Trivia: American actor Warren Hull left New York University to study voice and pursue a career in light operas and operettas. In 1935 Hull was signed to a contract by Warner Bros., and spent the next few years playing vapid leading men in such forgettables as Miss Pacific Fleet (1935) and Bengal Tiger (1936). His best film of this period was The Walking Dead (1936), though he and the rest of the cast were overshadowed by back-from-the-dead Boris Karloff. Hull left Warners for less money but larger parts in small-budget films, excelling as a serial hero. As the titular Mandrake the Magician (1939), Hull was impressively decked out in top hat and tails as he battled a disguised criminal called The Wasp, while in The Green Hornet Strikes Again (1941) Hull donned a disguise himself to battle crime. Perhaps his best serial appearance was in The Spider's Web (1938) in which he assumed three guises: the business-suited hero; the caped and cloaked Spider; and a lowlife information-gatherer with misshapen teeth named Blinky. As good film roles became scarce, Hull returned to radio announcing, which he'd been doing off and on since 1923. Throughout the '40s he popped up with frequency on such programs as The Hit Parade and Vox Pop. TV viewers of the '50s and '60s, as yet unfamiliar with old movie serials, knew Warren Hull only as the garrulous host of such programs as Strike it Rich and Who In the World.

Trivia: Sad-eyed, brunette American actress Anne Nagel was the daughter of one of the early Technicolor experts. Already a Hollywood habitue, Nagel made her film bow at age 21 in I Loved You Wednesday. She signed a contract with Warner Bros., appearing as everything from western ingenues to murder suspects. In 1935 she married another Warners contractee, leading man Ross Alexander. After Alexander's sudden, inexplicable suicide in 1937, Nagel was quietly dropped by Warners, then was optioned by Universal. Busiest in the early '40s, she appeared in numerous Universal serials (Don Winslow of the Navy [1940]) and horror films (Man Made Monster [1940]). She was cast as Madame Gorgeous, the circus aerialist mother of Gloria Jean in W.C. Fields' Never Give a Sucker an Even Break (1941), but nearly her entire part (including a spectacular death scene) ended up on the cutting room floor. Leaving Universal in 1943, Nagel freelanced at such minor operations as PRC and Republic. Her final film roles were supporting at best, often uncredited (e.g. as one of the "team wives" in the 1949 baseball biopic The Stratton Story). Retiring from films in 1949, Anne Nagel died of cancer in 1966 at the age of 53.

Trivia: A showgirl in the 1927 Ziegfeld Follies and the understudy for its star, Irene Delroy, blonde, blue-eyed leading lady Claudia Dell had been educated in San Antonio, TX, and Mexico City. Imported to Hollywood in the heady early days of sound, the porcelain pretty Dell made a potentially important screen debut in the title role of Sweet Kitty Bellairs (1930). But the Regency romance, really an operetta but without the music, tanked at the box office despite the added attraction of two-strip Technicolor, and a co-starring role opposite Al Jolson in Big Boy did as little for her as Sonny Boy (1929) had for the equally blonde Josephine Dunn. Warner Bros. subsequently dropped her option and she was relegated to Poverty Row. Rebounding at Universal, Dell did Destry Rides Again (1932) with Tom Mix, the first of four B-Westerns, and she was the nominal heroine in a very cheap action serial, The Lost City (1935). Dell was playing bit roles by the end of the decade and the 1940s saw her cast in low-grade Monogram antics such as Black Magic (1944), a Charlie Chan series entry, and Call of the Jungle (1944), a humid potboiler starring stripper Ann Corio. Divorced from theatrical agent Edwin Stilton, Claudia Dell later worked as a beauty shop receptionist and appeared in early television dramas.

Trivia: A pretty, blonde ingenue of the 1920s, Betty Ross Clarke had toured in the hit play Fair and Warmer prior to entering films as Katherine de Vaucelles opposite William Farnum's François Villon in If I Were King (1920). She was also Roscoe Arbuckle's leading lady in the comedy Brewster's Millions (1921), but then did mostly programmers. Leaving films in 1924 in favor of the stage, Clarke returned as a character actress in the sound era and is perhaps best remembered for replacing an otherwise engaged Sara Haden as Aunt Milly in two Andy Hardy comedies, Judge Hardy's Children and Love Finds Andy Hardy (both 1938).

Trivia: Burly stage comedian and dialectician Harrison Greene came to Hollywood in 1933. In features, Greene was usually cast as a diplomat or aristocrat with a foreign accent to fit every occasion. He was seen to better advantage in short subjects, starring in the Pete Smith specialty Attention Suckers (1933) and essaying such supporting roles as exterminator A. Mouser in the Three Stooges' Ants in the Pantry (1936) and Bustoff the wrestler in another Stooge opus, Grips Grunts and Groans (1937). Elsewhere, Harrison Greene could be found playing slightly sinister foreigners in all three of Republic's Dick Tracy serials.