Good Job, Brain! - 288: Too Close To Call

Episode Date: May 21, 2025

Whoosh! Trivia and facts about near misses and close calls. Is the ball in or out? Colin serves up some love for the high tech system used to judge tricky tennis calls and predict alternate futures. Chris quizzes us on games that were almost released on the Nintendo Entertainment System, and what's up with those 555 phone numbers you see in movies and TV? Take Karen's close call movie quiz about how your favorite films were almost called something else. ALSO: close elections and tie breakers For advertising inquiries, please contact [e-mail]! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

You're listening to an airwave media podcast. Hello, flattering flatfish flatmates riding in flat tops with flat screens. Welcome to Good Job Brain, your weekly quiz show and offbeat trivia podcast. This is episode 288, and of course, I'm your humble host, Karen, and we are are your bionic biomorphs in biodoms watching biologists biopics. I'm Colin. And I'm Chris. I am also hopped on antibiotics because I have strep throat.

Oh. I sound a little Rod Stewart-ish. A little bit. Well, without further ado, let's jump straight into our first general trivia segment, pop quiz, hot shot. I got two cards here I you know with sometimes I'm like Have I read

You know like these questions seem like I've read them before But yeah Just so everybody knows listeners There's a trash can next to me Every time I read these I throw them in the trash So you should get Karen

A little A card size shredder And just really dramatically Shred each one Yeah And then recycle it responsibly But yeah Well listeners I usually

pick a random trivial pursuit card out from a box. I don't know what they're about. And then you guys have your barnyard buzzers ready. So let's answer some questions. Here we go. This is Trivial Pursuit Classic Edition. Okay. Blue Wedge for geography.

After China, what is the second most populous country in the world? Chris. India. Correct. It is India. Next question. Pink Wedge for pop culture. For which 1996 hip-hop classic did Tupac release a video that's a parody of Mad Max set in Oakland of the future. Hey, Bay Area question. Colin? That's, uh, it was that, California love, right? California love. Dern-da-da. Yep. So cool. Next question, Yellow Edge. Oh, geez.

Which U.S. President's home was Monticello? Chris. It wasn't me who buzzed in. I know the answer. But I can't legally take it. Colin? I better get it right now, man, because I know Chris knows it. That was Jefferson.

That was Jefferson, right? Yeah, Thomas Jefferson. Tommy Jeff's. Purple Wedge. Next question. Harper Lee's Go Set a Watchman is the sequel to which novel? Chris.

Tequila Mockingbird. Tequila Mockingbird. The sequel was published in 2015. Yeah, decades, decades later. So 55 years after the first book. Wow. All right, Green Wedge for Science. The three astronauts on the first lunar landing mission

all had life insurance policies to carry. for their families. True or false? Oh. False. They didn't have faith. I'll say true. I'll say true. They didn't have families. I'll say true. I'll say true. I'll say true. It is false. It says here, premiums cost too much. Oh, okay. How do you underwrite that? Rim shot. How do you do that, right? Yeah, exactly. Yeah. They signed autographs pre-launched to be cashed in if they died. That's smart.

Wow. That's the capitalist insurance policy, which is here you go, baby. Here's some stuff to sell if I go up in a ball of fire. Sorry, I die. Yeah. All right. Spread these out, all right? Don't sell these all at once.

You've got to make these last. What's all step for, man? One catastrophic equipment failure for me. You got to put together some death autographs. It beats, it beats, you know, making a will. Yeah. Well, would these be, like, on a picture of, like a headshot of yourself? I'm imagining, like, baseball cards or, yeah, you know, like, glossies, maybe headshots, sure, yeah.

But, like, whatever, like, you would see, like, in the deli, right? Like, you know, the deli has, like, Jerry Seinfeld or Weird Al or somebody, they've got their, you know. Right. That's his deli. I'm going to risk it. Sorry, I died. Exactly. Always black and white.

Doesn't matter what generation the star is from. Okay. Last question, orange wedge. Man, I feel like we've had these questions before. All right, Orange Wedge. Olympic gold medals are made mostly of which metal? Gold. Silver or iron.

Oh. Colin. I think it's silver. I think he's silver. Even the gold ones are gold-plated off and silver, I think. Correct. Yeah. Oh, interesting.

Yes, silver. And the last solid gold medals were awarded in 1912. Mm-hmm. All right. Going on the trash. Buy card. It's like David Letterman where he flings the top ten card. Yeah.

It's too old of a reference. Should we do another card? Yeah. Okay, let's do another card. All right, listeners at home, answer along. Blue Wedge for Geography. Oh, this is a Trivial Pursuit, also Classic Edition.

Which city is home to the Coliseum? And the Spanish Steps. Oh. That Coliseum. Yeah. Colin. Are they looking for Rome here? They're looking for Rome.

Not the New Haven Coliseum. Not Oakland Coliseum. Hey. Pink Wedge for pop culture. Which crime fighter drives a weapons-laden Chrysler, Imperial Crown. nicknamed Black Beauty. Ooh, interesting.

Which crime fighter drives a weapons-laden Chrysler Imperial Crown, nicknamed Black Beauty. Okay. Huh. Okay, so Crime Fighter. It sounds like a comic book superhero, but it might not be weapons-laden? Is it an old, I mean, is it like the shadow or somebody? Is it like an old crime fighter?

