Trivia / Andy Hardy

• Billing Displacement: Despite playing the titular character for over half the films, Mickey Rooney didn't receive top-billing until the penultimate film Love Laughs at Andy Hardy. Prior to that, the actor playing his father Judge Hardy, initially Lionel Barrymore and then Lewis Stone after that, was top-billed.
• Breakaway Pop Hit: "Lazy Summer Night" from Andy Hardy Comes Home was a decent success for The Four Preps, who scored a #21 hit in 1958 with their recording of it which was released half a year before the movie itself.
• The Cast Showoff: Judy Garland gets three songs in Love Finds Andy Hardy.
• The Character Died with Him: Judge Hardy is absent from the final film, Andy Hardy Comes Home, because Lewis Stone had passed away several years earlier.
• Dawson Casting: A 15-year-old Judy Garland plays a 12-year-old character in Love Finds Andy Hardy.
• The Other Darrin: The first Hardy film, A Family Affair, features Lionel Barrymore as Judge Hardy, Spring Byington as Mrs. Hardy, and Margaret Marquis as Polly Benedict. Lewis Stone, Fay Holden, and Ann Rutherford took over the respective roles for the remainder of the series.
• Real-Life Relative: Mickey Rooney's son Teddy plays Andy Jr. in the final film.
• Star-Making Role: For Mickey Rooney.
• What Could Have Been: Before Andy Hardy Comes Home was released, its writers were working on a sequel featuring Andy Hardy as a judge called Andy Hardy Carries On. The disappointing box office take of the former evidently led to the mothballing of the latter. There was also a pilot filmed in the early 1960s for a prospective Andy Hardy TV series on NBC with an all-new cast and Judge Hardy returning from the dead, but it wasn't picked up.