December 18, 1963: “The Pink Panther” Premieres

December 18, 1963: The film The Pink Panther premieres, directed by Blake Edwards. The cartoon character of the same name debuted in the film's opening sequence, with the classic theme song composed and conducted by Henry Mancini. You know the joke: What did the Pink Panther say when he stepped on an ant? "Dead ant, dead ant... "

But, within the film, the Pink Panther is not a character. Rather, it is the thing everyone is chasing, what film director Alfred Hitchcock called a "MacGuffin": A large pink diamond with a "flaw" in the shape of a leaping panther. It is owned by Princess Dala (played by the Tunisian-born Italian actress Claudia Cardinale, with her voice dubbed by Canadian singer Gale Garnett), an exiled royal whose country's new dictatorship wants it back, and the United Nations' World Court has sided with them, and they've offered a big reward for it.

And Inspector Jacques Clouseau (played by Peter Sellers), the incompetent, clumsy, accident-prone Paris police official who was, clearly, named for oceanographer Jacques Cousteau, isn't the hero of the movie. The hero is actually a criminal, a "gentleman thief" named Sir Charles Lytton, a.k.a. The Phantom (David Niven).

Cardinale, Niven and the Panther

To make matters worse, Clouseau's wife, Simone (the French actress Germaine Hélène Irène Lefebvre, a.k.a. Capucine) is having an affair with The Phantom. He shouldn't be the hero, but he has been treated as such, because, while he often played less-than-moral characters, the handsome, incredibly charming Niven was beloved, as if he were an earlier, English version of Paul Newman. Even my mother, a senior in high school when the film came out, adored Niven. She also liked Robert Wagner, who played Lytton's American-based and even less-moral nephew, George.

The film was successful enough to lead to a series, with A Shot in the Dark premiering the following June, and Inspector Clouseau in 1968. The film also inspired the TV show Get Smart: NBC told the producers to combine Inspector Clouseau and James Bond, because they were the two biggest cultural phenomena in the world at the time. I guess they forgot about the Beatles.

The series resumed a few years later: The Return of the Pink Panther was released in 1975, The Pink Panther Strikes Again in 1976, and The Revenge of the Pink Panther in 1978. Sellers died in 1980. By that point, Niven was suffering from ALS, known in America as Lou Gehrig's disease. That didn't stop Blake Edwards: In 1982, he made The Trail of the Pink Panther, using a brief cameo from Niven and previously unused footage of Sellers, with Clouseau spending most of the film in a body-cast. And in 1983, all kinds of tricks, including the briefest of cameos from a dying Niven, were used for Curse of the Pink Panther.

In a way, in 1983, things came full circle: The cartoon Inspector Gadget premiered, with Don Adams, star of Get Smart, voicing the title role, a well-meaning but incompetent robot cop who dressed much like Inspector Clouseau, with a tan trenchcoat and a trilby hat, the kind also favored by another famous fictional cop, Telly Savalas on Kojak.

In 1993, Edwards tried again, with Son of the Pink Panther, with Italian actor Roberto Benigni as the title character, Gendarme Jacques Gambrelli. As it turns out, he is half of the result of a one-night stand between Clouseau and a different character played by Cardinale, the other being his twin sister, Jacqueline Gambrelli (Nicoletta Braschi).

The one constant through all these films was Czech-British actor Herbert Lom as the original Clouseau's beleaguered boss, Chief Inspector Charles Dreyfus.

Capucine died in 1990, Edwards in 2010, Lom in 2012. As of December 18, 2022, Cardinale and Wagner are still alive. (UPDATE: Cardinale died in 2025.)

In 2006, Steve Martin starred in a reboot, with The Pink Panther 2 released in 2009.

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December 18, 1963 was a Wednesday. Basketball star Charles Oakley and actor Brad Pitt were born.

Baseball was out of season. Football was in midweek. There were 4 games in the NBA:

* The New York Knicks lost to the Boston Celtics, 133-111 at the Boston Garden.

* The Baltimore Bullets beat the Detroit Pistons, 124-107 at Cobo Hall (now Huntington Place) in Detroit. For the Bullets, Gus Johnson scored 38 points, and Walt Bellamy scored 36. 

* The Los Angeles Lakers beat the Philadelphia 76ers, 116-96 at the Los Angeles Sports Arena. Jerry West scored 30 points and grabbed 14 rebounds.

* And the San Francisco Warriors beat the St. Louis Hawks, 104-96 at, sort of, a neutral site: The gymnasium at Sacramento High School, 88 miles northeast of downtown San Francisco. It was just another day at the office for Wilt Chamberlain: He scored 27 points, grabbed 27 rebounds, and had 11 assists. For the Hawks, Bob Pettit scored 29 points. Pettit was the NBA's all-time leading scorer.

And the NHL's entire "Original Six" were in action:

* The New York Rangers and the Detroit Red Wings played to a tie, 1-1 at the old Madison Square Garden.

* The Montreal Canadiens beat the Toronto Maple Leafs, 7-1 at the Montreal Forum.

* And the Boston Bruins beat the Chicago Black Hawks, 2-1 at the Chicago Stadium.