Um, are we going to feel silly? I don't have a guess. Go for it, Chris. All right. James Bond. No. No, no, no, no. That's, that's, that's, that's too obvious or it's too, uh, it's, it's too

it's too often. It's too, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah, it is green hornet. Oh, okay. Green Hornet, black beauty. All right. Next question, Yellow Edge.

Name three of the four presidents to win the Nobel Peace Prize. Okay. All right. We'll tag team here, Chris. Okay. All right. Barack Obama. Ah, dang. Um, uh, a Nobel Peace Prize. Jimmy Carter? Yes. Yeah. Okay. All right. What about the first one? There's two before Carter. Hmm. Hmm. Carter, Obama are the most recent. Yeah. Okay. I'll tell you, this is a trivia fact that I am very proud to know. Oh, nice. First one. was given to Theodore Roosevelt. Ah, okay, okay. Theodore Roosevelt. All right. And then Woodrow Wilson.

Oh, yeah. Okay, that's good to know. That's a good, I could see that one coming up a lot, like one point each at a pub quiz. That's a great, yeah. Purple Wedge for literature, which author who suffered from chronic insomnia created one of the least sleep-deprived literary characters, Rip Van Winkle. Least.

Least sleep-deprived. I don't know, yeah, I don't know, yeah. Was that Washington Irving? Yes, Washington Irving, Sleepy Hollow, and also Rip Van Winkle. Least Sleep Deprived. I know, it's like double negatives. Greenwitre Science, what two summer-friendly fruits are combined to make a pluot? Chris.

I hope it's a plum and an apricot. Yeah, it is. All right. Sure is. All right. Last question here, Orange Wedge. Which group is usually credited with making the first smores in 1927? Oh.

Which one is it? I think we might have both at the same time. I think boy stouts is... That's what I was going to say also. It is Girl Scouts. Really? Yes. The recipe appeared in the handbook, tramping and trailing with the girls.

Scouts. Okay. That's a good 50-50. That is a good. Yeah. Yeah. All right. Good job. Brains. Today's episode. Colin, you picked the interesting topic. I was hunting for cool stuff. Came to me out of a conversation I was having with my wife. You know, we like to play tennis. My wife and I, she played in high school. She's fundamentally much better than I am. Anyway, we're talking about line calls. She suggested you guys should have a show about Close calls. Intriguing. So this week, it's too close to call.

So when I'm doing work at my desk, I usually listen to music. But lately, I've been on a YouTube kick. There's a series of videos where an actor, director will like talk through a timeline of their iconic work. I don't know if you've seen them. GQ has a series like that. Vanity Fair has a series like that. And so I've learned so many cool things, production details.

I'll share some with you. So for example, there was one I was watching was from the director, Ryan Johnson, who's directed Knives Out and he was talking about this one scene. He said that, well, you can see that some of the characters in the movie use iPhones. modern movie people are using iPhones and he said that Apple has a certain rule because you have to get their approval to use their devices or likeness of devices in movies right if like a character is using an iPhone they have to pass it through Apple to make sure it's okay but Apple has a rule that yes characters can have iPhones except for the villain Apple will not approve the use of iPhones if

the owner of the iPhone the movie is a bad guy So I was watching one of these, and it was Samuel L. Jackson, you know, breaking down his roles. And he was talking about snakes on a plane. And early on, he heard that there was a movie being made about these killer snakes on a plane. And he's like, I just want to be in it. Like, let alone star and be the main character. He's like, I just want in. They're like, yeah, won't you star in this movie?

And so when they started shooting, the production company was calling the movie. Pacific Air Flight 121. And Sam Hill Jackson's like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. I thought this movie was snakes on a plane. That's what you guys were calling it. That's what I was calling it.

That's what immediately attracted me to the project was the fact that the title was snakes on a plane. There is no doubt about what you were getting into. Yes. And the movie company was like, well, we don't want to give it away. And Sam Hillel Jackson's like, no, no, no, no, no, no. This is the only reason I took the job. So Snakes on a plane was so close to being called Pacific Air Flight 121.

In the spirit of close calls, what could have been? I have a quiz about iconic movies that were super close to be called something else. Nice. Movies that were called something else due to a variety of reasons. All right? All right. So here we go. buzz in with what you think the answer is.

First question, what movie was almost called the lunch bunch, which is technically more accurate considering they eat their sandwiches filled with cereal, quarter gallon milk, and sushi around noon. Colin. Is that the breakfast club? It is the breakfast club. The lunch, the lunch, lunch. The lunch, lunch.

It rhymes. It sounds like just. A variety show, Kids Hour, yeah, it doesn't sound like a hip movie in any way. Technically, it's more correct because they eat their lunch.

They're not eating breakfast. All right. Next question. What movie was almost called Star Beast? But was renamed because Star Beast wasn't terrifying enough. Oh.

Chris. Alien. It is. is alien. Wow. Can you imagine? What a bad name. Yeah. Especially coming like, you know, just a couple years after Star Wars, too. It would have just, it would have seemed like such an obvious

attempt to ride the coattails. Maybe. Maybe. I don't know. Maybe not. All right. This one's tricky. What 1994 cult favorite movie had to modify its original title when an MTV show of the same name debuted in 1992? You can give me the show or the movie name. Say it again.

