Ray Goulding
Raymond Walter "Ray" Goulding was an American comedian, together with Bob Elliott formed the comedy duo of Bob and Ray. He was born in Lowell, the fourth of five children of Thomas Goulding, an overseer in a textile mill, his wife Mary. Upon graduation from high school at age 17, Ray Goulding was hired as a $15-a-week announcer on local station WLLH, using the name'Dennis Howard' to avoid confusion with his older brother Phil, an announcer in Boston radio at the time. A year Ray was hired by Boston radio station WEEI under his own name, his career was interrupted in 1942 by World War II. After graduating from US Army OCS he was posted to Fort Knox, Kentucky as an instructor, attaining the rank of captain. While stationed there he met his wife, then-Lt. Mary Elizabeth Leader attached to the base as a dietitian, they married in 1945 and would have four sons and two daughters. Upon his discharge in 1946, Goulding was hired on at Boston station WHDH, where he served as newsreader for the morning program hosted by Bob Elliott.
The two men soon discovered an extraordinary comedic rapport and found themselves in-demand as a team. Standing six-foot-two and possessing a distinctive baritone voice, Goulding made an effective contrast to his partner both physically and vocally taking on outsize roles in their skits, his dead-on impersonation of Senator Joseph McCarthy inspired a pointed series of Bob & Ray sketches at the height of the Army-McCarthy hearings. He played all the female roles, most notably cooking expert Mary Margaret McGoon. In 1949, Goulding as Mary recorded a novelty cover of "I'd Like to Be a Cow in Switzerland", which became a local hit. In 1951, Elliott and Goulding were hired by NBC Radio, supporting the nationally broadcast "Monitor" program, beginning a four decade long association with the network. In 1951, they began a short-lived but influential television series "Bob and Ray", which featured Audrey Meadows and Cloris Leachman. In 1956, he won a Peabody Award for broadcast excellence along with Elliot.
Away from the studio, his hobbies included sport shooting. He was a lifelong Boston Red Sox fan. Ray Goulding died of kidney failure at his home in Manhasset on New York's Long Island in 1990, four days after his 68th birthday. Ray Goulding on IMDb Larry Josephson's official Bob and Ray site Bob and Ray for the Truly Desperate collection at the Internet Archive https://archive.org/details/bobandraytoaster
Happy Days
Happy Days is an American television sitcom that aired first-run from January 15, 1974 to September 24, 1984 on ABC, with a total of 255 half-hour episodes spanning eleven seasons. Created by Garry Marshall, the series presented one of the most successful series of the 1970s, an idealized vision of life in the mid-1950s to mid-1960s Midwestern United States, starred Ron Howard as teenager Richie Cunningham, Henry Winkler as his friend Arthur "Fonzie"/"The Fonz" Fonzarelli, Tom Bosley and Marion Ross as Richie's parents and Marion Cunningham. Happy Days became one of the biggest hits in television history and influenced the television style of its time; the series began as an unsold pilot starring Howard and Anson Williams, which aired in 1972 as a segment entitled "Love and the Television Set" on ABC's anthology show Love, American Style. Based on the pilot, director George Lucas cast Howard as the lead in his 1973 hit film American Graffiti, causing ABC to take a renewed interest in the pilot.
The first two seasons of Happy Days focused on the experiences and dilemmas of "innocent teenager" Richie Cunningham, his family, his high school friends, attempting to "honestly depict a wistful look back at adolescence". A moderate hit, the series' ratings began to fall during its second season, causing Marshall to retool it emphasizing broad comedy and spotlighting the minor character of Fonzie, a "cool" biker and high school dropout. Following these changes, Happy Days became the number-one program in television in 1976–1977, Fonzie became one of the most merchandised characters of the 1970s, Henry Winkler became a major star; the series spawned a number of spin-offs, including the hit shows Laverne & Shirley and Mork & Mindy. Set in Milwaukee, the series revolves around teenager Richie Cunningham and his family: his father, who owns a hardware store; the earlier episodes revolve around Richie and his friends, Potsie Weber and Ralph Malph, with Fonzie as a secondary character. However, as the series progressed, Fonzie proved to be a favorite with viewers and soon more story lines were written to reflect his growing popularity, Winkler was credited with top billing in the opening credits alongside Howard as a result.
