Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff you Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.

Speaker 2 (00:11):
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, and
there's Charles w Chuck Bryant, and Jerry's here too. We're
just rolling the dice and moving the pies. Yeah, because
I mean it was like a pie piece. Yeah. I
can't think of anything else you call them. I think
some people call them wedges, but they're clearly sickos. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (00:32):
Oh, I think they're officially wedges.

Speaker 2 (00:35):
Well, I've seen the guys who invented the game.

Speaker 1 (00:37):
So did you watch that video?

Speaker 2 (00:40):
Yeah?

Speaker 1 (00:40):
Oh boy.

Speaker 2 (00:41):
We should probably tell everybody what we're talking about. First,
this is Stuff you should Know. Second, we're talking about
Trivial Pursuit. Arguably one of the greatest board games ever created.
And we're not just saying that because Stuff you Should
Know has its own Trivial Pursuit edition. It's because it
legitimately is such a great game.

Speaker 1 (00:58):
Yeah. I played this game a lot when I was
a kid. It was a family favorite. My mom really
really loved it. We were often a team together, my
mom and I, so it's kind of one of my
good childhood memories with her.

Speaker 2 (01:13):
I'll bet Yeah, looking at the board and all like
pictures of the board and some of the question cards
and all that. Like, I was just overwhelmed with nostalgic
because it was a huge thing in my family too,
playing Trivial Pursuit.

Speaker 1 (01:25):
Boomer City, Baby.

Speaker 2 (01:27):
I love that game.

Speaker 1 (01:28):
Yeah, for sure, as it turns out, for sure.

Speaker 2 (01:30):
And what's funny is in doctrineeded us into everything that
Boomer's like. Like it was a really like huge cultural
transfer from one generation to the other in that way.

Speaker 1 (01:40):
Yeah, I mean I was a twelve year old who
learned about gun smoke and Richard Nixon through playing Trivial Pursuit.

Speaker 2 (01:48):
Yeah yeah, and Spiro Agnew from Mad Magazine. Oh yeah,
So we should probably start at the start, and that
actually goes long before Trivial Pursuit was created, but not
as far back as you would think. Like in the
United States, we did a live episode on game shows
that was really cool, and we talked about this some

(02:09):
but back as far back to the thirties on the
radio and then later on TV, quiz shows were like
all the rage and America's had like fascinations with trivia
and then got bored with it and then came and
found it again and then got bored with it. And
back in the thirties that was one of the peaks
where everybody was super into it.

Speaker 1 (02:29):
Yeah, quiz shows were for sure big. I think you know,
Lvia helped us with this. And I always kind of
wondered about the word trivial because I thought that was
a pretty genius And we'll get to the name change,
because initially this was called trivia pursuit, and a lot
of people called it trivia pursuit. But the change to trivial,
I don't know, that was just something that made it

(02:51):
a little cheeky.

Speaker 2 (02:53):
Maybe yeah, because you're not just talking about trivia, you're
also poking fun at your own game, Like you're putting
all this effort into something that doesn't really matter in
the end.

Speaker 1 (03:03):
Yeah, I guess so. But I thought it mattered when
I was a kid. I was Now that i'm adult,
I'm like, trivia Pursuit's kind of a fun name. When
I was a kid, I was like, this is not trivia.
These are facts and figures, right, it's weird.

Speaker 2 (03:14):
Oh I took it seriously too. Yeah, for sure, I
love trivial pursuit too, but it was definitely in the
vein of the people who invented this thing to kind
of poke fun at themselves and even at you, the
player for playing it.

Speaker 1 (03:25):
Yeah, for sure. So pub quizzes were big in England
before they were a big deal in the United States,
where we call it just par trivia, I guess, but
they kind of hit it big earlier on. So the
world of trivia was gaining steam through the nineteen sixties.
I think there was a Columbia student named Edwin Goodgold

(03:48):
who I think he wrote a book, right, He and another.

Speaker 2 (03:53):
Guy named Dan Karlinski wrote a book simply called Trivia. Yeah,
but he's credited as one of like the early people
to spread the whole concept of being quizzed about inconsequential
usually pop culture questions to just show like how much
you knew about your childhood and that Edwin Goodgold thing.
Two things about him. He went on to become the

(04:15):
manager of Shanna Nah really yeah, oh wow, And he
wrote in Columbia University's I guess their newspaper, he was
one of their writers. He wrote that this is that
these trivia games that are like the hot new thing
on campus are played by young adults who, on the
one hand, realize they have misspent their youth, yet on

(04:36):
the other hand, do not want to let go of it.
And that was the whole idea. It was about all
the stuff that you learned in your childhood from reading
Superman comic books and listening to like gangster or seen
like gangster TV shows, just from being a kid. That's
what the whole thing was based on. And that kind
of became a tradition too that it was largely stuff

(04:57):
in the past. A lot of it was pop culture.

Speaker 1 (05:00):
Yeah, exactly, and that was the mid sixties. The mid
seventies is when the pub quizzes really took off in England.
That didn't start in the US untill really after Trivial Pursuit.
There was a time even where the TV show Jeopardy
was not on the air because like you said, there
was just a waxing and waning on interest in trivia.
But Jeopardy came back in eighty four and all of

(05:22):
a sudden, you know, trivia started to be important in
the United States again.

Speaker 2 (05:27):
Yeah, and I didn't see it anywhere, but I would
put some serious money on the idea that Trivial Pursuits
success revived Jeopardy.

Speaker 1 (05:35):
Yeah, I bet it did, because it was.

Speaker 2 (05:37):
A huge, huge deal as we'll see, yeah, for sure,
But the whole thing starts all the way back in
nineteen seventy nine, in December of nineteen seventy nine, appropriately
because Trivial Pursuit and Christmas for its first few years
of being out, were synonymous with one another. Essentially, maybe
synonymous isn't the right word, but they were. It was

(05:57):
a big deal around Christmas time when it first came out.

