title: Demon

text: In the Genesis flood narrative the author explains how God was noticing "how corrupt the earth had become, for all the people on earth had corrupted their ways" (). In Jubilees the sins of man are attributed to "the unclean demons [who] began to lead astray the children of the sons of Noah, and to make to err and destroy them" (Jubilees 10:1). In Jubilees, Mastema questions the loyalty of Abraham and tells God to "bid him offer him as a burnt offering on the altar, and Thou wilt see if he will do this command" (Jubilees 17:16). The discrepancy between the story in Jubilees and the story in Genesis 22 exists with the presence of Mastema. In Genesis, God tests the will of Abraham merely to determine whether he is a true follower, however; in Jubilees Mastema has an agenda behind promoting the sacrifice of Abraham's son, "an even more demonic act than that of the Satan in Job". In Jubilees, where Mastema, an angel tasked with the tempting of mortals into sin and iniquity, requests that God give him a tenth of the spirits of the children of the watchers, demons, in order to aid the process (Jubilees 10:7–9). These demons are passed into Mastema's authority, where once again, an angel is in charge of demonic spirits.


title: Demon

text: The Testament of Solomon, written sometime in the first three centuries C.E., the demon Asmodeus explains that he is the son of an angel and a human mother. Another demon describes himself as having died in the "massacre in the age of giants". "Beelzeboul", the prince of demons, appears as a fallen angel not as a demon, but makes people worship demons as their gods.


title: Demon

text: Since Early Christianity, demonology has developed from a simple acceptance of demons to a complex study that has grown from the original ideas taken from Jewish demonology and Christian scriptures. Christian demonology is studied in depth within the Roman Catholic Church, although many other Christian churches affirm and discuss the existence of demons.


title: Demon

text: Building upon the few references to "daimon" in the New Testament, especially the poetry of the Book of Revelation, Christian writers of apocrypha from the second century onwards created a more complicated tapestry of beliefs about "demons" that was largely independent of Christian scripture.


title: Demon

text: While daimons were considered as both potentially benevolent or malevolent, Origen argued against Celsus that daimons are exclusively evil entities, supporting the later idea of (evil) demons. According to Origen's cosmology, increasing corruption and evil within the soul, the more estranged the soul gets from God. Therefore, Origen opined that the most evil demons are located underground. Besides the fallen angels known from Christian scriptures, Origen talks about Greek daemons, like nature spirits and giants. These creatures were thought to inhabit nature or air and nourish from pagan sacrifices roaming the earth. However, there is no functional difference between the spirits of the underworld and of earth, since both have fallen from perfection into the material world. Origen sums them up as fallen angels and thus equal to demons.


title: Demon

text: Many ascetics, like Origen and Anthony the Great, described demons as psychological powers, tempting to evil, in contrast to benevolent angels advising good. According to "Life of Anthony", written in Greek around 360 by Athanasius of Alexandria, most of the time, the demons were expressed as an internal struggle, inclinations and temptations. But after Anthony successfully resisted the demons, they would appear in human form to tempt and threaten him even more intensely.


title: Demon

text: Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite described "evil" as "defiancy" and does not give "evil" an ontological existence. He explains demons are deficiant creatures, who willingly turn themselves towards the unreal and non-existence. Their dangerous nature results not from power of their nature, but from their tendency to drag others into the "void" and the unreal, away from God.


title: Demon

text: Michael Psellos proposed the existence of several types of demons, deeply influenced by the material nature of the regions they dwell. The highest and most powerful demons attack the mind of people using their "imaginative action" (phantastikos) to produce illusions in the mind. The lowest demons on the other hand are almost mindless, gross and grunting spirits, which try to possess people instinctively, simply attracted by the warmth and life of humans. These cause diseases, fatal accidents and animalistic behavior in their victims. They are unable to speak, while other lower types of demons might give out false oracles. The demons are divided into:


title: Demon

text: Invocation of Saints, holy men and women, especially ascetics, reading the Gospel, holy oil or water is said to drive them out. However, Psellos' schemes have been too inconsistent to answer questions about the hierarchy of fallen angels. The devil's position is impossible to assign in this scheme and it does not respond to living perceptions of felt experience and was considered rather impractical to have a lasting effect or impact on Christian demonology.


title: Demon

text: The contemporary Roman Catholic Church unequivocally teaches that angels and demons are real beings rather than just symbolic devices. The Catholic Church has a cadre of officially sanctioned exorcists which perform many exorcisms each year. The exorcists of the Catholic Church teach that demons attack humans continually but that afflicted persons can be effectively healed and protected either by the formal rite of exorcism, authorized to be performed only by bishops and those they designate, or by prayers of deliverance, which any Christian can offer for themselves or others.


title: Demon

text: At various times in Christian history, attempts have been made to classify demons according to various proposed demonic hierarchies.


title: Demon

text: In Mandaeism, the World of Darkness (), also referred to as Sheol, is the underworld located below Tibil (Earth). It is ruled by its king Ur (Leviathan) and its queen Ruha, mother of the seven planets and twelve constellations. The great dark Ocean of Sup (or Suf) lies in the World of Darkness. The great dividing river of Hitpun, analogous to the river Styx in Greek mythology, separates the World of Darkness from the World of Light.


title: Demon

text: Prominent infernal beings found in the World of Darkness include "lilith", "nalai" (vampire), "niuli" (hobgoblin), "gadalta" (ghost), "satani" (Satan) and various other demons and evil spirits.


title: Demon

text: Gnostic largely relies on Greek and Persian dualism, especially on Platonism. In accordance with Platonism, they regarded the "idea" as good while considering the material and conscious world to be inherently evil. The demonized star-deities of late Persian religion became associated with a demon, thus identifying the seven observable planets with a demonic ruler. These demons rule over the earth and the realm of planets, representing different desires and passions. According to Origen, the Ophites depicted the world as surrounded by the demonic Leviathan.


title: Demon

text: Like in Christianity, the term "daimons" was used for demons and refers to both the Archons as well as to their demonic assistants. Judas Iscariot is, in the Gospel of Judas, portrayed as the "thirtheenth daimon" for betraying Jesus and a supporter of the Archons.


title: Demon

text: Examples of Gnostic portrayals of demons can be found in the "Apocryphon of John" in which they are said to have helped construct the physical Adam and in "Pistis Sophia" which states they are ruled over by Hekate and punish corrupt souls.


title: Demon

text: "Shayāṭīn" (or "Daeva" of Indo-Iranian religion) are the usual terms for demons in Islamic belief. In Islam demons try to lead humans astray from God, by tempting them to sin, teaching them sorcery and cause mischief among humans. Occult practises albeit not forbidden per se, may include conjuring demons, which requires acts against God's laws and are therefore forbidden, such as illicit blood-sacrifices, abandoning prayer and rejecting fasting. Based on the Islamic view on Solomon, who is widely believed to have been a ruler over genies and demons, Islam has a rich tradition about conjuring demons. Among the demons are the devils ("shayatin") and the fiends ("div"). Both are believed to have worked for Solomon as slaves. While the devils usually appear within a Judeo-Christian background, the "div" frequently feature in beliefs of Persian and Indian origin. But it is to be noted that in Islam both angels and demons are considered to be the creatures of God and so God has ultimate power over all of them.


title: Demon

text: According to exegesis of the Quran the devils are the offspring of Iblis (Satan). They are said to live until the world ceases to exist, always shadow in humans (and jinn) whispering onto their hearts to lead them astray. Prayers are used to ward off their attacks, dissolving them temporarily. As the counterpart of the angels, they try to go against God's will and their abode in Hell is pre-destined. They lack free will and are bound to evil. The "ifrit" and "marid" are considered to be two more powerful classes of devils.


title: Demon

text: According to Abu Ali Bal'ami's work on the history of the world, Wahb ibn Munabbih explained that the "divs" were the first beings created by God. Some argue the devils were created good, but turned evil by Iblis' act of arrogance, the "div" were created as vicious creatures and embodiment of evil. When Iblis was still among the angels, he led an army against the spirits on the earth. Among them were the "div", who formed two orders; one of which sided with the jinn and were banished with them, condemned to roam the earth. The other, treacherous "div" joined Iblis in battle, and exiled to Hell with him. The "div" are often depicted as sorcerers whose misdeeds are not bound to temptation only. They could cause sickness, mental illnesses, or even turn humans to stone by touching. While the devils frequently appear to ordinary humans to tempt them into everything disapproved by society, the "div" usually appear to specific heroes.


title: Demon

text: In the Bahá'í Faith, demons are not regarded as independent evil spirits as they are in some faiths. Rather, evil spirits described in various faiths' traditions, such as Satan, fallen angels, demons and jinn, are metaphors for the base character traits a human being may acquire and manifest when he turns away from God and follows his lower nature. Belief in the existence of ghosts and earthbound spirits is rejected and considered to be the product of superstition.


title: Demon

text: While some people fear demons, or attempt to exorcise them, others willfully attempt to summon them for knowledge, assistance, or power. The ceremonial magician usually consults a grimoire, which gives the names and abilities of demons as well as detailed instructions for conjuring and controlling them. Grimoires are not limited to demons – some give the names of angels or spirits which can be called, a process called theurgy. The use of ceremonial magic to call demons is also known as goetia, the name taken from a section in the famous grimoire known as the "Lesser Key of Solomon".


title: Demon

text: According to Rosemary Ellen Guiley, "Demons are not courted or worshipped in contemporary Wicca and Paganism. The existence of negative energies is acknowledged."


title: Demon

text: Psychologist Wilhelm Wundt remarked that "among the activities attributed by myths all over the world to demons, the harmful predominate, so that in popular belief bad demons are clearly older than good ones." Sigmund Freud developed this idea and claimed that the concept of demons was derived from the important relation of the living to the dead: "The fact that demons are always regarded as the spirits of those who have died "recently" shows better than anything the influence of mourning on the origin of the belief in demons."


title: Demon

text: M. Scott Peck, an American psychiatrist, wrote two books on the subject, "People of the Lie: The Hope For Healing Human Evil" and "Glimpses of the Devil: A Psychiatrist's Personal Accounts of Possession, Exorcism, and Redemption". Peck describes in some detail several cases involving his patients. In "People of the Lie" he provides identifying characteristics of an evil person, whom he classified as having a character disorder. In "Glimpses of the Devil" Peck goes into significant detail describing how he became interested in exorcism in order to debunk the "myth" of possession by evil spirits – only to be convinced otherwise after encountering two cases which did not fit into any category known to psychology or psychiatry. Peck came to the conclusion that possession was a rare phenomenon related to evil and that possessed people are not actually evil; rather, they are doing battle with the forces of evil.


