Trivia: Jockey turned singer/actor, Davy Jones played the adorable mop-top Davy on the mid-to-late '60s phenom television series, The Monkees. He and his fellow manufactured bandmates Peter Tork, Mickey Dolenz, and Michael Nesmith made one film together -- Head (1968). After the group's demise, Jones occasionally played himself as a guest star on television (Brady Bunch) and in commercials. In 1995, he again played himself in The Brady Bunch Movie. Jones and all the other Monkees, except Nesmith, periodically got back together for tours and reunion concerts.

Trivia: Starred in the 1950s series Circus Boy. Learned to play the drums after being cast as the Monkees' drummer. Played the first synthesizer on a rock recording (the Monkees' "Daily Nightly" from the 1967 album Pisces, Aquarius, Capricorn & Jones Ltd.). Cowrote and directed the final episode of The Monkees. Voiced various characters on Saturday-morning cartoons during the 1970s, including The Funky Phantom and The Scooby-Doo Show. Auditioned for the role of Fonzie on Happy Days. Moved to London in 1977 to costar in Harry Nilsson's musical The Point! with fellow Monkee Davy Jones. Worked as a director-producer in England during the late 1970s and early '80s. His credits include a stage version of Bugsy Malone that starred a 14-year-old Catherine Zeta-Jones. Created-produced the early 1980s British children's show Luna. Studied physics during the 1970s and '80s at the Open University, a UK correspondence college.

Trivia: Multi-talented Michael Nesmith has come a long way from playing the quiet Monkee in the little wool cap on the popular 1960s sitcom The Monkees. Since then he has proven himself an innovator in musical genres and music videos -- his work in the latter area led to the creation of the MTV network. Nesmith is also a movie and television producer. Born in Houston, TX, Nesmith is the son of Bette Nesmith Graham, the woman who invented Liquid Paper correction fluid. Before auditioning for The Monkees in 1965, Nesmith had served a two-year stint in the Air Force, worked as a backup musician in Nashville, performed in a Los Angeles-based folk-rock duo with his friend John London, composed songs, including "Mary, Mary" and "Different Drum," and recorded a few singles. While with the Monkees, Nesmith wrote several of their hits and helped persuade the Monkees' "handlers" to allow them to produce their own records. He left the television group after completing their only feature film, Head (1968), to form his own band and then launched his solo career. In 1977, he designed a new television show called Popclips, in which he utilized live music clips while counting down the week's chart-toppers. The show is credited for inspiring the genesis of MTV. Nesmith's mother died in 1980 and left him half of her Liquid Paper fortune (worth over 20 million dollars). Nesmith then launched his own record and film production company, Pacific Arts, which became the number one source of American music videos in the '80s, and won the first Video Grammy for it in 1981. In the late '80s, Nesmith made his own filmmaking debut with the inventive music video "Elephant Parts." He reunited with the Monkees and continued to occasionally perform with them. In 1997, he and the group appeared in an hour-long television special and also released a new album, Justus.

Trivia: Learned to play piano at the age of 9. Was part of Edwin O. Smith High School's first graduating class. Landed his spot in the Monkees thanks to a recommendation from friend and fellow musician Stephen Stills. In 1972, he spent three months in jail for hashish possession. Portrayed Topanga Lawrence's father in episodes of the TV series Boy Meets World. Battled a rare form of cancer known as adenoid cystic carcinoma in 2009.

Trivia: Best known for his satirical recorded send-ups of everything from popular songs to American history and as the father of funny television commercials, Stan Freberg is truly one of comedy's great geniuses. Born in Pasadena, CA, Freberg felt the performing bug's bite early on. He launched his professional career in 1943 performing vocal impressions on Cliffie Stone's radio program. In the mid-'40s, Freberg made a name for himself as a voice artist for such major animation studios as Warner Bros., Disney, Paramount, and Walter Lantz; he and fellow voice artist Daws Butler were both regulars on the Time for Beany show. During the '50s, Freberg began making his famous song parodies of such hits as "The Yellow Rose of Texas," "The Great Pretender," and "Banana Boat (Day-O)." These and others not only made fun of the tunes, they also skewered pop culture and history, as in his famous "Dragon-Net" send-up of Jack Webb's long-running television show. As an actor, Freberg has only appeared in a couple of feature films making his debut in Callaway Went Thataway (1951). He has also done work on Broadway and continues to occasionally make appearances on television shows such as Roseanne. In 1997, he became a regular on the CBS children's program The Weird Al Show. As a member of the advertising world, Freberg made many inroads toward making commercials genuinely entertaining. His television campaign for Sunsweet Prunes -- "Today the pits; tomorrow the wrinkles" -- is still considered one of the best of the 1970s. In 1988, Freberg published his autobiography, It Only Hurts When I Laugh.

Trivia: Severn Darden was born in New Orleans, educated at Mexico City College, and given his first professional acting opportunity at Virginia's Barter Theater. A charter member of the Compass Theater, the improvisational group that would later evolve into Second City, Darden distinguished himself as an "intellectual" monologist, effortlessly weaving allusions to Freud and Kant into his hilariously nonsensical ramblings. From 1963's Goldstein onward, Darden worked in films as a character actor and sometimes writer/director. He chalked up quite a few eccentric characterizations in films like Dead Heat on a Merry-Go-Round (1966) and They Shoot Horses, Don't They? (1969). He was at the top of his form in The President's Analyst (1967) as Kropotkin, a gay Soviet counterintelligence agent who turns out (much to his own surprise) to be one of the film's heroes. The peripatetic Severn Darden settled down long enough to appear as a TV-series regular on Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman (1977; as Popesco), Beyond Westworld (1980; as Foley), and Take Five (1987; as psychiatrist Noah Wolf).