Trivia: Launching his career as a stand-up comedian in 1967, Frank Welker opened for such acts as the Righteous Brothers, Sergio Mendez and Brazil 66, The Fifth Dimension and Glen Campbell. Welker's TV credits include comedy-ensemble stints on The Don Knotts Show (1971) and the syndicated Laugh Trax (1982). Despite his occasional on-camera appearances, Welker is best known as one of the most versatile voiceover specialists in show business. His specialty is a dead-on impression of the Three Stooges' Curly Howard, which he utilized to peak effect in the Hanna-Barbera TV cartoon weekly Jabberjaw (1976). To list all of his credits would take a couple of weeks at best: in Hal Erickson's encyclopedic 1995 volume Television Cartoon Shows, Welker is mentioned no fewer than 110 times! Some of his more memorable TV cartoon credits include Itsy Bitsy Spider (title character), Duck Tales, Captain Planet, Garfield and Friends, The Jetsons, Tiny Toon Adventures, Real Adventures of Jonny Quest and Batman: The Animated Series. In theatrical features, Welker is most often heard as nonverbal "funny animals" (1993's Aladdin) and "enchanted" inanimate objects (in 1994's The Shadow, he "played" a magic dagger).

Trivia: The inimitable American actress Kathleen Freeman has been convulsing film audiences with portrayals of dowdy, sharp-tongued matrons since she was in her 20s. After stage work, Freeman began taking bit roles in major-studio features in 1948, seldom getting screen credit but always making a positive impression. The best of her earliest roles was in Singin' in the Rain (1952); Freeman played long-suffering vocal coach Phoebe Dinsmore, whose Herculean efforts to get dumb movie star Jean Hagen to grasp the proper enunciation of the phrase "I can't staaaand him" proved uproariously futile. Often cast as domestics, Freeman had a year's run in 1953 as the "spooked" maid on the ghostly TV sitcom Topper. Freeman was a particular favorite of comedian Jerry Lewis, who cast the actress in showy (and billed!) roles in such farces as The Errand Boy (1961), The Nutty Professor (1963) and Who's Got the Action?. As Nurse Higgins in Lewis' Disorderly Orderly (1964), Freeman weeps quietly as Jerry meekly scrapes oatmeal off her face and babbles "Oh, Nurse Higgins...you're all full of...stuff." Lewis so trusted Freeman's acting instincts that he sent her to the set of director William Wyler's The Collector (1965) in order to help build up the confidence of Wyler's nervous young leading lady Samantha Eggar. Throughout the '70s and '80s, Freeman took occasional "sabbaticals" from her movie and TV assignments to do stage work, enjoying a lengthy run in a Chicago production of Ira Levin's Deathtrap. Like many character actors of the '50s, Kathleen Freeman is frequently called upon to buoy the projects of baby-boomer directors: she was recently seen as an hysterical Julia Child clone in Joe Dante's Gremlins 2: The New Batch (1990).

Trivia: Voice actor Christopher Knights is the man behind many of the zany characters that have populated some of the most popular animated films. In addition to his memorable role as the voice of one of the Blind Mice in the Shrek movies, Knights has also provided the voices for Private in Madagascar and Fat Barry in Flushed Away.

Trivia: A director born in New Zealand as the child of Methodist missionary parents, Andrew Adamson came to specialize almost exclusively in fantasy-themed material. He began his career as a special-effects technician on films including Toys (1992), A Time to Kill (1996), and Batman & Robin (1997), but moved into the ranks of Hollywood's elite with his work directing the breakthrough DreamWorks CG-animated comedy Shrek (2001). That film clocked in as a blockbuster hit (to say the least -- grossing a reported 484 million dollars worldwide) and paved the way for several sequels, with the first two also directed by Adamson. Then, beginning in 2004, Walden Media tapped Adamson to write, direct, and executive produce the first two adaptations of the Chronicles of Narnia books by British author C.S. Lewis: The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (2005) and The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian (2007). Audiences turned the franchise into a massive hit and a cash cow for Walden and Walt Disney Pictures, which laid the groundwork for many successive installments. Adamson remained on board as a producer for the third film in the series, The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (2010).