Speaker 1 (05:59):
About that, Yeah, and this is our pick. We kind
of had a hard time deciding this year, but actually
not really. It was a toss up, but we always
do like a Christmas you know, legendary Christmas gifts in
pop culture history kind of episode, And this year we
went with Trivial Pursuit because it was a big you know,
they as you'll see that. You know, rolling out a
board game in October and November is a pretty smart

(06:22):
move for sure.

Speaker 2 (06:24):
And these two guys, there are two Canadians. I read
an article about them that was contemporary to them in
the Toronto Star. It said that they come off like
the two original Hosers. Yeah, even bigger Hosers than Bob
and Doug Mackenzie is what they were saying.

Speaker 1 (06:39):
Yeah, there were a couple of hockey dudes, just hockey
beer drinking, Canadian, good old fashioned Canadian hockey playing. They're
at least hockey watching. I bet they played too. They
all played.

Speaker 2 (06:49):
Yeah, I think they definitely did. They certainly covered it.
One of them, Scott Abbott, was a sports reporter for
the Canadian Press who I think his focus was on hockey.
The other guy was Chris Haney. He was a photo
editor at the Montreal Gazette. So these are a couple
of late seventies early eighties journalist dudes who wear mustaches

(07:10):
and drink beer during their interviews on the news and
smoke like yeah, and smoke during them too, like this
would These were the guys who invented trivial pursuit.

Speaker 1 (07:20):
Yeah. Hani was a high school dropout. Abbott did have
a master's degree in journalism from the University of Tennessee,
and he was living with Haney and his wife Sarah
in their apartment in Montreal at the time. And as
the legend goes, they're hanging out one day it was
kind of rainy, they were like, hey, let's play some scrabble.
They realized they didn't have some scrabble, and then I

(07:43):
saw a couple of different versions. It kind of inconsequential,
like whether or not he just dropped everything and went
out and bought a scrabble or whether just on his
next shopping trip he did. But Hani would buy a
scrabble game, bring it back to play and was like,
you know what, I bought like six of these things
over the years because I just keep losing number leaving
behind or learning them out or something, and like what
a racket, Like we should get into the gaming business.

Speaker 2 (08:06):
Yeah, that's how I was born. They just realized how
how many times he bought a scrabble game, and they
were like, we should we could do that.

Speaker 1 (08:14):
We should say.

Speaker 2 (08:15):
Yeah, these guys, that was the kind of thing that
they would talk about doing, is making a game because
they realized that you could that other people have made
money off of it.

Speaker 1 (08:23):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (08:24):
Up to this point, their big claim to fame in
their circle was having carried out a pyramid scheme with
a chain letter that was actually successful in that they
made money off of it and they never got caught
for it either. So up to this point, so these
were that was these this kind of these kind of
guys right, And this particular idea though, kind of started

(08:48):
to take shape really really quickly. I think it was
Chris Abber Scott Abbott who was like, well, how about
something with trivia. And remember, at the time, like trivia
was not hot item, and also, as we'll see, board
games were not a high item. So these were like
two bad ideas that these guys decided to put together
and accidentally became a success, or not accidentally it ended

(09:11):
up becoming a success. But it was like they figured
it out really quickly, didn't they.

Speaker 1 (09:15):
Some might say suspiciously quickly. We'll get to that later.
But as their story goes at about forty five minutes time,
and they're really specific about that. I'd never saw anywhere
an hour. They always said forty five minutes. They got,
you know, the game together, They got some construction paper,
they started sketching things out. They based the design of

(09:37):
the circular board on a ship's wheel with six spokes
that corresponded to categories of geography, entertainment, sports and leisure,
science and nature, arts and literature, and history. And you
would roll the die. You would move in any direction
you wanted, as long as it's only one direction. You
get this little circular pie crust with six available pie slots,

(10:02):
right wedges not wedges. And the idea is you go
around and you answer questions in the corresponding categories, and
when you answer them on the center of each spoke
or I guess the landing point of each spoke, you
would get to put in a pie piece. Once you
have all those pie pieces in, you roll your way
to the center. Must have an exact role, and then

(10:23):
the other teams decide which category of question they want
to randomly ask you and if you miss you if
you make it, you win the game. If you miss it,
you got to roll back out and then answer questions
eventually roll back in.

Speaker 2 (10:36):
Yes, well put. I am not one for boasting typically,
but I will say that I once confirmed one a
game doing all the things you just said in twenty minutes.

Speaker 1 (10:50):
The wow by yourself?

Speaker 2 (10:53):
No no, no, not by myself. It's playing a dude
at work at the liquor store.

Speaker 1 (10:57):
No no, no, I mean, were you on a team by yourself?

Speaker 2 (10:59):
No? Oh no, just me, Okay, that's what.

Speaker 1 (11:02):
I was asking, not literally playing boy, Josh. I'll never mind.

Speaker 2 (11:08):
I mean, I guess if you were really honest you
could play by yourself.

Speaker 1 (11:11):
You know, he gets it around recards. I did that
for a little while.

Speaker 2 (11:15):
That's not honest. I'm saying you could roll, you could move,
you could ask yourself questions, answer them and yeah, got
it wrong.

Speaker 1 (11:21):
Yeah, just you could talk in different voices. No, good,
try chuck right, great.

Speaker 2 (11:26):
You kind of ruined my twenty minute anecdote.

Speaker 1 (11:28):
Frankly, no, I want to dwell back on that, because
twenty minutes. I mean, I played a lot of trivial pursuit,
and I don't feel like we ever got through a
game in less than that standard forty five minutes. It
took to an a minute.

Speaker 2 (11:41):
Yeah, yeah, it took It took a It could take
a while, especially if like they were just had a
lot of people who yeah, didn't didn't know trivia. But yeah,
it would usually take yeah, forty five minutes an hour,
depending on how fast everybody was moving. Usually it took
longer because the whole point was almost every question and
answer would like generate a quick conversation or usually a

(12:06):
short conversation, sometimes longer, yeah, exactly, And.

Speaker 1 (12:09):
Most of the times it was boomer parents like waxing
philosophic about how great their.

Speaker 2 (12:13):
Stuff was right exactly to that too. But that was
the point, and that's one of the reasons it became
so popular, is like it was really easy to have
a party centered on trivial pursuit.

