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The Trivial Pursuit Trivia Edition · Stuff You Should Know

0:01
Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff you Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
0:11
Speaker 2: Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, and
0:13
Speaker 2: there's Charles w Chuck Bryant, and Jerry's here too. We're
0:18
Speaker 2: just rolling the dice and moving the pies. Yeah, because
0:24
Speaker 2: I mean it was like a pie piece. Yeah. I
0:27
Speaker 2: can't think of anything else you call them. I think
0:29
Speaker 2: some people call them wedges, but they're clearly sickos. Yeah.
0:32
Speaker 1: Oh, I think they're officially wedges.
0:35
Speaker 2: Well, I've seen the guys who invented the game.
0:37
Speaker 1: So did you watch that video?
0:40
Speaker 2: Yeah?
0:40
Speaker 1: Oh boy.
0:41
Speaker 2: We should probably tell everybody what we're talking about. First,
0:43
Speaker 2: this is Stuff you should Know. Second, we're talking about
0:46
Speaker 2: Trivial Pursuit. Arguably one of the greatest board games ever created.
0:50
Speaker 2: And we're not just saying that because Stuff you Should
0:52
Speaker 2: Know has its own Trivial Pursuit edition. It's because it
0:55
Speaker 2: legitimately is such a great game.
0:58
Speaker 1: Yeah. I played this game a lot when I was
1:01
Speaker 1: a kid. It was a family favorite. My mom really
1:05
Speaker 1: really loved it. We were often a team together, my
1:10
Speaker 1: mom and I, so it's kind of one of my
1:11
Speaker 1: good childhood memories with her.
1:13
Speaker 2: I'll bet Yeah, looking at the board and all like
1:17
Speaker 2: pictures of the board and some of the question cards
1:19
Speaker 2: and all that. Like, I was just overwhelmed with nostalgic
1:22
Speaker 2: because it was a huge thing in my family too,
1:24
Speaker 2: playing Trivial Pursuit.
1:25
Speaker 1: Boomer City, Baby.
1:27
Speaker 2: I love that game.
1:28
Speaker 1: Yeah, for sure, as it turns out, for sure.
1:30
Speaker 2: And what's funny is in doctrineeded us into everything that
1:33
Speaker 2: Boomer's like. Like it was a really like huge cultural
1:37
Speaker 2: transfer from one generation to the other in that way.
1:40
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean I was a twelve year old who
1:44
Speaker 1: learned about gun smoke and Richard Nixon through playing Trivial Pursuit.
1:48
Speaker 2: Yeah yeah, and Spiro Agnew from Mad Magazine. Oh yeah,
1:53
Speaker 2: So we should probably start at the start, and that
1:56
Speaker 2: actually goes long before Trivial Pursuit was created, but not
2:01
Speaker 2: as far back as you would think. Like in the
2:03
Speaker 2: United States, we did a live episode on game shows
2:06
Speaker 2: that was really cool, and we talked about this some
2:09
Speaker 2: but back as far back to the thirties on the
2:11
Speaker 2: radio and then later on TV, quiz shows were like
2:15
Speaker 2: all the rage and America's had like fascinations with trivia
2:20
Speaker 2: and then got bored with it and then came and
2:22
Speaker 2: found it again and then got bored with it. And
2:25
Speaker 2: back in the thirties that was one of the peaks
2:27
Speaker 2: where everybody was super into it.
2:29
Speaker 1: Yeah, quiz shows were for sure big. I think you know,
2:33
Speaker 1: Lvia helped us with this. And I always kind of
2:36
Speaker 1: wondered about the word trivial because I thought that was
2:39
Speaker 1: a pretty genius And we'll get to the name change,
2:41
Speaker 1: because initially this was called trivia pursuit, and a lot
2:44
Speaker 1: of people called it trivia pursuit. But the change to trivial,
2:49
Speaker 1: I don't know, that was just something that made it
2:51
Speaker 1: a little cheeky.
2:53
Speaker 2: Maybe yeah, because you're not just talking about trivia, you're
2:56
Speaker 2: also poking fun at your own game, Like you're putting
3:00
Speaker 2: all this effort into something that doesn't really matter in
3:02
Speaker 2: the end.
3:03
Speaker 1: Yeah, I guess so. But I thought it mattered when
3:06
Speaker 1: I was a kid. I was Now that i'm adult,
3:08
Speaker 1: I'm like, trivia Pursuit's kind of a fun name. When
3:09
Speaker 1: I was a kid, I was like, this is not trivia.
3:11
Speaker 1: These are facts and figures, right, it's weird.
3:14
Speaker 2: Oh I took it seriously too. Yeah, for sure, I
3:17
Speaker 2: love trivial pursuit too, but it was definitely in the
3:19
Speaker 2: vein of the people who invented this thing to kind
3:22
Speaker 2: of poke fun at themselves and even at you, the
3:24
Speaker 2: player for playing it.
3:25
Speaker 1: Yeah, for sure. So pub quizzes were big in England
3:30
Speaker 1: before they were a big deal in the United States,
3:32
Speaker 1: where we call it just par trivia, I guess, but
3:35
Speaker 1: they kind of hit it big earlier on. So the
3:38
Speaker 1: world of trivia was gaining steam through the nineteen sixties.
3:43
Speaker 1: I think there was a Columbia student named Edwin Goodgold
3:48
Speaker 1: who I think he wrote a book, right, He and another.
3:53
Speaker 2: Guy named Dan Karlinski wrote a book simply called Trivia. Yeah,
3:56
Speaker 2: but he's credited as one of like the early people
4:00
Speaker 2: to spread the whole concept of being quizzed about inconsequential
4:05
Speaker 2: usually pop culture questions to just show like how much
4:09
Speaker 2: you knew about your childhood and that Edwin Goodgold thing.
4:13
Speaker 2: Two things about him. He went on to become the
4:15
Speaker 2: manager of Shanna Nah really yeah, oh wow, And he
4:21
Speaker 2: wrote in Columbia University's I guess their newspaper, he was
4:25
Speaker 2: one of their writers. He wrote that this is that
4:28
Speaker 2: these trivia games that are like the hot new thing
4:30
Speaker 2: on campus are played by young adults who, on the
4:33
Speaker 2: one hand, realize they have misspent their youth, yet on
4:36
Speaker 2: the other hand, do not want to let go of it.
4:38
Speaker 2: And that was the whole idea. It was about all
4:40
Speaker 2: the stuff that you learned in your childhood from reading
4:43
Speaker 2: Superman comic books and listening to like gangster or seen
4:47
Speaker 2: like gangster TV shows, just from being a kid. That's
4:51
Speaker 2: what the whole thing was based on. And that kind
4:54
Speaker 2: of became a tradition too that it was largely stuff
4:57
Speaker 2: in the past. A lot of it was pop culture.
5:00
Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly, and that was the mid sixties. The mid
5:03
Speaker 1: seventies is when the pub quizzes really took off in England.
5:06
Speaker 1: That didn't start in the US untill really after Trivial Pursuit.
5:10
Speaker 1: There was a time even where the TV show Jeopardy
5:13
Speaker 1: was not on the air because like you said, there
5:15
Speaker 1: was just a waxing and waning on interest in trivia.
5:18
Speaker 1: But Jeopardy came back in eighty four and all of
5:22
Speaker 1: a sudden, you know, trivia started to be important in
5:25
Speaker 1: the United States again.
5:27
Speaker 2: Yeah, and I didn't see it anywhere, but I would
5:29
Speaker 2: put some serious money on the idea that Trivial Pursuits
5:32
Speaker 2: success revived Jeopardy.
5:35
Speaker 1: Yeah, I bet it did, because it was.
5:37
Speaker 2: A huge, huge deal as we'll see, yeah, for sure,
5:40
Speaker 2: But the whole thing starts all the way back in
5:42
Speaker 2: nineteen seventy nine, in December of nineteen seventy nine, appropriately
5:46
Speaker 2: because Trivial Pursuit and Christmas for its first few years
5:50
Speaker 2: of being out, were synonymous with one another. Essentially, maybe
5:54
Speaker 2: synonymous isn't the right word, but they were. It was
5:57
Speaker 2: a big deal around Christmas time when it first came out.
