Trivia: It had originally been the hope of Walter Brennan (and his family) that he would follow in the footsteps of his father, an engineer; but while still a student, he was bitten by the acting bug and was already at a crossroads when he graduated in 1915. Brennan had already worked in vaudeville when he enlisted at age 22 to serve in World War I. He served in an artillery unit and although he got through the war without being wounded, his exposure to poison gas ruined his vocal chords, leaving him with the high-pitched voice texture that made him a natural for old man roles while still in his thirties. His health all but broken by the experience, Brennan moved to California in the hope that the warm climate would help him and he lost most of what money he had when land values in the state collapsed in 1925. It was the need for cash that drove him to the gates of the studios that year, for which he worked as an extra and bit player. The advent of the talkies served Brennan well, as he had been mimicking accents in childhood and could imitate a variety of different ethnicities on request. It was also during this period that, in an accident during a shoot, another actor (some stories claimed it was a mule) kicked him in the mouth and cost him his front teeth. Brennan was fitted for a set of false teeth that worked fine, and wearing them allowed him to play lean, lanky, virile supporting roles; but when he took them out, and the reedy, leathery voice kicked in with the altered look, Brennan became the old codger with which he would be identified in a significant number of his parts in the coming decades. He can be spotted in tiny, anonymous roles in a multitude of early-'30s movies, including King Kong (1933) (as a reporter) and one Three Stooges short. In 1935, however, he was fortunate enough to be cast in the supporting role of Jenkins in The Wedding Night. Directed by King Vidor and produced by Samuel Goldwyn, it was supposed to launch Anna Sten (its female lead) to stardom; but instead, it was Brennan who got noticed by the critics. He was put under contract with Goldwyn, and was back the same year as Old Atrocity in Barbary Coast. He continued doing bit parts, but after 1935, his films grew fewer in number and the parts much bigger. It was in the rustic drama Come and Get It (1936) that Brennan won his first Academy Award as Best Supporting Actor. Two years later, he won a second Best Supporting Actor Oscar for his performance in Kentucky (1938). That same year, he played major supporting roles in The Texans and The Buccaneer, and delighted younger audiences with his moving portrayal of Muff Potter, the man wrongfully accused of murder in Norman Taurog's The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. Brennan worked only in high-profile movies from then on, including The Story of Vernon and Irene Castle, Stanley and Livingston, and Goldwyn's They Shall Have Music, all in 1939. In 1940, he rejoined Gary Cooper in The Westerner, playing the part of a notoriously corrupt judge. Giving a beautifully understated performance that made the character seem sympathetic and tragic as much as dangerous and reprehensible, he won his third Best Supporting Actor award. There was no looking back now, as Brennan joined the front rank of leading character actors. His ethnic portrayals gradually tapered off as Brennan took on parts geared specifically for him. In Frank Capra's Meet John Doe and Howard Hawks' Sergeant York (both 1941), he played clear-thinking, key supporting players to leading men, while in Jean Renoir's Swamp Water (released that same year), he played another virtual leading role as a haunted man driven by demons that almost push him to murder. He played only in major movies from that point on, and always in important roles. Sam Wood used him in Goldwyn's The Pride of the Yankees (1942), Lewis Milestone cast him as a Russian villager in The North Star (1943), and he was in Goldwyn's production of The Princess and the Pirate (1944) as a comical half-wit who managed to hold his own working alongside Bob Hope. Brennan played the choice role of Ike Clanton in Ford's My Darling Clementine (1946) and reprised his portrayal of an outlaw clan leader in more comic fashion in Burt Kennedy's Support Your Local Sheriff some 23 years later. He worked with Cooper again on Delmer Daves' Task Force (1949) and played prominent roles in John Sturges' Bad Day at Black Rock and Anthony Mann's The Far Country (both 1955). In 1959, the 64-year-old Brennan got one of the biggest roles of his career in Hawks' Rio Bravo, playing Stumpy, the game-legged jailhouse keeper who is backing up the besieged sheriff. By that time, Brennan had moved to television, starring in the CBS series The Real McCoys, which