Fonzie befriended Richie and the Cunningham family, when Richie left the series for military service, Fonzie became the central figure of the show, with Winkler receiving sole top billing in the opening credits. In seasons, other characters were introduced including Fonzie's young cousin, Charles "Chachi" Arcola, who became a love interest for Joanie Cunningham; the eleven seasons of the series track the eleven years from 1955 to 1965, inclusive, in which the show was set. The series' pilot was shown as Love and the Television Set retitled Love and the Happy Days for syndication, a one-episode teleplay on the anthology series Love, American Style, aired on February 25, 1972. Happy Days spawned the hit television shows Laverne & Shirley and Mork & Mindy as well as three failures, Joanie Loves Chachi, Blansky's Beauties featuring Nancy Walker as Howard's cousin, Out of the Blue; the show is the basis for the Happy Days musical touring the United States since 2008. The leather jacket worn by Winkler during the series was acquired by the Smithsonian Institution for the permanent collection at the National Museum of American History.
The original tan McGregor jacket Winkler wore during the first season was thrown into the garbage after ABC relented and allowed the Fonzie character to wear a leather jacket. With season four, Al Molinaro was added as Al Delvecchio, the new owner of Arnold's, after Pat Morita's character of Arnold moved on after his character got married. Al Molinaro played Al's twin brother Father Anthony Delvecchio, a Catholic priest. Al married Chachi's mother and Father Delvecchio served in the wedding of Joanie to Chachi in the series finale; the most major character changes occurred after season five with the addition of Scott Baio as Fonzie's cousin, Charles "Chachi" Arcola. The character Spike was supposed to be the character who became Chachi. Season five saw the introduction of more outlandish and bizarre plots including Fonzie making a bet with the Devil, the appearance of Mork, an alien who wanted to take Richie back to his homeworld. Although when first aired this ended with it all being a dream Richie was having, this episode was retconned in subsequent airings by way of additional footage to have taken place, with Mork having wiped everyone's memory except Richie's and deciding to time travel to the present day.
Lynda Goodfriend joined the cast as semi-regular character Lori Beth Allen, Richie's steady girlfriend, in season five, became a permanent member of the cast between seasons eight and nine, after Lori Beth married Richie. After Ron Howard left the series, Ted McGinley joined the cast as Roger Phillips, the new physical educat
David Letterman
David Michael Letterman is an American television host, comedian and producer. He hosted late night television talk shows for 33 years, beginning with the February 1, 1982, debut of Late Night with David Letterman on NBC, ending with the May 20, 2015, broadcast of Late Show with David Letterman on CBS. In total, Letterman hosted 6,080 episodes of Late Night and Late Show, surpassing his friend and mentor Johnny Carson as the longest-serving late night talk show host in American television history. In 1996 Letterman was ranked 45th on TV Guide's 50 Greatest TV Stars of All Time. In 2002, The Late Show with David Letterman was ranked seventh on TV Guide's 50 Greatest TV Shows of All Time. Letterman hosts the Netflix series My Next Guest Needs No Introduction with David Letterman. Letterman is a television and film producer, his company, Worldwide Pants, produced his shows as well as The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson and several prime-time comedies, the most successful of, Everybody Loves Raymond, now in syndication.
Several late-night hosts have cited Letterman's influence, including Conan O'Brien, Stephen Colbert, Jimmy Fallon, Jimmy Kimmel, John Oliver, Seth Meyers. Letterman was born in Indiana, his father, Harry Joseph Letterman, was a florist. His mother, Dorothy Marie Letterman Mengering, a church secretary for the Second Presbyterian Church of Indianapolis, was an occasional figure on Letterman's show at holidays and birthdays, he lived on the north side of Indianapolis, about 12 miles from the Indianapolis Motor Speedway and he enjoyed collecting model cars, including racers. In 2000, he told an interviewer for Esquire that, while growing up, he admired his father's ability to tell jokes and be the life of the party. Harry Joseph Letterman survived a heart attack at age 36; the fear of losing his father was with Letterman as he grew up. The elder Letterman died of a second heart attack at age 57. Letterman attended his hometown's Broad Ripple High School and worked as a stock boy at the local Atlas Supermarket.