title: Demon

text: Although Peck's earlier work was met with widespread popular acceptance, his work on the topics of evil and possession has generated significant debate and derision. Much was made of his association with (and admiration for) the controversial Malachi Martin, a Roman Catholic priest and a former Jesuit, despite the fact that Peck consistently called Martin a liar and a manipulator. Richard Woods, a Roman Catholic priest and theologian, has claimed that Dr. Peck misdiagnosed patients based upon a lack of knowledge regarding dissociative identity disorder (formerly known as multiple personality disorder) and had apparently transgressed the boundaries of professional ethics by attempting to persuade his patients into accepting Christianity. Father Woods admitted that he has never witnessed a genuine case of demonic possession in all his years.


title: Demon

text: According to S. N. Chiu, God is shown sending a demon against Saul in 1 Samuel 16 and 18 in order to punish him for the failure to follow God's instructions, showing God as having the power to use demons for his own purposes, putting the demon under his divine authority. According to the "Britannica Concise Encyclopedia", demons, despite being typically associated with evil, are often shown to be under divine control, and not acting of their own devices.


title: Demographics of India

text: India is the second most populated country in the world with a sixth of the world's population. According to official estimates, India's population stood at 1.38 billion.


title: Demographics of India

text: Between 1975 and 2010, the population doubled to 1.2 billion, reaching the billion mark in 2000. India is projected to surpass China to become the world's most populous country by 2023. It is expected to become the first country to be home to more than 1.5 billion people by 2030, and its population is set to reach 1.7 billion by 2050. However, its pace of population growth is slowing. In 2017 its population growth rate was 0.98%, ranking 112th in the world; in contrast, from 1972 to 1983, India's population grew by an annual rate of 2.3%.


title: Demographics of India

text: In 2022, the median age of an Indian was 28.7 years, compared to 38.4 for China and 48.6 for Japan; and, by 2030; India's dependency ratio will be just over 0.4. However, the number of children in India peaked more than a decade ago and is now falling. The number of children under the age of five peaked in 2007, and since then the number has been falling. The number of Indians under 15 years old peaked slightly later (in 2011) and is now also declining.


title: Demographics of India

text: India has more than two thousand ethnic groups, and every major religion is represented, as are four major families of languages (Indo-European, Dravidian, Austroasiatic and Sino-Tibetan languages) as well as two language isolates: the Nihali language, spoken in parts of Maharashtra, and the Burushaski language, spoken in parts of Jammu and Kashmir. 1,000,000 people in India are Anglo-Indians and 700,000 United States citizens are living in India. They represent over 0.1% of the total population of India. Overall, only the continent of Africa exceeds the linguistic, genetic and cultural diversity of the nation of India.


title: Demographics of India

text: The sex ratio was 944 females for 1000 males in 2016, and 940 per 1000 in 2011. This ratio has been showing an upwards trend for the last two decades after a continuous decline in the last century.


title: Demographics of India

text: The following table lists estimates for the population of India (including what are now Pakistan and Bangladesh) from prehistory up until 1820. It includes estimates and growth rates according to five economic historians, along with interpolated estimates and overall aggregate averages derived from their estimates.


title: Demographics of India

text: The population grew from the South Asian Stone Age in 10,000 BC to the Maurya Empire in 200 BC at a steadily increasing growth rate, before population growth slowed down in the Early Medieval Era up to 700 AD, and then started decreasing the up to 1500 AD.


title: Demographics of India

text: Under Mughal Empire, India experienced a high economic and demographic upsurge, due to Mughal agrarian reforms that intensified agricultural production. 15% of the population lived in urban centres, higher than the percentage of the population in 19th-century British India and contemporary Europe up until the 19th century. Those estimates were criticised by Tim Dyson, who considers them exaggerations. According to Dyson, urbanisation of the Mughal empire was less than 9%


title: Demographics of India

text: Under the reign of Akbar (reigned 1556–1605) in 1600, the Mughal Empire's urban population was up to 17 million people, larger than the urban population in Europe. By 1700, Mughal India had an urban population of 23 million people, larger than British India's urban population of 22.3 million in 1871. Nizamuddin Ahmad (1551–1621) reported that, under Akbar's reign, Mughal India had 120 large cities and 3,200 townships. A number of cities in India had a population between a quarter-million and half-million people, with larger cities including Agra (in Agra Subah) with up to 800,000 people and Dhaka (in Bengal Subah) with over 1 million people. Mughal India also had a large number of villages, with 455,698 villages by the time of Aurangzeb (reigned 1658–1707).


title: Demographics of India

text: The total fertility rate is the number of children born per woman. It is based on fairly good data for the entire years. Sources: Our World in Data and Gapminder Foundation.


title: Demographics of India

text: The population of India under the British Raj (including what are now Pakistan and Bangladesh) according to censuses:


title: Demographics of India

text: Studies of India's population since 1881 have focused on such topics as total population, birth and death rates, geographic distribution, literacy, the rural and urban divide, cities of a million, and the three cities with populations over eight million: Delhi, Greater Mumbai (Bombay), and Kolkata (Calcutta).


title: Demographics of India

text: Mortality rates fell in the period 1920–45, primarily due to biological immunisation. Suggestions that it was the benefits of colonialism are refuted by academic thinking: "There can be no serious, informed belief… that… late colonial era mortality diminished and population grew rapidly because of improvements in income, living standards, nutrition, environmental standards, sanitation or health policies, nor was there a cultural transformation…".


title: Demographics of India

text: India occupies 2.41% of the world's land area but supports over 18% of the world's population. At the 2001 census 72.2% of the population lived in about 638,000 villages and the remaining 27.8% lived in more than 5,100 towns and over 380 urban agglomerations.


title: Demographics of India

text: India's population exceeded that of the entire continent of Africa by 200 million people in 2010. However, because Africa's population growth is nearly double that of India, it is expected to surpass both China and India by 2025.


title: Demographics of India

text: The table below summarises India's demographics (excluding the Mao-Maram, Paomata and Purul subdivisions of Senapati District of Manipur state due to cancellation of census results) according to religion at the 2011 census in per cent. The data are "unadjusted" (without excluding Assam and Jammu and Kashmir); the 1981 census was not conducted in Assam and the 1991 census was not conducted in Jammu and Kashmir. Missing citing/reference for "Changes in religious demagraphics over time" table below.


title: Demographics of India

text: The table below represents the infant mortality rate trends in India, based on sex, over the last 15 years. In the urban areas of India, average male infant mortality rates are slightly higher than average female infant mortality rates.


title: Demographics of India

text: Some activists believe India's 2011 census shows a serious decline in the number of girls under the age of seven – activists posit that eight million female fetuses may have been aborted between 2001 and 2011. These claims are controversial. Scientists who study human sex ratios and demographic trends suggest that a birth sex ratio between 1.08 and 1.12 can be due to natural factors, such as the age of mother at the baby's birth, the age of father at conception, number of babies per couple, economic stress, endocrinological factors, and others. The 2011 census birth sex ratio in India, of 917 girls to 1000 boys, is similar to birth sex ratios (870–930 girls to 1000 boys) observed in Japanese, Chinese, Cuban, Filipino and Hawaiian ethnic groups in the United States between 1940 and 2005. They are also similar to birth sex ratios (below 900 girls to 1000 boys) observed in mothers of different age groups and gestation periods in the United States.


title: Demographics of India

text: According to the 2001 census, 41.03% of the Indians spoke Hindi natively, while the rest spoke Assamese, Bengali, Gujarati, Maithili, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Odia, Punjabi, Tamil, Telugu, Urdu and a variety of other languages. There are a total of 122 languages and 234 mother tongues spoken in India. Of these, 22 languages are specified in the Eighth Schedule of Indian Constitution, while 100 are non-specified.


title: Demographics of India

text: The table below excludes Mao-Maram, Paomata and Purul subdivisions of Senapati District of Manipur state due to cancellation of census results.


title: Demographics of India

text: The TFR (total number of children born per women) by religion in 2005–2006 was: Hindus, 2.7; Muslims, 3.1; Christians, 2.4; and Sikhs, 2.0.


title: Demographics of India

text: See Languages of India and List of languages by number of native speakers in India. There are 216 languages with more than 10,000 native speakers in India. The largest of these is Hindi with some 337 million, and the second largest is Bengali with 238 million. 22 languages are recognised as official languages. In India, there are 1,652 languages and dialects in total.


title: Demographics of India

text: Caste and community statistics as recorded from "Socially and Educationally Backward Classes Commission" ("SEBC) or Mandal Commission of 1979. This was completed in 1983."


title: Demographics of India

text: India is projected to overtake China as the world's most populous nation by 2023. These projections make assumptions about future fertility and death rates which may not turn out to be correct in the event. Fertility rates also vary from region to region, with some higher than the national average and some lower than China's.


title: Demographics of India

text: The national Census of India does not recognise racial or ethnic groups within India, but recognises many of the tribal groups as Scheduled Castes and Tribes (see list of Scheduled Tribes in India).


title: Demographics of India

text: According to a 2009 study published by Reich "et al."., the modern Indian population is composed of two genetically divergent and heterogeneous populations which mixed in ancient times (about 1,200–3,500 BP), known as Ancestral North Indians (ANI) and Ancestral South Indians (ASI). ASI corresponds to the Dravidian-speaking population of southern India, whereas ANI corresponds to the Indo-Aryan-speaking population of northern India. 700,000 people from the United States of any race live in India. Between 300,000 and 1 million Anglo-Indians live in India.


title: Demographics of India

text: For a list of ethnic groups in the Republic of India (as well as neighbouring countries) see South Asian ethnic groups.


title: Demographics of India

text: Y-Chromosome DNA Y-DNA represents the male lineage, The Indian Y-chromosome pool may be summarised as follows where haplogroups R-M420, H, R2, L and NOP comprise generally more than 80% of the total chromosomes.


title: Demographics of India

text: Mitochondrial DNA mtDNA represents the female lineage. The Indian mitochondrial DNA is primarily made up of Haplogroup M


title: Demographics of India

text: Numerous genomic studies have been conducted in the last 15 years to seek insights into India's demographic and cultural diversity. These studies paint a complex and conflicting picture.