became a six-season hit built around his portrayal of the cantankerous family patriarch Amos McCoy. The series was such a hit that John Wayne's production company was persuaded to release a previously shelved film, William Wellman's Goodbye, My Lady (1956), about a boy, an old man (played by Brennan), and a dog, during the show's run. Although he had disputes with the network and stayed a season longer than he had wanted, Brennan also liked the spotlight. He even enjoyed a brief, successful career as a recording artist on the Columbia Records label during the 1960s. Following the cancellation of The Real McCoys, Brennan starred in the short-lived series The Tycoon, playing a cantankerous, independent-minded multimillionaire who refuses to behave the way his family or his company's board of directors think a 70-year-old should. By this time, Brennan had become one of the more successful actors in Hollywood, with a 12,000-acre ranch in Northern California that was run by his sons, among other property. He'd invested wisely and also owned a share of his first series. Always an ideological conservative, it was during this period that his political views began taking a sharp turn to the right in response to the strife he saw around him. During the '60s, he was convinced that the anti-war and civil rights movements were being run by overseas communists -- and said as much in interviews. He told reporters that he believed the civil rights movement, in particular, and the riots in places like Watts and Newark, and demonstrations in Birmingham, AL, were the result of perfectly content "Negroes" being stirred up by a handful of trouble-makers with an anti-American agenda. Those on the set of his last series, The Guns of Will Sonnett -- in which he played the surprisingly complex role of an ex-army scout trying to undo the damage caused by his being a mostly absentee father -- say that he cackled with delight upon learning of Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination in 1968. Brennan later worked on the 1972 presidential campaign of reactionary right-wing California Congressman John Schmitz, a nominee of the American Party, whose campaign was predicated on the notion that the Republican Party under Richard Nixon had become too moderate. Mostly, though, Brennan was known to the public for his lovable, sometimes comical screen persona, and was still working as the '60s drew to a close, on made-for-TV movies such as The Over-the-Hill Gang, which reunited him with one of his favorite directors, Jean Yarbrough, and his old stablemate Chill Wills. Brennan died of emphysema in 1974 at the age of 80.

Trivia: American actor Richard Crenna started out as a radio performer at age 11, demonstrating an astonishing range for one so young. The momentum of his career was unaffected by an army hitch and time spent earning an English degree at the University of Southern California. But even though he was by then in his twenties, Crenna found himself still playing adolescents, notably squeaky-voiced high schooler Walter Denton on the radio comedy Our Miss Brooks. That he was able to play characters of virtually any age was overlooked by movie and TV casting directors, who could see Crenna only in callow-juvenile roles. After making an excellent impression as ballplayer Daffy Dean in the 1953 film Pride of St. Louis, for example, Crenna wasn't cast in another film until the 1955 movie version of Our Miss Brooks--in which, at 29, he was Walter Denton once more. The following year, Crenna decided "to sorta let Walter Denton die," and took a decidedly mature role in the sleazy exploitation film Over-Exposed (1956). It was a fully grown Crenna who took on the role of Luke McCoy on the Walter Brennan TV series The Real McCoys, which ran from 1957 through 1963 and which gave Crenna his first opportunities as a director. After McCoys, Crenna found himself facing potential career standstill again, since it seemed that now he was typed as the rubeish Luke McCoy. This time, however, the actor had impressed enough producers with his dogged work ethic and the range displayed in guest-star appearances. In 1964, Crenna was cast in a prestigious TV drama For the People as assistant DA David Koster, and though the program lasted only one season, Crenna was firmly established as a compelling dramatic actor. Still, and despite solid Richard Crenna film performances in The Sand Pebbles (1966), Body Heat (1981) and The Flamingo Kid (1985), the actor has never completely escaped the spectre of Walter Denton. Crenna was able to conjure up the old adenoidal Denton voice on talk shows of the 1980s and 1990s, and in the action-film spoof Hot Shots: Part Deux, the actor, with an absolute straight face, portrayed Colonel Denton Walters!

