Animators William Hanna and Joseph Barbera first teamed up at MGM in the late 1930s, creating the Tom and Jerry cartoon series. After MGM shut down its animation studio, the two animators started their own company, Hanna-Barbera, which dominated the television cartoon field in the 1960s and 1970s, behind cartoons including Huckleberry Hound, Yogi Bear, The Flintstones, The Jetsons, Jonny Quest, and Scooby-Doo.
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In all, the Hanna–Barbera team won seven Academy Awards and eight Emmy Awards, including the 1960 award for The Huckleberry Hound Show, which was the first Emmy awarded to an animated series.
In the first couple of seasons of The Huckleberry Hound Show, each episode featured three cartoons – one centered on Huck, one starring the mice Pixie and Dixie, and one showcasing Yogi Bear.
Lawrence Peter “Yogi” Berra is a former American Major League Baseball player and manager. He played almost his entire career for the New York Yankees as catcher. The cartoon character Yogi Bear was presumably named after Berra (the cartoon’s creators denied it), something Berra did not appreciate after he started being periodically addressed as “Yogi Bear.”
Berra, who quit school after the eighth grade, has a tendency toward malapropism and fracturing the English language. “It ain’t over till it’s over” is arguably his most famous example, often quoted.
Yogi Berra grew up in the same neighborhood and attended the same school as baseball player, author, and sports commentator Joe Garagiola. The St. Louis Cardinals signed Garagiola over Berra.
A yogi named Kripalvananda was a master of kundalini yoga, and the namesake of the Kripalu Center in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, afer being informed by Dadaji (Amrit Desai) that his body was being occupied by the spirit of a deceased sadhu who wanted him to spread the knowledge of kundalini yoga to the West.
Stockbridge, Massachusetts was the home for many years of Saturday Evening Post artist Norman Rockwell and is home to his museum.
Stockbridge, Massachusetts was also the setting for Arlo Guthrie’s classic Thanksgiving song, “Alice’s Restaurant”, in which he described his encounter with Officer Obie for littering, and then segued into an account of his visit to the New York draft board.
William Obanhein – the real Officer Obie in Alice’s Restaurant – played himself in Arthur Penn’s movie based on the song. Despite getting good reviews, Obanhein went back to Stockbridge and continued on the police force after the film was released.
President Theodore Roosevelt handpicked his plump, affable but smart Secretary of War, William Howard Taft, to succeed him in office in 1908. However, they later parted ways due to both issues and personalities, and T.R. ran against him in the 1912 election. Both lost to Woodrow Wilson. President Warren G. Harding later appointed Taft as Chief Justice of the United States, making him the only former President to serve on the Supreme Court.
William Howard Taft was Governor General of the Philippines from 1901-1903 and consequently there is still a major thoroughfare called Taft Avenue in Manila, part of which is the heart of the city’s red light district.
Outfielder Taft Wright hit .350 in 1938, his rookie season with the Washington Senators, but did not have enough plate appearances to qualify for the batting title. He probably would have been named Rookie of the Year had that honor been around – it didn’t debut until 1947.
The original Washington Senators became the Minnesota Twins in 1961. In 1960, Minneapolis had been granted a franchise, and Washington owner Calvin Griffith, requested that he be allowed to move his team to Minneapolis, and instead grant Washington the expansion team. The league granted this request, and Washington fielded a brand new team with the old name. This team moved, prior to the 1972 and became the Texas Rangers.
No, he did qualify for the batting title according to the rules of the time – he appeared in 100 games. However, they gave the title Jimmy Foxx – who had more than twice the plate appearances – and changed to rule for qualifying from the number of games to the number of at bats (and later, to plate appearances).
Back to the thread: When the original American Football League, they announced they would have a team in Minnapolis. The owners of that franchise were pressured to quit the AFL before the season started (but after the player draft) and were awarded the NFL franchise the Minnesota Vikings. The AFL scrambled and added the Oakland Raiders, giving them the draft picks made by the original Minnesota ownership group. Oakland was actually awarded the franchise before an ownership group was put together.
In 1862 two entire regiments of Minnesota volunteers voted almost unanimously to desert from the Tullahoma campaign in Tennessee unless federal troops were dispatched immediately to fight the Sioux attacks in northern Minnesota. Ultimately the regiments were allowed permission to return home where the Sioux had killed hundreds of civilians. After a decisive victory the U.S. tried and hanged 38 Sioux chiefs and warriors in Mankato on the day after Christmas, the largest mass execution ever performed by the U.S. (drawing).
Frostbite Falls, Minnesota is the home of Rocky and Bullwinkle; in reality, this fictitious town is based on International Falls, Minnesota, the “Icebox of the Nation”
The bus in the Christmas special Olive the Other Reindeer passes an exit for Frostbite Falls.
Minnesota contains the northest part of the Continental U.S., the Northwest Angle, a peninsula in Lake of the Woods that can only be reached by boat from American territory. It can also be reached by car, but this must be done by going through Manitoba first.
The voice of the title character in Olive the Other Reindeer was performed by Drew Barrymore. Olive was, in fact, a dog, not a reindeer.