Speaker 1 (12:24):
Yeah, so I don't think we mentioned you could you
could have teams. I did sort of allude to that,
but you could have I mean, you could probably have
as many people as you want on a team, but
I think they suggested max of four, meaning a max
of twenty four players, and anything more than that would
get at unwieldy. But I feel like we were and
my family wasn't big. It was usually we were in pairs.

Speaker 2 (12:44):
Yeah, that was typically how it was done, so you
could argue and be mad at one another one the
other one insisted on the wrong answer.

Speaker 1 (12:52):
Yeah, And as a kid, I do also remember all
of my family trying to nab me because I was
the only one who really knew much about sport.

Speaker 2 (13:01):
Yeah. That was always my weak one too, and that
was always the one that would get picked for me
if I ever made it to the middle.

Speaker 1 (13:06):
What was your category? Like, if you could pick your
own final category, what would it be?

Speaker 2 (13:11):
It was usually history or entertainment.

Speaker 1 (13:13):
Yeah, I would say, I would say sports and leisure
or entertainment for me, Yeah, definitely not geography.

Speaker 2 (13:19):
Still, yeah, my worst was definitely sports and leisure, and
I would yeah, geography was probably second.

Speaker 1 (13:26):
That's because they didn't have masths.

Speaker 2 (13:29):
Right, only in the British version.

Speaker 1 (13:32):
So I mentioned the name change. That was Sarah, who
was Hani's wife, Chris Haney's wife. Sarah is the one
that said now change it to trivial instead of trivia.
I think it was a pretty great switch. And I
think that's a pretty good intro.

Speaker 2 (13:49):
Oh okay, well if that's the end of the intro,
then Chuck, I think we have to put an ad
break in here.

Speaker 1 (13:54):
Yeah, let's move along to Act two.

Speaker 2 (13:56):
Right after this, so Hani and Abbott like they were like,

(14:27):
we're gonna do this, and they came upon a great
idea that they would visit a toy industry convention, like
the big one in Canada. I think it was the
Canadian Toy Manufacturer's Trade Show. I can't remember what's called.
I looked it up and couldn't find anything on it.
But they went. Remember they were journalists, so they went

(14:48):
as reporters as if they were on an assignment to
do a story on the toy industry, specifically the board
game industry. So they used that cover to pick the
brains of a bunch of people who we're in the
board game industry and one of the well, they found
out a couple of things very quickly. They found out
that the board game industry was in a slump. They

(15:08):
also found out that is a very very closed industry
where if you're a newcomer with an idea, just hit
the bricks like they're not going to listen to you.
That's not how the board game industry works. And they
figured this out. So they decided that from going to
this conference they were going to have to do this themself.
If they wanted to get this game out there, they
were going to have to They couldn't just sell the idea.

(15:30):
They had to make the game first. And that's what
they said about doing.

Speaker 1 (15:34):
Yeah, they were like, we did a pyramid scheme. We're
good at selling things that don't exist. So they enlisted
a little bit of help. They got Chris's brother, John
Haney on the team, and then a guy named Ed
Werner who was a friend who's a corporate attorney, and
they formed the horn Abbot Company. Hani's sickname was the Horn,
and Abbot in this case with one tee was just

(15:54):
a variation on Abbot's two teed name. And they started
selling equity to raise a little money through friends and family.
So they sold forty shares at one thousand dollars each
to thirty two friends and family members. And boy, you
want to talk about an investment that paid off for sure? Wow?
Can you imagine it'd be like one of the early

(16:16):
Apple stock or Google stock, right, you know.

Speaker 2 (16:20):
Very similar to that, not quite as lucrative, but still
pretty well. The people who bought several shares each were
set for life basically after the game hit. Oh yeah,
but at the time Chris Haney told his mom she
shouldn't invest. Yeah, and this is his idea, his business venture.
That's how much he paged in it, I guess. But

(16:42):
there's a guy named Michael Worstlin, and so this iconic,
really elegant design for the package, the board itself, cards,
all that stuff. It was Michael Worstlin's work. He was
eighteen at the time.

Speaker 1 (16:57):
That's just amazing.

Speaker 2 (16:58):
And he didn't get a dime front for it. He
did this work for five shares of stock in the company.
Of equity and yeah, it was very smart, as we'll see.

Speaker 1 (17:08):
Yeah, so they managed to raise forty grand. They got
a seventy five thousand dollars line of credit from a bank,
and that was enough dough to start getting this game
together in earnest. The one thing they didn't have they
had design, They had it kind of all ready to go.
They needed six thousand questions and so I assume with

(17:29):
some of that, what is that like close to one
hundred and twenty grand. They went to Spain in nineteen
eighty one and they said, we're going to go drink
beer on the beach and write questions. We're going to
pack a bunch of you know, dictionaries and encyclopedias and
reference books and newspapers, and we're going to go out there.

(17:51):
We're going to write it for the American audience. Some
of this stuff's going to be pretty obscure stuff. Some
is going to be you know, some are going to
be a little easier. They wanted to kind of give
it a little bit of variety, and finally, in November
eighty one, registered Trivial Pursuit as a trademark and then
launched the Genus not Genius edition that same month is

(18:14):
when that came out.

Speaker 2 (18:16):
Yeah, we should explain, because I've never understood it until
I started researching this. It's called genus because genus, you know,
like in taxonomy, genus is above species. So yeah, there's
a bunch of different variations of this thing. Another way
to interpret another definition of it. It's general, it's not specific,

(18:36):
and so the questions in here were not They were
very general. You didn't have to be like a specialist
in anything to play trivial pursuit, and if you were,
you're kind of handicapped because there was a bunch of
other questions that had nothing to do with your specialist
or special Yes, specialist, specialism, what's the word I'm looking for? Specialty?

Speaker 1 (18:58):
You go, I think or something behind you with the
giant y like dancing up and down.

Speaker 2 (19:03):
I think there's somebody behind me with a hammer.