What 1994 cult favorite movie had to modify its original title when an MTV show of the same original title debuted in 1992. Ooh, Colin. Unplugged. Oh, I see where you're going. Incorrect. I'm trying to think. Oh.

Chris? Pulp Fiction? incorrect what MTVV show premiered in 92 yeah I mean the real world or uh yes it is the real world okay oh reality bites it's reality bites wow way to put that one together Chris good job yeah originally called the real world then the show yeah real world the show came about they're like whoops we got a change our title real world became reality bites which is not bad a good renaming Right. Next question.

The film adaptation of Stephen King's coming-of-age novella titled The Body was renamed into what? Because The Body sounded too much like a horror film or an adult film. Chris. Stand by me. Stand by me. Has some moments, but a very tender movie. It's a good one. The Body may have sounded a little bit too gruesome.

even though that's kind of in the plot anyways right here we go what movie's working title was 10 things i hate about clueless road trips when i can't hardly wait to be kissed chris not another teen movie not another teen movie starring your friend yes sevens yeah yeah we totally hung out and stuff in the same room maybe yeah in the same room absolutely yep yep okay next question This movie was almost called Black Mask, which is the name of a crime fiction magazine from the 1920s that launched the hard-boiled genre. But some would call them schlocky printed stories. Ooh, Colin. Is this Pulp Fiction? This is Pulp Fiction. Nice, nice.

Yes, yes, yes. Black Mask was the name of magazine. Nice. Oh, what is it? I didn't know that. Pulpy fiction. That's cool. This film was almost known as the title of the stage play was based on, called Everybody Comes to Ricks. The Ricks in this case is Ricks Cafe, located in Morocco.

Oh. Chris. Casablanca. Casablanca, yes. Based on a stage play called Everybody Comes to Ricks. Right. Apparently, everybody hated the stage play. But the movie turned out really good.

Casa Blanca. All right. Next one. A little bit tricky. Another cult favorite, Drop Dead Gorgeous, starring Kirsten Dunst and Denise Richards, is a black comedy about contestants of a small town beauty pageant, mysteriously dying,

was originally titled What? Until an ice cream chain of the same name filed a lawsuit. Wow. It's funny because I remember it, this movie as the original name. And when it came out, I was like, wait, I thought it was called this. Oh, interesting. Go for it. Dairy queen?

Yes. Dairy queens. Interesting. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, dairy queens. It was a dairy town. They're queens of a pageant. Oh, funny.

Oh, interesting. That's great. Yeah. I'm sure if it wasn't about mischievous murders and stuff, and they'd be like, oh. Next question. 007, license to kill was originally called, get this, license revoked. I remember that. Yes.

They printed out posters. They printed out all the promotional materials. It was 007 license revoked. And early audiences, they were confused about the license. Is this about like a driver's license being revoked? Right. Did he just get in? trouble with the yeah the constable yeah have the impact and so they changed it last minute even

though yeah a lot of the the stuff was already printed and promotion materials were already out here's the question who played james bond in license to kill slash revoked uh Colin I think we both had I think that was a that was a Dalton one right was that a Timothy Dalton yeah Timothy Dalton yeah license revoked they've kind of grown on me I don't think I've watched I've watched I've watched a single one. The only Timothy Dalton movie I watched was with Fran Drescher, a beautician and the Beast, which is the same premise as the nanny, but just happening in an Eastern European country. All right. Last question. Chris would know this one. Oh, boy. What was the original title of the classic film Goodfellas based on the real life mobster Henry

Hill. Chris. Wise guy. Yeah. So Goodfell's was based on a nonfiction book by Nicholas Pellegi. I don't know if I'm pronouncing it right. I think you are. Yep.

Called wise guy. And it was about Henry Hill. He was a real life mobster turned informant. Fun fact about that book. I think my copy of it is still in Collins house. I was going to say fun fact about that book. I have a copy that was lent to me by Chris Kohler. So yeah, we're feeling.

and the psychic bond here, Chris. Yeah. Another fun fact that's going to top your fun facts. Nicholas Pilegi, the writer of the book, was married to filmmaker Nora Ephron. Okay. Oh, I did not know that. And wrote several movies, Romcom Queen, when Harry met Sally, Sleepless in Seattle, you've got male, Julie and Julia.

And they were married, so they went through the Henry Hill research together. Oh, okay. And, oh, wait a minute. Nora Ephron went on to make my blue heaven, which is pretty much an alternative. Oh, my God. You're blowing my mind right now, Karen. They're in the same universe. I had always, not, oh, I mean, not always, but since those movies came out anyway,

I had known that they were sort of twinned in a way. I don't think I ever knew that they were a couple. that's that's amazing to me that's incredible yeah so you have goodfell's which is a serious super dramatic and violent movie about gangsters and they have my blue heaven which is the buddy comedy about steve martin being in the witness protection program as as a mobster it's a strange it's a strange movie it is a very strange movie wow you're connecting some amazing yeah yeah it blew my mind too for all you people who like to have like a double future film fest at home you can do goodfellas and then my blue heaven

And those are my movie close calls, movies that could have been called something else, something kind of bad. I was watching. Do you guys know the movie? This is from 1986, FX. Oh, yeah. Oh, my God. Was it that old? Yeah, yeah, 1986. One of my favorites with Brian Denahey and Brian Brown. And anyway, Jerry Orbach, great, in my opinion, great movie. It holds up really well. The creators of the movie, they lobbied the studio. really hard for the name FX, like F slash X, which, of course, meaning special effects, right? You know, and I think like now in 2025, that's a pretty common term. A lot of people know FX. Yeah, right, right. But in 86, people really did not know this term in the studio pushed back and pushed back.

