As an FYI: Our regular programming will be delayed by a week so that the team here at Trivia Factorial can catch its breath and line up the September slate of games. Trivia Newsletter LXXXV will be released on Monday, September 5.
To tide you over, we’ll be releasing Trivia Newsletter Variety Pack 3 on Thursday, September 1. There will be no theme—instead, a Variety Pack contains trivia questions we’ve previously written. If you look at Trivia Newsletter Variety Pack 2, which we did back in March, you’ll get a good idea of what’s coming. (The answers to Trivia Newsletter Variety Pack 2 are here.)
To recap:
Monday, August 29: No e-mail distribution
Thursday, September 1: Trivia Newsletter Variety Pack 3
Monday, September 5: Trivia Newsletter LXXXV
Below are six trivia questions. If you’d like to participate, you can either reply to this e-mail or submit your answers via Google Forms: https://forms.gle/sMAuhR6c355otpq36. Like most trivia, the answers can be readily found via Google, so you’re on the honor system (i.e., do not use external resources to help you answer any of the questions). The SIXTH question of each set is designed to be a question that cannot be easily Googled; correct answers to those will be tracked and recognized in the next newsletter. The answers, and the next set of questions, will be published on Mondays and Thursdays.
1) WHAT was the name of NASA’s second human spaceflight program, which began in 1961 and concluded in 1966? NASA clarified in 1965 that the official pronunciation of the program rhymes with “knee.”
2) LINKS is a quarterly magazine published in Hilton Head Island, South Carolina that was launched in 1988 and centers its coverage around WHAT topic? Contributors to the magazine have included Tom Doak, Nick Faldo, Jim Nantz, John Updike, and Ernie Els.
3) “From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail” is the subtitle of WHAT memoir published in 2012 by Cheryl Strayed that was later adapted into a film starring Reese Witherspoon and Laura Dern?
4) Travis Fimmel, Katheryn Winnick and Gustaf Skarsgård starred in WHAT television show that aired from 2013 to 2020? The show’s second episode shows a raid on a monastery on the island of Lindisfarne, which helps us estimate that the events in the episode took place in the year 793.
5) The following is a list of the most-recent sets of WHAT, specifically? Timberwolf/Scorecard, Eagle/Sundance, Trailblazer/Angler, Renegade/Celtic, Mogul/Hoosier, Celtic/Pioneer.
6) WHAT specific distinction, also this newsletter’s theme, is shared by the following films? The Mighty Ducks (1992), Fargo (1996), Jingle All the Way (1996), A Prairie Home Companion (2006), Juno (2007), Leatherheads (2008), Jennifer’s Body (2009), Contagion (2011).
Here are the answers from last time:
1) You won’t believe what happens when you combine (i) the titular character of a live-action/animated series that aired from 1996 to 2006 (and was rebooted in 2019), and (ii) the title of a 2010 action-comedy film starring Bruce Willis, Morgan Freeman, and Helen Mirren! Specifically, you get the title of WHAT epistolary novel that won the 1983 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction?
When you combine Blue (from Blue’s Clues) and Red, you get The Color Purple, the novel by Alice Walker. If you’re feeling listless, these next three paragraphs are for you.
The film The Color Purple (1985), based upon the novel, comes up in trivia for propositions such as the following: (1) it marked a career breakthrough for Whoopi Goldberg, (2) it was Oprah Winfrey’s film debut, (3) it was the first feature film directed by Steven Spielberg for which John Williams did not compose the music (instead Quincy Jones did the score), (4) it received eleven Oscar nominations and won none of them, a record it still holds (together with the 1977 film The Turning Point), and (5) Danny Glover plays the lead male role in the film. Let’s talk about none of those and instead talk about Laurence Fishburne, who has a bit role in The Color Purple (credited as Larry Fishburne).
We’re not going to talk about Fishburne’s most famous bit role (Apocalypse Now, where a 14-year-old Fishburne lied about his age to get on screen), his highest-grossing role, whether domestic or worldwide (it’s gotta be a Matrix movie, right? No? Okay, a John Wick movie? Not that either? Wait, it’s Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice?), the fact that he once got nominated for a BET Award for Best Actor for three different films that came out in the same year (the second and third Matrix films, and Mystic River), his Tony Award (Best Featured Actor in a Play for Two Trains Running, the sixth play in August Wilson’s The Pittsburgh Cycle), or even the fact that Fishburne was the first African-American to play the character Othello on film. No, we’re going to talk a little about the 1992 film Deep Cover.
The three things you need to know about Deep Cover (well, besides that its theme song was Dr. Dre’s debut solo single and features Snoop Dogg in his studio debut) are the following: (1) it stars Fishburne and also Jeff Goldblum, back when Jeff Goldblum played characters in films instead of playing Jeff Goldblum in films, (2) it’s just a great movie that you should watch, preferably today, if you have not, and (3) you can rent it for $2.99 right now on Amazon Prime (or plenty of other outlets). It’s cynical, it’s paranoid, it’s funny, it’s got something to say—it’s just great.