Speaker 1 (19:06):
Oh no, no, no, no. So toy Fair people were
not too interested at first, at least they got passed
on from the bigs Parker Brothers and Milton Bradley at
the time, saying this is a really expensive game to produce,
and I mean that's something we learned a lot about
and doing this stuff you should know version is like,

(19:26):
cost of production is obviously a big deal. I just
never we were like, you know what if those pieces
were like copper or something, and they're like, uh no,
they're gonna be punch out cardboard. But you got you
guys are sweet.

Speaker 2 (19:38):
Yeah. We were like, well what about plastic. They're like
we keep guessing.

Speaker 1 (19:41):
Yeah, you know Monopoly has all those solid lead figurines,
and they're like no, no, no, no, no no no.

Speaker 2 (19:47):
That's brain damage if you play too much.

Speaker 1 (19:49):
Not to knock the team we worked with, because they
werenating the game turned out great. It's just it's just
how you make a game to make money.

Speaker 2 (19:57):
Yeah, we said it before and we'll say it again.
Like they were the greatest bunch of people that I've
ever worked with as a group. Like, as a group,
they were as good as it comes. It was amazing.

Speaker 1 (20:07):
Yeah, it was pro top to bottom enthusiasm, just a
sheer pleasure. Yeah all right, so enough of that kissing up.
They got about eleven hundred games made, sold them to
local retailers, regional Canadian retailers, basically right before Christmas, and
then this distributor of games Cheaptain products very smartly were like, hey,

(20:33):
we'll put this thing together. My daughter, supposedly the vice
president's daughter, really really loved the game when she went
away for a weekend and played it a lot, and
he's it ended up being a great decision for them
as well.

Speaker 2 (20:44):
So yeah, a hugely consequential And this was Christmas nineteen
eighty one, So this is the first Christmas that Trivial
Pursuit comes out and makes a big splash because they
sold out of those eleven hundred games so quickly that
by the time that end of the by the time
the next Christmas rolled around, they'd already sold one hundred

(21:05):
thousand copies in Canada. And that's a lot. And it
turns out it's even more than you think it is,
because at the time a board game to be a
best seller sold about ten thousand copies. So this little
independent yeah, a very independent game created by a couple
of outsiders, sold ten times more than you would expect

(21:28):
it to sell as a best seller in this first year.

Speaker 1 (21:32):
Yeah, it was incredible. They were making everything in Canada
Canada at the time except for the Dice, thirty five
hundred games a day, but they still couldn't keep up
with the pace in nineteen eighty three. Finally, a US
company called Celcho and Richter I guess or writer, writer, yeah, writer,

(21:52):
they licensed that game. They had real marketing money. Finally,
they sold one point three million games nineteen eighty three
with that company. And one thing we haven't mentioned is
this game was about double the cost of what a
board game was at the time, twenty five to forty
bucks depending on where you went. That's up to ninety

(22:13):
dollars today.

Speaker 2 (22:14):
And so I saw one hundred and twenty five today.

Speaker 1 (22:17):
Oh really?

Speaker 2 (22:18):
Yeah? I put forty dollars in for nineteen eighty three
in west Egg and it said one hundred and twenty five.

Speaker 1 (22:23):
It told me ninety.

Speaker 2 (22:25):
Oh god, oh no, inflation calculations are no in question.

Speaker 1 (22:30):
Oh god, it must be having the worst thing that's
ever happened our beloved West Egg. Well, either way, let's
settle at one ten. Okay, great, But either way, that
was about double the cost of a board game. So
it was no small thing to plunk down that kind
of money on this big, heavy, voluminous, voluminous game.

Speaker 2 (22:51):
Voluptuous too, So you said heavy. Each game package weighs
six pounds, because they they really pulled out the stops
in their materials and like, yeah it was cardboard, and
yeah it was plastic, but it was really really well made,
well manufactured, well designed cardboard and plastic put together. And
again that just the look of it had such an

(23:13):
elegant look. It just didn't. It did not look like
other board games at the time. It's like Sorry or
Trouble or something like that, you know, whereas like wacky.
And there was like a cartoon explosion or something like that,
a bunch of kids rolling dice on there, and that
was a big deal too. There was no kid, no
person anywhere on the box. The only person who showed

(23:35):
up was the poet, the English poet Alexander Pope, who
who's quote what mighty contests derived from trivial things was
on the box. So this whole thing is so highbrow
that it just doesn't even make sense. And yet that
made people want it all the more. It was a
brand new thing. It was a revival of board games,

(23:56):
is what trivial Pursuit was when it came out.

Speaker 1 (23:58):
Yeah, and it was, I mean it said for adults
on the box, which turned out to be a stroke
of genius because I even remember I read an article
in Slate that kind of drove this home. But I
even remember kind of agreeing with what Slate was saying,
which was like as a kid in the eighties, especially

(24:18):
for kids in the eighties who had like narcissistic parents
who didn't show them much attention, it was if you
could play trivial pursuit and hang, it was a chance
to sit at the adult table for a minute. Yeah,
and to like interact with your parents for an hour
a day.

Speaker 2 (24:34):
Yeah, and maybe make some extra allowance in the bargain. Yeah, hey,
you throw a little money on it. You never know exactly.
So this was Christmas nineteen eighty three that it blew
up in the United States, and like when it blew
up in the US, it like it really just changed everything.
Like you said, that first year they sold one point

(24:56):
three million games, they sold twenty million the next year
in nineteen eighty f and by January of nineteen eighty four,
right after it started to come out in the United States,
the New York Times reported that people in New York
were trading cocktail parties for trivial Pursuit parties. And I
was thinking about it, yeah, right, yeah, I don't think
there's anything more insufferable than the New York Times reporting

(25:19):
on what cool New Yorkers are doing right now right.
This was a great example of that eighties version two.

Speaker 1 (25:26):
Yeah, for sure, they had a great marketing early on
with this new company that was a marketing consultant they
hire named Linda Pizzano, who would send these games out
to celebrities who were featured in questions in the game,
and she got letters back from some of them and
she would publish those. She got letters from Pat Boone,
Gregory Peck, and James Mason.