They wanted to give it a more traditional name. But the creator's like, no, it's like, MASH. It's like, we're going to teach people this term. It's going to be cool, wait, we promise. And, you know, it was a compelling enough argument. argument that the studio relented. So the movie came out and the name recognition was horrible, absolutely terrible. And the creators, to their credit, they said, yeah, we really kind of blew it. People had no idea what it meant. FX. It didn't convey anything about the

movie at all. That's like kind of a reverse close call where they should have listened to what the studio wanted and not gone with FX, which is what they did. Yeah, it's strange because I remember in A string of movies in the late 90s, early 2000s, it was all about like a shortened cool name. So Independence Day, for some reason, was marketed as ID4. Yes. Do you remember that? I absolutely do. Did you go watch ID4?

Yeah. What? Yeah. Like, it's not the fourth movie. It's not, you know, it's like they all had to have a catchy name. T2, it said Terminator 2. T2. I can't be bothered to say all this extra syllables.

Yeah. It was just too. Cool for school. All right. Well, speaking of tennis, as I was at the top of the show, I don't know how much tennis do you guys watch. Maybe some of the Grand Slams. Probably John McRoehrows swearing or something.

Right, John McEnroe swearing. Well, since the decades when he was an active player on the tour, there had been a number of developments in automatic line judge and line call technology, right? But the current overwhelming dominant technology that you'll see on the professional tennis circuit is called the hawk eye, the hawk eye system. And the way that you'll see it if you're watching a, you know, a high level pro tennis match usually is the players will very often have a limited number of challenges or calls, right? You know, like very often they'll have two. So they'll still have humans, you know, especially at the very high levels, humans on the lines, watching the line. calling in and out, and the players can have a limited number of challenges.

They can say, no, go to the challenge, go to the replay. You're full of poop. Yeah, and sometimes words much stronger than that, right. So what the Hawkeye system is replacing is essentially just relying on people. It's a network of very high-quality cameras and sensors placed around the tennis surface. They calculate the trajectory. of the ball for consultation. The cameras, they communicate with each other.

So at any instant in time, one camera, as little as three frames of high-speed video, calculate where the ball was, communicate with the other cameras, and then they will together produce sort of a 3D representation of the ball moving through space, especially in a sport like tennis where you can put a lot of spin on the ball. And so they'll say, all right, and they'll go up and they'll show it on the giant screen over the stadium and they'll start with the ball, all in, you know, computer simulated technology and they'll show the ball moving with a little trailing tail, and then they'll slow it down and zoom in right at the end, and then they'll show the ball very dramatically, like landing

either in the line, outside the line. And if it's really close, they'll zoom way in to show you the overlap. It's a crowd pleaser. It really, it makes for good entertainment. The system was developed in 2000 by engineers in England. Technology was spun off into its own company. It's been owned by Sony for a while since 2011. It is marketing itself out to a lot of pro sport circuits. Oh, not just tennis. I first knew it in tennis, but it can be applied to really any sport that has a ball, any sport that has boundaries, and where you need to keep track in starting around 2006, 2007, 2008, the major pro Grand Slam tournament started incorporating it, the U.S. Open, the Australian Open, Wimbledon. The French Open, this is a good little trivia nugget here for you.

The French Open does not rely on the Hawkeye. Do you guys know why that might be, why they don't need the line judging technology at the French Open? Oh, because of the surface, because they can tell where the ball lands by the clay surface. You got it, Karen, that's right. The clay kind of tells its own tale. That's right. I was surprised and delighted to discover that it originated. Now, I remember I told you it was developed in England.

It originated as a tool to be used to augment cricket matches, cricket technology. So the one thing that Hawkeye can do very well is it can capture and replay trajectories of a ball through space for judgment or, you know, did it. hit the line, did not hit the line, et cetera, that kind of thing. But the main reason that it was developed was deciding leg before wicket is when the ball on its way to hit the posts behind the batsman hits the batsman's leg and is deflected away. And in the official's judgment, if that ball would have hit the posts, the stumps, as they're called. If the leg wasn't in the way. That's right.

They're calling a leg before Wicked decision. So you have a case here where it's not about what did the ball do. It's about what might the ball have done. And so they developed this technology to predict and assist the umpires in saying like, based on the bounce path before it hit the leg, it would have hit the stumps or it would not have hit the stumps. and it's like they're spatially removing the leg that's right they're doing like you know CSI level reconstruction it's like oh i can show you what the ball did would you like to know what it would have done yeah it's a lot cooler yeah it's like minority report for balls yes exactly i had no

idea no idea that it came from cricket first of all and that it was yeah as you say minority report for sports balls that's great that's much better. They really, they should have marketed it. Maybe they will. So yeah, that's just a little bit about Hawkeye for you guys. So now next time you'll, when you watch tennis, we're coming up here on a tournament here. You guys, you guys don't know what to look for. All right. Let's take a quick break and we'll be right back. Are you dreaming about becoming a nurse or maybe you're already in nursing school? I'm Nurse Moe, creator of the straight A nursing podcast and I want you to know that I'm here for you.

