit of a struggler against whom fate always set an obstacle or challenge and which he would overcome through effort a good nature, and patience. They named their character Mortimer Mouse.
Mortimer struggled to find an identity, with Walt’s wife Lillian convinced the name was a bit to snobbish and would detract from the character’s audience appeal. Disney wanted his new studio’s primary character to be lovable, cute and little, traits he believed made it easy for children to fall in love with. In a later interview, Walt credited part of the personality of Mickey Mouse to Charlie Chaplin, a cute lovable character who thru no fault of his own always seemed to be getting into trouble. Mickey Rooney is on record as saying that Walt confided he chose the name Mickey after seeing Mickey McGuire, a character played by the young Mickey Rooney in the early 1920s.
By May 1928 the first Mickey Mouse short was ready for distribution, entitled Plane Crazy it featured Mickey and Minnie Mouse and a plane that Mickey had built. Mickey invites Minnie for the first flight and after take off attempts to kiss Minnie who jumps out of the plane with a parachute leaving Mickey to his adventure, which is of course filled with mishaps. The short failed to find a distributor so a second short, The Gallopin’ Gaucho was filmed and introduced Pegleg Pete, who had previously been seen in other Disney animations, as Mickey’s rival for Minnies affections. This too failed to find a distributor.
The Gallopin’ Gaucho was an unusual production in the Mickey was seen in two different designs, beginning the short looking like he did in Plane Crazy, notably with a black face and white eyes with black pupile, and in one of the cantina scenes Mickey is showing his teeth whilst smoking a cigarette or drinking a beer. Coincidentally at the time Mickey rescues Minnie from Pete and becomes her hero, his appearance changes to a white face with solid black eyes. Charges of racism have been leveled against this animation, but never sustained in a court of law.
The first Mickey Mouse animated short to find a distributor was Steamboat Willie, released November 1928, and again featuring Mickey, Minnie, and Pete who appears as the captain of the boat. Mickey himself appeared closely resembling the Mickey who became the hero in Gallopin’ Gaucho. Steamboat Willie proved an immediate hit with audiences loving the use of music and sound effects to add humor to the production, and encouraging Disney to fully adopt sound in all animations, including Mickey’s first spoken words in the 1929 production of The Karnival Kid.
A minor change to Mickey and Minnie’s appearance occurred in late 1929, they characters sported a smart pair of white gloves, which were added after complaints that viewers couldn’t see what they were doing with their hands when facing the camera. All Disney animation were still being filmed in black and white, so white gloves allowed the hands to contrast with other black parts of their bodies. By the early 1930s Mickey Mouse had overtaken Felix the Cat as Americas favorite cartoon animation, and Mortimer Mouse had been introduced as Minnie Mouse’s rancher uncle.
In 1935, a new animator at the Disney Company redesigned Mickey Mouse, returning the white eyes and black pupils, but also shortening Mickey’s nose, and giving his body a makeover, converting the round torso to an ellipse, as well as making Mickey’s face wider. In 1978, the 50th anniversary of Mickey Mouse’s first short film being produced and distributed, The Disney Company organized a huge extravaganza at Disneyland in California, with shows and some of the largest fireworks displays ever seen at the time. Mickey was also awarded a star on Hollywood Boulevard, the first cartoon character to ever receive a star.
As well, the Disney Company was operating Mickey Mouse Clubs in cinemas throughout the US and claiming over a million members, for whom specially discounted prices of Mickey Mouse merchandise were available, as well,the members would receive coloring books and badges. By the mid 1930s the administrative costs of managing these proved uneconomic, and they were closed down, but again in 1955 thru 1959 the Mickey Mouse Club was revived as a television series broadcast Monday to Friday.
The Mickey Mouse Club also aired in the 1970s, and then again in the 1990s, with many famous pop celebrities getting their first broadcasting role as cast members of the revived show, amngst them Christina Aguilera, Britney Spears, and Justin Timberlake. In 2006, a new format show named the Mickey Mouse Clubhouse began airing, however the show was aimed at preschoolers and isn’t a successor to the Mickey Mouse Club which The Disney Company reserve the right to revive.
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History of Football
Football, otherwise known as American Football is a sport involving two opposing teams of players competing for territory on a football field using a ball and set play with the objective being to get the ball to the goal line of the opposing team either by scoring a running touchdown or kicking the ball over the post and between the uprights of the goal. Unlike soccer, football does not have a goal defender, instead it is more similar to Rugby and Australian Rules Football where all team members play a defensive and offensive role during the game.
Rugby, the predecessor to Football was invented in England during the 1860s although its antecedents are common to soccer and date back to at least the middle ages when groups of rival villages would compete to score a goal using filled or inflated pigs bladders that were held and run with until the player was tackled and lost control of the ball.A goal was scored when the ball was picked or carried thru to a designated point like the church doors or a post erected in the village square.
During the 1860s in England a number of public schools, universities and working mens clubs got together to form a set of rules that would allow teams from different schools or districts to play against each other. The rules that were ultimately published were the forerunner of modern soccer, but were not accepted by all teams who refused to join the new association and instead chose to create their own code known as rugby that allowed picking up the ball and tackling of opponents.
