Trivia: One of Hollywood's premiere impressionists and comedians, Frank Gorshin is best remembered for his hypo-manic portrayal of the villainous, green-clad Riddler from the campy Batman television series of the 1960s. Gorshin made his film debut in the 1955 action-drama Hot Rod Girl. As a movie actor, Gorshin has spent the bulk of his career appearing in low-budget fare, but he has also worked in a few major features including Meteor Man (1993) and gave a well-received supporting performance in Terry Gilliam's 12 Monkeys (1996). He has also been on television as a guest star on comedies, dramas, and variety shows. Lovers of the first Star Trek series will know Gorshin from the anti-prejudice episode, "Let That Be Your Last Battlefield." Following the demise of the Batman series, Gorshin continued his film career as a character actor.

Trivia: Looking for all the world like a beardless Rumpelstiltskin, actor Raymond Hatton utilized his offbeat facial features and gift for mimicry in vaudeville, where he appeared from the age of 12 onward. In films from 1914, Hatton was starred or co-starred in several of the early Cecil B. DeMille productions, notably The Whispering Chorus (1917), in which the actor delivered a bravura performance as a man arrested for murdering himself. Though he played a vast array of characters in the late teens and early 1920s, by 1926 Hatton had settled into rubeish character roles. He was teamed with Wallace Beery in several popular Paramount comedies of the late silent era, notably Behind the Front (1926) and Now We're in the Air (1927). Curiously, while Beery's career skyrocketed in the 1930s, Hatton's stardom diminished, though he was every bit as talented as his former partner. In the 1930s and 1940s, Hatton showed up as comic sidekick to such western stars as Johnny Mack Brown and Bob Livingston. He was usually cast as a grizzled old desert rat, even when (as in the case of the "Rough Riders" series with Buck Jones and Tim McCoy) he happened to be younger than the nominal leading man. Raymond Hatton continued to act into the 1960s, showing up on such TV series as The Abbott and Costello Show and Superman and in several American-International quickies. Raymond Hatton's last screen appearance was as the old man collecting bottles along the highway in Richard Brooks' In Cold Blood (1967).

Trivia: Over his 14-year film career, actor Russ Bender appeared almost exclusively in low-budget horror films: The Amazing Colossal Man (1957), Invasion of the Saucer Men (1957), It Conquered the World (1957), Navy vs. the Night Monsters (1965), etc. One of his few "mainstream" assignments was the role of Edgar Llewellyn in 20th Century-Fox's Compulsion (1959). Russ Bender is also listed as screenwriter on such pinchpenny projects as Voodoo Woman.

Trivia: American character actor Douglas Henderson shifted his activities from stage to screen in 1952, when he appeared in Stanley Kramer's Eight Iron Men. Like many general purpose actors of the era, he was frequently cast in science fiction and horror films along the lines of King Dinosaur and Invasion of the Saucer Men. He was generally cast in authoritative or military roles: officers, congressmen, FBI agents, and the like. Douglas Henderson's final film assignment was the 1970 thriller Zigzag; eight years later, he committed suicide via carbon monoxide poisoning.

Trivia: Throughout most of his career Scott Peters appeared in low-budget horror movies and actioners. Though primarily a supporting actor, Peters occasionally won leading roles in features like Attack of the Puppet People (1958) and The Girl Hunters (1963). In the mid-'70s, Peters played Detective Valencia in the television drama Get Christie Love (1974).

Trivia: Muscular leading man Ed Nelson started out as a member of quickie-filmmaker Roger Corman's stock company, appearing in such drive-in fodder as Hot Rod Girl (1956), Invasion of the Saucer Men (1957) and Cry Baby Killer. In these and other low-budgeters of the late 1950s, Nelson not only starred, but doubled on the technical crew: he was one of several production assistants portraying the title crustacean in The Attack of the Crab Monsters (1956), and designed and operated the parasite props in 1958's The Brain Eaters, which he also produced. Eventually outgrowing such things, Nelson rose to TV stardom as Dr. Michael Rossi on the prime time soap opera Peyton Place, which ran from 1964 through 1969. He later starred as Ward Fuller on The Silent Force (1970) and as Dr. Michael Wise in Doctor's Private Lives (1979). In 1969, Nelson hosted a daily, syndicated talk show, which he was ultimately forced to give up when he decided to enter politics ("conflict of interests" and "equal time" were still considerations back then). He played President Truman several times, including the 1980 TV movie Enola Gay: The Men, the Mission, the Atomic Bomb, in the 1992 Brooke Shields flick Brenda Starr and onstage in Give 'Em Hell, Harry. Nelson died in 2014 at age 85.

Trivia: Diminutive American actor Angelo Rossitto was a fixture in American movies for more than 50 years, usually in highly visible supporting and extra roles. Born Angelo Salvatore Rossitto, he entered movies in his teens during the height of the silent era, making his first known appearance in The Beloved Rogue, starring John Barrymore, in 1926. Standing less than four feet tall, with dark hair and a grim visage, and billed at various times as Little Angie, Little Mo, and Little Angelo, Rossitto was a natural for pygmies and circus dwarves, often of a sinister appearing nature; his presence could help "dress" a carnival set or the setting for a fantasy film. He played the dwarf Angeleno in Tod Browning's Freaks at MGM, a pygmy in Cecil B. DeMille's The Sign of the Cross at Paramount, and one of the Three Little Pigs in the Laurel & Hardy-starring vehicle Babes in Toyland. Off camera, he was also a stand-in for Shirley Temple in several of her films. Rossitto didn't become a well-known figure, even among movie cultists, until he went to work for Monogram Pictures during the early '40s, in a series of low-budget horror films and horror film spoofs starring Bela Lugosi, often cast in tandem with the Hungarian-born actor as a kind of double act. His presence added to the bizarre, threatening nature of the films and he became as well known to fans of these low-budget movies as Lugosi, George Zucco, or any of the other credited stars. His role in the first of those Monogram productions with Lugosi, Spooks Run Wild, also starring the East Side Kids, deliberately played off of Lugosi's and Rossitto's sinister seeming images. In between his Poverty Row Monogram productions, the actor fit in small parts at Universal, including Preston Sturges' The Sin of Harold Diddlebock, and he was one of the jesters tormenting the blinded Samson in DeMille's Samson and Delilah. Rossitto, along with his younger contemporaries Jerry Maren, Frank Delfino, and Billy Curtis, was one of Hollywood's busier little people in the years after World War II. Rossitto can be spotted in carnival scenes in Carousel, appeared as the smallest of the "Moon Men" in the low-budget Jungle Jim movie Jungle Moon Men, and played the leader of the aliens in the late-'50s sci-fi satire Invasion of the Saucer Men. Many of Rossitto's appearances were in roles without character names, constituting highly specialized, uncredited (but highly visible) extra work, and he may have been in as many as 200 movies.On television in the late '60s and early '70s, he portrayed a life-sized puppet in the series H.R. Pufnstuf and played a hat in Lidsville. Rossitto was a sideshow huckster in the cheap cult horror movie Dracula Vs. Frankenstein, and as late as the mid-'80s was seen in a small role in Something Wicked This Way Comes and in the featured role of the Master-Blaster in Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome. Although work in 200 movies and television shows sounds like a lot, most of those appearances involved only a single day's or a single week's work, rather than full-time employment. He made his regular living from the 1930s through the 1960s at a newsstand in Hollywood just outside the gate of one of the studios; he joked that when he was needed for a film, they would simply pass the word directly to him on the street and he would report.