title: Black panther

text: A black panther is the melanistic colour variant of the leopard ("Panthera pardus") and the jaguar ("Panthera onca"). Black panthers of both species have excess black pigments, but their typical rosettes are also present. They have been documented mostly in tropical forests, with black leopards in Kenya, India, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Thailand, Peninsular Malaysia and Java, and black jaguars of the Americas in Mexico, Panama, Costa Rica, Brazil and Paraguay. Melanism is caused by a recessive allele in the leopard, and by a dominant allele in the jaguar.


title: Black panther

text: In 1788, Jean-Claude Delamétherie described a black leopard that was kept in the Tower of London and had been brought from Bengal. In 1794, Friedrich Albrecht Anton Meyer proposed the scientific name "Felis fusca" for this cat, the Indian leopard ("P. p. fusca").


title: Black panther

text: In 1809, Georges Cuvier described a black leopard kept in the Ménagerie du Jardin des plantes that had been brought from Java. Cuvier proposed the name "Felis melas", the Javan leopard ("P. p. melas").


title: Black panther

text: By the late 19th century, the occurrence of black and spotted leopard cubs in the same litter had been repeatedly recorded in India. Black leopards were thought to be more common in Travancore and in the hills of southern India than in other parts of the country. Black leopards were also frequently encountered in southern Myanmar.


title: Black panther

text: By 1929, the Natural History Museum, London had skins of black leopards collected in South Africa, Nepal, Assam and Kanara in India. Black leopards were thought to be common on the Malay Peninsula and on Java.


title: Black panther

text: A black African leopard ("P. p. pardus") was sighted in the alpine zone of Mount Kenya in the winter of 1989–1990.


title: Black panther

text: In Kenya's Laikipia County, a black leopard was photographed by a camera trap in 2007; in 2018, a female subadult black leopard was repeatedly recorded together with a spotted leopard about farther east in tropical and subtropical grasslands, savannas, and shrublands.


title: Black panther

text: In India's Western Ghats, black leopards were sighted and photographed in 2010 and 2012 in the Kas Plateau Reserved Forest, and in Bhadra Wildlife Sanctuary in 2012. In 2015, a dead black leopard was found on a highway near Satara in Maharashtra.


title: Black panther

text: In May 2012, a black leopard was photographed at an elevation of in Nepal's Kanchenjunga Conservation Area.


title: Black panther

text: At least one black leopard was photographed in mixed deciduous forest in Thailand's Kaeng Krachan National Park during a one-year-long camera trapping survey from 2003 to 2004. In 2009, black leopards were photographed more often than spotted leopards in Kui Buri National Park.


title: Black panther

text: Most leopards recorded at 16 sites south of the Kra Isthmus between 1996 and 2009 were black, indicating a near-fixation of melanism in Peninsular Malaysia. In 2019, a black individual was photographed outside a protected area in Jeli District.


title: Black panther

text: Both black and spotted leopards were recorded in Gunung Gede Pangrango National Park in West Java between 2005 and 2017.


title: Black panther

text: Frequency of melanism appears to be approximately 11% over the leopard's range. Data on the distribution of leopard populations indicates that melanism occurs in five subspecies in the wild: the Indian leopard, Javan leopard, African leopard, Indochinese leopard ("P. p. delacouri") and Sri Lankan leopard ("P. p. kotiya"). Based on records from camera traps, melanistic leopards occur foremost in tropical and subtropical moist broadleaf forests.


title: Black panther

text: It is thought that melanism confers a selective advantage under certain conditions since it is more common in regions of dense forest, where light levels are lower. Preliminary studies also suggest that melanism might be linked to beneficial mutations in the immune system.


title: Black panther

text: The taxonomic status of captive black leopards and the extent of hybridization between the Javan leopard and other leopard subspecies is uncertain. Therefore, coordinated breeding programs for black leopards do not exist in European and North American zoos. Black leopards occupy space needed for breeding endangered leopard subspecies and are not included within the North American Species Survival Plan.


title: Black panther

text: A pseudo-melanistic leopard has a normal background color, but the spots are more densely packed than normal, and merge to obscure the golden-brown background color. Any spots on the flanks and limbs that have not merged into the mass of swirls and stripes are unusually small and discrete, rather than forming rosettes. The face and underparts are paler and dappled, like those of ordinary spotted leopards.


title: Black panther

text: In 1801, Félix de Azara described a black jaguar observed by local people near the Paraná River in Paraguay.


title: Black panther

text: In 2009, a black jaguar was photographed by a camera trap for the first time in Costa Rica's Alberto Manuel Brenes Biological Reserve.


title: Black panther

text: In the mountains of the Cordillera de Talamanca, 104 records of jaguars were obtained between 2010 and 2019; 26 of them showed melanistic jaguars.


title: Black panther

text: In eastern Panama, black jaguars were repeatedly photographed in the Mamoní River Valley between 2016 and 2018, mostly in primary forest.


title: Black panther

text: Melanism in the jaguar is caused by deletions in the melanocortin 1 receptor gene and conferred by a dominant allele. Five black jaguars were monitored by researchers in the Mamirauá Sustainable Development Reserve in the Brazilian State of Amazonas between 2003 and 2018. The researchers studied their behaviour in Várzea forest.


title: Black panther

text: There is no authenticated case of a truly melanistic cougar. No specimen has been photographed or killed in the wild, nor has it ever been bred in captivity. Unconfirmed sightings known as the "North American black panther" are currently attributed to errors in species identification by non-experts, and by the mimetic exaggeration of size.


title: Death of Benito Mussolini

text: The death of Benito Mussolini, the deposed Italian fascist dictator, occurred on 28 April 1945, in the final days of World War II in Europe, when he was summarily executed by an Italian partisan in the small village of Giulino di Mezzegra in northern Italy. The generally accepted version of events is that Mussolini was shot by Walter Audisio, a communist partisan. However, since the end of the war, the circumstances of Mussolini's death, and the identity of his executioner, have been subjects of continuing dispute and controversy in Italy.


title: Death of Benito Mussolini

text: In 1940, Mussolini took his country into World War II on the side of Nazi Germany but soon was met with military failure. By the autumn of 1943, he was reduced to being the leader of a German puppet state in northern Italy and was faced with the Allied advance from the south and an increasingly violent internal conflict with the partisans. In April 1945, with the Allies breaking through the last German defences in northern Italy and a general uprising of the partisans taking hold in the cities, Mussolini's situation became untenable. On 25 April he fled Milan, where he had been based, and headed towards the Swiss border. He and his mistress, Claretta Petacci, were captured on 27 April by local partisans near the village of Dongo on Lake Como. Mussolini and Petacci were executed the following afternoon, two days before Adolf Hitler's suicide.


title: Death of Benito Mussolini

text: The bodies of Mussolini and Petacci were taken to Milan and left in a suburban square, the Piazzale Loreto, for a large angry crowd to insult and physically abuse. They were then hung upside down from a metal girder above a service station on the square. Initially, Mussolini was buried in an unmarked grave but, in 1946, his body was dug up and stolen by fascist supporters. Four months later it was recovered by the authorities who then kept it hidden for the next eleven years. Eventually, in 1957, his remains were allowed to be interred in the Mussolini family crypt in his home town of Predappio. His tomb has become a place of pilgrimage for neo-fascists and the anniversary of his death is marked by neo-fascist rallies.


title: Death of Benito Mussolini

text: In the post-war years, the "official" version of Mussolini's death has been questioned in Italy (but, generally, not internationally). Some journalists, politicians and historians, doubting the veracity of Audisio's account, have advanced a wide variety of theories and speculation as to how Mussolini supposedly died and who was responsible. At least twelve different individuals have, at various times, been claimed to be the killer. These have included Luigi Longo and Sandro Pertini who subsequently became general secretary of the Italian Communist Party and President of Italy respectively. Some writers believe that Mussolini's death was part of a British special forces operation, with the supposed aim of retrieving compromising "secret agreements" and correspondence with Winston Churchill that Mussolini had allegedly been carrying when he was captured. However, the "official" explanation, with Audisio as Mussolini's executioner, remains the most credible narrative.


title: Death of Benito Mussolini

text: Mussolini had been Italy's fascist leader since 1922, first as prime minister and, following his seizure of dictatorial powers in 1925, with the title "Il Duce". In June 1940, he took the country into World War II on the side of Nazi Germany led by Adolf Hitler. Following the Allied invasion of Sicily in July 1943, Mussolini was deposed and put under arrest; Italy then signed the Armistice of Cassibile with the Allies in the following September.


title: Death of Benito Mussolini

text: Shortly after the Armistice, Mussolini was rescued from prison in the Gran Sasso raid by German special forces, and Hitler installed him as leader of the Italian Social Republic, a German puppet state set up in northern Italy and based at the town of Salò near Lake Garda. By 1944, the "Salò Republic", as it came to be called, was threatened not only by the Allies advancing from the south but also internally by Italian anti-fascist partisans, in a brutal conflict that was to become known as the Italian Civil War.


title: Death of Benito Mussolini

text: Slowly fighting their way up the Italian Peninsula, the Allies took Rome and then Florence in the summer of 1944 and later that year they began advancing into northern Italy. With the Spring 1945 offensive in Italy bringing a final collapse of the German army's Gothic Line in April, total defeat for the Salò Republic and its German protectors was imminent.


title: Death of Benito Mussolini

text: On 18 April 1945, Mussolini left Gargnano, a village near Salò where he had been residing, and moved, with his entire government, to Milan and based himself in the city's prefecture. The purpose of the move appears to have been to prepare for final defeat. His new location would put him in closer proximity to the Archbishop of Milan, Cardinal Schuster, whom he hoped to use as an intermediary to negotiate with the Allies and the partisans. Additionally, it was better placed for an escape to the Swiss border.


title: Death of Benito Mussolini

text: Over the week following his arrival in Milan, and with the military situation deteriorating, Mussolini vacillated between a number of options including making a last stand in the Valtellina, a valley in the Italian Alps (the so-called ), fleeing to Switzerland, or attempting to negotiate a peaceful handover to the partisan leadership, the CLNAI, or to the Allies. As the German forces retreated, the CLNAI declared a general uprising in the main northern cities. It also issued a decree establishing popular courts, which included in its provisions what, in practice, would constitute a death sentence for Mussolini:


title: Death of Benito Mussolini

text: In the afternoon of 25 April, Cardinal Schuster hosted peace negotiations at his residence between Mussolini and representatives of the CLNAI, which were unsuccessful. That evening, with the German army in northern Italy about to surrender and the CLNAI taking control of Milan, Mussolini decided to flee the city. At 8p.m. he headed north toward Lake Como. It is unclear whether his objective was to attempt to cross the Swiss border or to go to the Valtellina; if it were the latter, he left the city without the thousands of supporters gathered in Milan intended to be his escort to the last stand in the Alps.


