Trivia: Born in a multicultural New York City neighborhood, comedian Don Adams joined the Marines upon the outbreak of World War II. After Guadalcanal, Adams saw little action due to a life-threatening bout of blackwater fever (malaria) that kept him out of commission until the end of the war. As a civilian, Adams tried at first to carve out a career as a professional artist, taking outside jobs to support himself and his family. Blessed with a gift for mimicry, Adams and a friend teamed up for a comedy act but response was minimal, and soon Adams was involved in the cartographic and engineering business. Then in 1954, on a whim, he auditioned for Arthur Godfrey's Talent Scouts; his routine went over, and he was on his way. Collaborating with his close friend Bill Dana, Adams developed a topnotch act full of "inside" showbiz references that fortunately never went over the heads of the audience. His best monologue was "The Defense Attorney," wherein Adams adopted the clipped speech cadence of actor William Powell. Though he would be seen in a variety of sketches during his nightclub years and his early-1960s stint as a regular on The Perry Como Show, it was the Powell imitation that scored highest. Adams would use this voice for the cartoon character of Tennessee Tuxedo in 1963, and that same year expanded on the impression in the role of inept house detective Byron Glick on The Bill Dana Show. The "spy cycle" of 1965 enabled Adams to refine the Byron Glick character into the magnificently self-confident but monumentally inept secret-agent Maxwell Smart on the hit TV sitcom Get Smart, which ran until 1970. In addition to providing Adams a conduit for his beloved movie parodies, the series also gave him an opportunity to direct. In 1971, Adams moved onto another genre-spoof TV series, The Partners, in which he played police detective Lennie Crook. Hampered by weak scripts and a death-valley timeslot opposite All in the Family, The Partners perished after thirteen weeks. After this debacle, Adams found the going rough for a while, though he made a comfortable living with nightclub appearances and guest spots on such TV series as The Love Boat. He made no fewer than three attempts to revive Get Smart between 1980 and 1994, one of which actually resulted in a (very short-lived) weekly Fox network sitcom. Adams is best known to children of the 1980s as the voice of cartoondom's bionic blockhead, Inspector Gadget. Don Adams was the brother of another comic actor, the late Richard Yarmy; Adams' cousin Robert Karvelas played secret agent Larrabee on Get Smart.

Trivia: American actress Barbara Feldon claimed to be a lonely child, one whose escape from loneliness took the form of books and ballet. While studying drama at Carnegie Tech, she became an expert in Shakespeare, and in this capacity made her TV debut as a contestant on The $64,000 Question (kinescopes exist of this appearance; Barbara is instantly recognizable, though she hasn't quite lost all her baby fat). Feldon worked as a chorus girl in New York, then slimmed down considerably and became a high-priced fashion model. Commercials followed, in which Feldon pitched deodorant pads and--most famously--men's cologne. Few males who were going through adolescence in the early '60s will forget Feldon pitching Top Brass cologne to the "tigers" in the audience, staring into the camera with almost unbearable sultriness (the actress insisted that her come-hither glare was a result of nearsightedness). After doing the guest-star round on several TV dramatic programs, Feldon won the role of statuesque Agent 99 on the spy sitcom Get Smart. Part of the fun on this program was watching Feldon try to avoid revealing that she was a few inches taller than co-star Don Adams (in some scenes he was standing on an incline, as proven when the Nickelodeon cable network put together a montage of "who's taller?" scenes from Get Smart in the early '90s). Get Smart ran from 1965 through 1970, but Feldon has occasionally re-created Agent 99, once in a Smart TV-movie reunion, and more recently in a "return" series for the Fox Network, again starring with Don Adams. Feldon's film career has been less remarkable, save for her brilliant interpretation of a near-fanatic beauty contest organizer in the 1975 satirical comedy Smile. In the last few years, Barbara Feldon has distinguished herself as an expert voiceover artist in commercials and TV specials; she can be heard as the narrator of the PBS series Dinosaurs.

Trivia: American character actor Edward Platt is best remembered as the eternally exasperated Chief on the Get Smart series. Before making his screen debut in the mid-'50s, he worked as a singer for a band. In feature films, he was typically cast as generals and bosses.

Trivia: American actress Karen Steele usually lived up to her name by playing tough, hard-shelled characters. After her 1955 movie debut, she co-starred in several Budd Boetticher-directed films (The Rise and Fall of Legs Diamond, etc.). Karen Steele's TV guest roles in the 1960s included Mary Jack Armstrong, "the strongest female enemy agent in the world," on Get Smart, and Eve in the 1966 Star Trek episode "Mudd's Women."

Trivia: American character actor Milton Selzer trafficked in bookish types, sometimes with an undercurrent of menace. An ineluctable TV presence, Selzer guest-starred on virtually every major program of the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s. He was a regular on Needles and Pins (1973) and The Famous Teddy Z (1989, second-billed as showbiz agent Abe Werkfinder); and on the popular spy spoof Get Smart (1965-70), he was brilliantly cast as a nervous special-weapons expert, who suffered a mild coronary every time dunderheaded Maxwell Smart (Don Adams) inadvertently destroyed Selzer's latest inventions. In films from 1959, Milton Selzer was given ample opportunity to shine as a sharkish movie mogul in Legend of Lylah Clare (1968) and as Nancy Spungen's grandfather in Sid and Nancy (1986).

Trivia: Described bluntly as "yeccch" in a 1968 book on movie villains, porcine Dan Seymour has certainly played more than his share of slimy bad guys. Seymour started out as a nightclub comedian, then decided to give movies a try. He was almost immediately cast in heavy roles due to his girth and sinister features. Seymour's career has in many ways been inextricably linked with the 1942 classic Casablanca. He played the small role of Abdul the doorman in that film, went on to a larger part in Warners' Casablanca clone To Have and Have Not (1944), graduated to chief of police in the Marx Brothers spoof A Night in Casablanca (1946), and, coming full circle, was cast in the old Sidney Greenstreet role of Ferrari in Warners' weekly TV series version of Casablanca in 1955. Dan Seymour continued to play small roles in films like The Way We Were into the 1970s, and was frequently seen on TV comedy series of the same era, usually cast as a self-indulgent Middle Eastern potentate.