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: American actress Patricia Barry was signed for a Columbia Pictures contract almost immediately upon her graduation from Stephens College. Billed as Patricia White, the young actress was kept busy in Gene Autry westerns, two-reel comedies with such funsters as Andy Clyde and Sterling Holloway, and occasional leads in B-plus features like The Wreck of the Hesperus (1948). Changing her professional name upon her marriage to producer/director Philip Barry, Jr. (son of the famed playwright), Patricia became one of the most visible actresses in 1950s television. She spent two years as a regular on the daytime drama First Love, and worked steadily in such anthologies as Playhouse 90 and Matinee Theatre. Though an advocate of the "method" school of acting, Barry's technique was a lot less self-indulgent and timewasting than most method actors of her era, and she continued popping up with regularity on TV shows of the 1960s, including a costarring stint with Jack Klugman in the short-lived 1964 sitcom Harris Against the World. Active in TV and films into the 1980s, Patricia Barry is probably best known to modern viewers for her performances in two Twilight Zone installments, "The Chaser" (1960) and "I Dream of Jeannie," wherein she pulled off the dextrous task of being both sexy and funny at the same time and for her work on soap operas, including Days of Our Lives and All My Children. Barry died in 2016, at age 93.

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: When actor Charles C. Wilson wasn't portraying a police chief onscreen, he was likely to be cast as a newspaper editor. The definitive Wilson performance in this vein was as Joe Gordon, reporter Clark Gable's apoplectic city editor in the 1934 multi-award winner It Happened One Night. Like many easily typecast actors, Wilson was usually consigned to one-scene (and often one-line) bits, making the sort of instant impression that hundreds of scripted words could not adequately convey. Shortly before his death in 1948, Charles C. Wilson could once more be seen at the editor's desk of a big-city newspaper -- this time as the boss of those erstwhile newshounds the Three Stooges in the two-reel comedy Crime on Their Hands (1948).

Trivia: Though the "Chief" was a purely honorary title, Chief Thundercloud was indeed a Native American. Educated at the University of Arizona, Thundercloud (given name: Victor Daniels) worked at a series of manual-labor and rodeo jobs before trying his luck in Hollywood. In films from 1928 through 1952, Thundercloud is best known for creating the role of Tonto in the 1938 serial The Lone Ranger. He also played the title role in Paramount's Geronimo (1939), though he incredibly received no on-screen credit. Chief Thundercloud should not be confused with another prominent Indian actor, Chief Thunderbird, who appeared as Sitting Bull in 1936's Annie Oakley, nor with film-actor Scott T. Williams, who also billed himself as Chief Thundercloud.