title: Death of Benito Mussolini

text: By some accounts, on 26 April, Mussolini, now joined by his mistress Claretta Petacci, made several failed attempts to cross the border into Switzerland. Giving up on this objective, on 27 April he joined a "Luftwaffe" column travelling in convoy and retreating northwards to Germany.


title: Death of Benito Mussolini

text: On 27 April 1945, a group of local communist partisans attacked the convoy in which Mussolini and Petacci were travelling, near the village of Dongo on the north western shore of Lake Como and forced it to halt. The convoy included a number of other Italian fascist leaders. The partisans, led by Pier Luigi Bellini delle Stelle and Urbano Lazzaro, recognised one of the fascists, but not Mussolini at this stage. They made the Germans hand over all the Italians in exchange for allowing the Germans to proceed. Eventually Mussolini was discovered slumped in one of the convoy vehicles. Lazzaro later said that:


title: Death of Benito Mussolini

text: The partisans arrested Mussolini and took him to Dongo, where he spent part of the night in the local barracks. In Dongo, Mussolini was reunited with Petacci, who had requested to join him, at about 2:30a.m. on 28 April. In all, over fifty fascist leaders and their families were found in the convoy and arrested by the partisans. Aside from Mussolini and Petacci, sixteen of the most prominent of them would be summarily shot in Dongo the following day and a further ten would be killed over two successive nights.


title: Death of Benito Mussolini

text: Fighting was still going on in the area around Dongo. Fearing that Mussolini and Petacci might be rescued by fascist supporters, the partisans drove them, in the middle of the night, to a nearby farm of a peasant family named De Maria; they believed this would be a safe place to hold them. Mussolini and Petacci spent the rest of the night and most of the following day there.


title: Death of Benito Mussolini

text: On the evening of Mussolini's capture, Sandro Pertini, the Socialist partisan leader in northern Italy, announced on Radio Milano:


title: Death of Benito Mussolini

text: Differing accounts exist of who made the decision that Mussolini should be summarily executed. Palmiro Togliatti, the Secretary-General of the Communist Party, claimed that he had ordered Mussolini's execution prior to his capture. Togliatti said he had done so by a radio message on 26 April 1945 with the words:


title: Death of Benito Mussolini

text: He also claimed that he had given the order as deputy prime minister of the government in Rome and as leader of the Communist Party. Ivanoe Bonomi, the prime minister, later denied that this was said with his government's authority or approval.


title: Death of Benito Mussolini

text: A senior communist in Milan, Luigi Longo, said that the order came from the General Command of the partisan military units "in application of a CLNAI decision". Longo subsequently gave a different story: he said that when he and , a member of the Action Party (which was part of the CLNAI), heard the news of Mussolini's capture they immediately agreed that he should be summarily executed and Longo gave the order for it to be carried out. According to Leo Valiani, the Action Party representative on the CLNAI, the decision to execute Mussolini was taken on the night of 27/28 April by a group acting on behalf of the CLNAI comprising himself, Sandro Pertini, and the communists Emilio Sereni and Luigi Longo. The CLNAI subsequently announced, on the day after his death, that Mussolini had been executed on its orders.


title: Death of Benito Mussolini

text: In any event, Longo instructed a communist partisan of the General Command, Walter Audisio, to go immediately to Dongo to carry out the order. According to Longo, he did so with the words "go and shoot him". Longo asked another partisan, , to go as well because, according to Lampredi, Longo thought Audisio was "impudent, too inflexible and rash".


title: Death of Benito Mussolini

text: Although several conflicting versions and theories of how Mussolini and Petacci died were put forward after the war, the account of Walter Audisio, or at least its essential components, remains the most credible and is sometimes referred to in Italy as the "official" version.


title: Death of Benito Mussolini

text: It was largely confirmed by an account provided by Aldo Lampredi and the "classical" narrative of the story was set out in books written in the 1960s by Bellini delle Stelle and Urbano Lazzaro, and the journalist Franco Bandini (). Although each of these accounts vary in detail, they are consistent on the main facts.


title: Death of Benito Mussolini

text: Audisio and Lampredi left Milan for Dongo early on the morning of 28 April 1945 to carry out the orders Audisio had been given by Longo. On arrival in Dongo, they met Bellini delle Stelle, who was the local partisan commander, to arrange for Mussolini to be handed over to them. Audisio used the "nom de guerre" of "Colonnello Valerio" during his mission. In the afternoon, he, with other partisans, including Aldo Lampredi and Michele Moretti, drove to the De Maria family's farmhouse to collect Mussolini and Petacci. After they were picked up, they drove 20 kilometres south to the village of Giulino di Mezzegra. The vehicle pulled up at the entrance of the Villa Belmonte on a narrow road known as "via XXIV maggio" and Mussolini and Petacci were told to get out and stand by the villa's wall. Audisio then shot them at 4:10p.m. with a submachine gun borrowed from Moretti, his own gun having jammed.


title: Death of Benito Mussolini

text: There were differences in Lampredi's account and that of Audisio. Audisio presented Mussolini as acting in a cowardly manner immediately prior to his death whereas Lampredi did not. Audisio said he read out a sentence of death, whereas Lampredi omitted this. Lampredi said that Mussolini's last words were "aim at my heart". In Audisio's account, Mussolini said nothing immediately prior to or during the execution.


title: Death of Benito Mussolini

text: Differences also exist with the account given by others involved, including Lazzaro and Bellini delle Stelle. According to the latter, when he met Audisio in Dongo, Audisio asked for a list of the fascist prisoners that had been captured the previous day and marked Mussolini's and Petacci's names for execution. Bellini delle Stelle said he challenged Audisio as to why Petacci should be executed. Audisio replied that she had been Mussolini's adviser, had inspired his policies and was "just as responsible as he is". According to Bellini delle Stelle no other discussion or formalities concerning the decision to execute them took place.


title: Death of Benito Mussolini

text: Audisio gave a different account. He claimed that on 28 April he convened a "war tribunal" in Dongo comprising Lampredi, Bellini delle Stelle, Michele Moretti and Lazzaro with himself as president. The tribunal condemned Mussolini and Petacci to death. There were no objections to any of the proposed executions. Urbano Lazzaro later denied that such a tribunal had been convened and said:


title: Death of Benito Mussolini

text: In a book he wrote in the 1970s, Audisio argued that the decision to execute Mussolini taken at the meeting in Dongo of the partisan leaders on 28 April constituted a valid judgment of a tribunal under Article 15 of the CNLAI's ordinance on the Constitution of Courts of War. However, the lack of a judge or a "Commissario di Guerra" (required by the ordinance to be present) casts doubt on this assertion.


title: Death of Benito Mussolini

text: During his dictatorship, representations of Mussolini's bodyfor example pictures of him engaged in physical labour either bare-chested or half-nakedformed a central part of fascist propaganda. His body remained a potent symbol after his death, causing it to be either revered by supporters or treated with contempt and disrespect by opponents, and assuming a broader political significance.


title: Death of Benito Mussolini

text: In the evening of 28 April, the bodies of Mussolini, Petacci, and the other executed fascists were loaded onto a van and transported south to Milan. On arriving in the city in the early hours of 29 April, they were dumped on the ground in the Piazzale Loreto, a suburban square near the main railway station. The choice of location was deliberate. Fifteen partisans had been shot there in August 1944 in retaliation for partisan attacks and Allied bombing raids, and their bodies had then been left on public display. At the time, Mussolini is said to have remarked "for the blood of Piazzale Loreto, we shall pay dearly".


title: Death of Benito Mussolini

text: Their bodies were left in a heap, and by 9:00a.m. a considerable crowd had gathered. The corpses were pelted with vegetables, spat at, urinated on, shot at and kicked; Mussolini's face was disfigured by beatings. Allied forces began arriving in the city during the course of the morning and an American eyewitness described the crowd as "sinister, depraved, out of control". After a while, the bodies were hung by their feet from the metal girder framework of a half-built Standard Oil service station. This mode of hanging had been used in northern Italy since medieval times to stress the "infamy" of the hanged. However, the reason given by those involved in hanging Mussolini and the others in this way was to protect the bodies from the mob. Movie footage of what happened appears to confirm that to be the case.


title: Death of Benito Mussolini

text: At about 2:00p.m. on 29 April, the recently arrived American military authorities ordered that the bodies be taken down and delivered to the city morgue for autopsies to be carried out. A US army cameraman went to the morgue and took photographs of the bodies for publication, including one with Mussolini and Petacci positioned in a macabre pose as though they were arm-in-arm.


title: Death of Benito Mussolini

text: On 30 April, an autopsy was carried out on Mussolini at the Institute of Legal Medicine in Milan. One version of the subsequent report indicated that he had been shot with nine bullets, while another version specified seven bullets. Four bullets near the heart were given as the cause of death. The calibres of the bullets were not identified. Samples of Mussolini's brain were taken and sent to the United States for analysis. The intention was to prove the hypothesis that syphilis had caused insanity in him, but nothing resulted from the analysis; no evidence of syphilis was found on his body either. No autopsy was carried out on Petacci.


title: Death of Benito Mussolini

text: On the afternoon of 29 April, Adolf Hitler learned of Mussolini's execution, although it is unknown how much of the detail was communicated to him. Earlier that day, Hitler had recorded in his "Last Will and Testament" that he intended to choose death rather than be captured by the enemy or fall into the hands of "the masses" to become "a spectacle arranged by Jews". The following day, Hitler committed suicide in Berlin, shortly before the city fell to the Red Army. In accordance with Hitler's prior instructions, his body was immediately burned with petrol, leaving virtually no remains.


title: Death of Benito Mussolini

text: Some historians believe that what happened to Mussolini was a factor in Hitler's decision to commit suicide and have his body burned. Alan Bullock said that news of Mussolini's fate had presumably increased Hitler's determination to avoid capture and William L. Shirer thought that knowledge of the events surrounding Mussolini's death may have strengthened Hitler's resolve not to risk his downfall being turned into a public humiliation. However, Hugh Trevor-Roper believed that this was improbable as it was unlikely that the details would have been reported to Hitler and, in any event, he had already decided on his course of action. Ian Kershaw notes that while it is uncertain whether Hitler was told the details of Mussolini's death:


title: Death of Benito Mussolini

text: After his death and the display of his corpse in Milan, Mussolini was buried in an unmarked grave in the Musocco cemetery, to the north of the city. On Easter Sunday 1946, Mussolini's body was located and dug up by a young fascist, Domenico Leccisi, and two friends. Over a period of sixteen weeks it was moved from place to place – the hiding places included a villa, a monastery and a convent – while the authorities searched for it. Eventually, in August, the body (with a leg missing) was tracked down to the Certosa di Pavia, a monastery not far from Milan. Two Franciscan friars were charged with assisting Leccisi to hide the body.


