Trivia: While on the Darmouth College football team, Charles Starrett was hired for an extra role in a 1926 film titled The Quarterback. Starrett honed his performing skills in vaudeville and stock, eventually obtaining leading-man roles on Broadway. His first film was 1930's Fast and Loose; three years later, Starrett was one of several movie performers who put his career on the line by helping to organize the Screen Actors Guild. After several years of relatively colorless romantic leads, Starrett switched to Westerns, signing with Columbia Pictures in 1936 and remaining there until the 1950s; the actor's latter-day trade ads proudly proclaimed "Twenty years with the same brand." One of the most popular of all cowboy stars, Starrett was best known for his portrayal of the Durango Kid, a Lone Ranger-like masked avenger.

Trivia: Smiley Burnette, said his longtime partner and boss Gene Autry, "couldn't read a note of music but wrote 350 songs and I never saw him take longer than an hour to compose one." Arguably the most beloved of all the B-Western sidekicks and certainly one of the more prolific and enduring, Burnette had been a disc jockey at a small radio station in Tuscola, IL, when discovered by Autry. The crooner prominently featured him both on tour and on Chicago's National Barn Dance broadcasts, making certain that Burnette was included in the contract he signed in 1934 with Mascot Pictures. As Autry became a major name in Hollywood, almost single-handedly establishing the long-lasting Singing Cowboy vogue, Burnette was right there next to him, first with Mascot and then, through a merger, with the newly formed Republic Pictures, where he remained through June 1944. The culmination of Burnette's popularity came in 1940, when he ranked second only to Autry in a Boxoffice Magazine popularity poll of Western stars, the lone sidekick among the Top Ten. Perhaps not everyone's cup of tea -- his style of cute novelty songs and tubby slapstick humor could, on occasion, become quite grating -- Burnette nevertheless put his very own spin on B-Westerns and became much imitated. In fact, by the 1940s, there were two major trends of sidekick comedy in B-Westerns: Burnette's style of slapstick prairie buffoonery, also practiced by the likes of Dub Taylor and Al St. John, and the more character-defined comedy of George "Gabby" Hayes, Andy Clyde, et al. Burnette, who would add such classic Western tunes as "Song of the Range" and "Call of the Canyon" to the Autry catalog, refined his naïve, but self-important, Frog Millhouse character through the years at Republic Pictures -- called "Frog," incidentally, from the way his vocals suddenly dropped into the lowest range possible. But the moniker belonged to the studio and he was plain Smiley Burnette thereafter. When Autry entered the service in 1942, Burnette supported Sunset Carson, Eddie Dew, and Robert Livingston before switching to Columbia Pictures' Durango Kid series starring Charles Starrett. But despite appearing in a total of 56 Durango Westerns, Burnette was never able to achieve the kind of chemistry he had enjoyed with Autry and it was only fitting that they should be reunited for the final six Western features Gene would make. Although his contribution to Autry's phenomenal success was sometimes questioned (minor cowboy star Jimmy Wakely opined that Autry had enough star power to have made it with any comic sidekick), Smiley Burnette remained extremely popular with young fans throughout his career, and although not universally beloved within the industry, he has gone down in history as the first truly popular B-Western comedy sidekick. Indeed, without his early success, there may never have been the demand for permanent sidekicks. When B-Westerns went out of style, Burnette spent most of his time in his backyard recording studio, returning for an appearance on television's Ranch Party (1958) and the recurring role of train engineer Charley Pratt on Petticoat Junction (1963-1967). He died of leukemia in 1967 at the age of 55.

Trivia: The leading lady of six "Durango Kid" Westerns and at least two Three Stooges' comedy shorts, voluptuous ash-blonde Nancy Saunders came to the screen in 1946 courtesy of RKO talent scout/movie actor Donald Dillaway, who reportedly spotted her dancing at Hollywood's famed Coconut Grove. A former photographer's model and a professional exhibition rider, Saunders was a natural for B-Western fame -- she did a total of eight -- but television audiences are probably better acquainted with her appearances in the Stooges' shorts Brideless Groom (1947), as one of Shemp Howard's aggressive would-be brides, and The Ghost Talks (1949), as Lady Godiva no less. Footage from these comedies wound up in Stone Age Romeos (1955) and Husbands Beware (1956), prolonging Saunders' onscreen visibility by about four years.

Trivia: After attending Boston College, Fred F. Sears entered the regional-theatre talent pool as an actor, director and producer. Sears created the famed Little Theatre of Memphis and taught dramatic arts at Southwestern University before being hired by Columbia Pictures as a dialogue coach in 1947. He played supporting parts in several Columbia features before being promoted to director on the studio's Charles Starrett "B" western series. Sears remained at Columbia for the rest of his career, generally working with the ultra-economical Sam Katzman unit. His output consisted of westerns, crime dramas, low-budget musicals (Rock Around the Clock, Cha-Cha-Cha Boom!) and science-fiction flicks. Most observers consider Earth vs. the Flying Saucers (1956) as Sears' finest effort, though credit for most of that film's success must go to special- effects wizard Ray Harryhausen. Fred F. Sears also directed several half-hour playlets for Columbia's TV subsidiary Screen Gems, sometimes lensing as many as three episodes of three different series simultaneously!