According to the Ball State Daily News, he had wanted to attend Indiana University, but his grades were not good enough, so he instead attended Ball State University, in Muncie, Indiana. He is a member of the Sigma Chi fraternity, he graduated in 1969 from what was the Department of Radio and Television. A self-described average student, Letterman endowed a scholarship for what he called "C students" at Ball State. Though he registered for the draft and passed his physical after graduating from college, he was not drafted for service in Vietnam because of receiving a draft lottery number of 346. Letterman began his broadcasting career as an announcer and newscaster at the college's student-run radio station—WBST—a 10-watt campus station which now is part of Indiana Public Radio, he was fired for treating classical music with irreverence. He became involved with the founding of another campus station—WAGO-AM 570, he credits Paul Dixon, host of the Paul Dixon Show, a Cincinnati-based talk show shown in Indianapolis while he was growing up, for inspiring his choice of career: I was just out of college, I didn't know what I wanted to do.
And all of a sudden I saw him doing it. And I thought: That's what I want to do! Soon after graduating from Ball State in 1969, Letterman began his career as a radio talk show host on WNTS and on Indianapolis television station WLWI as an anchor and weatherman, he received some attention for his unpredictable on-air behavior, which included congratulating a tropical storm for being upgraded to a hurricane and predicting hail stones "the size of canned hams." He would occasionally report the weather and the day's high and low temps for fictitious cities while on another occasion saying that a state border had been erased when a satellite map accidentally omitted the state border between Indiana and Ohio, attributing it to dirty political dealings. He starred in a local kiddie show, made wisecracks as host of a late night TV show called "Freeze-Dried Movies", hosted a talk show that aired early on Saturday mornings called Clover Power, in which he interviewed 4-H members about their projects.
In 1971 Letterman appeared as a pit road reporter for ABC Sports' tape-delayed coverage of the Indianapolis 500. Letterman was introduced as Chris Economaki, although this was corrected at the end of the interview. Letterman interviewed Mario Andretti. In 1975, encouraged by his then-wife Michelle and several of his Sigma Chi fraternity brothers, Letterman moved to Los Angeles, with hope of becoming a comedy writer, he and Michelle headed west. As of 2012, he still owned the truck. In Los Angeles, he began performing comedy at The Comedy Store. Jimmie Walker saw him on stage.
Satire
Satire is a genre of literature, sometimes graphic and performing arts, in which vices, follies and shortcomings are held up to ridicule, ideally with the intent of shaming individuals, government, or society itself into improvement. Although satire is meant to be humorous, its greater purpose is constructive social criticism, using wit to draw attention to both particular and wider issues in society. A feature of satire is strong irony or sarcasm—"in satire, irony is militant"—but parody, exaggeration, comparison and double entendre are all used in satirical speech and writing; this "militant" irony or sarcasm professes to approve of the things the satirist wishes to attack. Satire is nowadays found in many artistic forms of expression, including internet memes, plays, television shows, media such as lyrics; the word satire comes from the subsequent phrase lanx satura. Satur meant "full" but the juxtaposition with lanx shifted the meaning to "miscellany or medley": the expression lanx satura means "a full dish of various kinds of fruits".
The word satura as used by Quintilian, was used to denote only Roman verse satire, a strict genre that imposed hexameter form, a narrower genre than what would be intended as satire. Quintilian famously said that satura, a satire in hexameter verses, was a literary genre of wholly Roman origin, he was aware of and commented on Greek satire, but at the time did not label it as such, although today the origin of satire is considered to be Aristophanes' Old Comedy. The first critic to use the term "satire" in the modern broader sense was Apuleius. To Quintilian, the satire was a strict literary form, but the term soon escaped from the original narrow definition. Robert Elliott writes: As soon as a noun enters the domain of metaphor, as one modern scholar has pointed out, it clamours for extension; the odd result is. By about the 4th century AD the writer of satires came to be known as satyricus. Subsequent orthographic modifications obscured the Latin origin of the word satire: satura becomes satyra, in England, by the 16th century, it was written'satyre.'