title: Death of Benito Mussolini

text: The authorities then arranged for the body to be hidden at a Capuchin monastery in the small town of Cerro Maggiore where it remained for the next eleven years. The whereabouts of the body was kept a secret, even from Mussolini's family. This remained the position until May 1957, when the newly appointed Prime Minister, Adone Zoli, agreed to Mussolini's re-interment at his place of birth in Predappio, in Romagna. Zoli, who also came from Predappio and knew Mussolini's widow, Rachele, was reliant on the far right to support him in Parliament. This included Leccisi himself, who was now a neo-fascist party deputy.


title: Death of Benito Mussolini

text: The re-interment in the Mussolini family crypt in Predappio was carried out on 1 September 1957, with supporters present giving the fascist salute. Mussolini was laid to rest in a large stone sarcophagus. The tomb is decorated with fascist symbols and contains a large marble head of Mussolini. In front of the tomb is a register for visitors paying their respects to sign. The tomb has become a neo-fascist place of pilgrimage. The numbers signing the tomb's register range from dozens to hundreds per day, with thousands signing on certain anniversaries; almost all the comments left are supportive of Mussolini.


title: Death of Benito Mussolini

text: The anniversary of Mussolini's death on 28 April has become one of three dates neo-fascist supporters mark with major rallies. In Predappio, a march takes place between the centre of town and the cemetery. The event usually attracts supporters in the thousands and includes speeches, songs and people giving the fascist salute.


title: Death of Benito Mussolini

text: Outside of Italy, Audisio's version of how Mussolini was executed has largely been accepted and is uncontroversial. However, within Italy, the subject has been a matter of extensive debate and dispute since the late 1940s to the present and a variety of theories of how Mussolini died has proliferated. At least 12 different individuals have been identified at various times as being responsible for carrying out the shooting. Comparisons have been made with the John F. Kennedy assassination conspiracy theories, and it has been described as the Italian equivalent of that speculation.


title: Death of Benito Mussolini

text: Until 1947, Audisio's involvement was kept a secret, and in the earliest descriptions of the events (in a series of articles in the Communist Party newspaper "L'Unità" in late 1945) the person who carried out the shootings was only referred to as "Colonnello Valerio".


title: Death of Benito Mussolini

text: Audisio was first named in a series of articles in the newspaper "Il Tempo" in March 1947 and the Communist Party subsequently confirmed Audisio's involvement. Audisio himself did not speak publicly about it until he published his account in a series of five articles in "L'Unità" later that month (and repeated in a book that Audisio later wrote which was published in 1975, two years after his death). Other versions of the story were also published, including, in the 1960s, two books setting out the "classical" account of the story: "Dongo, la fine di Mussolini" by Lazzaro and Bellini delle Stelle and "Le ultime 95 ore di Mussolini" by Franco Bandini.


title: Death of Benito Mussolini

text: Before long, it was noted that there were discrepancies between Audisio's original story published in "L'Unità", subsequent versions that he provided and the versions of events provided by others. Although his account most probably is built around the facts, it was certainly embellished. The discrepancies and obvious exaggerations, coupled with the belief that the Communist Party had selected him to claim responsibility for their own political purposes, led some in Italy to believe that his story was wholly or largely untrue.


title: Death of Benito Mussolini

text: In 1996, a previously unpublished private account written in 1972 by Aldo Lampredi for the Communist Party's archives, appeared in "L'Unità". In it, Lampredi confirmed the key facts of Audisio's story but without the embellishments. Lampredi was undoubtedly an eyewitness and, because he prepared his narrative for the private records of the Communist Party – and not for publication – it was perceived that he had no motivation other than to tell the truth. Furthermore, he had had a reputation for being reliable and trustworthy; he was also known to have disliked Audisio personally. For all these reasons it was seen as significant that he largely confirmed Audisio's account. After Lampredi's account was published, most, but not all, commentators were convinced of its veracity. The historian Giorgio Bocca commented:


title: Death of Benito Mussolini

text: In his 1993 book "Dongo: half a century of lies", the partisan leader Urbano Lazzaro repeated a claim he had made earlier that Luigi Longo and not Audisio, was "Colonnello Valerio". He also claimed that Mussolini was inadvertently wounded earlier in the day when Petacci tried to grab the gun of one of the partisans, who killed Petacci and Michele Moretti then shot dead Mussolini.


title: Death of Benito Mussolini

text: There have been several claims that Britain's wartime covert operations unit, the Special Operations Executive (SOE), was responsible for Mussolini's death, and that it may have even been ordered by the British prime minister, Winston Churchill. Allegedly, it was part of a "cover up" to retrieve "secret agreements" and compromising correspondence between the two men, which Mussolini was carrying when he was captured by partisans. It is said that the correspondence included offers from Churchill of peace and territorial concessions in exchange for Mussolini persuading Hitler to join the western Allies in an alliance against the Soviet Union. Proponents of this theory have included historians such as Renzo De Felice and Pierre Milza and journalists including Peter Tompkins and ; however, the theory has been dismissed by many.


title: Death of Benito Mussolini

text: In 1994 Bruno Lonati, a former partisan leader, published a book in which he claimed that he had shot Mussolini and he was accompanied on his mission by a British army officer called "John", who shot Petacci. Journalist Peter Tompkins claimed to have established that "John" was Robert Maccarrone, a British SOE agent who had Sicilian ancestry. According to Lonati, he and "John" went to the De Maria farmhouse in the morning of 28 April and killed Mussolini and Petacci at about 11:00a.m. In 2004, the Italian state television channel, RAI, broadcast a documentary, co-produced by Tompkins, in which the theory was put forward. Lonati was interviewed for the documentary and claimed that when he arrived at the farmhouse:


title: Death of Benito Mussolini

text: They took them out of the house and, at the corner of a nearby lane they were stood against a fence and shot. The documentary included an interview with Dorina Mazzola who said that her mother had seen the shooting. She also said that she herself had heard the shots and that she "looked at the clock, it was almost 11". The documentary went on to claim that the later shootings at the Villa Belmonte were subsequently staged as part of the "cover up".


title: Death of Benito Mussolini

text: The theory has been criticised for lacking any serious evidence, particularly on the existence of the correspondence with Churchill. Commenting on the RAI television documentary in 2004, Christopher Woods, researcher for the official history of the SOE, dismissed these claims saying that "it's just love of conspiracy-making".


title: Death of Benito Mussolini

text: Some, including most persistently the fascist journalist Giorgio Pisanò, have claimed that Mussolini and Petacci were shot earlier in the day near the De Maria farmhouse and that the execution at Giulino de Mezzegra was staged with corpses. The first to put this forward was Franco Bandini in 1978.


title: Death of Benito Mussolini

text: Other theories have been published, including allegations that not only Luigi Longo, subsequently leader of the Communist Party in post-war Italy, but also Sandro Pertini, a future President of Italy, carried out the shootings. Others have claimed that Mussolini (or Mussolini and Petacci together) committed suicide with cyanide capsules.


title: The Waltons

text: The Waltons is an American historical drama television series about a family in rural Virginia during the Great Depression and World War II. It was created by Earl Hamner Jr., based on his 1961 book "Spencer's Mountain" and the 1963 film of the same name. The series aired from 1972–1981.


title: The Waltons

text: The television film The Homecoming: A Christmas Story was broadcast on December 19, 1971. Based on its success, the CBS television network ordered the first season of episodes (to be based on the same characters) and that became the television series "The Waltons". Beginning in September 1972, the series aired on CBS for nine seasons in total. After the series was canceled in 1981, three television film sequels aired in 1982 on NBC, with three more in the 1990s on CBS. "The Waltons" was produced by Lorimar Productions and distributed by Warner Bros. Domestic Television Distribution in syndication.


title: The Waltons

text: The show's end sequence featured the family saying goodnight to one another before drifting off to sleep. According to the BBC (which also aired the series) "Goodnight, John-Boy" was one of the most common catchphrases of the 1970s.


title: The Waltons

text: The main story is set in Walton's Mountain, a fictional mountain community in the fictitious Jefferson County, Virginia.


title: The Waltons

text: The real place upon which the stories are based is the community of Schuyler in Nelson County, Virginia.


title: The Waltons

text: The time period is from 1933 to 1946, during the Great Depression and World War II, during the presidential administrations of Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry S Truman. The year 1933 is suggested by a reference to the opening of the Century of Progress exposition in Chicago, a brief shot of an automobile registration, and it is divulged in episode 5 that the date is in the spring of 1933. The last episode of season one, "An Easter Story," is set in February – April 1934. The year 1934 takes two seasons to cover, while some successive years are covered over the course of a few months.


title: The Waltons

text: The series finale, "The Revel," revolves around a party and the invitation date is given as June 4, 1946. A span of 13 years is therefore covered in nine seasons. There are some chronological inconsistencies, most of which do not hinder the storyline.


title: The Waltons

text: The first three reunion movies ("A Wedding on Walton's Mountain", "Mother's Day on Walton's Mountain", and "A Day for Thanks on Walton's Mountain"), all produced in 1982, are set in 1947. Of the later reunions, "A Walton Thanksgiving Reunion", filmed in 1993, is set in 1963, and revolves around President John F. Kennedy's assassination. "A Walton Wedding", made in 1995, is set in 1964, and "A Walton Easter", filmed in 1997, is set in 1969.


title: The Waltons

text: The series began relating stories that occurred 39 years in the past and ended with its last reunion show set 28 years in the past.


title: The Waltons

text: A major inconsistency exists (for those keeping score) in how many years John and Olivia are said to be married in the last reunion movie counting back to the first episode. In the movie, set in 1969, John and Olivia are celebrating their 40th wedding anniversary. That would mean they wed in 1929, however John Boy is 17 years old in the series' first episode set in 1933, creating a 13 year gap. To reconcile John Boy's age gap and add an additional year to account for his "proper" Walton's Mountain post-wedding conception and pre-birth development, Mr. and Mrs. Walton would have more accurately wed in 1915. In 1969, they would have been celebrating their 54th wedding anniversary. In the pilot episode "The Homecoming: A Christmas Story", set during Christmas, 1933, Olivia remarks she and John had been married 17 years, which would date their marriage to 1916. In the pilot, John Boy says he is 15 years old, making his birth year 1918. Also, in the pilot, the adult John Boy, as narrator, states his father died in 1969.