5:59
Speaker 1: About that, Yeah, and this is our pick. We kind
6:02
Speaker 1: of had a hard time deciding this year, but actually
6:04
Speaker 1: not really. It was a toss up, but we always
6:07
Speaker 1: do like a Christmas you know, legendary Christmas gifts in
6:11
Speaker 1: pop culture history kind of episode, And this year we
6:13
Speaker 1: went with Trivial Pursuit because it was a big you know,
6:16
Speaker 1: they as you'll see that. You know, rolling out a
6:18
Speaker 1: board game in October and November is a pretty smart
6:22
Speaker 1: move for sure.
6:24
Speaker 2: And these two guys, there are two Canadians. I read
6:27
Speaker 2: an article about them that was contemporary to them in
6:31
Speaker 2: the Toronto Star. It said that they come off like
6:34
Speaker 2: the two original Hosers. Yeah, even bigger Hosers than Bob
6:38
Speaker 2: and Doug Mackenzie is what they were saying.
6:39
Speaker 1: Yeah, there were a couple of hockey dudes, just hockey
6:42
Speaker 1: beer drinking, Canadian, good old fashioned Canadian hockey playing. They're
6:47
Speaker 1: at least hockey watching. I bet they played too. They
6:48
Speaker 1: all played.
6:49
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think they definitely did. They certainly covered it.
6:52
Speaker 2: One of them, Scott Abbott, was a sports reporter for
6:54
Speaker 2: the Canadian Press who I think his focus was on hockey.
6:58
Speaker 2: The other guy was Chris Haney. He was a photo
7:00
Speaker 2: editor at the Montreal Gazette. So these are a couple
7:02
Speaker 2: of late seventies early eighties journalist dudes who wear mustaches
7:10
Speaker 2: and drink beer during their interviews on the news and
7:14
Speaker 2: smoke like yeah, and smoke during them too, like this
7:17
Speaker 2: would These were the guys who invented trivial pursuit.
7:20
Speaker 1: Yeah. Hani was a high school dropout. Abbott did have
7:23
Speaker 1: a master's degree in journalism from the University of Tennessee,
7:28
Speaker 1: and he was living with Haney and his wife Sarah
7:31
Speaker 1: in their apartment in Montreal at the time. And as
7:33
Speaker 1: the legend goes, they're hanging out one day it was
7:36
Speaker 1: kind of rainy, they were like, hey, let's play some scrabble.
7:40
Speaker 1: They realized they didn't have some scrabble, and then I
7:43
Speaker 1: saw a couple of different versions. It kind of inconsequential,
7:46
Speaker 1: like whether or not he just dropped everything and went
7:48
Speaker 1: out and bought a scrabble or whether just on his
7:50
Speaker 1: next shopping trip he did. But Hani would buy a
7:53
Speaker 1: scrabble game, bring it back to play and was like,
7:56
Speaker 1: you know what, I bought like six of these things
7:57
Speaker 1: over the years because I just keep losing number leaving
8:00
Speaker 1: behind or learning them out or something, and like what
8:03
Speaker 1: a racket, Like we should get into the gaming business.
8:06
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's how I was born. They just realized how
8:09
Speaker 2: how many times he bought a scrabble game, and they
8:12
Speaker 2: were like, we should we could do that.
8:14
Speaker 1: We should say.
8:15
Speaker 2: Yeah, these guys, that was the kind of thing that
8:17
Speaker 2: they would talk about doing, is making a game because
8:20
Speaker 2: they realized that you could that other people have made
8:23
Speaker 2: money off of it.
8:23
Speaker 1: Yeah.
8:24
Speaker 2: Up to this point, their big claim to fame in
8:28
Speaker 2: their circle was having carried out a pyramid scheme with
8:32
Speaker 2: a chain letter that was actually successful in that they
8:35
Speaker 2: made money off of it and they never got caught
8:38
Speaker 2: for it either. So up to this point, so these
8:41
Speaker 2: were that was these this kind of these kind of
8:43
Speaker 2: guys right, And this particular idea though, kind of started
8:48
Speaker 2: to take shape really really quickly. I think it was
8:52
Speaker 2: Chris Abber Scott Abbott who was like, well, how about
8:56
Speaker 2: something with trivia. And remember, at the time, like trivia
8:59
Speaker 2: was not hot item, and also, as we'll see, board
9:02
Speaker 2: games were not a high item. So these were like
9:04
Speaker 2: two bad ideas that these guys decided to put together
9:07
Speaker 2: and accidentally became a success, or not accidentally it ended
9:11
Speaker 2: up becoming a success. But it was like they figured
9:13
Speaker 2: it out really quickly, didn't they.
9:15
Speaker 1: Some might say suspiciously quickly. We'll get to that later.
9:18
Speaker 1: But as their story goes at about forty five minutes time,
9:24
Speaker 1: and they're really specific about that. I'd never saw anywhere
9:26
Speaker 1: an hour. They always said forty five minutes. They got,
9:30
Speaker 1: you know, the game together, They got some construction paper,
9:32
Speaker 1: they started sketching things out. They based the design of
9:37
Speaker 1: the circular board on a ship's wheel with six spokes
9:41
Speaker 1: that corresponded to categories of geography, entertainment, sports and leisure,
9:45
Speaker 1: science and nature, arts and literature, and history. And you
9:49
Speaker 1: would roll the die. You would move in any direction
9:53
Speaker 1: you wanted, as long as it's only one direction. You
9:56
Speaker 1: get this little circular pie crust with six available pie slots,
10:02
Speaker 1: right wedges not wedges. And the idea is you go
10:06
Speaker 1: around and you answer questions in the corresponding categories, and
10:09
Speaker 1: when you answer them on the center of each spoke
10:13
Speaker 1: or I guess the landing point of each spoke, you
10:16
Speaker 1: would get to put in a pie piece. Once you
10:18
Speaker 1: have all those pie pieces in, you roll your way
10:21
Speaker 1: to the center. Must have an exact role, and then
10:23
Speaker 1: the other teams decide which category of question they want
10:27
Speaker 1: to randomly ask you and if you miss you if
10:30
Speaker 1: you make it, you win the game. If you miss it,
10:32
Speaker 1: you got to roll back out and then answer questions
10:35
Speaker 1: eventually roll back in.
10:36
Speaker 2: Yes, well put. I am not one for boasting typically,
10:42
Speaker 2: but I will say that I once confirmed one a
10:46
Speaker 2: game doing all the things you just said in twenty minutes.
10:50
Speaker 1: The wow by yourself?
10:53
Speaker 2: No no, no, not by myself. It's playing a dude
10:55
Speaker 2: at work at the liquor store.
10:57
Speaker 1: No no, no, I mean, were you on a team by yourself?
10:59
Speaker 2: No? Oh no, just me, Okay, that's what.
11:02
Speaker 1: I was asking, not literally playing boy, Josh. I'll never mind.
11:08
Speaker 2: I mean, I guess if you were really honest you
11:10
Speaker 2: could play by yourself.
11:11
Speaker 1: You know, he gets it around recards. I did that
11:14
Speaker 1: for a little while.
11:15
Speaker 2: That's not honest. I'm saying you could roll, you could move,
11:18
Speaker 2: you could ask yourself questions, answer them and yeah, got
11:21
Speaker 2: it wrong.
11:21
Speaker 1: Yeah, just you could talk in different voices. No, good,
11:24
Speaker 1: try chuck right, great.
11:26
Speaker 2: You kind of ruined my twenty minute anecdote.
11:28
Speaker 1: Frankly, no, I want to dwell back on that, because
11:32
Speaker 1: twenty minutes. I mean, I played a lot of trivial pursuit,
11:35
Speaker 1: and I don't feel like we ever got through a
11:37
Speaker 1: game in less than that standard forty five minutes. It
11:40
Speaker 1: took to an a minute.
11:41
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, it took It took a It could take
11:44
Speaker 2: a while, especially if like they were just had a
11:46
Speaker 2: lot of people who yeah, didn't didn't know trivia. But yeah,
11:50
Speaker 2: it would usually take yeah, forty five minutes an hour,
11:54
Speaker 2: depending on how fast everybody was moving. Usually it took
11:57
Speaker 2: longer because the whole point was almost every question and
12:01
Speaker 2: answer would like generate a quick conversation or usually a
12:06
Speaker 2: short conversation, sometimes longer, yeah, exactly, And.
12:09
Speaker 1: Most of the times it was boomer parents like waxing
12:12
Speaker 1: philosophic about how great their.