The word satire derives from satura, its origin was not influenced by the Greek mythological figure of the satyr. In the 17th century, philologist Isaac Casaubon was the first to dispute the etymology of satire from satyr, contrary to the belief up to that time. Laughter is not an essential component of satire. Conversely, not all humour on such topics as politics, religion or art is "satirical" when it uses the satirical tools of irony and burlesque. Light-hearted satire has a serious "after-taste": the organizers of the Ig Nobel Prize describe this as "first make people laugh, make them think". Satire and irony in some cases have been regarded as the most effective source to understand a society, the oldest form of social study, they provide the keenest insights into a group's collective psyche, reveal its deepest values and tastes, the society's structures of power. Some authors have regarded satire as superior to non-comic and non-artistic disciplines like history or anthropology. In a prominent example from ancient Greece, philosopher Plato, when asked by a friend for a book to understand Athenian society, referred him to the plays of Aristophanes.
Satire has satisfied the popular need to debunk and ridicule the leading figures in politics, economy and other prominent realms of power. Satire confronts public discourse and the collective imaginary, playing as a public opinion counterweight to power, by challenging leaders and authorities. For instance, it forces administrations to amend or establish their policies. Satire's job is to expose problems and contradictions, it's not obligated to solve them. Karl Kraus set in the history of satire a prominent example of a satirist role as confronting public discourse. For its nature and social role, satire has enjoyed in many societies a special freedom license to mock prominent individuals and institutions; the satiric impulse, its ritualized expressions, carry out the function of resolving social tension. Institutions like the ritual clowns, by giving expression to the antisocial tendencies, represent a safety valve which re-establishes equilibrium and health in the collective imaginary, which are jeopardized by the repressive aspects of society.
The state of political satire in a given society reflects the tolerance or intolerance that characterizes it, the state of civil liberties and human rights. Under totalitarian regimes any criticism of a political system, satire, is suppressed. A typical example is the Soviet Union where the dissidents, such as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Andrei Sakharov were under strong pressure from the government. While satire of everyday life in the USSR was allowed, the most prominent satirist being Arkady Raikin, political satire existed in the form of anecdotes that made fun of Soviet political leaders Brezhnev, famous for his narrow-mindedness and love for awards and decorations. Satire is a diverse genre, complex to classif
Gilda Radner
Gilda Susan Radner was an American comedian and actress, one of the seven original cast members for the NBC sketch comedy show Saturday Night Live. In her routines, Radner specialized in parodies of television stereotypes, such as advice specialists and news anchors, in 1977, she won an Emmy Award for her performances on the show, she portrayed those characters in her successful one-woman show on Broadway in 1979. Radner's SNL work established her as an iconic figure in the history of American comedy, she died from ovarian cancer in 1989. Her autobiography dealt frankly with her life and personal struggles, including those with the illness, her widower, Gene Wilder, carried out her personal wish that information about her illness would help other cancer victims and inspiring organizations that emphasize early diagnosis, hereditary factors and support for cancer victims. She was posthumously awarded a Grammy Award in 1990. Radner was inducted into the Michigan Women's Hall of Fame in 1992. Radner was born in Detroit, Michigan, to Jewish parents, Henrietta, a legal secretary, Herman Radner, a businessman.
Through her mother, Radner was a second cousin of business executive Steve Ballmer. She grew up in Detroit with a nanny, Elizabeth Clementine Gillies, whom she called "Dibby", an older brother named Michael, she attended the exclusive University Liggett School in Detroit. Toward the end of her life, Radner wrote in her autobiography, It's Always Something, that during her childhood and young adulthood, she battled numerous eating disorders: "I coped with stress by having every possible eating disorder from the time I was nine years old. I have weighed as much as 160 pounds and as little as 93; when I was a kid, I overate constantly. My weight distressed my mother and she took me to a doctor who put me on Dexedrine diet pills when I was ten years old."Radner was close to her father, who operated Detroit's Seville Hotel, where many nightclub performers and actors stayed while performing in the city. He took her on trips to New York to see Broadway shows; as Radner wrote in It's Always Something, when she was 12, her father developed a brain tumor, the symptoms began so that he told people his eyeglasses were too tight.