title: The Waltons

text: The story is about the family of John Walton Jr. (known as John-Boy): his six siblings, his parents John and Olivia Walton, and paternal grandparents Zebulon "Zeb" and Esther Walton. John-Boy is the oldest of the seven children (15 years old in "The Homecoming"; 17 at the beginning of the series), who becomes a journalist and novelist. Each episode is narrated at the opening and closing by a middle-aged John Jr. (voiced by author Earl Hamner on whom John-Boy is based). John Sr., who quit his city job after the traumatic events in the pilot episode, manages to eke out a living for his family by operating a lumber mill with the help of his sons as they grow older. The family income is augmented by some small-scale farming, and John occasionally hunts to put meat on the table. In the simpler days of their country youth, all of the children are rambunctious and curious, but as times grow tough, the children slowly depart from the innocent, carefree days of walking everywhere barefoot while clad in overalls and hand-sewn pinafores, and into the harsh, demanding world of adulthood and responsibility.


title: The Waltons

text: The family shares hospitality with relatives and strangers as they are able. The small community named after their property is also home to folk of various income levels, ranging from the well-to-do Baldwin sisters, two elderly spinsters who distill moonshine that they call "Papa's recipe;" Ike Godsey, postmaster and owner of the general store with his somewhat snobbish wife Corabeth (a Walton cousin; she calls her husband "Mr. Godsey"); an African-American couple, Verdie and Harley Foster; Maude Gormley, a sassy octogenarian artist who paints on wood; Flossie Brimmer, a friendly though somewhat gossipy widow who runs a nearby boarding house; and Yancy Tucker, a good-hearted handyman with big plans but little motivation. Jefferson County sheriff Ep Bridges, who fought alongside John in World War I and was awarded the Medal of Honor, keeps law and order in Walton's Mountain. The entire family (except for John) attends a Baptist church, of which Olivia and Grandma Esther are the most regular attendees.


title: The Waltons

text: In the signature scene that closes almost every episode, the family house is enveloped in darkness, save for 1, 2 or 3 lights in the upstairs bedroom windows. Through voice-overs, two or more characters make some brief comments related to that episode's events, and then bid each other goodnight, after which the lights go out.


title: The Waltons

text: After completing high school, John-Boy attends fictional Boatwright University in the fictional nearby town of Westham. He later goes to New York City to work as a journalist.


title: The Waltons

text: During the latter half of the 1976–77 season, Grandma Esther Walton suffers a stroke and returns home shortly before the death of her husband, Grandpa Zeb Walton (reflecting Ellen Corby's real-life stroke and the death of Will Geer, the actors who portrayed those characters).


title: The Waltons

text: During the series' last few years, Mary Ellen and Ben start their own families; Erin, Jason and John-Boy are married in later television movie sequels. Younger children Jim-Bob and Elizabeth struggle to find and cement true love.


title: The Waltons

text: World War II deeply affects the family. All four Walton boys enlist in the military. Mary Ellen's physician husband, Curtis "Curt" Willard, is sent to Pearl Harbor and is reported to have perished in the Japanese attack on December 7, 1941. Years later, Mary Ellen hears of sightings of her "late" husband, investigates and finds him alive (played by another actor), but brooding over his war wounds and living under an assumed name. She divorces him and later remarries.


title: The Waltons

text: John-Boy's military plane is shot down, while Olivia becomes a volunteer at the VA hospital and is seen less and less. She eventually develops tuberculosis and enters an Arizona sanatorium. Olivia's cousin, Rose Burton, moves in at the Walton house to look after the family. Two years later, John Sr. moves to Arizona to be with Olivia. Grandma appears in only a handful of episodes during the eighth season. She was usually said to be visiting relatives in nearby Buckingham County. Consistent with the effects of Ellen Corby's actual stroke, Grandma rarely speaks during the remainder of the series, usually limited to uttering brief one-or two-word lines such as "No!" or "Oh, boy!"


title: The Waltons

text: Six feature-length movies were made after the series run. Set from 1947 to 1969, they aired between 1982 and 1997.


title: The Waltons

text: Earl Hamner's rural childhood growing up in the unincorporated community of Schuyler, Virginia, provided the basis for the setting and many of the storylines of "The Waltons". His family and the community provided many life experiences which aided in the characters, values, area, and human-interest stories of his books, movies, and television series. Hamner provided the voice-over of the older John-Boy, usually heard at the beginning and end of each episode.


title: The Waltons

text: John-Boy Walton's fictional "alma mater", Boatwright University, is patterned after Richmond College, which became part of the University of Richmond on Boatwright Drive near Westham Station in The West End of Richmond, Virginia, about east of Schuyler.


title: The Waltons

text: "The Homecoming: A Christmas Story" (1971) was not made as a pilot for a series, but it was so popular that it led to CBS initially commissioning one season of episodes based on the same characters, and the result was "The Waltons". Except for the Walton children and Grandma Esther Walton, the characters were all recast for the TV series. The musical score was by Oscar-winning composer Jerry Goldsmith and was later released on an album by "Film Score Monthly" paired with James Horner's score for the 1982 TV movie "Rascals and Robbers: The Secret Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn". (Goldsmith also scored several episodes of the first season, but the producers believed his TV movie theme was too gentle and requested he write a new theme for the series.) The series was also commissioned in response to the rural purge that the networks in general and CBS specifically had done that rid of most rural-themed shows in 1971 and the subsequent backlash from fans of those shows that were still popular at the time of their cancelation.


title: The Waltons

text: Patricia Neal (as Olivia) won a Golden Globe Award for Best Actress - Television Series Drama. The movie was also nominated for 3 Emmys: Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Miniseries or a Movie (Neal), Outstanding Writing Achievement in Drama - Adaptation (Earl Hamner), and Outstanding Directorial Achievement in Drama - A Single Program (Fielder Cook).


title: The Waltons

text: The town of Walton's Mountain was built in the rear area of the main lot at Warner Bros. Studios, bordering the Los Angeles River, but the mountain itself was part of the Hollywood Hills range opposite Warner studios in Burbank, California, the reverse side of which, and slightly to the east, is Mount Lee and the Hollywood Sign. The Waltons house façade was built in the back of the Warner Brothers lot. After the series concluded, the set was destroyed. For the reunion shows, a replica Waltons' house façade was built on the "Here Come the Brides" set on the Columbia Ranch studio, now part of the Warner Brothers studios. The Waltons' house is still used as scenery at Warner Brothers. For example, it served as the Dragonfly Inn on "Gilmore Girls".


title: The Waltons

text: For the first few seasons, the show would oftentimes shoot exterior scenes in Frazier Park, 70 miles to the north of Los Angeles. They would also occasionally film scenes in Franklin Canyon Park in Beverly Hills.


title: The Waltons

text: Some sources indicate CBS put the show on its fall 1972 schedule in response to congressional hearings on the quality of television. Backlash from a 1971 decision to purge most rural-oriented shows from the network lineup may have also been a factor. The network gave "The Waltons" an undesirable timeslot – Thursdays at 8 p.m – opposite 2 popular programs: "The Flip Wilson Show" on NBC and "The Mod Squad" on ABC. "The rumor was that they put it against "Flip Wilson" and "The Mod Squad" because they didn't think it would survive. They thought, 'We can just tell Congress America doesn't want to see this'," Kami Cotler, who played Elizabeth Walton, said in a 2012 interview. However, CBS had enough faith in the show to devise a full-page newspaper ad flanked with the show's positive reviews, urging people to watch the show. Radically increased ratings were attributed to this ad, saving "The Waltons".


title: The Waltons

text: Ralph Waite was reluctant to audition for the part of John Walton because he didn't want to be tied to a long-running TV series, but his agent persuaded him by saying, "It will never sell. You do the pilot. You pick up a couple of bucks and then you go back to New York."


title: The Waltons

text: "The Waltons" won the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Drama Series in 1973. Also in 1973 Richard Thomas won the Emmy for Lead Actor in a Drama Series. Michael Learned won the Emmy for Lead Actress in a Drama Series 3 times (1973, 1974, and 1976). Ellen Corby was also a three-time winner in the Supporting Actress category, winning in 1973, 1975, and 1976. Will Geer was awarded the Supporting Actor Emmy in 1975. Veteran actress Beulah Bondi won an Emmy in 1977 for Lead Actress in a Single Performance for her guest appearance as Martha Corrine Walton in the episode "The Pony Cart" (Episode #111). She first appeared in "The Waltons" episode "The Conflict" (Episode #51) as the widow of Zeb Walton's brother.


title: The Waltons

text: The series itself earned a Peabody Award for its first season. In 2013, "TV Guide" ranked "The Waltons" No. 34 on its list of the 60 Best Series of All Time.


title: The Waltons

text: In 2017, from March 20 to March 24, INSP network remembered the life of Earl Hamner Jr. (who died in 2016) by featuring clips of interviews (once per episode) with him about his time involved with "The Waltons" during the breaks while its syndicated reruns aired from 3–5pm and again at 7pm.


title: The Waltons

text: On January 27, 1992, then-President George H. W. Bush said, "We are going to keep on trying to strengthen the American family, to make American families a lot more like the Waltons and a lot less like the Simpsons." In response, "The Simpsons" made a short animated segment for a repeat showing of the episode "Stark Raving Dad", where the family watches the speech, and Bart remarks, "Hey, we're just like the Waltons. We're prayin' for an end to the Depression, too."


title: The Waltons

text: On November 28, 2021, The CW (part-owned by CBS and Warner Bros.) aired "The Waltons: Homecoming", a remake of "The Homecoming: A Christmas Story". Also set in 1933, this film features the Walton family (portrayed by new actors) minus Ben, waiting for John to get home by bus. Richard Thomas narrated. Executive producer Sam Haskell hopes the movie will lead to a new series. Another film "A Waltons Thanksgiving" aired on November 20, 2022.In it, Ben was added to the family.