By the way, going back to the film The Turning Point (remember, it was nominated for eleven Oscars and won none), WHAT ACTIVITY is The Turning Point about? As a hint, the title is a double entendre. The answer’s at the end of this newsletter.1
2) One weird trick to stop Professor Ratigan from usurping the Queen of the Mice and becoming the supreme ruler of all mousedom can be seen in WHAT 1986 film, based upon the children’s book series Basil of Baker Street?
This is THE GREAT MOUSE DETECTIVE—it’s a Disney movie that’s a riff on Sherlock Holmes (“Baker Street” in the question was supposed to help with this connection). The Great Mouse Detective, incidentally, is my favorite Disney film (#2 is The Lion King, and #3 is The Emperor’s New Groove).
Professor Ratigan, the villain of the film, is voiced by Vincent Price. Price is most famous for his work as a character actor, horror-movie actor, and eventually narrator. As an example, it’s Price who narrates the spoken-word outro of the Michael Jackson song “Thriller”—hey, Quincy Jones produced that too! I wondered whether The Great Mouse Detective was Price’s highest-grossing film (whether domestic or worldwide) ever, but it’s not. #2 on that list is Edward Scissorhands (1990), as Price plays the inventor character. #1, which I did not expect, is The Ten Commandments (1956). You can see Price’s character getting killed by Charlton Heston‘s Moses below (warning: not particularly graphic or violent, but more than 0% graphic and violent, I guess):
3) Wow! WHAT fictional character, owned by the real-life company Sanrio, is most commonly depicted as a young female gijinka of a certain domestic pet, almost always with a red bow? The same-name brand centered around this character has accounted for billions of dollars in merchandise sales, but comparatively nearly no revenue from video-game sales or the box office.
This is HELLO KITTY. Hello Kitty is not a cat.
Wait, what?
Yes. Hello Kitty is not a cat.
Are we thinking of the same Hello Kitty? This one?
Yup. That’s the one.
But it has whiskers. And cat ears. And looks like a cat. And also “Kitty” is in its name.
Not a cat. Also, Hello Kitty is a “she.”
Okay, she’s a cat.
Nope. Not a cat. I know this because Christine R. Yano, an anthropologist, was working on an exhibit on Hello Kitty to be displayed in the Japanese American National Museum in Los Angeles a few years ago. Yano asked Sanrio to review her notes and she was told by Sanrio in no uncertain terms that Hello Kitty is not a cat. Quoting her: “I was corrected — very firmly. That’s one correction Sanrio made for my script for the show. Hello Kitty is not a cat. She’s a cartoon character. She is a little girl. She is a friend. But she is not a cat. She’s never depicted on all fours. She walks and sits like a two-legged creature. She does have a pet cat of her own, however, and it’s called Charmmy Kitty.”
So if Hello Kitty is not a cat, but this other character Charmmy Kitty is a cat, then surely Charmmy Kitty looks very different than Hello Kitty?
Oh, absolutely. Completely different. This is self-evident because Charmmy Kitty is a cat while Hello Kitty, to be very clear, is not a cat. See, look at Charmmy Kitty, a cat:
What.
Not a cat. Well, Charmmy Kitty is. Not Hello Kitty.
But doesn’t Roland Barthes argue that the author doesn’t necessarily get to decide—
No! We’re not doing literary theory again! We already did that two weeks ago. Hello Kitty is not a cat.
4) Three structures near the Urubamba River that you need to visit today are the Intihuatana, the Temple of the Sun, and the Room of the Three Windows; those are all part of WHAT site, believed by many to have been constructed as an estate for the emperor Pachacuti?
This is MACHU PICCHU. As far as trivia fare goes, this was just my attempt to write a straightforward Machu Picchu question that didn’t give you the ordinary key connections of “Peru” and “Incas” but did give you enough to take a reasonable guess.
If I hadn’t already written a whole lot about movies in this recap, we’d talk about Secret of the Incas (hey, that’s another Charlton Heston movie), the 1954 film that was shot on location at Machu Picchu and that usually gets brought up for the proposition that it inspired Raiders of the Lost Ark. Instead, let’s briefly turn to the singer Yma Sumac, who appeared in Secret of the Incas.
Sumac, the person,2 has been the correct response in Jeopardy! exactly once, and that was 31 years ago: “This Peruvian known for her incredible range claims to be descended from Inca kings.” As I understand, a typical trained singer’s range is three octaves; Sumac’s was said to be five octaves. If you go over to Spotify or YouTube and look up a song called “Gopher” by her, you’ll get an idea of that range. She sold more than 40 million records, making her in this respect the most successful Peruvian singer of all time. She passed away in 2008; here is the first paragraph of her obituary in The Guardian:
More than half a century ago the Peruvian-born singer, Yma Sumac, who has died aged 86, became the voice and face of a musical style that freely mixed Broadway show tunes, Latin American folk-song and easy-listening arrangements. Initially untitled, the new musical genre came to be known as "exotica", and Sumac was crowned its "queen". Sumac rose from obscurity to fame, returned to obscurity then found herself again in the spotlight aged 70. While the material she sang was often kitsch, her multi-octave voice stood out among the bland pop singers of Eisenhower's America, as did her outlandish image: marketed as a mixture of Carmen Miranda and Rider Haggard's She, Sumac was the very incarnation of fiery, primal Latina beauty (at least as far as Hollywood saw it).