Speaker 2 (25:49):
So the trio.

Speaker 1 (25:50):
Yeah, the boomers are just going nuts. And then to
really drive it home, there was a Time magazine report
that the cast of The Big Chill, the most boomer
movie of all boomers movies of all time, were unwinding
between scenes, enjoying trivial pursuit and looking back at the
nostalgia of their younger days. And that's it was. That

(26:12):
was peak boomer nostalgia, trivial pursuit reporting.

Speaker 2 (26:16):
Yeah, I've never seen that movie, but I do know
it's good that one of the characters lets her husband,
I guess, impregnate serve as like a surrogate sperm donor.
To her friend.

Speaker 1 (26:29):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (26:30):
The only reason I know that is because there was
a great Saturday Night Lives get about it really Yeah,
and I guess did they show the wife who was
like hanging out downstairs in the movie while they went
upstairs or something like that. Yeah, So in the Satura
Night Live one, like she's just sitting there like reflecting,

(26:51):
like drinking tea and like thinking about how great and
just beautiful. This is the sound coming from upstairs. They're
like really getting into it, and she's getting more and
more concerned than more.

Speaker 1 (27:04):
I remember that.

Speaker 2 (27:05):
Yeah, it was I think it was Jan Hooks who
was like the yeah coming downstairs. That was a great sketch.

Speaker 1 (27:10):
Oh that's funny. Well, that movie was very big in
my house. In that soundtrack, I mean, I joke about
it now, but that's literally the thing that introduced me
to Motown. Oh yeah as a kid, Yeah, listening to
I was twelve years old or whatever. It was listening
to Aretha Franklin and the Four Tops and you know
everyone else. Jeremiah was a Bullfrog, which wasn't Motown. But

(27:32):
if you want to hear a more in depth conversation
about that, you can listen to the movie Crush episode
featuring the wonderful and charming Janey had d Tompkins.

Speaker 2 (27:41):
Oh nice, that was her pick, Hunt, that was her pick. Nice.

Speaker 1 (27:44):
Good movie though, but now it suffers from anti boomeritis.

Speaker 2 (27:49):
Oh okay, so I should wait ten years to see it.

Speaker 1 (27:53):
How do you feel about boomers right now?

Speaker 2 (27:55):
I'll wait ten years to say.

Speaker 1 (27:56):
Okay, all right, So nineteen eighty four, well, I guess
we should mention that book. In nineteen eighty three, a
guy named Robert J. Heller wrote a book called How
to Win at Trivial Pursuit. Like that's how big it got.
I think, like ninety six trivia games trying to cash
in on trivial pursuits success, and people writing books like

(28:18):
how to Win at Trivial Pursuit, in which Robert J.
Heller said, why don't you just memorize all six thousand cards?

Speaker 2 (28:24):
That became kind of an urban legend, like your cousin's
friend memorized. Also really thousand questions?

Speaker 1 (28:31):
Yeah, that's funny.

Speaker 2 (28:32):
Yeah. And there were some other cute or interesting anecdotes
I guess that kind of came out around the time.
One was Ronald Reagan was reported on having played the
game while he was waiting for the election results in
nineteen eighty four, and during the game he got two
questions about himself, and you can relax, he got them correct,

(28:55):
both of them.

Speaker 1 (28:57):
Well, that's the only thing Reagan I can do, is
the one word.

Speaker 2 (29:01):
One of the one of the facts I saw bandied
about in some of the reporting that was a great
Reagan by the way, was that either Ronald Reagan signed
Clark Gable's discharge papers from the army or Clark Gable
signed robins. It depends on who you ask, Yes.

Speaker 1 (29:18):
What was one of them authorized to do so? Or
are they just like, come over here, buddy, sign this thing.

Speaker 2 (29:22):
No, No, like they just happened to be like that
was just happened to be the luck of the draw
as far as the arrangement went.

Speaker 1 (29:29):
Oh, like they bore witness or something.

Speaker 2 (29:31):
No. I think like, as let's say it was Clark
Gable who signed them, he would have maybe been like
a higher up to Ronald Reagan, because Ronald Reagan was
getting out. It happened to be Clark Gable rather than
Colonel Joe Schmoe.

Speaker 1 (29:43):
Who was glad I complicated that very clean and cool story.
Another fun little trivial factoid, And yes, I'm saying factoid
was that q E two Queen Elizabeth I hosted and
the first NERD Cruise. It sounds like because she hosted
an eight day trivial pursuit tournament crews in I guess

(30:05):
eighty five.

Speaker 2 (30:06):
And so at each Christmas nineteen eighty three, it was
like you could not find that thing. Yeah, in nineteen
eighty four, same same deal, Like it was really hard
to find. But this time Selchow and writer had like
learned their lesson and we're like keeping up with supply
a lot better than they were at the very beginning
of this whole thing. And so at the at the

(30:29):
peak of this, I think it really peaked in eighty four,
but that certainly continued on in the nineteen eighty five.
Oh yeah, and the spring of nineteen eighty five, fifteen
percent of households in America had a trivial pursuit game
in their house. I saw at some point it was
twenty percent, one in five.

Speaker 1 (30:49):
Yeah, I think they're at about eighty million to date game.

Speaker 2 (30:53):
Oh, I believe that totally.

Speaker 1 (30:56):
That's just a staggering amount of game. I mean, my
mom still you talked about how well it was made.
My mom still has our the og from whatever forty
eight years ago.

Speaker 2 (31:04):
Yeah, I'm sure it's just a little bit frayed in,
like yep, the parts were it folded and the rest
of it's just fine.

Speaker 1 (31:09):
No, you can still read Richard Nixon on a third
of those cards.

Speaker 2 (31:13):
Nice, there's a little like cocaine in the little folds
and like tequila stains on some of the in the spots.