12:13
Speaker 2: Stuff was right exactly to that too. But that was
12:17
Speaker 2: the point, and that's one of the reasons it became
12:19
Speaker 2: so popular, is like it was really easy to have
12:21
Speaker 2: a party centered on trivial pursuit.
12:24
Speaker 1: Yeah, so I don't think we mentioned you could you
12:26
Speaker 1: could have teams. I did sort of allude to that,
12:28
Speaker 1: but you could have I mean, you could probably have
12:30
Speaker 1: as many people as you want on a team, but
12:32
Speaker 1: I think they suggested max of four, meaning a max
12:35
Speaker 1: of twenty four players, and anything more than that would
12:37
Speaker 1: get at unwieldy. But I feel like we were and
12:40
Speaker 1: my family wasn't big. It was usually we were in pairs.
12:44
Speaker 2: Yeah, that was typically how it was done, so you
12:46
Speaker 2: could argue and be mad at one another one the
12:49
Speaker 2: other one insisted on the wrong answer.
12:52
Speaker 1: Yeah, And as a kid, I do also remember all
12:56
Speaker 1: of my family trying to nab me because I was
12:58
Speaker 1: the only one who really knew much about sport.
13:01
Speaker 2: Yeah. That was always my weak one too, and that
13:03
Speaker 2: was always the one that would get picked for me
13:05
Speaker 2: if I ever made it to the middle.
13:06
Speaker 1: What was your category? Like, if you could pick your
13:08
Speaker 1: own final category, what would it be?
13:11
Speaker 2: It was usually history or entertainment.
13:13
Speaker 1: Yeah, I would say, I would say sports and leisure
13:16
Speaker 1: or entertainment for me, Yeah, definitely not geography.
13:19
Speaker 2: Still, yeah, my worst was definitely sports and leisure, and
13:23
Speaker 2: I would yeah, geography was probably second.
13:26
Speaker 1: That's because they didn't have masths.
13:29
Speaker 2: Right, only in the British version.
13:32
Speaker 1: So I mentioned the name change. That was Sarah, who
13:36
Speaker 1: was Hani's wife, Chris Haney's wife. Sarah is the one
13:40
Speaker 1: that said now change it to trivial instead of trivia.
13:43
Speaker 1: I think it was a pretty great switch. And I
13:46
Speaker 1: think that's a pretty good intro.
13:49
Speaker 2: Oh okay, well if that's the end of the intro,
13:52
Speaker 2: then Chuck, I think we have to put an ad
13:53
Speaker 2: break in here.
13:54
Speaker 1: Yeah, let's move along to Act two.
13:56
Speaker 2: Right after this, so Hani and Abbott like they were like,
14:27
Speaker 2: we're gonna do this, and they came upon a great
14:30
Speaker 2: idea that they would visit a toy industry convention, like
14:36
Speaker 2: the big one in Canada. I think it was the
14:39
Speaker 2: Canadian Toy Manufacturer's Trade Show. I can't remember what's called.
14:42
Speaker 2: I looked it up and couldn't find anything on it.
14:44
Speaker 2: But they went. Remember they were journalists, so they went
14:48
Speaker 2: as reporters as if they were on an assignment to
14:51
Speaker 2: do a story on the toy industry, specifically the board
14:54
Speaker 2: game industry. So they used that cover to pick the
14:58
Speaker 2: brains of a bunch of people who we're in the
15:01
Speaker 2: board game industry and one of the well, they found
15:03
Speaker 2: out a couple of things very quickly. They found out
15:06
Speaker 2: that the board game industry was in a slump. They
15:08
Speaker 2: also found out that is a very very closed industry
15:13
Speaker 2: where if you're a newcomer with an idea, just hit
15:16
Speaker 2: the bricks like they're not going to listen to you.
15:18
Speaker 2: That's not how the board game industry works. And they
15:20
Speaker 2: figured this out. So they decided that from going to
15:23
Speaker 2: this conference they were going to have to do this themself.
15:25
Speaker 2: If they wanted to get this game out there, they
15:28
Speaker 2: were going to have to They couldn't just sell the idea.
15:30
Speaker 2: They had to make the game first. And that's what
15:32
Speaker 2: they said about doing.
15:34
Speaker 1: Yeah, they were like, we did a pyramid scheme. We're
15:36
Speaker 1: good at selling things that don't exist. So they enlisted
15:39
Speaker 1: a little bit of help. They got Chris's brother, John
15:41
Speaker 1: Haney on the team, and then a guy named Ed
15:43
Speaker 1: Werner who was a friend who's a corporate attorney, and
15:47
Speaker 1: they formed the horn Abbot Company. Hani's sickname was the Horn,
15:51
Speaker 1: and Abbot in this case with one tee was just
15:54
Speaker 1: a variation on Abbot's two teed name. And they started
15:57
Speaker 1: selling equity to raise a little money through friends and family.
16:01
Speaker 1: So they sold forty shares at one thousand dollars each
16:05
Speaker 1: to thirty two friends and family members. And boy, you
16:09
Speaker 1: want to talk about an investment that paid off for sure? Wow?
16:13
Speaker 1: Can you imagine it'd be like one of the early
16:16
Speaker 1: Apple stock or Google stock, right, you know.
16:20
Speaker 2: Very similar to that, not quite as lucrative, but still
16:23
Speaker 2: pretty well. The people who bought several shares each were
16:27
Speaker 2: set for life basically after the game hit. Oh yeah,
16:30
Speaker 2: but at the time Chris Haney told his mom she
16:34
Speaker 2: shouldn't invest. Yeah, and this is his idea, his business venture.
16:38
Speaker 2: That's how much he paged in it, I guess. But
16:42
Speaker 2: there's a guy named Michael Worstlin, and so this iconic,
16:46
Speaker 2: really elegant design for the package, the board itself, cards,
16:52
Speaker 2: all that stuff. It was Michael Worstlin's work. He was
16:55
Speaker 2: eighteen at the time.
16:57
Speaker 1: That's just amazing.
16:58
Speaker 2: And he didn't get a dime front for it. He
17:01
Speaker 2: did this work for five shares of stock in the company.
17:05
Speaker 2: Of equity and yeah, it was very smart, as we'll see.
17:08
Speaker 1: Yeah, so they managed to raise forty grand. They got
17:12
Speaker 1: a seventy five thousand dollars line of credit from a bank,
17:16
Speaker 1: and that was enough dough to start getting this game
17:19
Speaker 1: together in earnest. The one thing they didn't have they
17:22
Speaker 1: had design, They had it kind of all ready to go.
17:24
Speaker 1: They needed six thousand questions and so I assume with
17:29
Speaker 1: some of that, what is that like close to one
17:32
Speaker 1: hundred and twenty grand. They went to Spain in nineteen
17:36
Speaker 1: eighty one and they said, we're going to go drink
17:39
Speaker 1: beer on the beach and write questions. We're going to
17:41
Speaker 1: pack a bunch of you know, dictionaries and encyclopedias and
17:47
Speaker 1: reference books and newspapers, and we're going to go out there.
17:51
Speaker 1: We're going to write it for the American audience. Some
17:54
Speaker 1: of this stuff's going to be pretty obscure stuff. Some
17:57
Speaker 1: is going to be you know, some are going to
17:59
Speaker 1: be a little easier. They wanted to kind of give
18:00
Speaker 1: it a little bit of variety, and finally, in November
18:04
Speaker 1: eighty one, registered Trivial Pursuit as a trademark and then
18:09
Speaker 1: launched the Genus not Genius edition that same month is
18:14
Speaker 1: when that came out.
18:16
Speaker 2: Yeah, we should explain, because I've never understood it until
18:19
Speaker 2: I started researching this. It's called genus because genus, you know,
18:23
Speaker 2: like in taxonomy, genus is above species. So yeah, there's
18:27
Speaker 2: a bunch of different variations of this thing. Another way
18:32
Speaker 2: to interpret another definition of it. It's general, it's not specific,
18:36
Speaker 2: and so the questions in here were not They were
18:39
Speaker 2: very general. You didn't have to be like a specialist
18:42
Speaker 2: in anything to play trivial pursuit, and if you were,
18:45
Speaker 2: you're kind of handicapped because there was a bunch of
18:48
Speaker 2: other questions that had nothing to do with your specialist
18:51
Speaker 2: or special Yes, specialist, specialism, what's the word I'm looking for? Specialty?
18:58
Speaker 1: You go, I think or something behind you with the
19:01
Speaker 1: giant y like dancing up and down.
