Trivia: Known to millions as the easily confused, heavily accented Latino José Jimenez, Bill Dana was actually born William Szathmary-"a Jungarian Hew", explains Dana in his Jimenez dialect. A prolific comedy writer, Dana created special material for such performers as George Gobel and Don Adams throughout the 1950s. He joined the writing stable of The Steve Allen Show in 1956, making his on-camera debut as José Jimenez during a 1959 Christmas show. The sketch was predicated on the gimmick of a Puerto Rican Santa Claus whose hearty laugh came out "Jo, Jo, Jo!" The bit scored an immediate hit with the public, and soon the versatile Dana was a regular performer on the Allen show, playing a wide variety of dialect characterizations. When the Mercury space program became a hot topic, Dana cut a Grammy-nominated comedy album, José the Astronaut ("What will you do if you're lost in space?" "I plan to cry a lot") which accompanied many a genuine astronaut into the stratosphere. Dana brought his Jimenez persona to 1961's The Spike Jones Show, then appeared on a semi-regular basis as José the elevator operator on The Danny Thomas Show. This stint spun off into Dana's own sitcom in 1963, The Bill Dana Show, in which José Jimenez was employed as a bellhop at a posh New York Hotel. The series was cancelled in 1965, after which Dana continued making TV guest appearances and the occasional movie (1967's The Busy Body, 1980's The Nude Bomb, etc.). In the early 1970s, Dana was compelled to "retire" José Jimenez in the face of protests from scattered anti-defamation groups, but he still had plenty of comedy material and projects up his sleeve. One of Bill Dana's strangest endeavors of the 1980s was No Soap Radio (1982), a non sequitur-laden sitcom (with such "characters" as a boy-eating sofa!) which Dana both starred in and co-produced. He retired from acting and writing in the mid-1990s. Dana died in 2017, at age 92.

Trivia: After a few seasons of stage work, Don Porter signed a Universal Pictures contract in 1939. Porter spent most of his screen time at Universal as a general-purpose actor: he was most interestingly cast in Abbott and Costello's Who Done It? (1942), energetically participating in the film's slapstick climax. In the postwar years, Porter played many a stuffed-shirt businessman, often with a few illegal irons in the fire. On television, he played Ann Sothern's eternally flummoxed boss, theatrical agent Peter Sands, in the long-running (1953-57) sitcom Private Secretary (aka Susie). When Sothern decided to make a few alterations in her subsequent Ann Sothern Show(1958-61), she brought in her old friend and colleague Porter to play another boss, hotelier James Devery. In 1963, Porter was cast as Gidget's dad Mr. Lawrence in the theatrical feature Gidget Goes to Rome (1963); this led to his being recast in the same role on the 1965 TV version of Gidget starring Sally Field. One of Porter's more rewarding post-Gidget assignments was the part of the teflon-coated Republican incumbent in Robert Redford's The Candidate. Don Porter was married to actress Peggy Converse. Porter passed away in Los Angeles at age 84.