Within days, he was bedridden and unable to communicate, remained in that condition until his death two years later. Radner graduated from Liggett and enrolled at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor in 1964. In Ann Arbor, Radner dropped out in her senior year to follow her boyfriend, Canadian sculptor Jeffrey Rubinoff, to Toronto, where she made her professional acting debut in the 1972 production of Godspell with future stars Eugene Levy, Andrea Martin, Victor Garber, Martin Short, Paul Shaffer. Afterward, Radner joined The Second City comedy troupe in Toronto. Radner was a featured player on the National Lampoon Radio Hour, a comedy program syndicated to some 600 U. S. radio stations from 1974 to 1975. Fellow cast members included John Belushi, Chevy Chase, Richard Belzer, Bill Murray, Brian Doyle-Murray, Rhonda Coullet. Radner gained name recognition as one of the original "Not Ready for Prime Time Players", the freshman group on the first season of Saturday Night Live, she was the first performer cast for the show, co-wrote much of the material that she performed, collaborated with Alan Zweibel on sketches that highlighted her recurring characters.
Between 1975 and 1980, she created characters such as obnoxious personal advice expert Roseanne Roseannadanna and "Baba Wawa", a parody of Barbara Walters. After Radner's death, Walters stated in an interview that Radner was the "first person to make fun of news anchors, now it's done all the time." She played the character Emily Litella, an elderly, hearing-impaired woman who gave angry and misinformed editorial replies on "Weekend Update". Additionally, Radner parodied celebrities such as Lucille Ball, Patti Smith, Olga Korbut in SNL sketches, she won an Emmy Award in 1978 for her work on SNL. In Rolling Stone's February 2015 appraisal of all 141 SNL cast members to date, Radner was ranked ninth in importance. " the most beloved of the original cast," they wrote. "In the years between Mary Tyler Moore and Seinfeld's Elaine, Radner was the prototype for the brainy city girl with a bundle of neuroses."Radner battled bulimia while on the show. She had a relationship with SNL castmate Bill Murray, with whom she worked at the National Lampoon, which ended badly.
Few details of their relationship or its end were made public. In It's Always Something, this is the one reference Radner made to Murray in the entire book: "All the guys liked to have me around because I would laugh at them till I peed in my pants and tears rolled out of my eyes. We worked together for a couple of years creating The National Lampoon Show, writing The National Lampoon Radio Hour, working on stuff for the magazine. Bill Murray joined the show and Richard Belzer..."In 1979, incoming NBC President Fred Silverman offered Radner her own primetime variety show, which she turned down. That year, she was a host of the Music for UNICEF Concert at the United Nations General Assembly. Alan Zweibel, who co-created the Roseanne Roseannadanna character and co-wrote Roseanne's dialogue, recalled that Radner, one of three original SNL cast members who stayed away from cocaine, chastised him for abusing it. While in character as Roseanne Roseannadanna, Radner gave the commencement address to the graduating class at the Columbia School of Journalism in 1979.
Radner had mixed emotions about
United States
The United States of America known as the United States or America, is a country composed of 50 states, a federal district, five major self-governing territories, various possessions. At 3.8 million square miles, the United States is the world's third or fourth largest country by total area and is smaller than the entire continent of Europe's 3.9 million square miles. With a population of over 327 million people, the U. S. is the third most populous country. The capital is Washington, D. C. and the largest city by population is New York City. Forty-eight states and the capital's federal district are contiguous in North America between Canada and Mexico; the State of Alaska is in the northwest corner of North America, bordered by Canada to the east and across the Bering Strait from Russia to the west. The State of Hawaii is an archipelago in the mid-Pacific Ocean; the U. S. territories are scattered about the Pacific Ocean and the Caribbean Sea, stretching across nine official time zones. The diverse geography and wildlife of the United States make it one of the world's 17 megadiverse countries.