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Smooth puzzles, smart trivia. Good job, brain. Well, I just came back from the game developers conference or GDC. My friends at the Video Game History Foundation were there. Video Game History Foundation is a nonprofit. dedicated to preserving history of video games. Just this year, they launched their digital archive, their digital library. Library.gamehistory.org, which you should definitely go check out.

It's the ultimate research tool for video game history. It's like magazines and game design documents and supplemental materials, all text searchable. So they were there at GDC with a big booth on the show floor promoting the foundation with a very cool display of unreleased games for the Nintendo Entertainment System. The NES, the 8-bit Nintendo, very popular in the 80s and the 90s. And everybody, all the video game, computer game publishers kind of wanted to get in on the action. There was a lot of money to be made, you know, wanted to make games for the original Nintendo system.

And that meant that there were a lot of games that nearly came out, but did not. because it was often almost cheaper to make a game to like have somebody design program a game than it was to actually manufacture it and put it into stores because you would have to get the cartridges made by Nintendo and they would cost, there would be a significant upfront cost to get like a minimum order of cartridges, you know?

And so a lot of times a game would get finished and they'd look at it and say, even if the game was good, bad, whatever, it's like it's not worth pouring in the extra money to actually distribute this game. And so very often, video game history foundation, other groups will be able to find games that didn't get released. Maybe they're sitting on a prototype game cartridge, you know, that somebody took from work and had it in their house. You know, maybe they find in some rare cases the source code. And sometimes people pull stuff out of their radix. And there's an unreleased game in there

because their uncle actually did work at Nintendo. You know, it happens. At any rate, as a shout out to the Video Game History Foundation, I put together a quiz themed around real games for the 8-bit Nintendo Entertainment System released in 85, you know, and these games were not released. Okay. Some of them were found and you can play them, but some of them were not found and might still be out there somewhere.

So here is your quiz about games that almost came out for the gender entertainment system. Will we know them? The answer is not necessarily the name of the game. Okay, okay, about. You're going to learn about some of these games, but you don't need to love the name of the game, basically, right? Don't worry, it's not hardcore video game time.

All right, here we go. The Grape Escape was the subtitle of a finished but unreleased NES game based on this fictional R&B group. Is this, is this the California Raisins? Oh, my California Raisins. Oh, the grape escape. That's so good. The California Raisins game was discovered, and you can find it on the internet and you can play it.

I know you are yourself an aficionado of the California Raisins, Chris. Yes. I did end up selling my childhood. raisins collection because i i you know i can't keep everything um all right next question a james bond game for the nes that was apparently finished but not yet found was based on nineteen eighty nine's license to kill the final film starring this actor Karen as double oh seven Karen two beautician and the beast Timothy Dalton But Titian and the Beast, Timothy Dalton, indeed.

Fantastic. How'd you know that? Wow. Well, wait, so what do you mean not found? It is known that it was in development. They did it for other platforms. Oh, I see. And in interviews with the developers, they said, oh, yeah, we made a version for the NES, and it was done.

And it wasn't published. Nobody's found it yet. So it might still be out there. starring Timothy Dalton. Hopefully that's the last time we talk about Timothy Dalton on this episode. Oh, you never know.

You can come back later, yeah. All right. Next question. An NES game was planned but never released based on this sequel to the 1991 film The Adams Family.

Oh, the sequel. Karen. The title, Adams Family's Values. Adam's Family Values. I believe there were Adams Family Values games for other platforms, but again, you know, not the 8-bit Nintendo Entertainment System version, has not been found. May not have been started, who knows. But, you know, sometimes these things have a way of popping up.

All right. Next one, the strong Museum of Play in Rochester, New York, has at this point the only known copy of an NES game based on this 1980s comedy film series which has subtitles such as their first assignment Citizens on Patrol

and Mission to Moscow Colin That's the Police Academy Police Academy Yes In this case they found the source code The Police Academy game

Got it running And they have posted videos of the game running, but because they are a museum, they're not allowed. Oh, oh. They can't distribute it. Right, right. What would be nice is if eventually they would change the laws so that a library could provide like online access to researchers so that you could maybe go onto a website and be able to

actually interact with the game. Yeah. That currently is not allowed. So if you do want to play the NES version of Police Academy and you're a researcher, you can fly to Rochester, New York, and you can visit the archives of the museum and you could play it there. That is pretty cool. Well, in 2020, next question, the year 2020, video game history foundation recovered an unreleased version of an NES car racing game based on this 1990, Tom Cruise. Cruise film.

