The Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences gives honorary awards for lifetime achievements, exceptional contributions to motion pictures arts and sciences and outstanding service to the Academy. These awards might be statuettes or certificates. The two most unusual honorary awards ever given went to Walt Disney, which was a standard Oscar® statuette and seven miniature statuettes, and to ventriloquist Edgar Bergen, who received a wooden Oscar with a movable mouth. Not quite as fancy as the aforementioned, but no less of an honor, on this day in 1942 conductor Leopold Stokowski and his associates received a certificate of merit “for their unique achievement in the creation of a new form of visualized music” in Fantasia, and Walt Disney, William Garity, John N.A. Hawkins, and the RCA Manufacturing Company were recognized with a certificate of merit “for their outstanding contribution to the advancement of the use of sound in motion pictures through the production of Fantasia.”
