Todd’s Serial Blog

Blanche Mehaffey aspired to be a great star, as many young actresses do, but instead she became a popular actress in low budget films.  A WAMPUS Baby Star in 1924 she appeared in shorts like Friend and Husband (1924) and The Haunted Honeymoon (1925).  Her early film work included The Princess From Hoboken (1927) and Airmail Pilot (1928).

Making the successful transfer to sound films she made the Harry Webb Productions serial The Mystery Trooper (1931).  She played one of a group of heirs to a hidden gold mine who fights Al Ferguson’s attempts to steal it and she is aided by the unknown title character.

Marrying Ralph Like, Mehaffey would go on to make a series of low budget films produced by her husband, many of which went on to become popular among bad movie fans.  Films included Sally of the Subway (1932), The Devil Monster (1936) and Wages of Sin (1938).

Mehaffey left films in the late thirties and reportedly filed a lawsuit in 1948 to keep the new owners of her films from selling them to TV, but lost.

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Gabriel Dell holds an interesting distinction among the original Dead End Kids, he managed to achieve a succesfull solo  career after leaving the group.  Cast as the sickly TB in the original play, he, along with Billy Halop, Bobby Jordan, Leo Gorcey, Huntz Hall and Bernard Punsley, was brought to Hollywood to repeat his part in the film version of Dead End (1937).  It’s success lead to a short lived series of A pictures at Warner Brothers; Crime School (1938), Angels with Dirty Faces (1938), Hells’ Kitchen (1939), The Made Me a Criminal (1939) and Angel’s Wash Their Faces (1939).

After being dropped by Warners the group split up with Gorcey and Jordan going to Monogram and forming the East Side Kids, and the rest moving over to Universal where they made B pictures as The Dead End Kids and Little Tough Guys like You’re Not So Tough (1940), Mob Town (1941) and Tough as They Come (1942).  Ironically Dell would also appear in some of the East Side Kids films at Monogram, usually as a bad guy, like in Mr. Wise Guy (1942) and Let’s Get Tough (1942).

During this time Dell, as part of the Little Tough Guys appeared in three Universal serials.  Junior G-Men (1940) had the gang joining forces with the Junior G-Men to fight Fifth Columnists and search for Halop’s missing father.  Sea Raiders (1941) had the boys fighting a master spy targeting cargo ships headed for Allied countries.  Their final serial, Junior G-Men of the Air (1942) had the boys fighting a Japanese spy ring on the eve of the bombing of Pearl Harbor, who have kidnapped Halop’s inventor brother.

Dell went into the Merchant Marine during WWII and when he returned to acting was convinced by Gorcey to join his new group, The Bowery Boys.  Dell agreed but instead of being a current member of the gang he played a former member who returns from overseas with a French wife, in Spook Busters (1946) and in subsequent films would usually have a different job that played into the the gang’s current adventure, such as a gambler in Bowery Buckaroos (1947), a private detective in Smuggler’s Cove (1948), and a composer in Blues Buster’s (1950).

Tiring of playing an overaged teenager in farces, Dell finally left the group for good and taking acting and dancing lessons at the Actor’s Studio,reemerged in the late fifties as a dependable supporting player on TV and film.

His TV work included appearances on The Seve Allen Show, Ben Casey, The Fugitive, Mannix, McCloud, Barney Miller, Sandford and Son, and probably the strangest show ever made, Hanna Barbara’s live action superhero variety show, Legends of the Superheroes.  HIs film work included Earthquake (1974), The Manchu Eagle Murder Caper Mystery (1975), Framed (1975) and The Escape Artist (1982).

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Charlotte Henry seemed to be someone who as a child actor was going to be a big star.  A Broadway actress since she was thirteen in 1928, she had had supporting roles in Huckleberry Finn (1931) and Rebbecca of Sunnybrook Farm (1932) before being cast as the lead in Paramount’s big screen adaptation of Alice in Wonderland (1933), which unfortunately bombed at the box office despite the star power of W. C. Fields as Humpty Dumpty.  Things were looking up the following year when she played the female lead in the Laurel and Hardy version of Babes in Toyland (1934).

Despite the success of this film Henry dropped down to B productions for the rest of her career.  He work during this time included Charlie Chan at the Opera (1936) and Charlie Chan at the Olympics (1937), The Mandarin Mystery (1937) opposite a mis-cast Eddie Quillan as boyishly exuberant Ellery Queen (!?!?!), and The East Side Kids melodrama Bowery Bliztkrieg (1941).  Henry retired from acting after a small role in the Lucille Gleason (as in Mrs Jackie Gleason) vehicle She’s in the Army (1942).

Her one serial was Columbia’s debut effort in the genre, Jungle Menace (1937), which starred real life animal trapper Frank “Bring ‘em Back Alive” Buck as famous animal trapper Frank Hardy helping rubber plantation owners Henry and William Bakewell fight a gang of river pirates trying to take over their lucrative businesses in Southeast Asia.

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