February 4

February 04, 2026

It's February 4th

On this day in 1967 - Lunar Orbiter 3 lifts off from Cape Canaveral's Launch Complex 13 on its mission to identify possible landing sites for the Surveyor and Apollo spacecraft.

In 1974 - The Stooges play a bar in Wayne, Michigan, where a biker gang called The Scorpions is initiating a new member by having him hurl eggs at lead singer Iggy Pop, who responds by going into the crowd to fight him and gets leveled.
(https://calendar.songfacts.com/)

In 1977 - Fleetwood Mac release "Rumours"

In 1980 - The Ramones release their 5th album "End of the Century"

In 2007 - Prince plays "Purple Rain" during the Super Bowl XLI halftime special, in the rain no less.

Birthdays:

Rob Corddry
as Bob Howard in "Bad Therapy"

Lisa Eichhorn
as Mother in "Deus: The Dark Sphere"

Michael Beck as Hunter in "Warlords of the 21st Century" aka "Battletruck"

as Miles Creighton in Wes Craven's "Chiller"

Vincent Furnier

Alan Shields
"Gas Up"

Florence LaRue

John Steel

John Schuck
as Psychiatrist in "All Light Will End"

David Newman

George A. Romero

Gary Conway
as Tony Mantell/The Teenage Frankenstein in "How to Make a Monster"

Many of Pete Dumond's "children" destroyed in the fire were props originally created by Paul Blaisdell for earlier AIP films, and he actually allowed the props to be destroyed. They include The Cat Girl (1957), "Beulah" from It Conquered the World (1956), Invasion of the Saucer Men (1957) and the Dr. Jekyll mask from Attack of the Puppet People (1958).Blaisdell also created a brand new monster costume he dubbed "Aunt Esmeralda" which he created specifically to be burned in the fire scene (designed so that as the face melted, a grisly skull was revealed underneath). Blaisdell's She-Creature mask was also in the scene but miraculously was not destroyed. Blaisdell had specifically asked AIP not to burn his Cat Girl mask, but it was carelessly destroyed in the fire anyway. (To compound the tragedy, the cameraman failed to film the Cat Girl mask as it was burning.) The whole incident left a bad taste in Blaisdell's mouth. AIP did not have a physical studio, so the film was shot at Ziv Studios. During production there, a sign was put up that called the studio lot "American International Studios", which was totally misleading. Ed Wood's widow Kathy claimed in a 1992 interview that her husband always felt that the idea for How To Make a Monster was stolen from him by AIP producer Sam Arkoff. She said "Eddie condemned Arkoff, he really hated him. Eddie gave them a script for approval, and they changed the characters a little bit around. Eddie had written it for Lugosi. It was about this old horror actor who couldn't get work any more, so he took his vengeance out on the studio. (They changed it to) a make-up man who takes revenge on a studio." Arkoff denied Wood's claim was true, stating that Herman Cohen originated the entire project on his own.

Collin Wilcox
as Ann in "The Revolutionary"

Paul Burlison

Jerry Adler
as Louis Varga in "Six Ways to Sunday"

Russell Hoban
"A Russell Hoban Omnibus"

Conrad Bain

Betty Friedan

Janet Waldo
the voice of Alice in "Alice Through the Looking Glass"

Luigi Pareyson

Norman Wisdom
as as Norman Pitkin and Giulio Napolitani in "On the Beat"

William Talman
as Emmett Myers in "The Hitch-Hiker"

Rosa Parks

Julian Bell
"Nonsense"

Sing a song of sixpence,
A pocketful of rye,
The lover's in the garden
And battle's in the sky.
The banker's in the city
Getting off his gold;
Oh isn't it a pity
The rye can't be sold.
The queen is drinking sherry
And dancing to a band;
A crowd may well feel merry
That it does not understand.
The banker turns his gold about
But that won't sell the rye,
Starve and grow cold without,
And ask the reason why
The guns are in the garden,
And battle's in the sky.

Clyde Tombaugh