Trivia: Intending to become a dentist like his father, American actor Edgar Buchanan wound up with grades so bad in college that he was compelled to take an "easy" course to improve his average. Buchanan chose a course in play interpretation, and after listening to a few recitations of Shakespeare he was stagestruck. After completing dental school, Buchanan plied his oral surgery skills in the summertime, devoting the fall, winter and spring months to acting in stock companies and at the Pasadena Playhouse in California. He was given a screen test by Warner Bros. studios in 1940, received several bit roles, then worked himself up to supporting parts upon transferring to Columbia Pictures. Though still comparatively youthful, Buchanan specialized in grizzled old westerners, with a propensity towards villainy or at least larceny. The actor worked at every major studio (and not a few minor ones) over the next few years, still holding onto his dentist's license just in case he needed something to fall back on. Though he preferred movie work to the hurried pace of TV filming, Buchanan was quite busy in television's first decade, costarring with William Boyd on the immensely popular Hopalong Cassidy series, then receiving a starring series of his own, Judge Roy Bean, in 1954. Buchanan became an international success in 1963 thanks to his regular role as the lovably lazy Uncle Joe Carson on the classic sitcom Petticoat Junction, which ran until 1970. After that, the actor experienced a considerably shorter run on the adventure series Cade's County, which starred Buchanan's close friend Glenn Ford. Buchanan's last movie role was in Benji (1974), which reunited him with the titular doggie star, who had first appeared as the family mutt on Petticoat Junction.

Trivia: The son of vaudeville and burlesque performers, George O'Hanlon made his own stage bow as a dancer at age 16 -- only to be fired after a few weeks over a salary dispute. O'Hanlon made the rounds in summer stock and burlesque, then registered with Hollywood's Central Casting as a film extra in the early '30s. While hoofing away in the choruses of many a Warner Bros. musical, O'Hanlon took acting lessons at the Bliss-Hayden theater in Beverly Hills. His big break came when he was hired by fledgling director Richard Bare for a U.S.C.-subsidized short subject, So You Want to Give Up Smoking (1942). After the war, O'Hanlon and Bare teamed for a series of shorts for Warners release; informally titled Behind the Eight Ball, these one-reel gems starred O'Hanlon as benighted "everyman" Joe McDoakes. This popular series ran from 1946 through 1955, amassing a total of 56 entries, three of which were nominated for Academy Awards. Outside of his McDoakes assignments, O'Hanlon appeared as Gillis in 45 episodes of the 1950s TV sitcom The Life of Riley, and also wrote and directed several installments of such TV weeklies as The Roaring 20s, 77 Sunset Strip, and Petticoat Junction. He played supporting roles in films like The Hucksters (1946), The Tanks are Coming (1951), and Kronos (1957), and directed the 1959 Tommy Noonan/Pete Marshall vehicle The Rookies. Children of the 1960s will remember George O'Hanlon as the voice of George Jetson on the Hanna-Barbera prime-time cartoon series The Jetsons.

Trivia: Trained as a dancer by Marge Champion's father Ernest Belcher, Iris Adrian began her performing career at age 13 by winning a "beautiful back" contest. Working as a New York chorus girl (she briefly billed herself as "Jimmie Joy"), Iris's big break came with the 1931 edition of The Ziegfeld Follies, which led to featured nightclub and comedy revue work in the U.S. and Europe. In the Kaufman/Hart Broadway play The Fabulous Invalid, Adrian raised the temperatures of the tired businessmen in the audiences by performing a strip-tease--this at a time (the late 1930s) when the standard burlesque houses had been banned from New York by Mayor LaGuardia. Brought to films by George Raft, Adrian made her first screen appearance in Raft's 1934 vehicle Rhumba. This led to dozens of supporting roles in subsequent feature films; Iris' standard characterization at this time was the brassy, gold-digging dame who never spoke below a shout. Often appearing in one-scene bits, Adrian received more sizeable roles in Laurel and Hardy's Our Relations (1936), Bob Hope's The Paleface (1948), Milton Berle's Always Leave Them Laughing (1949) and Jerry Lewis' The Errand Boy (1961). Through the auspices of director William Wellman, who had a fondness for elevating character actors to larger roles, Adrian gave a rollicking performance as Bonnie Parker wannabe Two Gun Gertie in 1942's Roxie Hart. She launched her TV career in 1949 on Buster Keaton's LA-based weekly comedy series. Some of her most memorable work for the small screen was on the various TV programs of Jack Benny, Adrian's favorite comedian and co-worker. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, Iris Adrian kept very active in the comedy films of the Walt Disney studio, including That Darn Cat (1965) and The Love Bug (1968); and in 1978, she was superbly cast in the regular role of the sarcastic secretary for a New York escort service on The Ted Knight Show.

Trivia: The son of vaudeville monologist Julius Tannen, Charles Tannen launched his own film career in 1936. For the rest of his movie "life," Tannen was most closely associated with 20th Century Fox, playing minor roles in films both large (John Ford's The Grapes of Wrath) and not so large (Laurel and Hardy's Great Guns). Rarely receiving screen credit, Tannen continued playing utility roles well into the 1960s, showing up in such Fox productions as The Fly (1958) and Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea (1961). Charles Tannen's older brother, William, was also an active film performer during this period.

Trivia: General purpose actor Don Megowan began his acting career in 1951 in Robert Parrish's crime thriller The Mob, playing a beefy longshoreman. Usually playing low-mentality thugs, he made several fleeting appearances in Westerns and crime dramas. Larger roles came his way in Disney productions as Colonel Billy Travis in Davy Crockett, King of the Wild Frontier (1955) and as Marion A. Ross in The Great Locomotive Chase (1956), and starting in the second half of 1950s he also became a familiar figure to fans of horror and science fiction -- although pretty much unrecognizable, Megowan played the title role of the land-bound Gill Man in John Sherwood's The Creature Walks Among Us (1956), and that same year was the star -- this time as the hero, the sheriff trying to understand a series of seemingly random, grisly killings -- in Fred F. Sears' The Werewolf; and in 1962, he was the lead in Wesley Barry's The Creation Of The Humanoids, a script that gave Megowan the largest amount of dialogue of his whole career . On television, Megowan was seen as Captain Huckabee on the 1961 syndicated adventure series The Beachcomber, replacing Adam West, who had been cast in the role in the pilot episode. And he later played Lucille Ball's boyfriend, whose indisposition gets her Lucy Carmichael involved in stuntman work, on The Lucy Show. One of the actor's more enjoyable assignments during the '70s was as the gum-chewing desperado in Mel Brooks' Western spoof Blazing Saddles (1974). Megowan died of throat cancer in 1981.