Whilst the rules of football can be traced to the English parent games, in fact American Football is also indigenous to North America and older versions of the sport were played at Princeton in the early 1800s. The game was called ballown and involved passing and punching the ball along the field and past the opposing team to score. Eventually the game became known as football but the rules changed from year to year as new students took it up.
Wilder Graves Penfiels - Princeton
At Harvard University a similar game was played on the first Monday of the academic year by freshman and sophomore students to the great enjoyment of senior students. The game was called Bloody Monday and was considered a good ice breaker for letting new students get to know each other. The name Bloody Monday was no accident, but wasn’t a free for all, there was an objective to be met, to win by scoring goals.
Soon after the rules of soccer and rugby had been agreed on in England the US entered a new period of prosperity brought about by the end of the civil war. Rutgers and Princeton independently created their own rules of play, and on the 6th November 1869 played the very first intercollegiate game of football. Princeton lost by two goals, scoring only four goals to Rutger’s six, but college football was born.
Not long after intercollegiate games became popular and in 1873 representatives from Rutgers, Princeton, Yale and Columbia met to formulate a set of rules that would be used for future intercollegiate games. They established the Intercollgeiate Football Association and adopted many of the rules used in rugby, reducing the number of players per team from twenty to fifteen and setting the length of the field to 140 yards.
Being very similar to rugby, football in the Americas had its dissenters, namely Walter Camp of Yale who wanted a shorter playing field and less players fielded down to just eleven at any one time. As a senior member of the IFA rules committee Camp was influential and not long after the first rules were drawn up Camp and Yale got their wish, the field was reduced to 110 yards and the number of players brought down to eleven.
American style football had been born and proved more popular with American players and audiences than the older rugby styled game. Colleges all over the United States adopted Camps new rules establishing American Football as the leading football code within a very short time. In 1882 Camp and the rules committee brought in the new system of three downs, a further change from rugby that allowed the team with possession of the ball to retain possession until the completion of their set play.
During the 1890s many colleges banned the game for being too rough and brutal with horrific injuries being reported and despite and enlarged rules committee representing over 60 colleges things didn’t improve much until President Roosevelt who was a keen follower of the game called on the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA), the successor to the IFA, to eliminate brutality from the game.
The forward pass rule was instituted that almost immediately eliminated the mass scrums that had been the cause of so many injuries and opened up the gam to wide running play that is the hallmark of American Football even today. The number of downs was increased to four, and the distance of play between downs increased from five yards to ten yards.
So successful were the new changes to American Football that non college teams based around community athletic clubs formed and began to compete against each other, often players were paid their time, and in 1920 the National Football League (NFL) was formed. The rules of play were the same as for college football with the noted difference that players became professional and no longer had to work a separate job.
By the 1950s professional football and the NFL franchise had begun to dominate with ever increasing viewer numbers and network television broadcasting most major games. A rival association, the American Football League (AFL) started in areas not already serviced by NFL teams and quickly started to compete for the best players, viewing numbers, and network broadcasting contracts.
The merger of the AFL and NFL in 1970 into a 26 team franchise has been described as a defining moment in American Football history. A stronger league emerged and created the Super Bowl as its defining championship game, but most importantly the revenue sharing model in place has meant that every team has a chance of competing in the Super Bowl. This is in stark contrast to other codes where major teams manage to dominate their league.
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History of Sesame Street
Sesame Street is a pre-school TV show produced and filmed in the USA by the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS), although the show is very popular outside of the US as well. The show features a group of human actors who interact with puppet characters created by Jim Henson to educate and entertain young children.
Sesame Street’s history began back in 1966 when Joan Cooney, a children’s TV education producer, Lewis Freedman, Cooney’s boss, and Lloyd Morisett, a psychologist working as grants officer for the Carnegie Trust met to discuss the development of a new educational show for pre-schoolers.
Lloyd Morisett was most interested in providing educational materials to children from low income and minority homes. Television had already reached a 97% saturation level in the USA and amongst pre-schoolers was very highly watched. This seemed like an ideal platform to use in the Carnegie Trusts goal.
Taking three years to research and come up with the eventual concept, the researchers tested their content and presentation to produce a formula almost guaranteed to keep a child’s interest, and at the same time add some subtlety that would appeal to their parents. Jim Henson’s puppets were instrumental in making Sesame Street a success.
Filmed in New York, the producers also made a daring decision to use a brownstone street background which they believe was more realistic to the majority of children being targeted. Sadly the good intention had the effect of alienating some parents at the time who considered Sesame Street too low class and didn’t want their children exposed to ghetto accents although the brownstone look did allow the show to connect with inner city kids.
Sesame Street finally had it’s full debut in 1969 on National Education Television (NET) and featured Ernie and Bert, Big Bird, Gordon, Susan, Bob and Mr Hooper. A few months later NET was merged with a local station and it’s best shows such as Sesame Street were transferred to PBS where it has stayed to this day.
Over the years since 1969 Sesame Street has seen numerous lineup changes and the introduction of a full family of Muppets, some of the most popular being Elmo, Kermit the Frog, Cookie Monster, Oscar the Grouch, and Frazzle.
In the history of children’s television Sesame Street is now one of the longest running and currently produced shows, second only to the Disney Anthology. The show has also won the Emmy for most outstanding pre-school series several times.
Check out the 1993 Sesame Street intro music:
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