Karen. Days of Thunder. Yes. Nicely spotted. Yes. There was a released Days of Thunder, but there was also a completely separate project that was like the original version that was in the works. They got close to releasing it, but then it was scrapped and they had a totally different

developer start again. And again, they compiled this game from the developer's original source code. which was on a stack of floppy disks. And if one of those magnetic floppy disks had failed, then it would have been unrecoverable. So it was very lucky, you know. Next one. This is the full title of the game based on American football

endorsed by a legendary coach that Ubisoft did not release for the NES in the year 1993. Okay, this is the full actual. title of this game. That did not really. It ends, it ends in 93. Oh. Full title. The full, the full titles, a three word title.

Karen. John Madden football. It's John Madden football. The game today is called Madden NFL. Oh, I never, I, you know what? When the series began, it was called John Madden. Right, right, right. of John Madden on the cover

which has not been the case the name has been like completely disassociated from you know the original intent which was to have legendary coach John Madden front and center on the game like hey you know but Madden you know is still

so crucial that they must keep calling the game that all right next one I hope I don't have to improvise a series of one-word clues to get you to guess what game show this unreleased NES game was based on Karen. Whose line is it anyways? It is not that.

You're thinking about improvise, but let's think about having to come up with a series of one-word clues. Colin. Is it password? Password. Password. Technically, it's super password. Ah, right, right. It's based on the game show, generally known as password, yes.

All right. Legendary game designer Shigeru Miyamoto and Will Wright worked together to create this canceled NES game, which the Video Game History Foundation recovered in 2017. Oh. Oh, Miyamoto and Will Wright, creator of the Sims. The Sims creator, right? Okay. It's a game that has been released on other platforms.

Are we overthinking this one, Taryn? I think so. Is it just SimCity? It's Tim City. Okay. All right. Oh, I see. Okay.

Nice. And the last question. This unreleased game based on a sitcom was described as being, quote, as simple as Lucas Films Maniac Mansion, so the player can direct the characters as easily as as Pegg manipulates Al's wallet. Married with children. I want a married new children, any S-D-A-S game.

How it work! So the original pitch, the original concept for this was, and there is exactly one sort of in-development screenshot of a computer version out there, and it was a point-and-click adventure game with a menu, a text menu,

so it actually did look very, very, similar to Maniac Mansion or Secret of Monkey Island, but married with children. Wow. They initially planned it for the computer. The company then switched over primarily to console games, and they said that this was going to come out on the NES, and it did not. And I am very, very sad that it didn't, obviously. Yeah.

Pagan Al Bundy, can you imagine? Wow. Can you imagine playing point-and-click adventure? Just the sound clips alone that we would have got would have been fantastic. We really missed out. We really missed out. That was close but no cigar in a big way. Yes.

So again, hopefully not too video game-centric, a video game quiz for you all. And yes, you know, several of those games that I mentioned, again, have been preserved by tireless preservationists, sometimes having to spend a lot of money to get their hands. on these, get these things away from collectors sometimes. So, you know, there's a lot of very generous people out there. I'm clicking around the video game History Foundation Library Archive, and they have pretty much every single magazine I worked on. Oh, yeah.

That's great. It's preserved. Now search for Karen too. It's all, it's fully text searchable. It's going to be the rest of Karen's night. Oh, my God. There's a, I think I've mentioned it before, but again, if a fish. PlayStation magazine is on there. There's way, way back in the day, there was a page in OPM where I wrote

some reviews of kids games and Karen drew an illustration. And so it's like this is illustration Karen. We didn't know each other. That's fantastic. It's like they had to really work on the, the OCR, the character recognition technology because OCR is kind of built for like documents. You know, it's built for somebody writes a letter on letterhead. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. They're trying to OCR issues of GamePro magazine from 1990s. Funky layouts and different fonts. Crazy fonts.

The text is all rotated and fish eye lens and they really did it. Wow. That's awesome. I can't believe these are scans, you know what I mean? Like, it's not like. So just to be clear, they debinds the magazines with a laser cutter, not laser off the spine. They chop it off, but there's a laser that lines it up. So you line it up with like a laser pointer kind of thing.

And then it's like chop, chops the spine off. And it's like, it's a big deal. Like the thing won't operate if it detects fingers near it, you know? Oh, cool. You have to hit, you have to operate it with two buttons. So make sure you both your hands are outside the thing. And then they have a feed scanner. So you just take the magazine and put it in.

It's like a reverse printer. You know, you load the magazine in. It's like, boom, boom, boom, page after page. And they have, yeah, and they've got like, and they have custom software that you put the magazine, line it up and it's just, shh, shh, shh, and it just scans every page. And then it, and then it just turns that into a properly paginated PDF, a properly paginated PDF. How cool. So for this segment, I was more inspired by the call part of close calls, to be honest. It's widely known that in American film and TV shows, whenever there's a phone number on screen, it almost always starts with 555-5-5-55 Ghostbusters. There was 555-2368, Marla Singer's number from Fight Club, 555-0134, Super Mario Brothers Plumbing Company in the new movie, 555-0185, they're fake. And the whole point is to avoid a showing an actual connected working number on screen and then have people spam calling and bothering those people with the actual numbers, right?

And maybe avoid some sort of potential lawsuit. Other countries actually have their equivalent of 555 numbers. Oh, of course. Oh, I never thought about that. That's great. Here's a thing. I looked at a bunch of different countries. All of their phone numbers look like real numbers.