19:03
Speaker 2: I think there's somebody behind me with a hammer.
19:06
Speaker 1: Oh no, no, no, no. So toy Fair people were
19:11
Speaker 1: not too interested at first, at least they got passed
19:14
Speaker 1: on from the bigs Parker Brothers and Milton Bradley at
19:18
Speaker 1: the time, saying this is a really expensive game to produce,
19:21
Speaker 1: and I mean that's something we learned a lot about
19:24
Speaker 1: and doing this stuff you should know version is like,
19:26
Speaker 1: cost of production is obviously a big deal. I just
19:29
Speaker 1: never we were like, you know what if those pieces
19:31
Speaker 1: were like copper or something, and they're like, uh no,
19:34
Speaker 1: they're gonna be punch out cardboard. But you got you
19:37
Speaker 1: guys are sweet.
19:38
Speaker 2: Yeah. We were like, well what about plastic. They're like
19:40
Speaker 2: we keep guessing.
19:41
Speaker 1: Yeah, you know Monopoly has all those solid lead figurines,
19:45
Speaker 1: and they're like no, no, no, no, no no no.
19:47
Speaker 2: That's brain damage if you play too much.
19:49
Speaker 1: Not to knock the team we worked with, because they
19:52
Speaker 1: werenating the game turned out great. It's just it's just
19:55
Speaker 1: how you make a game to make money.
19:57
Speaker 2: Yeah, we said it before and we'll say it again.
19:59
Speaker 2: Like they were the greatest bunch of people that I've
20:02
Speaker 2: ever worked with as a group. Like, as a group,
20:05
Speaker 2: they were as good as it comes. It was amazing.
20:07
Speaker 1: Yeah, it was pro top to bottom enthusiasm, just a
20:10
Speaker 1: sheer pleasure. Yeah all right, so enough of that kissing up.
20:16
Speaker 1: They got about eleven hundred games made, sold them to
20:21
Speaker 1: local retailers, regional Canadian retailers, basically right before Christmas, and
20:27
Speaker 1: then this distributor of games Cheaptain products very smartly were like, hey,
20:33
Speaker 1: we'll put this thing together. My daughter, supposedly the vice
20:37
Speaker 1: president's daughter, really really loved the game when she went
20:40
Speaker 1: away for a weekend and played it a lot, and
20:41
Speaker 1: he's it ended up being a great decision for them
20:44
Speaker 1: as well.
20:44
Speaker 2: So yeah, a hugely consequential And this was Christmas nineteen
20:48
Speaker 2: eighty one, So this is the first Christmas that Trivial
20:51
Speaker 2: Pursuit comes out and makes a big splash because they
20:55
Speaker 2: sold out of those eleven hundred games so quickly that
20:58
Speaker 2: by the time that end of the by the time
21:01
Speaker 2: the next Christmas rolled around, they'd already sold one hundred
21:05
Speaker 2: thousand copies in Canada. And that's a lot. And it
21:09
Speaker 2: turns out it's even more than you think it is,
21:11
Speaker 2: because at the time a board game to be a
21:14
Speaker 2: best seller sold about ten thousand copies. So this little
21:19
Speaker 2: independent yeah, a very independent game created by a couple
21:24
Speaker 2: of outsiders, sold ten times more than you would expect
21:28
Speaker 2: it to sell as a best seller in this first year.
21:32
Speaker 1: Yeah, it was incredible. They were making everything in Canada
21:35
Speaker 1: Canada at the time except for the Dice, thirty five
21:38
Speaker 1: hundred games a day, but they still couldn't keep up
21:42
Speaker 1: with the pace in nineteen eighty three. Finally, a US
21:46
Speaker 1: company called Celcho and Richter I guess or writer, writer, yeah, writer,
21:52
Speaker 1: they licensed that game. They had real marketing money. Finally,
21:57
Speaker 1: they sold one point three million games nineteen eighty three
22:01
Speaker 1: with that company. And one thing we haven't mentioned is
22:05
Speaker 1: this game was about double the cost of what a
22:07
Speaker 1: board game was at the time, twenty five to forty
22:11
Speaker 1: bucks depending on where you went. That's up to ninety
22:13
Speaker 1: dollars today.
22:14
Speaker 2: And so I saw one hundred and twenty five today.
22:17
Speaker 1: Oh really?
22:18
Speaker 2: Yeah? I put forty dollars in for nineteen eighty three
22:21
Speaker 2: in west Egg and it said one hundred and twenty five.
22:23
Speaker 1: It told me ninety.
22:25
Speaker 2: Oh god, oh no, inflation calculations are no in question.
22:30
Speaker 1: Oh god, it must be having the worst thing that's
22:32
Speaker 1: ever happened our beloved West Egg. Well, either way, let's
22:37
Speaker 1: settle at one ten. Okay, great, But either way, that
22:40
Speaker 1: was about double the cost of a board game. So
22:43
Speaker 1: it was no small thing to plunk down that kind
22:46
Speaker 1: of money on this big, heavy, voluminous, voluminous game.
22:51
Speaker 2: Voluptuous too, So you said heavy. Each game package weighs
22:55
Speaker 2: six pounds, because they they really pulled out the stops
22:59
Speaker 2: in their materials and like, yeah it was cardboard, and
23:02
Speaker 2: yeah it was plastic, but it was really really well made,
23:05
Speaker 2: well manufactured, well designed cardboard and plastic put together. And
23:10
Speaker 2: again that just the look of it had such an
23:13
Speaker 2: elegant look. It just didn't. It did not look like
23:16
Speaker 2: other board games at the time. It's like Sorry or
23:19
Speaker 2: Trouble or something like that, you know, whereas like wacky.
23:22
Speaker 2: And there was like a cartoon explosion or something like that,
23:25
Speaker 2: a bunch of kids rolling dice on there, and that
23:27
Speaker 2: was a big deal too. There was no kid, no
23:31
Speaker 2: person anywhere on the box. The only person who showed
23:35
Speaker 2: up was the poet, the English poet Alexander Pope, who
23:39
Speaker 2: who's quote what mighty contests derived from trivial things was
23:43
Speaker 2: on the box. So this whole thing is so highbrow
23:46
Speaker 2: that it just doesn't even make sense. And yet that
23:50
Speaker 2: made people want it all the more. It was a
23:52
Speaker 2: brand new thing. It was a revival of board games,
23:56
Speaker 2: is what trivial Pursuit was when it came out.
23:58
Speaker 1: Yeah, and it was, I mean it said for adults
24:01
Speaker 1: on the box, which turned out to be a stroke
24:04
Speaker 1: of genius because I even remember I read an article
24:07
Speaker 1: in Slate that kind of drove this home. But I
24:10
Speaker 1: even remember kind of agreeing with what Slate was saying,
24:14
Speaker 1: which was like as a kid in the eighties, especially
24:18
Speaker 1: for kids in the eighties who had like narcissistic parents
24:23
Speaker 1: who didn't show them much attention, it was if you
24:25
Speaker 1: could play trivial pursuit and hang, it was a chance
24:28
Speaker 1: to sit at the adult table for a minute. Yeah,
24:30
Speaker 1: and to like interact with your parents for an hour
24:33
Speaker 1: a day.
24:34
Speaker 2: Yeah, and maybe make some extra allowance in the bargain. Yeah, hey,
24:38
Speaker 2: you throw a little money on it. You never know exactly.
24:42
Speaker 2: So this was Christmas nineteen eighty three that it blew
24:46
Speaker 2: up in the United States, and like when it blew
24:50
Speaker 2: up in the US, it like it really just changed everything.
24:53
Speaker 2: Like you said, that first year they sold one point
24:56
Speaker 2: three million games, they sold twenty million the next year
24:59
Speaker 2: in nineteen eighty f and by January of nineteen eighty four,
25:02
Speaker 2: right after it started to come out in the United States,
25:05
Speaker 2: the New York Times reported that people in New York
25:09
Speaker 2: were trading cocktail parties for trivial Pursuit parties. And I
25:13
Speaker 2: was thinking about it, yeah, right, yeah, I don't think
25:16
Speaker 2: there's anything more insufferable than the New York Times reporting
25:19
Speaker 2: on what cool New Yorkers are doing right now right.
25:22
Speaker 2: This was a great example of that eighties version two.