Paleo-Indians migrated from Siberia to the North American mainland at least 12,000 years ago. European colonization began in the 16th century; the United States emerged from the thirteen British colonies established along the East Coast. Numerous disputes between Great Britain and the colonies following the French and Indian War led to the American Revolution, which began in 1775, the subsequent Declaration of Independence in 1776; the war ended in 1783 with the United States becoming the first country to gain independence from a European power. The current constitution was adopted in 1788, with the first ten amendments, collectively named the Bill of Rights, being ratified in 1791 to guarantee many fundamental civil liberties; the United States embarked on a vigorous expansion across North America throughout the 19th century, acquiring new territories, displacing Native American tribes, admitting new states until it spanned the continent by 1848. During the second half of the 19th century, the Civil War led to the abolition of slavery.
By the end of the century, the United States had extended into the Pacific Ocean, its economy, driven in large part by the Industrial Revolution, began to soar. The Spanish–American War and World War I confirmed the country's status as a global military power; the United States emerged from World War II as a global superpower, the first country to develop nuclear weapons, the only country to use them in warfare, a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council. Sweeping civil rights legislation, notably the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the Fair Housing Act of 1968, outlawed discrimination based on race or color. During the Cold War, the United States and the Soviet Union competed in the Space Race, culminating with the 1969 U. S. Moon landing; the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 left the United States as the world's sole superpower. The United States is the world's oldest surviving federation, it is a representative democracy.
The United States is a founding member of the United Nations, World Bank, International Monetary Fund, Organization of American States, other international organizations. The United States is a developed country, with the world's largest economy by nominal GDP and second-largest economy by PPP, accounting for a quarter of global GDP; the U. S. economy is post-industrial, characterized by the dominance of services and knowledge-based activities, although the manufacturing sector remains the second-largest in the world. The United States is the world's largest importer and the second largest exporter of goods, by value. Although its population is only 4.3% of the world total, the U. S. holds 31% of the total wealth in the world, the largest share of global wealth concentrated in a single country. Despite wide income and wealth disparities, the United States continues to rank high in measures of socioeconomic performance, including average wage, human development, per capita GDP, worker productivity.
The United States is the foremost military power in the world, making up a third of global military spending, is a leading political and scientific force internationally. In 1507, the German cartographer Martin Waldseemüller produced a world map on which he named the lands of the Western Hemisphere America in honor of the Italian explorer and cartographer Amerigo Vespucci; the first documentary evidence of the phrase "United States of America" is from a letter dated January 2, 1776, written by Stephen Moylan, Esq. to George Washington's aide-de-camp and Muster-Master General of the Continental Army, Lt. Col. Joseph Reed. Moylan expressed his wish to go "with full and ample powers from the United States of America to Spain" to seek assistance in the revolutionary war effort; the first known publication of the phrase "United States of America" was in an anonymous essay in The Virginia Gazette newspaper in Williamsburg, Virginia, on April 6, 1776. The second draft of the Articles of Confederation, prepared by John Dickinson and completed by June 17, 1776, at the latest, declared "The name of this Confederation shall be the'United States of America'".
The final version of the Articles sent to the states for ratification in late 1777 contains the sentence "The Stile of this Confederacy shall be'The United States of America'". In June 1776, Thomas Jefferson wrote the phrase "UNITED STATES OF AMERICA" in all capitalized letters in the headline of his "original Rough draught" of the Declaration of Independence; this draft of the document did not surface unti
Tim Burton
Timothy Walter Burton is an American filmmaker, artist and animator. He is known for his dark and eccentric horror and fantasy films such as Beetlejuice, Edward Scissorhands, The Nightmare Before Christmas, Ed Wood, Sleepy Hollow, Corpse Bride, Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, Dark Shadows, Frankenweenie, he is known for blockbusters such as the adventure comedy Pee-wee's Big Adventure, the superhero films Batman and its first sequel Batman Returns, the sci-fi film Planet of the Apes, the fantasy drama Big Fish, the musical adventure film Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, the fantasy film Alice in Wonderland. Burton has worked with Johnny Depp and Danny Elfman, who has composed scores for all but three of the films Burton has directed. Helena Bonham Carter, Burton's former domestic partner, has appeared in many of his films, he wrote and illustrated the poetry book The Melancholy Death of Oyster Boy & Other Stories, published in 1997 by Faber and Faber and a compilation of his drawings and other artwork, entitled The Art of Tim Burton, was released in 2009.
