Trivia: An "Okie" whose parents died when he was a child, William Boyd became a manual laborer before breaking into the movies in 1919 as an extra in Cecil B. De Mille's Why Change Your Wife? He soon became one of De Mille's favorite actors and was cast as an unassuming leading man in comedies and swashbuckling adventure films. Boyd continued his success in the sound era, but was hurt when a scandal hit another actor named "William Boyd" and the public confused the two. His career took off in 1935 when he began to appear in "Hopalong Cassidy" films (based on the Clarence E. Mulford stories of the Old West), beginning with Hop-A-Long Cassidy and eventually amounting to 66 episodes, the final twelve of which Boyd produced. Cassidy, dressed in black and mounted on his famous horse Topper, was a clean-living good guy who didn't smoke, drink, or swear, and hardly ever kissed the heroine; the character became an enormous hero to millions of American boys, and Boyd bought the rights to it. With the breakthrough of TV in the early 50s, Boyd began to reap huge profits from the character as the old shows found a new audience and by-products began to be produced and sold; he played Cassidy the rest of his life, even into genial, gray-haired old age. Ultimately, William Boyd Enterprises was sold for $8 million. Boyd was married four times and divorced three, each time to an actress: Ruth Miller, Elinor Fair, Dorothy Sebastian, and Grace Bradley.

Trivia: Born in Florida, Evelyn Brent was raised in New York by her widowed father. A teenaged model, Evelyn began appearing in films at the Popular Plays and Players studio in Fort Lee, New Jersey. After World War I, she travelled to England, where she worked in films and on stage. Back in the U.S. in 1922, Evelyn established herself in exotic, "dangerous" roles, notably in the late-silent efforts of director Josef Von Sternberg. Luckily, Evelyn's voice matched her screen image perfectly, and she had no trouble adjusting to talkies; unluckily, her earliest talkie starring efforts were box-office failures, and by the mid-1930s Evelyn was consigned to secondary roles. She took occasional sabbaticals from Hollywood to tour in vaudeville, rounding out her acting career in such Monogram cheapies as Bowery Champs (1944) and The Golden Eye (1948). Evelyn Brent worked as an actor's agent in the 1950s, then retired, periodically emerging from her Westwood Village home to appear as guest of honor at theatrical revivals of her best silent films.

Trivia: Virtually the prototype of all grizzled old-codger western sidekicks, George "Gabby" Hayes professed in real life to hate westerns, complaining that they all looked and sounded alike. For his first few decades in show business, he appeared in everything but westerns, including travelling stock companies, vaudeville, and musical comedy. He began appearing in films in 1928, just in time to benefit from the talkie explosion. In contrast to his later unshaven, toothless screen persona, George Hayes (not yet Gabby) frequently showed up in clean-faced, well groomed articulate characterizations, sometimes as the villain. In 1933 he appeared in several of the Lone Star westerns featuring young John Wayne, alternating between heavies and comedy roles. Wayne is among the many cowboy stars who has credited Hayes with giving them valuable acting tips in their formative days. In 1935, Hayes replaced an ailing Al St. John in a supporting role in the first Hopalong Cassidy film, costarring with William Boyd; Hayes' character died halfway through this film, but audience response was so strong that he was later brought back into the Hoppy series as a regular. It was while sidekicking for Roy Rogers at Republic that Hayes, who by now never appeared in pictures with his store-bought teeth, earned the soubriquet "Gabby", peppering the soundtrack with such slurred epithets as "Why, you goldurned whipersnapper" and "Consarn it!" He would occasionally enjoy an A-picture assignment in films like Dark Command (1940) and Tall in the Saddle (1944), but from the moment he became "Gabby", Hayes was more or less consigned exclusively to "B"s. After making his last film appearance in 1952, Hayes turned his attentions to television, where he starred in the popular Saturday-morning Gabby Hayes Show ("Hullo out thar in televisium land!") and for a while was the corporate spokesman for Popsicles. Retiring after a round of personal appearance tours, Hayes settled down on his Nevada ranch, overseeing his many business holdings until his death at age 83.

Trivia: Scratch a sniveling prison "stoolie" or cowardly henchman and if he were not Paul Guilfoyle or George Chandler, he would be the diminutive Ernie S. Adams, a ubiquitous presence in scores of Hollywood films of the 1930s and '40s. Surprisingly, the weasel-looking Adams had begun his professional career in musical comedy -- appearing on Broadway in such shows as Jerome Kern's Toot Toot (1918) -- prior to entering films around 1919. A list of typical Adams characters basically tells the story: "The Rat" (Jewels of Desire, 1927), "Johnny Behind the 8-Ball" (The Storm, 1930), "Lefty" (Trail's End, 1935), "Jimmy the Weasel" (Stars Over Arizona, 1937), "Snicker Joe" (West of Carson City, 1940), "Willie the Weasel" (Return of the Ape Man, 1944) and, of course "Fink" (San Quentin, 1937). The result, needless to say, is that you didn't quite trust him even when playing a decent guy, as in the 1943 Columbia serial The Phantom. One of the busiest players in the '40s, the sad-faced, little actor worked right up until his death in 1947. His final four films were released posthumously.