Do you know what I mean? It's not as silly or obvious as 5-5-5, right? Their numbers look real and kind of random. Like you're watching Memento. It's a stylish, serious movie, and the Polaroid shows up, and it's like 5-5-5, this number. And it really pulls you out. Yeah. We know exists.

We know why they do it. But why 5? And why 5-5? Do you guys know? Was it just picked randomly? It's kind of right in the middle of the keypad. So for this, we have to travel back, back, back, back, back, back, back, back, back in time. Back during a time when a phone call had to be made with telephone operator, like a person who physically connects cables your call on a switchboard.

Yeah. Okay, so let's talk about how phone numbers worked in America. Right, right. Between 1940s, 1947, up to the 60s. With the switchboard system, you live in an. area where your area has a switchboard telephone exchange center for your area, right, in your neighborhood. Places where it's more densely populated, there's more people, you might have multiple

several central offices for each service area. Each of these offices have names based on the neighborhood you live in. Yeah, mostly named after like streets or neighborhoods or city. So if I had to make a phone call in 1947, I pick up the rotary phone and I would Dial zero to get to my operator, and it's a person, I would say, Atlantic City 2-2-2-2-2-2. Mm-hmm. So my local switchboard operator will then connect me to the Atlantic City office, and then the operator there would then connect me to the individual phone number 2-2-2-2-2. So I have to say Atlantic City and then 2-2-2-2-2.

So as they were reworking the numbering plan and evolving and automating the switch process in the 50s, for example, your Atlantic City just became AT, just became known as the first two letters of your office, right, of your area. So Atlantic City becomes AT, taking the first two letters. So instead of saying out loud to the switchboard operator, now I can just dial the letters A and T. of the advent and the adoption of mapping the letters to the dialed digits. We still have this. We still use this, guys. We see it on our phone keypads. Yeah.

The little grid of numbers. Two is assigned ABC, 3, DEF, 4, GHI, and so forth, right? So now I can just dial AT. So we went from saying Atlantic City 2-2-2-2-2-A-T-2-2-A-T-2-2-2-A-T's mapped to two and eight. So now we have 28, 2-2-2-2-2-2. So phone operators, companies, and organizations noticed that

it was really, really rare for any numbers to start with 5-5, because not a lot of places have their first two letters start with the letters J, K, or L. Other letter combinations, there's a vowel, or maybe

there's like R, you know, S-T-R, P-S-E-S-S, R is, right. Right, right. Your Wheel of Fortune letters, right. Yes. Yeah, yeah. So it's really, really rare that you have a place that starts with the first two letters, J.K. or L. And so a lot of the TV and movies, they kind of caught on. They're like, well, nobody has these numbers. So we'll just use these numbers that nobody logically can have. It's not going to hassle anybody. So what's interesting is television shows in the 60s and the 50s, you know, you still have to say the name of the place.

like I said, Atlantic City 2-2-2-2. So they would start saying Klondike. Ah. Because it starts with K and L, and that's a 5-5 number that no one's going to use. That's really interesting. I never... So if you watch back to the future, Doc's number back in the 50s, his number was Klondike 5-4385. Nice.

Nice little hat tip. It's really weird. Phone numbers had a word attached to it. Or the very popular song, Pennsylvania 6,000, right. Exactly. And so Pennsylvania then would be called P-E, and they would just use the two numbers that stood for P and E. I never knew the lineage from the unused bank of numbers into the 5-5. That's really great.

In the 90s, they've gotten a little bit more restrictive. If you're using it for film and TV, like fictional use, you can only use 555-0-100 to 0-1. 199. So now there's a smaller bank. But some companies try to get around it. Like I said, it's really hard to be immersive when you see like a silly 555 number. And so some companies try to get around it by acquiring actual phone numbers to use in films. So for example, Universal Pictures owns one number that they've used in a lot of their movies. I think I've read that before. Yes. And I will end my segment with this interesting thing as we have all of our technology. We also have to have fake technology,

fictional technology also in our media, in our films and movies. So, for example, these days, whenever you see a show or a movie and someone has to Google something, they can't use Google, right? They have to get Google's approval or like some sort of licensing fee. There is a bank of fake search engine names that TVs and movies generally use. Oh, that's great. And one of the main ones is called finder spider. Spider with a Y.

Finder Spider. I feel like I've seen that. Oh, my God. Something before. Yeah. It is in Breaking Bad, CSI, Criminal Minds, Prison Break, X-Files, Needs, Lexer, without a trace. And the funny thing about finder spider is the look of the website evolved with time. Nice.

With whatever was. So it's contemporary. Whatever. search engines look like you know you have your very text laden altavista and then you have the google like colors but it's a spider and each leg has a different color it's so interesting to see how it evolves with us and it's like completely fake i love they just don't want to use google i love it i love that everyone just agrees this is the easiest way to do it and there's also uh search z Search Z's was used in community.

Search Ling is also one. Quereo, search wise. Back then, it's like, oh, God, we got to have fake telephone numbers. Now it's like we're going to have fake search engines. What's next? Like fake chat GPT. That's 555 numbers. There are really many reasons to listen to our podcast, Big Picture Science.