25:26
Speaker 1: Yeah, for sure, they had a great marketing early on
25:30
Speaker 1: with this new company that was a marketing consultant they
25:32
Speaker 1: hire named Linda Pizzano, who would send these games out
25:36
Speaker 1: to celebrities who were featured in questions in the game,
25:40
Speaker 1: and she got letters back from some of them and
25:42
Speaker 1: she would publish those. She got letters from Pat Boone,
25:46
Speaker 1: Gregory Peck, and James Mason.
25:49
Speaker 2: So the trio.
25:50
Speaker 1: Yeah, the boomers are just going nuts. And then to
25:54
Speaker 1: really drive it home, there was a Time magazine report
25:58
Speaker 1: that the cast of The Big Chill, the most boomer
26:01
Speaker 1: movie of all boomers movies of all time, were unwinding
26:05
Speaker 1: between scenes, enjoying trivial pursuit and looking back at the
26:09
Speaker 1: nostalgia of their younger days. And that's it was. That
26:12
Speaker 1: was peak boomer nostalgia, trivial pursuit reporting.
26:16
Speaker 2: Yeah, I've never seen that movie, but I do know
26:19
Speaker 2: it's good that one of the characters lets her husband,
26:24
Speaker 2: I guess, impregnate serve as like a surrogate sperm donor.
26:28
Speaker 2: To her friend.
26:29
Speaker 1: Yeah.
26:30
Speaker 2: The only reason I know that is because there was
26:32
Speaker 2: a great Saturday Night Lives get about it really Yeah,
26:39
Speaker 2: and I guess did they show the wife who was
26:42
Speaker 2: like hanging out downstairs in the movie while they went
26:45
Speaker 2: upstairs or something like that. Yeah, So in the Satura
26:49
Speaker 2: Night Live one, like she's just sitting there like reflecting,
26:51
Speaker 2: like drinking tea and like thinking about how great and
26:53
Speaker 2: just beautiful. This is the sound coming from upstairs. They're
26:59
Speaker 2: like really getting into it, and she's getting more and
27:01
Speaker 2: more concerned than more.
27:04
Speaker 1: I remember that.
27:05
Speaker 2: Yeah, it was I think it was Jan Hooks who
27:07
Speaker 2: was like the yeah coming downstairs. That was a great sketch.
27:10
Speaker 1: Oh that's funny. Well, that movie was very big in
27:13
Speaker 1: my house. In that soundtrack, I mean, I joke about
27:16
Speaker 1: it now, but that's literally the thing that introduced me
27:18
Speaker 1: to Motown. Oh yeah as a kid, Yeah, listening to
27:21
Speaker 1: I was twelve years old or whatever. It was listening
27:23
Speaker 1: to Aretha Franklin and the Four Tops and you know
27:28
Speaker 1: everyone else. Jeremiah was a Bullfrog, which wasn't Motown. But
27:32
Speaker 1: if you want to hear a more in depth conversation
27:34
Speaker 1: about that, you can listen to the movie Crush episode
27:37
Speaker 1: featuring the wonderful and charming Janey had d Tompkins.
27:41
Speaker 2: Oh nice, that was her pick, Hunt, that was her pick. Nice.
27:44
Speaker 1: Good movie though, but now it suffers from anti boomeritis.
27:49
Speaker 2: Oh okay, so I should wait ten years to see it.
27:53
Speaker 1: How do you feel about boomers right now?
27:55
Speaker 2: I'll wait ten years to say.
27:56
Speaker 1: Okay, all right, So nineteen eighty four, well, I guess
28:02
Speaker 1: we should mention that book. In nineteen eighty three, a
28:04
Speaker 1: guy named Robert J. Heller wrote a book called How
28:06
Speaker 1: to Win at Trivial Pursuit. Like that's how big it got.
28:09
Speaker 1: I think, like ninety six trivia games trying to cash
28:13
Speaker 1: in on trivial pursuits success, and people writing books like
28:18
Speaker 1: how to Win at Trivial Pursuit, in which Robert J.
28:21
Speaker 1: Heller said, why don't you just memorize all six thousand cards?
28:24
Speaker 2: That became kind of an urban legend, like your cousin's
28:28
Speaker 2: friend memorized. Also really thousand questions?
28:31
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's funny.
28:32
Speaker 2: Yeah. And there were some other cute or interesting anecdotes
28:37
Speaker 2: I guess that kind of came out around the time.
28:40
Speaker 2: One was Ronald Reagan was reported on having played the
28:44
Speaker 2: game while he was waiting for the election results in
28:47
Speaker 2: nineteen eighty four, and during the game he got two
28:50
Speaker 2: questions about himself, and you can relax, he got them correct,
28:55
Speaker 2: both of them.
28:57
Speaker 1: Well, that's the only thing Reagan I can do, is
28:59
Speaker 1: the one word.
29:01
Speaker 2: One of the one of the facts I saw bandied
29:04
Speaker 2: about in some of the reporting that was a great
29:06
Speaker 2: Reagan by the way, was that either Ronald Reagan signed
29:11
Speaker 2: Clark Gable's discharge papers from the army or Clark Gable
29:15
Speaker 2: signed robins. It depends on who you ask, Yes.
29:18
Speaker 1: What was one of them authorized to do so? Or
29:20
Speaker 1: are they just like, come over here, buddy, sign this thing.
29:22
Speaker 2: No, No, like they just happened to be like that
29:25
Speaker 2: was just happened to be the luck of the draw
29:27
Speaker 2: as far as the arrangement went.
29:29
Speaker 1: Oh, like they bore witness or something.
29:31
Speaker 2: No. I think like, as let's say it was Clark
29:33
Speaker 2: Gable who signed them, he would have maybe been like
29:35
Speaker 2: a higher up to Ronald Reagan, because Ronald Reagan was
29:39
Speaker 2: getting out. It happened to be Clark Gable rather than
29:42
Speaker 2: Colonel Joe Schmoe.
29:43
Speaker 1: Who was glad I complicated that very clean and cool story.
29:50
Speaker 1: Another fun little trivial factoid, And yes, I'm saying factoid
29:55
Speaker 1: was that q E two Queen Elizabeth I hosted and
29:59
Speaker 1: the first NERD Cruise. It sounds like because she hosted
30:01
Speaker 1: an eight day trivial pursuit tournament crews in I guess
30:05
Speaker 1: eighty five.
30:06
Speaker 2: And so at each Christmas nineteen eighty three, it was
30:10
Speaker 2: like you could not find that thing. Yeah, in nineteen
30:15
Speaker 2: eighty four, same same deal, Like it was really hard
30:18
Speaker 2: to find. But this time Selchow and writer had like
30:21
Speaker 2: learned their lesson and we're like keeping up with supply
30:24
Speaker 2: a lot better than they were at the very beginning
30:26
Speaker 2: of this whole thing. And so at the at the
30:29
Speaker 2: peak of this, I think it really peaked in eighty four,
30:32
Speaker 2: but that certainly continued on in the nineteen eighty five.
30:35
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, and the spring of nineteen eighty five, fifteen
30:39
Speaker 2: percent of households in America had a trivial pursuit game
30:44
Speaker 2: in their house. I saw at some point it was
30:46
Speaker 2: twenty percent, one in five.
30:49
Speaker 1: Yeah, I think they're at about eighty million to date game.
30:53
Speaker 2: Oh, I believe that totally.
30:56
Speaker 1: That's just a staggering amount of game. I mean, my
30:58
Speaker 1: mom still you talked about how well it was made.
31:00
Speaker 1: My mom still has our the og from whatever forty
31:03
Speaker 1: eight years ago.
31:04
Speaker 2: Yeah, I'm sure it's just a little bit frayed in,
31:06
Speaker 2: like yep, the parts were it folded and the rest
31:08
Speaker 2: of it's just fine.
31:09
Speaker 1: No, you can still read Richard Nixon on a third
31:12
Speaker 1: of those cards.
31:13
Speaker 2: Nice, there's a little like cocaine in the little folds
31:16
Speaker 2: and like tequila stains on some of the in the spots.
31:20
Speaker 1: Oh not in my family, pal, So Trivial Pursuit is
31:23
Speaker 1: selling Gangbusters. Abbott and Haney are rich dudes and also
31:28
Speaker 1: weirdly kind of celebrities. They were not shy. They love
31:33
Speaker 1: to be on TV and to do interviews. They were
31:35
Speaker 1: in TV commercials, They were pitchmen for other brands like
31:40
Speaker 1: Amex and Diet Coke, and they would put that Trivial
31:43
Speaker 1: Pursuit branding on anything they thought they could make money of.