January 29, 1964: "Dr. Strangelove" Premieres

January 29, 1964: Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb premieres. It would have premiered a few weeks earlier, but was postponed due to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy the preceding November 22.

Director Stanley Kubrick wanted to make a film about the Cold War, and a friend gave him Peter George's 1958 novel Red Alert. At first, Kubrick intended the film as a serious drama and a warning. But the more he read about the idea of MAD -- Mutually Assured Destruction -- the more he saw how absurd the whole thing was. He said:

My idea of doing it as a nightmare comedy came in the early weeks of working on the screenplay. I found that in trying to put meat on the bones and to imagine the scenes fully, one had to keep leaving out of it things which were either absurd or paradoxical, in order to keep it from being funny; and these things seemed to be close to the heart of the scenes in question.

Stanley Kubrick

Among the titles that Kubrick considered for the film were Dr. Doomsday or: How to Start World War III Without Even Trying (a parody of the Broadway musical How to Succeed In Business Without Even Trying), Dr. Strangelove's Secret Uses of Uranus, and Wonderful Bomb (also a play on a Broadway title: Wonderful Town). After deciding to make the film a black comedy, Kubrick brought in Terry Southern as a co-writer in late 1962.

Columbia Pictures agreed to finance the film if Peter Sellers played multiple roles. Kubrick had no problem with this, as Sellers had appeared in his previous film, an adaptation of Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita.

But Kubrick had to film in London, because Sellers, was going through a divorce from Anne Howe, the 1st of what turned out to be 4 ex-wives -- he was cheating on her with Swedish actress Britt Ekland, who became his 2nd ex-wife -- and could not leave the United Kingdom. In spite of being unable to visit Washington, D.C. -- and he wouldn't have been allowed into the room anyway, due to security concerns -- someone who had been there at the time said, years later, that Kubrick had come very close to getting the scene right.

Sellers played 3 roles: Group Captain Lionel Mandrake, a Royal Air Force officer on exchange in the United States; Merkin Muffley, a bald, indecisive President of the United States based on former Presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson; and the title character, a German scientist named Merkwürdigliebe, which translates to "Strange love." His nuclear experiments have left him blind, confined to a wheelchair, and with a right arm that occasionally, involuntarily, goes up into a Nazi salute. And, in his ever-present German accent, he calls the President "Mein Führer." This character was not in Red Alert.

Among the other stars: George C. Scott as General Buck Turgidson, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; Sterling Hayden as General Jack D. Ripper, who acts on his anti-Communist paranoia and launches a nuclear attack; James Earl Jones, in his very 1st film, as Lieutenant Lothar Zogg, the bombardier in the one and only B-52 bomber that wasn't successfully recalled; and Slim Pickens as Major T.J. "King" Kong, the commanding officer of the B-52, last seen riding a dropped bomb like a bucking bronco, waving a cowboy hat around in the air.

Kubrick had a stroke of genius: He only told half the cast that the film was a comedy, so half of them acted as though it was serious, while the other half pretended to.

As of January 29, 2022, only 2 actors from the film are still alive: James Earl Jones, and Glenn Beck, who played Air Force Lieutenant Kivel. Beck should not be confused with the controversial talk show host of the same name, who was born 12 days after the film premiered. This Glenn Beck also worked with Kubrick in 2001: A Space Odyssey, and later played Abraham Lincoln in National Treasure: Book of Secrets.

Six months before the film premiered, Marvel Comics debuted the character of Doctor Strange, a superhero magician. Perhaps the hype around Dr. Strangelove helped the character gain fans. And Dick Stuart, a 1st baseman then playing for the Boston Red Sox, was a powerful slugger, but a horrible fielder, in an era before the designated hitter. Already nicknamed Stonefingers, after the James Bond novel Goldfinger, he soon received a new nickname: Dr. Strangeglove.

In a 2014 episode of the YouTube series Epic Rap Battles of History, rapper Ruggles Outbound played Kubrick. It became a "battle royale" of film directors, with "Nice" Peter Shukoff playing Steven Spielberg and Michael Bay, while "Epic" Lloyd Ahlquist played Alfred Hitchcock, and rapper Michael "Wax" Jones played Quentin Tarantino.

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January 29, 1964 was a Wednesday. Baseball and football were out of season. There were 3 games played in the NBA:

* The New York Knicks beat the St. Louis Hawks, 105-104 at the Kiel Auditorium in St. Louis.

* And there was a doubleheader at the Boston Garden. In the opener, the Philadelphia 76ers beat the Los Angeles Lakers, 102-97. Elgin Baylor had 34 points in defeat.

* In the nightcap, the San Francisco Warriors beat the Boston Celtics, 100-92. Wilt Chamberlain had 28 points and 22 rebounds.

There were 2 games played in the NHL. The Montreal Canadiens beat the Toronto Maple Leafs, 2-1 at the Montreal Forum. And the Detroit Red Wings and the Chicago Black Hawks played to a tie, 2-2 at the Chicago Stadium. The New York Rangers and the Boston Bruins did not play that night.