It's kind of a challenge to summarize them all, Molly. Okay, here's a reason to listen to our show, Big Picture, science because you love to be surprised by science news. We love to be surprised by science news. So, for instance, I learned on our own show that I had been driving around with precious metals in my truck before it was stolen. That was brought up in our show about precious metals and also rare metals like most of the things in your catalytic converter. I was surprised to learn that we may begin naming heat waves like we do hurricanes. You know, prepare yourself for heatwave Lucifer. I don't think I can prepare myself for that. Look, we like surprising our listeners. We like

surprising ourselves by reporting new developments in science and while asking the big picture questions about why they matter and how they will affect our lives today and in the future. Well, we can't affect lives in the past, right? No, I guess that's a point. So the podcast is called big picture science and you can hear it wherever you get your podcasts. We are the host. Seth is a scientist. I'm a science journalist, and we talk to people smarter than us. We hope you'll take a listen. All right. And we have one last segment. Colin? I've got a little story here for you with some trivia nuggets. I had on my little list of ideas is election tiebreakers, some kind of weird, wacky ways that elections that have come down to a tie have been decided. I discovered that,

Honestly, super close elections and ties are actually very common in history. And even the, what I would have described as wacky ways of deciding them are fairly common as well. Coin flips, rolling dice, drawing straws, like randomizers, yeah. And almost to the point where I was like, well, so many cases where you could have a tie, you know, you get through whatever your tie breaking procedure is. And then you get to the very last rule. And it really, in many places, in the rulebook on the law, it says, choose lots. If you really can't decide. And so a lot of these elections.

I was going to be like, pick a lobster and your lobsters battle or something like wacky like that. In many of these localities that as long as the candidates agree, they could theoretically have it be lobster based. You know, I mean, which circle the lobster crawls into. We win, right? I don't know. If you're in Maine, maybe you choose to do that. Just almost out of a hat, I'll give you one example of a story. This is from 2023 in Monroe, North Carolina.

The story was filed. A coin flip deciding who would become mayor of Monroe. Robert Burns and Bob Yanichick each received 970 votes out of five names on their ballot. So they flipped a coin. And that was it. It's like, okay, you win the coin toss and you're the mayor. congratulations. Then I kind of changed my scope a little bit and was focusing on some of the interesting stories of close elections in general, not necessarily how the elections were

decided. So I got one story here. I just wanted to share with you guys here. This is the story of Herb Connolly, Herbert L. Connolly. Herb Connolly, who was a fairly well-known politician in Massachusetts, served in World War II. After he got out of the war, he joined his family business, which was an auto dealership. In fact, the legacy of the Connolly auto dealers still running today. If you live in or near Framingham Mass, you may be very familiar with Herb Connolly Chevy, Herb Connolly Accura, Herb Connolly Hyundai. I mean, yes. So after working in the family business for a while, Herb Connolly decided to run for public office. In 1968, he broke through and he was elected to the Massachusetts Governor's Council and started serving in 1969.

He served for 20 years, but in 1988, Herb Connolly, he lost the Democratic primary to a city counselor from Lowell named Robert B. Kennedy, not associated with the Massachusetts Kennedy political dynasty. Yes. Thank you. Yes. Just to clarify, first question, any person would ask. Yes. He lost the Democratic primary by one vote. He lost it 14,716 to 14,715. No. When you give the scale. Like, if it's like, oh, out of like 32 versus 33, you're like, okay. Yeah. Right. Exactly. Maybe just, you know, someone sneezed differently, you might have won. Right. No, I mean, we're talking, you know, over 28,000. votes cast and you know cleared um lost by one vote now so i'm going to read for you the the ap newswire headline from um october 3rd 1988 candidate loses election by only one vote

his own no this is the story that like every sitcom right about a politician like every This is an episode of Futurama. Herb Connolly was so busy campaigning out, glad-handing, getting his name out there. After 20 years in the office, on Election Day, he showed up to vote a few minutes too late in his local precinct. And they did not let him in. And he didn't vote. And he didn't vote for himself. And he lost the election.

So he challenged the results. He got a recount. The recount, he again lost by one vote. Robert B. Kennedy went on to win the primary, and he did win the general election as well. That's unfortunate. He did lose his seat. But then, you know, went back to the family auto business, which he ran for many years successfully. But yeah, so now next time out in Massachusetts, I'm going to keep my eye out for Herb Connolly auto dealerships,

because I have this awesome, tragic story of him, the man who truly did forget to vote for himself and cost himself, at least the chance of victory, a runoff. Oh, my God. Yeah. Well, no lobster battles. I was hoping. Trial by lobster combat. Well, the thing is, with her, even if he did vote, it would result in a tie.

Yes, that's true. It's not that he would win. It's not necessarily, right. Now, I mean, he's certainly being the incumbent with the years behind him, you know, maybe he could have marshaled into a runoff. Yeah. Look, you got to be in it to win it. You got to vote for your, you have to vote for yourself.

You can't not vote for yourself. And that's our show. Thank you all for joining me and thank you listeners for listening in. Hope you learn stuff about 555 numbers, about close calls in tennis and the Hawkeye, about games that almost got released and more close calls. You can find us on all major podcast apps and on our website, Good JobBrain.com. This podcast is part of Airwave Media,

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