31:46
Speaker 1: And like you mentioned, those original investors did really, really well.
31:50
Speaker 1: There was an entertainment writer at the Toronto Globe and
31:52
Speaker 1: Mail named Susan Ferrier McKay who took out a bank
31:57
Speaker 1: loan to buy ten shares early on, and in nineteen
32:00
Speaker 1: eighty four she bought a house and then she retired
32:04
Speaker 1: not too long after that.
32:06
Speaker 2: Yeah, and Worstlin, the guy the eighteen year olds who
32:08
Speaker 2: did all the art, he founded a company called Worstlin
32:12
Speaker 2: Group All one word that became pretty successful marketers in Toronto,
32:17
Speaker 2: and he used his money from his shares to start that,
32:20
Speaker 2: so it definitely paid off. And then yeah, like you said,
32:24
Speaker 2: the Heinies and Chris Abber or Scott Abbott were just
32:28
Speaker 2: mega rich from this. I mean, this game made hundreds
32:32
Speaker 2: of millions of dollars in the eighties, like eighties money.
32:35
Speaker 2: God knows what West Egg would convert that to, but
32:39
Speaker 2: there was a lot of money made off this, and
32:41
Speaker 2: you got to think back like these were just a
32:43
Speaker 2: couple of dudes who had an idea and went with it,
32:47
Speaker 2: although there were people who were like, yeah, that's questionable
32:50
Speaker 2: whether you had that idea, like you kind of referred
32:53
Speaker 2: to earlier. Right.
32:54
Speaker 1: Yeah, there were two cases, at least like two notable
32:58
Speaker 1: court cases. One was a lawsuit in nineteen ninety four
33:02
Speaker 1: from a guy, an Australian named David Wall who said, hey,
33:06
Speaker 1: in nineteen seventy nine, this Chris Haney guy picked me
33:10
Speaker 1: and my buddy up when we were hitchhiking and we
33:14
Speaker 1: were in Nova, Scotia, and while we were driving around,
33:17
Speaker 1: I told him about this idea for the game, like
33:20
Speaker 1: really specifically, like my mom has pictures of the wheel
33:25
Speaker 1: that I drew and the pie pieces and everything. In
33:28
Speaker 1: the court were like, well where are those documents And
33:30
Speaker 1: he was like, I don't have those anymore. And they
33:33
Speaker 1: said we'll bring forward some witnesses and he was like,
33:36
Speaker 1: no one, No one's really coming forward. They moved, Yeah,
33:40
Speaker 1: they moved away, Hane said, or he said that. Hany
33:45
Speaker 1: later offered him shares, like, hey man, we're getting this
33:48
Speaker 1: game that you got told me the idea for going,
33:51
Speaker 1: and I'm going to offer to buy you shares. This
33:53
Speaker 1: is a real thing. He refused. Had he bought those shares,
33:57
Speaker 1: he would have ended up a rich person as well.
34:00
Speaker 1: But in court, Haney was like, I never met this guy,
34:02
Speaker 1: never picked him up. They awarded him initially, well not
34:07
Speaker 1: awarded him. He got zero dollars, but the judge ruled
34:11
Speaker 1: in Haney's favor and awarded them one point two million
34:13
Speaker 1: dollars in court costs, just after a thirteen year legal battle.
34:16
Speaker 1: But they reduced that to one million because they said,
34:20
Speaker 1: but you know what, your big corporate attorneys came in
34:23
Speaker 1: and sued two of his witnesses. So we're gonna knock
34:26
Speaker 1: off two hundred grand and just make it a million.
34:29
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean imagine being that guy. You're like, you
34:31
Speaker 2: owe me tens of millions of dollars and then ten
34:34
Speaker 2: years later you owe them a million dollars. Like, yeah,
34:37
Speaker 2: this is just some guy. He wasn't some like high
34:39
Speaker 2: flying jet setter who had a bunch of money. I
34:42
Speaker 2: don't know what happened to him.
34:43
Speaker 1: But yeah, I mean he had a hard he didn't
34:45
Speaker 1: have the million bucks. I saw that. So they said
34:47
Speaker 1: they were looking to garnish his wages, and I was like,
34:49
Speaker 1: oh man, this just gets from bad to worse.
34:52
Speaker 2: Yeah, but I mean, this is the one guy who
34:55
Speaker 2: said that, and like you said, he didn't come up
34:57
Speaker 2: with witnesses or any kind of supporting evidence. And yeah,
35:00
Speaker 2: it's just not clear what the deal was, whether he
35:03
Speaker 2: was just looking for a payday or if he did
35:05
Speaker 2: get ripped off. But as far as the court's concerned,
35:08
Speaker 2: he definitely did not get ripped off.
35:10
Speaker 1: Yeah. What I was trying to find out was they
35:12
Speaker 1: you know, they said they sued to first. The judge
35:14
Speaker 1: said there was no witnesses. Then I find out that
35:17
Speaker 1: they had sued two of the witnesses, which they considered like,
35:22
Speaker 1: you know, witness intimidation or something. Sure, so I'm wondering
35:25
Speaker 1: if one of those witnesses they sued was like the
35:27
Speaker 1: friend that hitchhiked with them, And I'm just I couldn't
35:29
Speaker 1: find anything out. It's so hard to find out stuff
35:32
Speaker 1: about old court cases.
35:33
Speaker 2: Well, if if it was like a David and Goliath
35:36
Speaker 2: thing where Goliath won, that would be very sad. Indeed, Yeah,
35:39
Speaker 2: what I imagine that. Yeah, we'll move on because this
35:42
Speaker 2: one's getting really sad. Uh. The other one is the
35:45
Speaker 2: story of a guy named Fred Elworth, And if you
35:48
Speaker 2: are into trivia, fred Worth is essentially your messiah. He
35:52
Speaker 2: is the original trivia dude who's been writing books on trivia,
35:58
Speaker 2: books like containing trivia for decades and decades. Now. I
36:02
Speaker 2: don't know if he's still a live but if he is,
36:04
Speaker 2: he's probably still going strong. And he apparently published a
36:09
Speaker 2: three volume Encyclopedia of trivia at some point, this is
36:12
Speaker 2: before Trivia Pursuit was launched, and he did something. You
36:16
Speaker 2: know how we've talked about map makers, like including like
36:19
Speaker 2: a fake town to basically protect their properties, see if
36:23
Speaker 2: somebody ripped them off.
36:24
Speaker 1: Yeah, he did.
36:25
Speaker 2: Something with trivia question. He included a trick question in
36:28
Speaker 2: his stuff.
36:30
Speaker 1: He did, and that that well, it didn't bear fruit,
36:33
Speaker 1: but it played out in his favor. It was a
36:36
Speaker 1: question on Colombo the TV show with what's his name
36:42
Speaker 1: Peter Falk, Peter Falk, Almos said Robert Blake, I used
36:44
Speaker 1: to get those confused.
36:45
Speaker 2: No, that was Barretta.
36:47
Speaker 1: Yeah, he sees the one who murdered his wife in
36:49
Speaker 1: real life.
36:50
Speaker 2: Yeah.
36:51
Speaker 1: Yeah, anyway, Peter Falk did not murdered his wife as
36:55
Speaker 1: far as I know, but he he was Frank Colombo.
36:59
Speaker 1: And and the question it was, the answer was Philip Columbo,
37:03
Speaker 1: Like what was Columbo's real name? And you know, I
37:06
Speaker 1: don't know if anywhere else Philip Columbo had ever been printed,
37:08
Speaker 1: So it looked like pretty good proof to me. He
37:11
Speaker 1: sued for three hundred million bucks, claimed that close to
37:14
Speaker 1: seventeen hundred of the questions were his, and a judge
37:17
Speaker 1: threw it out and said, first of all, this game
37:19
Speaker 1: is a lot different than that book, and at which
37:22
Speaker 1: time Worth should have said, that's not what I'm saying, right,
37:25
Speaker 1: And then he said but you can't copyright facts. No case,
37:29
Speaker 1: which I officially feel bad for Worth because it seems
37:32
Speaker 1: clear to me that they took a lot of his questions.