title: The Waltons

text: Warner Home Video has released all nine seasons and six TV movies of "The Waltons" on DVD in Region 1. Seasons 1–4 have been released in Region 2. The pilot movie, "The Homecoming: A Christmas Story", was released by Paramount Home Entertainment. Lorimar produced the series, CBS produced the pilot film, which is why Paramount, under CBS Home Entertainment, handles home video rights for "The Homecoming".


title: The Waltons

text: German-release DVDs provide German or English soundtrack options, with dubbed German voices, or the original English soundtrack, although the German episode titles are not always either literal or precise translations of the original English-language titles.


title: The Waltons

text: Seasons 1–9 are available via streaming in standard-definition as well as high-definition video through services such as Amazon Prime Video.


title: The Waltons

text: Lorimar sold the distribution rights of "The Waltons" to Warner Bros. Television to avoid a lawsuit owing to the similarities between the series and the film "Spencer's Mountain" (1963), which Warner owned. Warner Bros. acquired Lorimar in 1989, and has continued to syndicate the series ever since.


title: The Waltons

text: Reruns have aired in the U.S. on MeTV since January 1, 2020, and also on INSP and Hallmark Drama, and formerly aired on Hallmark Channel. In Canada, "The Waltons" airs on Vision TV and BookTelevision.


title: The Waltons

text: In the UK, the series was broadcast on BBC 2 and BBC 1 and during the 1970s/1980s – the first three seasons were broadcast on BBC 2 from February 18, 1974, to May 17, 1976, on Mondays at 20.00 GMT, and seasons 4 and 5 were shown on BBC 1 from September 5, 1976, to August 30, 1977, on Sundays at 16.10 in 1976 and Tuesdays at 19.00 through 1977. After that, seasons 6–9 would be broadcast on BBC 2 again, starting on April 30, 1979, and concluding in April 1983. The three reunion TV movies filmed in 1982 were also shown on BBC 2 from December 21 to December 28, 1983. The show was repeated on Channel 4 between 1986 and 1991 and again from 1996 to 2000. It last aired on Sony Channel until March 31, 2020, in the UK.


title: Debby Ryan

text: Deborah Ann Ryan (born May 13, 1993) is an American actress and singer. She started acting professionally onstage at the age of seven, and was later discovered during Disney Channel's nationwide search for new talent.


title: Debby Ryan

text: Ryan's work for Disney Channel includes starring roles in the series "The Suite Life on Deck" (2008–2011), the film "16 Wishes" (2010), the series "Jessie" (2011–2015), and the film "Radio Rebel" (2012). She also appeared in the drama film "What If..." (2010) and the Netflix series "Insatiable" (2018–2019). She gained prominence in music by contributing vocals to the soundtracks of her Disney projects and later formed the band The Never Ending in 2013, with whom she released the EP "One" (2014).


title: Debby Ryan

text: Deborah Ann Ryan was born in Huntsville, Alabama, on May 13, 1993. She has a brother. Her father's job as a civilian consultant to the U.S. military required the family to move to numerous places around Europe, and they lived in Germany until she was 10. She started performing in professional theaters at the age of seven on an American base in Germany. They then returned to the U.S. and settled in Texas. In a 2009 "People Magazine" interview, Ryan described herself as a "nerd" in school. She was bullied in middle school for being a mascot and a member of the school's chess club.


title: Debby Ryan

text: Ryan began appearing in various television commercials in her early teenage years. In 2006 she made her television debut on the show "Barney & Friends". Ryan's first film role was in 2007 as a guest character in "Barney: Let's Go to the Firehouse", she played the role of a teenager. She appeared in several commercials for iDog and various board games; she was in an iDog Dance commercial in 2008. Ryan also had a major role in the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer feature film "The Longshots" as Edith. Ryan played one of the main characters, Bailey Pickett, on the Disney Channel Original Series, "The Suite Life on Deck", which is a sequel to the hit Disney Channel series, "The Suite Life of Zack & Cody". The series's pilot aired on September 26, 2008 in the United States and it became the most watched series premiere in Canada on the Family channel. The character is a very intelligent girl who boarded the ship to leave the fictional town of Kettlecorn, Kansas because she hated the fact that the town is so small. The series was 2008's number one top scripted television series for teens, beating the veteran series "Hannah Montana" and "Wizards of Waverly Place" in the ratings.<ref name="Disney Channel/DisneyChannel.com Highlights For 2008"></ref> The series was also 2009's top rated scripted series, outpacing other teenage shows.


title: Debby Ryan

text: In 2009, Ryan landed a starring role in the independent feature film, "What If...", alongside Kevin Sorbo and Kristy Swanson. The film was shot in Grand Rapids and Manistee, Michigan in July 2009 and was released in theaters on August 20, 2010. The film is produced by Pure Flix Entertainment and centers on a Christian family. In October 2009, Ryan hosted the first Tween Girl Summit Music Festival. "Tween girls are drawn to talented performers who emanate the joy of life, and we are so happy to have teen favorite Debby Ryan as the first host of The Tween Summit Music Festival," said Denise Restauri, founder of The Tween Summit, AllyKatzz.com and AK Tweens. Ryan was set to headline the "Terrific Teen Tour", a concert series which co-headlined Mitchel Musso, Jasmine Richards and Savannah Outen, that would start on July 9, 2009 and end on July 14 but the tour was canceled owing to schedule conflicts. The tour would have been Ryan's debut as a live musician. In 2010, she starred in the young adult film "16 Wishes". In addition, the movie introduced Ryan to new audiences, such as the contemporary adult audience since the movie received high viewership in the adults demographic. Ryan noted that to prepare for her role in "16 Wishes", she watched numerous Brat Pack movies.


title: Debby Ryan

text: On March 25, 2011, Ryan starred in "The Suite Life Movie", based on the show she had starred in. On March 29, she released the promotional single "Made of Matches", which served as the theme of the Discovery Family show "R.L. Stine's The Haunting Hour", in which she starred in one episode. "The Suite Life on Deck" finished its run on May 6, 2011. On July 6, she released her debut solo single, the alternative hip hop song "We Ended Right", featuring Chad Hively & Chase Ryan. The song was released from her own label, the Ryan River Studio, founded with her brother, Chase Ryan. Also in 2011, it was announced that Ryan landed her own Disney Channel series called "Jessie", which debuted in September 2011. The show follows a girl who moves from Texas to New York City to become a star but becomes a nanny instead for a family with four children. "Jessie" is a show she also helped create, relating that she wanted her character to relate to herself. Ryan directed the season three episode "Coffee Talk", making her the youngest female director for a Disney Channel production. Additionally, in a shift towards a more mature role, she guest starred in an episode of the show "Private Practice" as a recovering drug addict.


title: Debby Ryan

text: On February 17, 2012, Ryan starred in another Disney Channel movie entitled "Radio Rebel" as Tara, a very shy teenage who dreads speaking to anyone in her school, but in the privacy of her bedroom, she incorporates the most famous radio persona of the internet under the nickname 'Radio Rebel'. She released a cover version of "We Got the Beat", by The Go-Go's, as the promotional single for the film on February 21. On August 31, 2012 she voiced the character Spike in the Tinker Bell film "Secret of the Wings". Also in 2012, she formed the indie band The Never Ending with guitarist Kyle Moore and drummer Johnny Franco. She plays several instruments, including the guitar, piano, and keyboard. In 2013, Ryan starred in the film "Kristin's Christmas Past" as Haddie. She recorded an appearance in the film "Muppets Most Wanted", released on March 21, 2014, as Savana, but the scene was deleted. The scene was later reinstated in the Blu-ray release's extended version. On June 1, The Never Ending released their debut single, "Mulholland Drive", with a premiere on the Billboard website. Their debut EP "One" was released on June 24, featuring album art with a circus-theme. She also appeared in the show TV series "Mighty Med" as Jade and was guest mentor in the fifth season of "Fashion Police". On April 17, 2015, an episode of Girl Meets World premiered featuring Ryan as Aubrey Macavoy. On June 23, 2015, The Never Ending debuted their new single, titled "Secondhand". Later that year, the band toured as an opening act for the North American leg of Fifth Harmony's Reflection Tour.


title: Debby Ryan

text: In 2016, Ryan was cast in the NBC police series "The Mysteries of Laura" in season two as Lucy Diamond, Laura's drugged and trouble-making younger paternal half-sister and the half-aunt of Nicholas and Harrison. At the same time, Ryan was confirmed in the cast of comedy series "Sing It!". The show debuted on May 25, 2016 at YouTube Red, a paid service of streaming original series and movies, similar to Netflix. Ryan played Holli Holiday, a famous and egocentric singer, who uses the fictional talent show "Sing It!" to self-promote. The character was inspired by Paula Abdul. On August 22, Ryan was confirmed to join the VH1 drama series "Daytime Divas", based on the book "Satan's Sisters" by former "The View" host Star Jones. The series debuted on June 5, 2017. She will play Maddie Finn, an ex-host of "The Lunch Hour" and rival of Kibby, who wants to return to the show.


title: Debby Ryan

text: In June 2017, Ryan announced via her Instagram account that Netflix had ordered "Insatiable" to series, after previously being passed on by The CW. The first season premiered on August 10, 2018. On February 14, 2020, the series was cancelled after two seasons.


title: Debby Ryan

text: In 2020, Ryan starred alongside Alison Brie in the Netflix drama film "Horse Girl", which was directed by Jeff Baena. In the same year, Ryan was cast in the Netflix's upcoming thriller film "Night Teeth", directed by Adam Randall. She will also appear in "The Opening Act" directed by Steve Byrne.


title: Debby Ryan

text: Ryan was involved in Disney's Friends for Change. She was featured in a commercial on Disney Channel. The charity helps explain how kids can help preserve the planet and invites them to go to the Friends for Change website to register and pledge, offering them the chance to help choose how Disney will invest $1 million in environmental programs. Ryan took part in "Disney's Friends for Change Games", which featured over 30 Disney Channel and Disney XD stars competing in fun and physical challenges inspired by good actions for the environment. The stars were broken up into teams and each team played on behalf of an environmental charity. Ryan had been taking part as Captain of the Blue Team playing to benefit Ocean Conservancy.


title: Debby Ryan

text: In May 2012, Ryan traveled to Udaipur, as part of Disney's Friends for Change's partnership with international charity WE Charity. The trip was hosted by Me to We, a social enterprise and partner of Free The Children. During her visit she volunteered to help build a new school in Lai Gow and met with local community members to learn about their culture. Her experience was filmed and aired between programs on Disney Channel starting on June 28, 2012.