Speaker 1 (31:20):
Oh not in my family, pal, So Trivial Pursuit is
selling Gangbusters. Abbott and Haney are rich dudes and also
weirdly kind of celebrities. They were not shy. They love
to be on TV and to do interviews. They were
in TV commercials, They were pitchmen for other brands like
Amex and Diet Coke, and they would put that Trivial

(31:43):
Pursuit branding on anything they thought they could make money of.
And like you mentioned, those original investors did really, really well.
There was an entertainment writer at the Toronto Globe and
Mail named Susan Ferrier McKay who took out a bank
loan to buy ten shares early on, and in nineteen
eighty four she bought a house and then she retired

(32:04):
not too long after that.

Speaker 2 (32:06):
Yeah, and Worstlin, the guy the eighteen year olds who
did all the art, he founded a company called Worstlin
Group All one word that became pretty successful marketers in Toronto,
and he used his money from his shares to start that,
so it definitely paid off. And then yeah, like you said,
the Heinies and Chris Abber or Scott Abbott were just

(32:28):
mega rich from this. I mean, this game made hundreds
of millions of dollars in the eighties, like eighties money.
God knows what West Egg would convert that to, but
there was a lot of money made off this, and
you got to think back like these were just a
couple of dudes who had an idea and went with it,
although there were people who were like, yeah, that's questionable

(32:50):
whether you had that idea, like you kind of referred
to earlier. Right.

Speaker 1 (32:54):
Yeah, there were two cases, at least like two notable
court cases. One was a lawsuit in nineteen ninety four
from a guy, an Australian named David Wall who said, hey,
in nineteen seventy nine, this Chris Haney guy picked me
and my buddy up when we were hitchhiking and we
were in Nova, Scotia, and while we were driving around,

(33:17):
I told him about this idea for the game, like
really specifically, like my mom has pictures of the wheel
that I drew and the pie pieces and everything. In
the court were like, well where are those documents And
he was like, I don't have those anymore. And they
said we'll bring forward some witnesses and he was like,
no one, No one's really coming forward. They moved, Yeah,

(33:40):
they moved away, Hane said, or he said that. Hany
later offered him shares, like, hey man, we're getting this
game that you got told me the idea for going,
and I'm going to offer to buy you shares. This
is a real thing. He refused. Had he bought those shares,
he would have ended up a rich person as well.
But in court, Haney was like, I never met this guy,

(34:02):
never picked him up. They awarded him initially, well not
awarded him. He got zero dollars, but the judge ruled
in Haney's favor and awarded them one point two million
dollars in court costs, just after a thirteen year legal battle.
But they reduced that to one million because they said,
but you know what, your big corporate attorneys came in

(34:23):
and sued two of his witnesses. So we're gonna knock
off two hundred grand and just make it a million.

Speaker 2 (34:29):
Yeah, I mean imagine being that guy. You're like, you
owe me tens of millions of dollars and then ten
years later you owe them a million dollars. Like, yeah,
this is just some guy. He wasn't some like high
flying jet setter who had a bunch of money. I
don't know what happened to him.

Speaker 1 (34:43):
But yeah, I mean he had a hard he didn't
have the million bucks. I saw that. So they said
they were looking to garnish his wages, and I was like,
oh man, this just gets from bad to worse.

Speaker 2 (34:52):
Yeah, but I mean, this is the one guy who
said that, and like you said, he didn't come up
with witnesses or any kind of supporting evidence. And yeah,
it's just not clear what the deal was, whether he
was just looking for a payday or if he did
get ripped off. But as far as the court's concerned,
he definitely did not get ripped off.

Speaker 1 (35:10):
Yeah. What I was trying to find out was they
you know, they said they sued to first. The judge
said there was no witnesses. Then I find out that
they had sued two of the witnesses, which they considered like,
you know, witness intimidation or something. Sure, so I'm wondering
if one of those witnesses they sued was like the
friend that hitchhiked with them, And I'm just I couldn't
find anything out. It's so hard to find out stuff

(35:32):
about old court cases.

Speaker 2 (35:33):
Well, if if it was like a David and Goliath
thing where Goliath won, that would be very sad. Indeed, Yeah,
what I imagine that. Yeah, we'll move on because this
one's getting really sad. Uh. The other one is the
story of a guy named Fred Elworth, And if you
are into trivia, fred Worth is essentially your messiah. He
is the original trivia dude who's been writing books on trivia,

(35:58):
books like containing trivia for decades and decades. Now. I
don't know if he's still a live but if he is,
he's probably still going strong. And he apparently published a
three volume Encyclopedia of trivia at some point, this is
before Trivia Pursuit was launched, and he did something. You
know how we've talked about map makers, like including like

(36:19):
a fake town to basically protect their properties, see if
somebody ripped them off.

Speaker 1 (36:24):
Yeah, he did.

Speaker 2 (36:25):
Something with trivia question. He included a trick question in
his stuff.

Speaker 1 (36:30):
He did, and that that well, it didn't bear fruit,
but it played out in his favor. It was a
question on Colombo the TV show with what's his name
Peter Falk, Peter Falk, Almos said Robert Blake, I used
to get those confused.

Speaker 2 (36:45):
No, that was Barretta.

Speaker 1 (36:47):
Yeah, he sees the one who murdered his wife in
real life.

Speaker 2 (36:50):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (36:51):
Yeah, anyway, Peter Falk did not murdered his wife as
far as I know, but he he was Frank Colombo.
And and the question it was, the answer was Philip Columbo,
Like what was Columbo's real name? And you know, I
don't know if anywhere else Philip Columbo had ever been printed,
So it looked like pretty good proof to me. He
sued for three hundred million bucks, claimed that close to

(37:14):
seventeen hundred of the questions were his, and a judge
threw it out and said, first of all, this game
is a lot different than that book, and at which
time Worth should have said, that's not what I'm saying, right,
And then he said but you can't copyright facts. No case,
which I officially feel bad for Worth because it seems
clear to me that they took a lot of his questions.

Speaker 2 (37:36):
Uh yeah, he probably. I mean they said that they
used his book for creating these things. Like they didn't
deny that at all, but yeah, I guess it was
just their Their case was based on the idea that
like the effects of fact, like this guy didn't it's
not a creation of his own. Yes, he found it right, No,
I get it. And I imagine Fred Worth probably thought
that was like an iron proof defense, like.