A follow-up to The Art of Tim Burton, entitled The Napkin Art of Tim Burton: Things You Think About in a Bar, containing sketches made by Burton on napkins at bars and restaurants he visits, was released in 2015. Burton was born in 1958, in Burbank, the son of Jean Burton the owner of a cat-themed gift shop, William "Bill" Burton, a former minor league baseball player, working for the Burbank Parks and Recreation Department; as a preteen, Burton would make short films in his backyard on Evergreen Street using crude stop motion animation techniques or shoot them on 8 mm film without sound. Burton attended Providencia Elementary School in Burbank. Burton went to Burbank High School, but he was not a good student, he played on the water polo team at Burbank High. Burton was an introspective person and found pleasure in painting and watching movies, his future work would be influenced by the works of such childhood heroes as Dr. Seuss and Roald Dahl. After graduating from Burbank High School, Burton attended the California Institute of the Arts in Valencia, California, to study character animation.
As a student at CalArts, Burton made the shorts Stalk of King and Octopus. Stalk of the Celery Monster attracted the attention of Walt Disney Productions' animation division, which offered Burton an animator's apprenticeship at the studio, he worked as an animator, storyboard artist, graphic designer, art director and concept artist on films such as The Fox and the Hound and The Black Cauldron. His concept art never made it into the finished films. While at Disney in 1982, Burton made his first short, Vincent, a six-minute black-and-white stop motion film based on a poem written by the filmmaker, depicting a young boy who fantasizes that he is his hero Vincent Price, with Price himself providing narration; the film was produced by Rick Heinrichs, whom Burton had befriended while working in the concept art department at Disney. The film was shown at the Chicago Film Festival and released, alongside the teen drama Tex, for two weeks in one Los Angeles cinema; this was followed by Burton's first live-action production Hansel and Gretel, a Japanese-themed adaptation of the Brothers Grimm fairy tale for the Disney Channel, which climaxes in a kung fu fight between Hansel and Gretel and the witch.
Having aired once in 1983 at 10:30 pm on Halloween and promptly shelved, prints of the film are difficult to locate, fueling rumors that the project did not exist. The short would go on public display in 2009 at the Museum of Modern Art, again in 2011 as part of the Tim Burton art exhibit at LACMA, it was again shown at the Seoul Museum of Art in 2012. Burton's next live-action short film, was released in 1984, it tells the story of a young boy. Filmed in black-and-white, it stars Shelley Duvall and Daniel Stern. After Frankenweenie was completed, Disney fired Burton, under the pretext of him spending the company's resources on doing a film that would be too dark and scary for children to see. Actor Paul Reubens saw Vincent and chose Burton to direct the cinematic spin-off of his popular character Pee-wee Herman. Pee-wee Herman gained mainstream popularity with a successful stage show at The Groundlings and the Roxy, turned into an HBO special; the film, Pee-wee's Big Adventure, was made on a budget of $8 million and grossed more than $40 million at the North American box office.
Burton, a fan of the eccentric musical group Oingo Boingo, asked songwriter Danny Elfman to provide the music for the film. Since Elfman has scored every film that Tim Burton has directed, except for Ed Wood, Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street and Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children. After directing episodes for the revitalized version of'50s/'60s anthology horror series Alfred Hitchcock Presents and Shelley Duvall's Faerie Tale Theatre, Burton directed his next big project: Beetlejuice, a supernatural comedy horror about a young couple forced to cope with life after death, the family of pretentious yuppies who invade their treasured New England home, their teenage daughter Lydia (Winona Ryder
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