Stuff You Should Know - The Trivial Pursuit Trivia Edition

Episode Date: December 19, 2024

For our annual pre-Holiday-Special-holiday-episode-about-a-holiday-toy we are jumping into one of the greatest games of all time, Trivial Pursuit (and we’re not just saying that because there’s an SYSK edition). See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Today's episode is brought to you by Shipt. With Shipt same-day delivery, you get more than just fresh groceries delivered to your door. You get time to do the things you love with the people you love. And one of the things I love is making a cheese plate and sharing it with my friends and playing games. Oh yes, good game sessions always. And with Shipt, there's a shopper waiting to check off your grocery list or make that last-minute trip to the store so you can relish the greatest gift of all, more time for the things you love. Download the Shipt app. That's S-H-I-P-T.

And let an expert handle the shopping. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio. 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. I call them pies too. Yeah, because I mean it was like a pie piece. Yeah, I can't think of anything else you would call them.

I think some people call them wedges but they're clearly sickos. Yeah. Oh, I can't think of anything else you would call them. I think some people call them wedges, but they're clearly sickos. Yeah. Oh, I think they're officially wedges. Well, I've seen the guys who invented the game, so... Did you watch that video? Yeah. Oh, boy. 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. 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. 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 nostalgia because it was a huge thing in my family too, playing Trivial Pursuit. Boomer City, baby. I love that game. Yeah, for sure. As it turns out. For sure. And what's funny is it indoctrinated us into everything that boomers like.

Like it was a really like huge cultural transfer from one generation to the other in that way. Yeah. I mean, I was a 12 year old who learned about Gunsmoke and Richard Nixon through playing Trivial Pursuit. Yep. 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. But back as far back to the 30s 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 30s, that was one of the peaks where everybody was super into it. Yeah, quiz shows were for sure big. I think, you know, Livia 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 a little cheeky, maybe? Yeah, because you're not just talking about Trivia,

you're also poking fun at your own game, like you're putting all of this effort into something that doesn't really matter in the end. Yeah, I guess so, but I thought it mattered. When I was a kid, now that I'm an adult, I'm like, Trivia Pursuit's kind of a fun name. When I was a kid, I was like, this is, I'm like, Trivial 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 was weird. Oh, I took it seriously too, for sure. I love Trivial Pursuit too, but it was definitely in the vein of the people who invented this thing that kind of poke fun at themselves and even at you, the player, for playing it. 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 bar trivia, I guess. But they kind of hit it big earlier on. So the world of trivia was gaining steam through the 1960s. I think there was a Columbia student named Edwin Goodgold who, I think he wrote a book, right? He and another guy named Dan Karlincki

wrote a book simply called Trivia. 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 manager of Sha Na Na. Really?

Yeah. Oh, wow. And he wrote in Columbia University's, I guess, their newspaper. He was one of their writers. He wrote 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 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 seeing 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 in the past. A lot of it was pop culture. Yeah, exactly. And that was the mid-60s. The mid-70s is when the pub quizzes really took off in England. That didn't start in the U.S. till 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 84 and all of a sudden, trivia started to be important in the United States again. Yeah, and I didn't see it anywhere but I would put some serious money on the idea that Trivial Pursuit success revived Jeopardy.

Yeah, I bet it did. Because it was a huge, huge deal, as we'll see. Yeah, for sure. But the whole thing starts all the way back in 1979 and December of 1979 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 a big deal around Christmas time when it first came out, how about that? Yeah, and this is our pick. We kinda had a hard time deciding this year, but, actually not really, it was a toss-up, but we always do like a Christmas, legendary Christmas gifts in pop

culture history kind of episode. And this year we went with Tribute Pursuit because it was big, you know, they, as you'll see, you know, rolling out a board game in October and November is a pretty smart move. For sure. And these two guys, they're 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. Like even bigger hosers than Bob and Doug McKenzie is what they were saying. Yeah, there were a couple of hockey dudes, just hockey, beer drinking Canadian, good

old fashioned Canadian hockey playing, or at least hockey watching. I bet they played too, they all played. 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 70s, early 80s, journalist dudes who wear mustaches and drink beer during their interviews on the news. And smoke. Yeah, and smoke during them too. These were the guys who invented Trivial Pursuit. Yeah, Haney was a high school dropout. Abbott did have a master's degree in journalism from 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 were 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 saw a couple of different versions, 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 Haney 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 them or leaving behind or loaning them out or something.

And like, what a racket. Like we should get into the gaming business. Yeah, that's how I was born. They just realized how many times he bought a Scrabble game and they were like, we could do that. What a story. We should say, yeah, these guys, that was the kind of thing that they would talk about doing is making a game because they realized that other people have made money off of it.

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 this kind of, these kind of guys, right? And this particular idea though kind of started to take shape really, really quickly. Um, I think it was Chris Abbot or Scott Abbott who was like, well, how about something with trivia? And remember at the time, like trivia was not a hot item.