Trivia: Soupy Sales wasn't the first kiddie show host to find a sub rosa appeal among adults, but he was the first to build a national following, and an entire career, on that foundation. His mix of wide-eyed, child-like wonderment, underscored by an awareness of the "adult" side of his humor -- which, in addition to a sharp satirical edge and an anarchistic component reminiscent of the Marx Brothers, also occasionally included some adult moments -- made him a unique presence on television and in American popular culture, and even allowed him to make the occasional jump into feature films.He was born Milton Supman in Franklinton, NC, in 1926. And because his family's last name was pronounced "soupman" by their neighbors, he adopted the nickname "Soupy" as a boy. He attended Marshall College in Huntington, WV, but it was performing, and especially comedy as embodied by the Marx Brothers and the Ritz Brothers, that appealed to him. Working initially as "Soupy Hines" -- which he later changed to "Soupy Sales" in honor of actor/comedian/author Charles "Chic" Sale -- he hosted dance shows on radio and television in the early '50s, mostly in Ohio, working out of Cincinnati and Cleveland, before making the jump to his own show, Lunch With Soupy, in 1953 on WXYZ-TV in Detroit. It was during this period that introduced such fixtures of his subsequent national show as Pookie The Lion, and he first worked with puppeteer and actor Frank Nastasi, who would work with him for more than a decade. Sales later moved to Los Angeles and had a show on the ABC network, before moving to New York City in the mid-'60s, where he got a show with Metromedia on WNEW-TV (Channel 5) in the fall of 1964, which was nationally syndicated by Columbia Pictures. That was the show that was most widely seen, and on which a lot of his reputation rested, with Pookie The Lion, Black Tooth and White Fang as puppet sidekicks; Hobart and Reba (the heads in the pot-bellied stove on his set), and his on-going Dick Tracy-style serial "Philo Kvetch," in which he played a private detective trying to track down his arch-enemy, "The Mask." The Soupy Sales Show appealed to youngsters, but it also had a lure for adults, who could see in his antics a satirical edge -- old detective thrillers ("Philo Kvetch" being an ethnic play on "Philo Vance") and of politics (when "The Mask" was finally unmasked, he was revealed as an actor wearing a not-too-convincing mask of then-Soviet premier Nikita Krushchev -- this at a time when the Cold War had hardly cooled at all), among numerous other "serious" subjects. Sales' show became the thing to do, much as the late Ernie Kovacs' show had been; it became a treat for celebrities, including Tony Curtis, Jerry Lewis, and, in one celebrated instance, Frank Sinatra -- along with Sammy Davis, Jr. and Trini Lopez, at a time when Sinatra and Davis were two of the biggest names in show business -- to go on the show, do a sketch, and get hit in the face with a pie. Sales had carved out a unique niche for himself as a national entertainer, his humor somewhere midway between Rocky & Bullwinkle, Ernie Kovacs, and Groucho Marx. It was also reportedly a very wild set; one of the running gags was the knock-at-the-door, in which Sales would interact with whoever or whatever was on the other side. But on at least one occasion, out of camera shot, there was a well-endowed topless female on the other side of the door, and all one saw was Sales' stunned reaction and ad-libs. The series was damaged, however, by a comic bit in which, on New Years' Day of 1965, Sales told his young audience to go through their parents' pockets and take those little pieces of paper with presidents' pictures and send them in. No one can say for sure how many children actually responded, but Metromedia was forced to take him off the air by the FCC over viewer complaints. This didn't stop his career momentum, however; he had a Top 10 hit record, as a single and LP in 1965, with "Do the Mouse," which he performed on The Ed Sullivan Show that year (the dance was a zany jump-and-sway with mouse ears, and probably helped put an end to the goofy dance crazes of the mid-'60s). He also made the leap to movies that year. Sales had previously appeared in a supporting role in the 1961 feature The Two Little Bears, but in 1966 he starred in the comedy Birds Do It, directed by Andrew Marton, about a NASA janitor who acquires the ability to fly. Sales' appeal to adults was codified by his appearances as a panelist on What's My Line?, and he had his own radio show in the 1980s as well. His later efforts at reviving his adult/kid show concept, however, never quite took off in the same way as his late '50s and '60s vehicles. The production values were higher (they couldn't have been lower; the Channel 5 set looked like it cost about $5 to decorate), and the shooting was in color, but the timing wasn't as tight, and he seemed to be trying too hard to do what he had done easily and effortlessly, and seemingly spontaneously, in earlier years. There were some clever bits, however, such as a sketch in which Sales is running from a security guard (played by Barney Martin) at a film vault and literally runs into and onto the action on a film strip (featuring Chester Morris, no less), with the guard still chasing him, now in black-and-white. He made a career over the 1980s, 1990s, and early 21st century simply by being Soupy Sales. He appeared as an occasional guest star, sometimes very effectively, on shows like Wings (where he played a champion Simon Says competitor), and also signed autographs at film conventions. He'd always had competitors, even in his prime; in the mid-'60s -- Sandy Becker and Chuck McCann had rival kids shows that also appealed to adults, though neither had Sales' satiric edge -- and in later years, there came successors, of whom the most well known is probably Floyd Vivino, aka Uncle Floyd, whose Uncle Floyd Show owed a huge amount to Sales' work. He remained active into the new century, and published an autobiography, Soupy Sez, co-authored with Charles Salzberg, in 2001. He died October 22, 2009, at the age of 83.