37:36
Speaker 2: Uh yeah, he probably. I mean they said that they
37:38
Speaker 2: used his book for creating these things. Like they didn't
37:41
Speaker 2: deny that at all, but yeah, I guess it was
37:44
Speaker 2: just their Their case was based on the idea that
37:47
Speaker 2: like the effects of fact, like this guy didn't it's
37:49
Speaker 2: not a creation of his own. Yes, he found it right, No,
37:53
Speaker 2: I get it. And I imagine Fred Worth probably thought
37:55
Speaker 2: that was like an iron proof defense, like.
37:58
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, I got it.
37:59
Speaker 2: These people in putting this question in there and it
38:01
Speaker 2: didn't work out. I'm sure he was astonished when that
38:03
Speaker 2: came along that ruling. But also, just before we move on, Chuck,
38:08
Speaker 2: I just want to tell all of our hardcore Colombo
38:12
Speaker 2: fan listeners to just stop your emails right now. We
38:15
Speaker 2: know for a fact that Frank is not, as far
38:17
Speaker 2: as Cannon goes, Colombo's first name. Yeah, canonically Colombo doesn't
38:22
Speaker 2: have a first name or else. His first name is lieutenant.
38:25
Speaker 2: So Frank Columbo just happened to show up in a
38:27
Speaker 2: couple of screenshots that the producers of the show originally
38:31
Speaker 2: never intended anybody to be able to zoom in on.
38:34
Speaker 1: Boy, do you think there are any Colombo pet ants?
38:39
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, definitely listen to this.
38:41
Speaker 2: Sure, yeah, we got all kinds. Takes all kinds, Chuck.
38:47
Speaker 1: So the nineties are now upon us and these guys
38:51
Speaker 1: are are They said they feel like rock stars. Basically,
38:54
Speaker 1: they've got all kinds of money. Supposedly John Haney, the
39:00
Speaker 1: that was brought in early on. They were talking about
39:02
Speaker 1: finances and he said, we'll be great as long as
39:04
Speaker 1: we don't do anything stupid like invest in racehorses. So
39:08
Speaker 1: that's just what they did. Hani and Abbott invested in racehorses,
39:12
Speaker 1: but for Abbot paid off. He spent fifty grand on
39:14
Speaker 1: a yearly named Charlie Bailey that ended up winning about
39:17
Speaker 1: nine hundred thousand dollars in total purses over the years.
39:21
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, and lots of studding out for big money.
39:25
Speaker 1: And they both invested in kind of built from the
39:29
Speaker 1: ground up these two golf courses in Canada, and Abbot
39:33
Speaker 1: bought that. He was a big hockey guy, so he
39:36
Speaker 1: bought the Brampton Battalion at the time before moving them
39:40
Speaker 1: north and changing their name, and they are from the
39:43
Speaker 1: Ontario Hockey League, and I think he might still own them.
39:47
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, I think so.
39:48
Speaker 1: I mean this article I found was from the late
39:51
Speaker 1: twenty teens.
39:53
Speaker 2: Oh yeah probably then.
39:54
Speaker 1: Yeah, I don't see why he would have sold it.
39:57
Speaker 2: Oh so they're now the Brampton Battalion. They were the
40:00
Speaker 2: North bab Battalion.
40:01
Speaker 1: Right, no, no, no, and now they're in North Bay.
40:04
Speaker 2: Okay, I always get North Bay and Brampton. Confused, I
40:07
Speaker 2: do too. So Olivia dug up a pretty interesting article written.
40:13
Speaker 1: By who chuck a guy named Ron Rodriguez.
40:17
Speaker 2: No, it's one Rodriguez.
40:19
Speaker 1: Oh is it one?
40:20
Speaker 2: Yeah? Okay, so mister Rodriguez is what we're going to
40:24
Speaker 2: call him from now. And because his name is really
40:27
Speaker 2: hard to say, it turns out he was a He
40:31
Speaker 2: wrote I think a daily quota of forty trivial pursuit
40:34
Speaker 2: questions a day, obviously, and only about half would get picked.
40:39
Speaker 2: And we kind of went through that too, because we
40:41
Speaker 2: helped out putting questions together for our version, and they've
40:47
Speaker 2: asked for hundreds and hundreds of them and you're like, okay,
40:49
Speaker 2: well we're done. They're like, okay, well we're going to
40:51
Speaker 2: use about a third of those, So we're gonna have
40:53
Speaker 2: to do this again a couple more times. And it
40:55
Speaker 2: was like, there weren't that many facts in all of
40:57
Speaker 2: the episodes of stuff you should know, you guys, But
41:00
Speaker 2: we pulled it out. But I can feel mister Rodriguez
41:03
Speaker 2: his pain.
41:04
Speaker 1: Yeah, for sure. It was a lot of writing. He
41:08
Speaker 1: said that he is the dictionary of twentieth century world politics,
41:11
Speaker 1: pop culture magazines. As his story goes, when he needed
41:15
Speaker 1: Rambo questions, he watched all the Rambo movies two times
41:19
Speaker 1: to come up with the best questions. And you know,
41:23
Speaker 1: once you write them, they did. I think he had
41:25
Speaker 1: a partner. They had some researchers on the team and
41:28
Speaker 1: they would fact check and do corrections and tweaks and
41:30
Speaker 1: stuff like that.
41:31
Speaker 2: Yeah, I should say we didn't. We weren't actually writing
41:34
Speaker 2: the questions. We were coming up with the source material
41:36
Speaker 2: for the question.
41:37
Speaker 1: Yeah, from the podcast Huge Signa.
41:39
Speaker 2: They're going, oh no, yeah, there's some writer. It has
41:42
Speaker 2: Bro's like, uh.
41:46
Speaker 1: As far as the nitty gritty goes, questions have a
41:49
Speaker 1: maximum of forty five characters. They prefer two lines, even
41:54
Speaker 1: though there can be three. They just visually thought the
41:56
Speaker 1: two line questions looked better, so they tried to edit
41:59
Speaker 1: them down when possible.
42:02
Speaker 2: Yeah, and then I think now, over the years there's
42:05
Speaker 2: been about three hundred editions published, and very early on
42:12
Speaker 2: they stayed fairly generalist. Although I mean, let me take
42:17
Speaker 2: that back. They went from Genus to silver screen edition,
42:21
Speaker 2: baby Boomers Edition, and I think a sports edition, but
42:25
Speaker 2: compared to some of the editions that they've come up
42:28
Speaker 2: with now, those are still pretty generalists. So another one
42:33
Speaker 2: was Disney. Disney was the first tie in that they
42:35
Speaker 2: had in nineteen eighty five, and that was still pretty general.
42:39
Speaker 2: It wasn't like Donald duck backs specifically, right. Weirdly, here's
42:45
Speaker 2: a piece of trivia for you. The second brand tie
42:48
Speaker 2: in that Trivial Pursuit released a game around was Fame.
42:53
Speaker 2: The TV show and movie Oh Wow, Like I'm going
42:55
Speaker 2: to Live Forever had its own Trivial Pursuit edition back
42:59
Speaker 2: in nineteen ninety three.
43:00
Speaker 1: Was the first question, how long did the Fame people
43:03
Speaker 1: think they were going to live?
43:05
Speaker 2: That's a great question.
43:07
Speaker 1: I couldn't have been very as these editions weren't as
43:10
Speaker 1: big though, right, there's no way no.
43:13
Speaker 2: And that slight article that you referred to the author
43:18
Speaker 2: makes a case. They were basically saying, I think the
43:20
Speaker 2: whole premise was trivial pursuit lost its way. And this
43:23
Speaker 2: is about ten years ago or something. And the premise
43:27
Speaker 2: or the thesis this author had was that it went
43:31
Speaker 2: from being general where basically anybody could come along and
43:34
Speaker 2: try their hand at it, to increasingly more specific, to
43:38
Speaker 2: where now you had to know everything there is to
43:41
Speaker 2: know about Harry Potter or everything there is to know
43:44
Speaker 2: about the Lord of the Rings or Friends or the
43:46
Speaker 2: Nightmare before Christmas or that kind of thing, and that
43:49
Speaker 2: it just it made it more and more narrow and
43:52
Speaker 2: narrowed the pool, so you have to have more and
43:53
Speaker 2: more additions to appeal as many people as possible, whereas
43:57
Speaker 2: if you just made more generalists versions of the game,
44:01
Speaker 2: then you were always going to appeal to the most
44:04
Speaker 2: people possible.