Speaker 1 (37:58):
Yeah, yeah, I got it.

Speaker 2 (37:59):
These people in putting this question in there and it
didn't work out. I'm sure he was astonished when that
came along that ruling. But also, just before we move on, Chuck,
I just want to tell all of our hardcore Colombo
fan listeners to just stop your emails right now. We
know for a fact that Frank is not, as far
as Cannon goes, Colombo's first name. Yeah, canonically Colombo doesn't

(38:22):
have a first name or else. His first name is lieutenant.
So Frank Columbo just happened to show up in a
couple of screenshots that the producers of the show originally
never intended anybody to be able to zoom in on.

Speaker 1 (38:34):
Boy, do you think there are any Colombo pet ants?
Oh yeah, definitely listen to this.

Speaker 2 (38:41):
Sure, yeah, we got all kinds. Takes all kinds, Chuck.

Speaker 1 (38:47):
So the nineties are now upon us and these guys
are are They said they feel like rock stars. Basically,
they've got all kinds of money. Supposedly John Haney, the
that was brought in early on. They were talking about
finances and he said, we'll be great as long as
we don't do anything stupid like invest in racehorses. So

(39:08):
that's just what they did. Hani and Abbott invested in racehorses,
but for Abbot paid off. He spent fifty grand on
a yearly named Charlie Bailey that ended up winning about
nine hundred thousand dollars in total purses over the years.
Oh yeah, and lots of studding out for big money.
And they both invested in kind of built from the

(39:29):
ground up these two golf courses in Canada, and Abbot
bought that. He was a big hockey guy, so he
bought the Brampton Battalion at the time before moving them
north and changing their name, and they are from the
Ontario Hockey League, and I think he might still own them.

Speaker 2 (39:47):
Oh yeah, I think so.

Speaker 1 (39:48):
I mean this article I found was from the late
twenty teens.

Speaker 2 (39:53):
Oh yeah probably then.

Speaker 1 (39:54):
Yeah, I don't see why he would have sold it.

Speaker 2 (39:57):
Oh so they're now the Brampton Battalion. They were the
North bab Battalion.

Speaker 1 (40:01):
Right, no, no, no, and now they're in North Bay.

Speaker 2 (40:04):
Okay, I always get North Bay and Brampton. Confused, I
do too. So Olivia dug up a pretty interesting article written.

Speaker 1 (40:13):
By who chuck a guy named Ron Rodriguez.

Speaker 2 (40:17):
No, it's one Rodriguez.

Speaker 1 (40:19):
Oh is it one?

Speaker 2 (40:20):
Yeah? Okay, so mister Rodriguez is what we're going to
call him from now. And because his name is really
hard to say, it turns out he was a He
wrote I think a daily quota of forty trivial pursuit
questions a day, obviously, and only about half would get picked.
And we kind of went through that too, because we

(40:41):
helped out putting questions together for our version, and they've
asked for hundreds and hundreds of them and you're like, okay,
well we're done. They're like, okay, well we're going to
use about a third of those, So we're gonna have
to do this again a couple more times. And it
was like, there weren't that many facts in all of
the episodes of stuff you should know, you guys, But
we pulled it out. But I can feel mister Rodriguez

(41:03):
his pain.

Speaker 1 (41:04):
Yeah, for sure. It was a lot of writing. He
said that he is the dictionary of twentieth century world politics,
pop culture magazines. As his story goes, when he needed
Rambo questions, he watched all the Rambo movies two times
to come up with the best questions. And you know,
once you write them, they did. I think he had

(41:25):
a partner. They had some researchers on the team and
they would fact check and do corrections and tweaks and
stuff like that.

Speaker 2 (41:31):
Yeah, I should say we didn't. We weren't actually writing
the questions. We were coming up with the source material
for the question.

Speaker 1 (41:37):
Yeah, from the podcast Huge Signa.

Speaker 2 (41:39):
They're going, oh no, yeah, there's some writer. It has
Bro's like, uh.

Speaker 1 (41:46):
As far as the nitty gritty goes, questions have a
maximum of forty five characters. They prefer two lines, even
though there can be three. They just visually thought the
two line questions looked better, so they tried to edit
them down when possible.

Speaker 2 (42:02):
Yeah, and then I think now, over the years there's
been about three hundred editions published, and very early on
they stayed fairly generalist. Although I mean, let me take
that back. They went from Genus to silver screen edition,
baby Boomers Edition, and I think a sports edition, but

(42:25):
compared to some of the editions that they've come up
with now, those are still pretty generalists. So another one
was Disney. Disney was the first tie in that they
had in nineteen eighty five, and that was still pretty general.
It wasn't like Donald duck backs specifically, right. Weirdly, here's
a piece of trivia for you. The second brand tie

(42:48):
in that Trivial Pursuit released a game around was Fame.
The TV show and movie Oh Wow, Like I'm going
to Live Forever had its own Trivial Pursuit edition back
in nineteen ninety three.

Speaker 1 (43:00):
Was the first question, how long did the Fame people
think they were going to live?

Speaker 2 (43:05):
That's a great question.

Speaker 1 (43:07):
I couldn't have been very as these editions weren't as
big though, right, there's no way no.

Speaker 2 (43:13):
And that slight article that you referred to the author
makes a case. They were basically saying, I think the
whole premise was trivial pursuit lost its way. And this
is about ten years ago or something. And the premise
or the thesis this author had was that it went
from being general where basically anybody could come along and

(43:34):
try their hand at it, to increasingly more specific, to
where now you had to know everything there is to
know about Harry Potter or everything there is to know
about the Lord of the Rings or Friends or the
Nightmare before Christmas or that kind of thing, and that
it just it made it more and more narrow and
narrowed the pool, so you have to have more and
more additions to appeal as many people as possible, whereas

(43:57):
if you just made more generalists versions of the game,
then you were always going to appeal to the most
people possible.