And also as we'll see, board games were not a hot item. So they, these were like two bad ideas that these guys decided to put together and accidentally became a success or not it ended up becoming a success. But it was like, they figured it out really quickly, didn't they? Some might say suspiciously quickly. We'll get to that later, but as their story goes, in about 45 minutes time,

and they're really specific about that, I never saw anywhere an hour, they always said 45 minutes. They got, you know, they game minutes. They got the game together. They got some construction paper. They started sketching things out. They based the design of 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. Right, not 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 roll, and then the other teams decide which category of question they want to randomly ask you.

And if you make it, you win the game. If you miss it, you gotta roll back out and then answer questions and eventually roll back in. Yes, well put. I am not one for boasting, typically. But I will say that I once confirmed won a game doing all the things you just said in 20 minutes. Wow! By yourself?

Yeah. No, no, no, not by myself. I was playing a dude at work at the liquor store. No, no, no. I mean, were you on a team by yourself? No, no, no, just me. Okay, that's what I was asking. Not literally playing by yourself. Boy, Josh, I mean, oh, never mind. I mean, I guess if you were really honest, you could play by yourself, you know? Yeah, you could sit around and read cards.

I did that for a little while. That's not honest. I'm saying you could roll. You could move. You could ask yourself questions. Answer them, and if you got it wrong, you know? Yeah, yeah. Just talking different voices? No, good try, Chuck. Right. You kind of ruined my 20-minute anecdote, frankly. Uh, no, I want to dwell back on that, because 20 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 45 minutes it took to invent it.

Yeah, yeah. It took a, it could take a while, especially if like, you just had a lot of people who, yeah, didn't know trivia. But yeah, it would usually take, yeah, 45 minutes an hour, depending on how fast everybody was moving. Yeah. Usually it took longer because the whole point was almost every question and answer would generate a quick conversation, or usually short conversation, sometimes longer.

Yeah. Exactly. And most of the times it was boomer parents like waxing philosophic about how great their 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.

Yeah, so I don't think we mentioned, you could have teams, I did sort of elude 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 24 players, and anything more than that would get a little unwieldy, but I feel like we were, and my family wasn't big, it was usually we were in pairs.

Yeah, that was typically how it was done. So you could argue and be mad at one another when the other one insisted on the wrong answer. 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 sports. 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. What was your category? Like, if you could pick your own final category, what would it be? It was usually history or entertainment. category, what would it be? It was usually history or entertainment. Yeah, I would say sports and leisure or entertainment for me.

Yeah. Definitely not geography, still. Yeah, my worst was definitely sports and leisure. Yeah, geography was probably second. That's because they didn't have masks. Right, only in the British version. So I mentioned the name change. That was Sarah, who was Haney's wife.

Chris Haney's wife Sarah is the one that said, no, change it to trivial instead of trivia. I think it was a pretty great switch, and I think that's a pretty good intro. Oh, okay. Well, if that's the end of the intro, then Chuck, I think we have to put an ad break in here. Yeah, let's move along to Act 2 right after this. This episode is brought to you by Shipt. Running low on time?

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Download the Amazon Music app now to start listening. Terms apply. So, Haney and Abbott, like, they were like, we're going to 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 Manufacturers Trade Show. I can't remember what it was called. I looked it up but couldn't find anything on it. But they went, remember they were journalists, so they went 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 were 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 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 themselves. If they wanted to get this game out there, they were going to have to, they couldn't just sell the idea. They had to make the game first. And that's what they said about doing.

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 Warner, who was a friend, who's a corporate attorney. And they formed the Horn Abbott Company. Haney's nickname was the Horn,

and Abbott, in this case with one T, was just a variation on Abbott's. Haney's nickname was The Horn and Abbott in this case with 1T was just a variation on Abbott's 2T name and they started selling equity to raise a little money through friends and family. So they sold 40 shares at $1,000 each to 32 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, like, Apple stock or Google stock people, you know? Right. Very similar to that. Not quite as lucrative, but still pretty, 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 believed in it, I guess. But there's a guy named Michael Wurstlin. And so this iconic, really elegant design

for the package, the board itself, the cards, all that stuff. It was Michael Wurstlin's work. He was 18 at the time. That's just amazing. And he didn't get a dime up 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. Yeah, so they managed to raise 40 grand. They got a $75,000 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 6,000 questions.

And so I assume with some of that, what is that, like close to 120 grand, they went to Spain in 1981 and they said, we're going to go drink beer on the beach and write questions. We're going to pack a bunch of dictionaries and encyclopedias and reference books and newspapers and we're going to go out there,, we're gonna write it for the American audience. Some of this stuff's gonna be pretty obscure stuff. Some is gonna be, you know, some are gonna be a little easier, they wanted to kind of give it

a little bit of variety. And finally, in November 81, Registered Trivial Pursuit is a trademark and then launched the Genus, not Genius edition, that same month is when that came out. 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 there's a bunch of different variations of this thing. Another way to interpret or another definition of it, it's general, it's not specific. 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. Your special, Yeah, specialist. Specialism? What is the word I'm looking for? Specialty.