44:05
Speaker 1: You know, some of those versions are definitely not my thing,
44:10
Speaker 1: but I'm not gonna say it lost its way. I
44:12
Speaker 1: disagreed with that guy, and like, if you want a
44:15
Speaker 1: Harry Potter edish and that's your jam, then like I
44:17
Speaker 1: love it. Sure. In fact, I wouldn't mind a Friends
44:20
Speaker 1: edition now that I'm thinking of it. I did today
44:23
Speaker 1: the Friends Edition I think would be kind of fun
44:25
Speaker 1: for me, or Seinfeld Edition because I know those pretty well.
44:28
Speaker 1: But I did today by the Greatest Hits Edition, which
44:35
Speaker 1: is mainly eighties and nineties and a lot of pop culture,
44:39
Speaker 1: and supposedly that's like a gen X feast. So I
44:42
Speaker 1: bought that today and hopefully I'll be getting it very soon.
44:45
Speaker 2: That's awesome. I will be very disappointed if the Seinfeld
44:49
Speaker 2: edition doesn't have a question about who invaded Spain in
44:52
Speaker 2: the nine hundreds and the answers the moops right, it's
44:56
Speaker 2: got too, it has to.
44:59
Speaker 1: Yeah, we could probably write a Seinfeld edition, you and
45:02
Speaker 1: I could probably.
45:04
Speaker 2: They've come up with some other pretty cool ones too.
45:06
Speaker 2: One's called X. It's for it's much more adult edgy questions.
45:10
Speaker 2: I think it's for eighteen and up. And it's a
45:13
Speaker 2: stamp game where if you get it wrong, they stamp
45:17
Speaker 2: an X onto your forehead and inc and once you
45:19
Speaker 2: get five stamps on your forehead, you're out.
45:22
Speaker 1: Interesting.
45:23
Speaker 2: It is interesting. And then the weirdest edition I found,
45:27
Speaker 2: Chuck was the EMS edition. Emergency Medical Services came out
45:31
Speaker 2: in twenty twelve, wow, and it had categories like trauma, illness, anatomy.
45:37
Speaker 1: It's just minor cuts, major cuts.
45:40
Speaker 2: Right, Yeah, I'd like to see some of those questions.
45:42
Speaker 2: I couldn't find them. And you can also play free online.
45:46
Speaker 2: There's a new version that came out this year called
45:50
Speaker 2: Trivial Pursuit Infinite uses generative AI to come up with questions.
45:56
Speaker 2: And if you are a TV watcher, you can watch
45:59
Speaker 2: the new Tripe Pursuit game on the CW that's hosted
46:02
Speaker 2: by the lovable LeVar Burton.
46:05
Speaker 1: Oh we love LeVar.
46:07
Speaker 2: Everyone loves LeVar.
46:08
Speaker 1: Who doesn't, no one?
46:10
Speaker 2: Yeah, you got anything else?
46:13
Speaker 1: I got nothing else. I'm looking forward to playing, you know.
46:16
Speaker 1: I do have to say I think I tried to
46:17
Speaker 1: play the original Genus sometime in the last like five
46:22
Speaker 1: or six years. It's been a minute, but I remember
46:24
Speaker 1: it didn't feel like it held up that well. And
46:28
Speaker 1: that's that's probably due to the fact that it was
46:30
Speaker 1: written in the eighties and it was geared toward boomers. Gotcha,
46:34
Speaker 1: but it was still okay.
46:36
Speaker 2: Can you give an example of how it didn't hold
46:39
Speaker 2: up for a general example, Well, just.
46:41
Speaker 1: You know, questions about gun smoke and Richard Nixon and
46:45
Speaker 1: and over and over, like they're.
46:46
Speaker 2: Gonna say, it was like deeply sexist or something like that.
46:48
Speaker 1: No, no, no, no, not like that. It just felt a
46:50
Speaker 1: little dated question wise, like, hey, I mean, supposedly the
46:55
Speaker 1: Master's Edition is the one I think the Gamer ranked
47:00
Speaker 1: in twenty twenty one and a listicle, and the Gamer
47:02
Speaker 1: said that the twenty twenty one Master Edition was the
47:06
Speaker 1: best edition yet. But that Classic Edition has sold the
47:11
Speaker 1: lion's share of those eighty million versions.
47:13
Speaker 2: Yeah, pretty impressive stuff.
47:15
Speaker 1: Yeah.
47:16
Speaker 2: I love these Christmas episodes, the pre Christmas special usually
47:22
Speaker 2: Christmas Toy episode. Me too, So happy Holidays to all
47:28
Speaker 2: of you out there. And the next time you see us,
47:30
Speaker 2: we're going to be on that ad free holiday special
47:35
Speaker 2: coming soon. Do you have a listener mail today?
47:38
Speaker 1: I do?
47:39
Speaker 2: Oh great, Well, since Chuck answered in the affirmative when
47:42
Speaker 2: I asked him if he had a listener mail, it's
47:44
Speaker 2: time for listener mail.
47:46
Speaker 1: Hey, guys, love your September episode on the history of
47:49
Speaker 1: music streaming. I grew up in the nineties. I can
47:51
Speaker 1: vividly remember being at my friend Ross's house downloading Weezer
47:55
Speaker 1: songs off of Napster and burning pirated versions onto CDRs.
48:00
Speaker 1: Title suggests I'm an active musician now and I wanted
48:02
Speaker 1: to take a quick moment and give a shout out
48:03
Speaker 1: to the music streaming platforms that didn't end up in
48:06
Speaker 1: the episode, like band camp and SoundCloud. Oh yeah, I
48:10
Speaker 1: feel bad we didn't mention these and we just kind
48:11
Speaker 1: of went with the big corporate modelists. As an independent artist,
48:15
Speaker 1: especially like how band camp allows us to promote shows,
48:17
Speaker 1: discover connect with other musicians directly, and the ability to
48:20
Speaker 1: customize the look and copy our releases look and copy
48:25
Speaker 1: on our releases page. It's made getting gigs and connecting
48:28
Speaker 1: with other indie bands so much easier. I also found
48:31
Speaker 1: it interesting how the preferred medium of the day has
48:33
Speaker 1: informed artists choices, has informed their choices when releasing music.
48:37
Speaker 1: In the nineties, albums were so much longer, he says,
48:41
Speaker 1: I'm looking at you, Smashing Pumpkins, because a loan CD
48:45
Speaker 1: could hold more than a vinyl LP or cassette. Today,
48:47
Speaker 1: there are so much music available at our fingertips. Musicians
48:50
Speaker 1: are releasing shorter albums, digital mixtapes, and a steady stream
48:54
Speaker 1: of albumless singles, all in an attempt to stay relevant
48:57
Speaker 1: and capture fleeting attention spans of listeners. I'm curious to
49:01
Speaker 1: see what happens over the next decade. Thanks for your
49:05
Speaker 1: time in the years of parasocial education and entertainment. This
49:10
Speaker 1: is from Chris and Seattle. And we actually met and
49:12
Speaker 1: hung out with Chris when many many years ago in Seattle.
49:16
Speaker 1: He was a friend of our booking agent at least
49:18
Speaker 1: at the time, Josh Lingren. We still our booking agent.
49:22
Speaker 1: They were friends at the time, as far as I know,
49:24
Speaker 1: friends anymore, because well, I don't know. I just didn't ask,
49:27
Speaker 1: but he I was going to text Linger and ask
49:30
Speaker 1: if you knew him, but they He came to the
49:32
Speaker 1: Neptune Show and I even rode in a car with
49:34
Speaker 1: him with Emily to some after party we went to.
49:36
Speaker 2: Wowee.
49:38
Speaker 1: Yeah. So good to be back in touch with Chris.
49:39
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, thanks a lot, Chris, thanks for getting back
49:42
Speaker 2: in touch. I think that that's no longer parasocial, that's
49:45
Speaker 2: just social.
49:47
Speaker 1: Yeah, you're right.
49:48
Speaker 2: Well, if you want to be like Chris and remind
49:50
Speaker 2: us that we've hung out with you before, and also
49:52
Speaker 2: share some pretty great information and correct us for not
49:55
Speaker 2: shouting out independent version of something we talked about. We
49:59
Speaker 2: love that kind of stuff. You can send us an
50:01
Speaker 2: email to Stuff Podcast at iHeartRadio.
50:04
Speaker 1: Dot com Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio.
50:11
Speaker 1: For more podcasts myheart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
50:15
Speaker 1: or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.