Speaker 1 (44:05):
You know, some of those versions are definitely not my thing,
but I'm not gonna say it lost its way. I
disagreed with that guy, and like, if you want a
Harry Potter edish and that's your jam, then like I
love it. Sure. In fact, I wouldn't mind a Friends
edition now that I'm thinking of it. I did today
the Friends Edition I think would be kind of fun
for me, or Seinfeld Edition because I know those pretty well.

(44:28):
But I did today by the Greatest Hits Edition, which
is mainly eighties and nineties and a lot of pop culture,
and supposedly that's like a gen X feast. So I
bought that today and hopefully I'll be getting it very soon.

Speaker 2 (44:45):
That's awesome. I will be very disappointed if the Seinfeld
edition doesn't have a question about who invaded Spain in
the nine hundreds and the answers the moops right, it's
got too, it has to.

Speaker 1 (44:59):
Yeah, we could probably write a Seinfeld edition, you and
I could probably.

Speaker 2 (45:04):
They've come up with some other pretty cool ones too.
One's called X. It's for it's much more adult edgy questions.
I think it's for eighteen and up. And it's a
stamp game where if you get it wrong, they stamp
an X onto your forehead and inc and once you
get five stamps on your forehead, you're out.

Speaker 1 (45:22):
Interesting.

Speaker 2 (45:23):
It is interesting. And then the weirdest edition I found,
Chuck was the EMS edition. Emergency Medical Services came out
in twenty twelve, wow, and it had categories like trauma, illness, anatomy.

Speaker 1 (45:37):
It's just minor cuts, major cuts.

Speaker 2 (45:40):
Right, Yeah, I'd like to see some of those questions.
I couldn't find them. And you can also play free online.
There's a new version that came out this year called
Trivial Pursuit Infinite uses generative AI to come up with questions.
And if you are a TV watcher, you can watch
the new Tripe Pursuit game on the CW that's hosted

(46:02):
by the lovable LeVar Burton.

Speaker 1 (46:05):
Oh we love LeVar.

Speaker 2 (46:07):
Everyone loves LeVar.

Speaker 1 (46:08):
Who doesn't, no one?

Speaker 2 (46:10):
Yeah, you got anything else?

Speaker 1 (46:13):
I got nothing else. I'm looking forward to playing, you know.
I do have to say I think I tried to
play the original Genus sometime in the last like five
or six years. It's been a minute, but I remember
it didn't feel like it held up that well. And
that's that's probably due to the fact that it was
written in the eighties and it was geared toward boomers. Gotcha,

(46:34):
but it was still okay.

Speaker 2 (46:36):
Can you give an example of how it didn't hold
up for a general example, Well, just.

Speaker 1 (46:41):
You know, questions about gun smoke and Richard Nixon and
and over and over, like they're.

Speaker 2 (46:46):
Gonna say, it was like deeply sexist or something like that.

Speaker 1 (46:48):
No, no, no, no, not like that. It just felt a
little dated question wise, like, hey, I mean, supposedly the
Master's Edition is the one I think the Gamer ranked
in twenty twenty one and a listicle, and the Gamer
said that the twenty twenty one Master Edition was the
best edition yet. But that Classic Edition has sold the

(47:11):
lion's share of those eighty million versions.

Speaker 2 (47:13):
Yeah, pretty impressive stuff.

Speaker 1 (47:15):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (47:16):
I love these Christmas episodes, the pre Christmas special usually
Christmas Toy episode. Me too, So happy Holidays to all
of you out there. And the next time you see us,
we're going to be on that ad free holiday special
coming soon. Do you have a listener mail today?

Speaker 1 (47:38):
I do?

Speaker 2 (47:39):
Oh great, Well, since Chuck answered in the affirmative when
I asked him if he had a listener mail, it's
time for listener mail.

Speaker 1 (47:46):
Hey, guys, love your September episode on the history of
music streaming. I grew up in the nineties. I can
vividly remember being at my friend Ross's house downloading Weezer
songs off of Napster and burning pirated versions onto CDRs.
Title suggests I'm an active musician now and I wanted
to take a quick moment and give a shout out
to the music streaming platforms that didn't end up in
the episode, like band camp and SoundCloud. Oh yeah, I

(48:10):
feel bad we didn't mention these and we just kind
of went with the big corporate modelists. As an independent artist,
especially like how band camp allows us to promote shows,
discover connect with other musicians directly, and the ability to
customize the look and copy our releases look and copy
on our releases page. It's made getting gigs and connecting
with other indie bands so much easier. I also found

(48:31):
it interesting how the preferred medium of the day has
informed artists choices, has informed their choices when releasing music.
In the nineties, albums were so much longer, he says,
I'm looking at you, Smashing Pumpkins, because a loan CD
could hold more than a vinyl LP or cassette. Today,
there are so much music available at our fingertips. Musicians
are releasing shorter albums, digital mixtapes, and a steady stream

(48:54):
of albumless singles, all in an attempt to stay relevant
and capture fleeting attention spans of listeners. I'm curious to
see what happens over the next decade. Thanks for your
time in the years of parasocial education and entertainment. This
is from Chris and Seattle. And we actually met and
hung out with Chris when many many years ago in Seattle.

(49:16):
He was a friend of our booking agent at least
at the time, Josh Lingren. We still our booking agent.
They were friends at the time, as far as I know,
friends anymore, because well, I don't know. I just didn't ask,
but he I was going to text Linger and ask
if you knew him, but they He came to the
Neptune Show and I even rode in a car with
him with Emily to some after party we went to.

Speaker 2 (49:36):
Wowee.

Speaker 1 (49:38):
Yeah. So good to be back in touch with Chris.

Speaker 2 (49:39):
Yeah, yeah, thanks a lot, Chris, thanks for getting back
in touch. I think that that's no longer parasocial, that's
just social.

Speaker 1 (49:47):
Yeah, you're right.

Speaker 2 (49:48):
Well, if you want to be like Chris and remind
us that we've hung out with you before, and also
share some pretty great information and correct us for not
shouting out independent version of something we talked about. We
love that kind of stuff. You can send us an
email to Stuff Podcast at iHeartRadio.

Speaker 1 (50:04):
Dot com Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio.
For more podcasts myheart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.