title: Debby Ryan

text: In July 2012, Ryan started work on a clothing line for 2013. She said she was in the beginning stages of building herself a fashion brand and revealed that she has been looking into designers and interviewing brands she might like to work with.


title: Debby Ryan

text: Ryan is a Christian. Due to her father's job with the military leading her family to relocate around Europe during her childhood, she is fluent in German.


title: Debby Ryan

text: Ryan dated Twenty One Pilots drummer Josh Dun from May 2013 to September 2014, and they later resumed their relationship at an unknown date. They were married in Austin, Texas, on December 31, 2019.


title: Debby Ryan

text: In March 2015, Ryan revealed that she had once been in an abusive relationship, though she described it as a professional relationship rather than a romantic one. She explained that "it was such emotional manipulation to the point where it became physical", and the experience inspired her to team up with Mary Kay and Love is Respect for their "Don't Look Away" anti-domestic violence campaign.


title: Debby Ryan

text: In April 2016, Ryan was arrested for driving under the influence. She was initially charged with felony DUI, which was later reduced to two misdemeanors, and was released after posting $100,000 bail. On June 30, she pleaded no contest to reckless driving and was sentenced to three years of probation, community service, and attending a DUI program.


title: Debby Ryan

text: In a 2009 "People" interview, Ryan stated that her "Suite Life" co-star, Brenda Song, is her acting idol. In a March 2009 interview, Ryan revealed she also looks up to Meryl Streep, calling Streep "so profoundly thought-provoking and life-changing". She has said that her other role models include Anne Hathaway, Rachel McAdams, and Tobey Maguire.


title: Debby Ryan

text: Ryan has said that her musical style includes folk, indie pop, and country. She cited The Lumineers, Mumford & Sons, April Smith and the Great Picture Show, and Tom Petty as musical influences for her band's debut EP. When asked about musical tastes, she said, "I love jazz! I love singing it. I also love country! My brother loves rock; he also has this chill Jason Mraz-like style. So basically, my answer is: jazz-country-rock-alternative? I have no idea! But I honestly would love to make country music."


title: Illumination (company)

text: Illumination (formerly known as Illumination Entertainment) is an American computer animation studio, founded by Chris Meledandri in 2007. Illumination is owned by Meledandri and the Illumination brand is co-owned by Universal Pictures, a division of Comcast through its wholly owned subsidiary NBCUniversal. Meledandri produces the films, while Universal finances and distributes them. The studio is responsible for the "Despicable Me", "The Secret Life of Pets" and "Sing" franchises and the film adaptations of Dr. Seuss' books "The Lorax" and "How the Grinch Stole Christmas". The Minions, characters from the "Despicable Me" series, are the mascots of the studio.


title: Illumination (company)

text: Illumination has produced 12 feature films, with an average gross of $695.4 million per film. The studio's highest-grossing films are "Minions" ($1.159 billion) and "Despicable Me 3" ($1.034 billion). Both films are among the 50 highest-grossing films of all-time, and six of their films are among the 50 highest-grossing animated films.


title: Illumination (company)

text: Meledandri left as President of 20th Century Fox Animation and Blue Sky Studios in early 2007. While at those companies he supervised or executive-produced movies including "Ice Age", "", "Robots", and "Dr. Seuss' Horton Hears a Who!" After leaving, he founded Illumination Entertainment and a deal was announced positioning Illumination Entertainment as NBC Universal's family entertainment arm, that would produce one to two films a year starting in 2010. As part of the deal, Illumination retains creative control and Universal Pictures exclusively distributes the films.


title: Illumination (company)

text: In 2011, Illumination acquired the animation department of the French animation and visual effects studio Mac Guff, which animated "Despicable Me" and "Dr. Seuss' The Lorax", and formed Illumination Mac Guff (later Illumination Studios Paris).


title: Illumination (company)

text: On August 22, 2016, NBCUniversal acquired competing studio DreamWorks Animation, which fuelled speculation that Meledandri was to oversee both studios. While he had been approached by NBCUniversal to oversee both studios, he turned down the offer and later explained “I love the process of making films and working with artists. I don’t think I’m particularly great at managing companies”.


title: Illumination (company)

text: On September 23, 2022, Illumination announced its hiring of former Netflix head of adult animation Mike Moon as senior creative advisor, and a new label led by Moon known as Moonlight, which will aim to "produce animated films that push beyond the family genre".


title: Illumination (company)

text: In a similar fashion to Sony Pictures Animation and DreamWorks Animation, Illumination does not produce its films in-house where it is based in Santa Monica, but rather outsources the animation production of its films to other studios. Most of its films are animated by Illumination Studios Paris, a subsidiary formed through the purchase of Mac Guff (which animated the first "Despicable Me"). So far, the only Illumination film not to be animated by Illumination Studios Paris or Mac Guff was "Hop", which was animated by Rhythm & Hues Studios.


title: Illumination (company)

text: Not unlike Pixar, in its early days Illumination depended on a core group of directors and writers to create its films. The directors of "Despicable Me", Pierre Coffin and Chris Renaud, also directed or co-directed "Dr. Seuss' The Lorax", "Despicable Me 2", "Minions", "The Secret Life of Pets", and "Despicable Me 3". Screenwriters Cinco Paul and Ken Daurio (who had written "Dr. Seuss' Horton Hears a Who!" for Meledandri at Fox) wrote or co-wrote "Despicable Me", "Hop", "Dr. Seuss' The Lorax", "Despicable Me 2", "The Secret Life of Pets", and "Despicable Me 3", while screenwriter Brian Lynch wrote or co-wrote "Hop", "Minions", and "The Secret Life of Pets".


title: Illumination (company)

text: Illumination's films have a budget between $60–80 million. Meledandri prefers to keep Illumination adhering to a low-cost model, recognising that "strict cost controls and hit animated films are not mutually exclusive". In an industry where film expenses often exceed $100 million, Illumination's first two releases were completed with significantly lower budgets, considering "Despicable Me" $69 million budget and "Hop" $63 million budget. One way the company sustains a lean financial model is by employing cost-conscious animation techniques that lower the expenses and render times of its computer graphics. To date, "Sing 2" is the studio's most expensive film, with an $85 million budget.


title: Illumination (company)

text: The studio's first film, "Despicable Me", directed by Chris Renaud and Pierre Coffin, was released on July 9, 2010 and was commercially successful, earning $56 million on its opening weekend, and going on to ticket sales of $251 million domestically and $543 million worldwide. Illumination's second film was the live-action/CGI hybrid "Hop." Directed by Tim Hill and released on April 1, 2011, the film had a $37 million opening, ending up with $108 million domestically and $183 million worldwide. "Hop" was followed by an adaptation of Dr. Seuss' "The Lorax" (also directed by Renaud), which debuted on March 2, 2012, earning $70 million on its opening weekend, and with eventual totals of $214 million in the US market and $348 million worldwide. The studio's first sequel, "Despicable Me 2", again directed by Renaud and Coffin, opened in the United States on July 3, 2013 to a domestic five-day opening weekend of $142 million (and $82 million over the regular three-day frame), making it, at the time of its release, the biggest animated film to open on that frame. The film would go on to earn $368 million domestically and $970 million worldwide, becoming the second highest-grossing 2013 animated film and breaking a record as the most profitable Universal Studios film in its 100-year history. A spin-off of the "Despicable Me" franchise, titled "Minions", directed by Coffin and newcomer Kyle Balda, was released on July 10, 2015 to a domestic opening weekend of $115 million. The film would go on to gross $336 million domestically and $823 million overseas, amounting to a worldwide total of $1.159 billion, making it the highest-grossing animated film of 2015 and, at the time of its release, the second highest-grossing animated film of all time, behind Walt Disney Animation Studios' "Frozen" (2013).


title: Illumination (company)

text: "The Secret Life of Pets" was released on July 8, 2016. Directed by Renaud and Yarrow Cheney, the film would earn $104 million in its opening weekend, going on to gross $368 million domestically, and $875 million worldwide. "Sing", a comedy written and directed by Garth Jennings, was released on December 21, 2016. It was the first movie for the studio to have a Christmas release. The film would earn $56 million in its first 5 days, grossing $270 million stateside and $634 million worldwide. It also holds the record for the highest-grossing film not to ever be at No. 1 in its run. "Despicable Me 3", which reunited Coffin and Balda as directors, was released on June 30, 2017 to a $75 million domestic opening weekend. The film would then go on to gross $264 million domestically and $1.034 billion worldwide, making it the second film from the studio to cross the $1 billion mark, as well as highest-grossing animated film of 2017. At the time of its release, it also set a record for the highest theatre count ever with 4,536 theatres in its second week. The film that followed was an adaptation of Dr. Seuss' "How the Grinch Stole Christmas!", simply titled "The Grinch," which was released on November 9, 2018, with Scott Mosier and Cheney as directors and featuring a screenplay by Michael LeSieur and Tommy Swerdlow. The film opened to $67 million in its first domestic weekend and went on to earn $271 million stateside and $513 million worldwide, making it the highest-grossing Christmas film of all time. "The Secret Life of Pets 2", again directed by Renaud, was released on June 7, 2019 to a domestic opening weekend of $47 million, going on to gross $159 million stateside and $446 million worldwide, making less than half of its predecessor.


title: Illumination (company)

text: It was followed by "Sing 2", again directed by Jennings, which was released on December 22, 2021. Despite opening to a modest $41 million over a five-day weekend (and $23 million over the normal three-day frame), the film would eventually become the highest-grossing animated film of 2021, as well as the highest-grossing animated film released during the COVID-19 pandemic, earning $163 million stateside and $408 million worldwide. "", directed by Balda, was released on July 1, 2022, after a delay of two years caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. The film earned $125 million stateside over the four-day July 4 weekend, a new record over said timeframe. The film would go on to overtake "Sing 2" as the highest-grossing animated film during the pandemic, with $368 million domestically and $933 million worldwide.


title: Illumination (company)

text: On May 19, 2011, Illumination announced that it would be working with Universal Studios to create "Despicable Me Minion Mayhem", a 3-D ride at Universal Parks & Resorts in Orlando, Hollywood, and Osaka. The ride officially opened on July 2, 2012 in Orlando, in Hollywood on April 12, 2014, and in Osaka on April 21, 2017. In April 2019, it was announced they would collaborate again on the creation of "The Secret Life of Pets: Off the Leash!", a dark ride attraction at Universal Studios Hollywood. While its opening was scheduled for March 27, 2020, it was delayed until further notice due to the novel coronavirus outbreak. It eventually opened on April 8, 2021.