5) Copy editors hate these! Take the five letter worrd for certain things which are within this question no less then five times, now rearrange those leters and you have the name of WHAT subject of the 1903 film Electrocuting an Elephant, that was produced by Thomas Edison’s film company?
The question had a bunch of “typos” in it, so the name of the subject of Electrocuting an Elephant is the elephant TOPSY.
Thomas Edison is sometimes noted in pop culture for, among his other accomplishments, killing Topsy the elephant via electrocution at Luna Park on Coney Island in 1903. That’s almost certainly not true. We spotted you his name in the question because of those pop-culture connections, and because it was his film company, but he wasn’t involved in the company’s day-to-day operations. In fact, Edison wasn’t on the scene, none of the contemporaneous news accounts mentions Edison, and if you think that the electrocution had anything to do with the “Battle of the Currents” between Edison and Westinghouse/Tesla, it didn’t, according to the Thomas A. Edison Papers Project at Rutgers (which admittedly may have an interest in the matter).
6) WHAT character fills in the blank in the following ordered list? (As always, a [BLANK] may represent one word or more than one word unless specified otherwise.) Wade Wilson, Wade Wilson, Guy, [BLANK], Wade Wilson, Guy, Andrew Paxton, Turbo, Hal Jordan, Guy.
This is a list of the top-ten roles that Ryan Reynolds has played/voiced in film, sorted by international gross, omitting uncredited roles. First of all, before we go to the answer, isn’t it odd that Reynolds plays a character named “Guy” in Free Guy but also plays a completely different character named “Guy” in The Croods and The Croods: A New Age? Given how Reynolds is typecast, actually, maybe it isn’t so odd.
The missing character is DETECTIVE PIKACHU from the 2019 film Pokémon Detective Pikachu. What was supposed to get you there? This one may have been more natively gettable to those of you who have a good grasp of Reynolds’s film roles and know that Wade Wilson is the real name of Deadpool, the Marvel character. However, we made connections throughout as well:
Question #1: “Red” and “Blue” meant to reference the first two North American installments of the Pokémon games
Question #2: The Great Mouse Detective is another film about a mouse-like detective
Question #3: Hello Kitty is another wildly popular Japanese media franchise (the mention of the box office and video games were meant for you to compare those to other potential answers, like Pokémon)
Question #4: “Picchu” sounds like Pikachu (well, more like Pichu, the Pokémon that evolves into Pikachu)
Question #5: Meant to bring you closer to “electricity” and “animals”
Newsletter Title: We had fun with a “clickbait” theme in this one. You probably noticed that the title, instructions, and questions were all written in that urgent, breathless style that some internet outlets use to try to get you to click on something. You’ve seen it—the headline will be something such as “You Won’t Believe This Dental Mistake You’re Making” and the article will tell you “floss more” or something. (By the way, the best parody of a clickbait article is Clickhole’s “The Time I Spent On A Commercial Whaling Ship Totally Changed My Perspective On The World”.)
The newsletter title was “#6 Will Shock You!”, meant to confirm your guess of Pikachu (since it is an electric mouse that can shock you).
Finally, since the whole newsletter was clickbait, it was inviting you to “click” through to the actual newsletter post, and if you had done so, you may have noticed the URL of this edition of the newsletter, which was “https://www.hammersmif.substack.com/p/thethemeispikachu”, with the theme right there for you at the end of the URL.3
The current-ish* Question #6 leaderboard can be viewed at this link.
*typically updated 4-6 hours after each newsletter is released
The Turning Point is a film about BALLET—when you support all of your body weight on the tips of your feet, you are “on point” or en pointe. The film stars, in addition to big-deal actresses Shirley MacLaine and Anne Bancroft, real-life dancers such as Mikhail Baryshnikov and Leslie Browne. Baryshnikov was probably the preeminent male classical dancer of the time. Browne’s mother, Isabel Mirrow Brown, was a ballerina; in fact, Brown is actually the subject of The Turning Point and is played by MacLaine (though Brown’s name was changed).
Browne played MacLaine’s character’s daughter in the film, so all of that is a long way of saying that Browne’s character was a fictionalized version of Browne herself. Worded differently: Congratulations, Leslie Browne, you played yourself.
If you hear “sumac” on Jeopardy!, it’s more likely you’re being asked about the type of tree/shrub called a sumac. Jeopardy! likes you to know that they often have red fruit, that they include smooth and poison varieties, and that the sumac family is sometimes called the cashew family.