Trivia: Irving Bacon entered films at the Keystone Studios in 1913, where his athletic prowess and Ichabod Crane-like features came in handy for the Keystone brand of broad slapstick. He appeared in over 200 films during the silent and sound era, often playing mailmen, soda jerks and rustics. In The Amazing Dr. Clitterhouse (1938) it is Irving, as a flustered jury foreman, who delivers the film's punchline. In the late 1930s and early 1940s, Irving played the recurring role of Mr. Crumb in Columbia's Blondie series; he's the poor postman who is forever being knocked down by the late-for-work Dagwood Bumstead, each collision accompanied by a cascade of mail flying through the air. Irving Bacon kept his hand in throughout the 1950s, appearing in a sizeable number of TV situation comedies.

Trivia: After a brief Broadway career, actor William Janney came to films in 1929. He was sometimes cast as the reckless kid brother who gets knocked off in the first or second reel, as witness The Dawn Patrol (1930) and Hopalong Cassidy Returns. Otherwise, it was Janney's unfortunate lot to play weaklings and snivelers; his films included Crime of the Century (1933), in which he was a red-herring suspect who didn't do it, and Secrets of the Blue Room (1933), in which he was the least likely suspect who did. He also played the nominal hero in Laurel & Hardy's Bonnie Scotland (1935), a film he'd later remember as a pleasurable experience, save for the whining, indecisive character he was called upon to portray. Tired of playing the same basic part over and over, William Janney retired from films in 1936.

Trivia: American actor Morris Ankrum graduated from the University of Southern California with a law degree, then went on to an associate professorship in economics at the University of California at Berkeley. Here he founded a collegiate little theatre, eventually turning his hobby into a vocation as a teacher and director at the Pasadena Playhouse. (He was much admired by his students, including such future luminaries as Robert Preston and Raymond Burr.) Having already changed his name from Nussbaum to Ankrum for professional reasons, Ankrum was compelled to undergo another name change when he signed a Paramount Pictures contract in the 1930s; in his first films, he was billing as Stephen Morris. Reverting to Morris Ankrum in 1939, the sharp-featured, heavily eyebrowed actor flourished in strong character roles, usually of a villainous nature, throughout the 1940s. By the 1950s, Ankrum had more or less settled into "authority" roles in science-fiction films and TV programs. Among his best known credits in this genre were Rocketship X-M (1950), Red Planet Mars (1952), Flight to Mars (1952), Invaders From Mars (1953) (do we detect a subtle pattern here?), Earth Vs. the Flying Saucers (1956) and From the Earth to the Moon (1958). The fact that Morris Ankrum played innumerable Army generals was fondly invoked in director Joe Dante's 1993 comedy Matinee: the military officer played by Kevin McCarthy in the film-within-a-film Mant is named General Ankrum.

Trivia: Gawky, loose-limbed Al St. John performed from childhood with his family in vaudeville and burlesque around his home state of California, perfecting an athletic bicycle act that would stand him in good stead for the remainder of his career. Despite his parents' misgivings about "the flickers," St. John was persuaded to enter films by the success of his uncle, Mack Sennett star Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle. St. John became a "Keystone Kop" in that famous congregation's very first film, The Bangville Police (1913), supported Charles Chaplin and Marie Dressler in the feature comedy Tillie's Punctured Romance (1914), and then followed Arbuckle to Comique, where he and the young Buster Keaton functioned as "second bananas" to the hefty star. On his own, St. John starred in Educational comedies (one, The Iron Mule [1925], directed by his now disgraced uncle under the pseudonym of William Goodrich), all along developing his patented rube personality complete with oversized overalls and porkpie hat.St. John himself later claimed that a deal with the Fox company went sour and that he suddenly found himself more or less blacklisted by the major studios. He did appear in one of Roscoe Arbuckle's comeback shorts, Buzzin' Around (1933), but by the mid-'30s he seemed all washed up. To keep food (and, it was rumored, quite a bit of spirits) on the table, St. John switched gears and began pursuing a career in independently produced B-Westerns. He played a variety of characters, both major and minor, before almost accidentally stumbling over the particular role that would sustain him for the rest of his career and make him perhaps the favorite sidekick among kids -- that of the limber, baggy-pants braggart Fuzzy Q. Jones.Poverty Row company Spectrum had originally intended for Melody of the Plains (1937) to co-star singer Fred Scott with Fuzzy Knight but he proved unavailable and the script was simply never changed. St. John became so popular in the role that, by 1940, he was playing Fuzzy in no less than three Western series simultaneously, PRC's Billy the Kid and Lone Rider programmers and Republic Pictures' Don "Red" Barry vehicles. He remained with the Billy the Kid/Billy Carson Westerns when star Bob Steele was replaced by Larry "Buster" Crabbe and was still Fuzzy Q. Jones in 1947 when Crabbe left in favor of Humphrey Bogart-lookalike Al "Lash" LaRue. In quite a few of these downright poverty-stricken potboilers, St. John provided the only glimmer of entertainment. As LaRue often remarked, "Fuzzy could stumble over a match stick and spend 15 exciting minutes looking for the match." In other words, kids didn't really go to see a Buster Crabbe or Lash LaRue Western, they went to see Fuzzy.Al St. John was unique among B-Western sidekicks in that he actually carried his films rather than the easily disposable leading men. Both Crabbe and LaRue were well aware of that and remained steadfast in their praise for the diminutive performer. When the LaRue era finally ended with a short-lived television series, Lash of the West (1953), St. John returned to the boards and continued making personal appearances until his death from a heart attack.