There you go. I think there's someone behind you with a giant Y, like dancing up and down. I think there's somebody behind me with a hammer. 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 in doing the Stuff You Should Know version is like, 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 were like, no, they're if those pieces were like copper or something? And they were like, no, they're gonna be punch out cardboard. But you guys are sweet.

Yeah, we were like, well, what about plastic? They were like, well, keep guessing. Yeah, you know Monopoly has all those solid lead figurines. And they're like, no, no, no, no, no. They give you brain damage if you play too much. Not to knock the team we worked with, because they were great and the game turned out great. It's just how you make a game to make money.

Yeah, we've said it before and we'll say it again. They were the greatest bunch of people that I've ever worked with as a group. As a group, they were as good as it comes. It was amazing. Yeah, it was pro top to bottom enthusiasm, just a sheer pleasure. Yeah. All right, so a sheer pleasure. Yep. All right.

So enough of that kissing up. They got about 1,100 games made, sold them to local retailers, regional Canadian retailers basically right before Christmas. And then this distributor of games, Cheapton products, very smartly were like, hey, 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 it ended up being a great decision for them as well.

Yeah, hugely consequential. And this was Christmas 1981. So this is the first Christmas that Trivial Pursuit comes out and makes a big splash because they sold out of those 1,100 games so quickly that by the time the next Christmas rolled around, they'd already sold 100,000 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 10,000 copies. So this little-

Independent. Yeah, a very independent game created by a couple of outsiders sold 10 times more than you would expect it to sell as a best seller in this first year. Yeah, it was incredible. They were making everything in Canada at the time except for the dice. 3,500 games a day, but they still couldn't keep up with the pace. In 1983, finally, a U.S. company called Celcho and Richter, I guess, or Ryder?

Ryder, yeah. Ryder? They licensed that game. They had real marketing money finally. They sold 1.3 million games in 1983 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. 25 to 40 bucks, depending on where you went.

That's up to 90 dollars today. Oh I saw 125 today. Oh really? Yeah I put 40 dollars in for 1983 in West Egg and it said 125. It told me 90. Oh god all of our inflation calculations are now in question. Oh god. It must be having a bad day. This is the worst thing that's ever happened to us. Our beloved West Egg. Well, either way, let's settle at 110. Okay, great. Perfect.

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 game. Voluptuous too. So you said heavy. Each game package weighed six pounds because they really pulled out the stops in the 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, just the look of it had such an elegant look. It just didn't, it did not look like other board games at the time. It was like sorry or trouble or something like that. You know, where it was 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 up was the poet, the English poet Alexander Pope, who's quote, what mighty contests arrived 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, is what Trivial Pursuit was when it came out.

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 80s, especially for kids in the 80s 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

and to like interact with your parents for an hour a day. 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 1983 that it blew up in the United States. And when it blew up in the US,

it really just changed everything. Like you said, that first year, they sold 1.3 million games. They sold 20 million the next year in 1984. And by January of 1984, 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 on what cool New Yorkers are doing right now. Right. This was a great example of that, the 80s version too. Yeah, for sure. They had great marketing early on with this new company. There was a marketing consultant they hired

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. So the Boomer... The trio.

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 was peak boomer nostalgia of their younger days. And that was Peak Boomer Nostalgia Trivial Pursuit reporting. Yeah, I've never seen that movie, but I do know that one of the characters lets her husband,

I guess impregnate, serve as a surrogate sperm donor to her friend. Yeah. The only reason I know that is because there was a great Saturday Night Live skit about it. Oh 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 Saturday Night Live one, like she's just sitting there like reflecting, like drinking tea and like thinking about how great and just beautiful this is The the sound coming from upstairs they're like really getting into it and she's getting like more and more concerned Yeah, I think it was Jan Hooks who was like the woman downstairs it was a great sketch

Oh, that's funny. Well that movie was very big in my house and that soundtrack, I mean, I joke about it now, but that's literally the thing that introduced me to Motown as a kid. Yeah, listening to, I was 12 years old or whatever it was, listening to Aretha Franklin and the Four Tops and everyone else, Jeremiah was a bullfrog, which wasn't Motown.

But if you wanna hear a more in-depth conversation about that, you can listen to the movie crush episode featuring the wonderful and charming Janie Haddad-Thomkins. Oh, nice, that was her pick, huh? That was her pick. Nice. Good movie, though. But now it suffers from anti-boomeritis.

Oh, okay. So I should wait 10 years to see it? How do you feel about Boomers right now? I'll wait 10 years to see it. Okay. All right. So 1984, well, I guess we should mention that book in 1983. A guy named Robert J. Heller wrote a book called How to Win a Tribute Pursuit. Like, that's how big it got. I think like 96 trivia games trying to cash in on Trivial Pursuit's success and people writing books like How to Win at Trivial Pursuit

in which Robert J. Heller said, why don't you just memorize all 6,000 cards? That became kind of an urban legend. Like your cousin's friend memorized all 6,000 questions. Oh, that's funny. 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 1984 and during the game he got two questions about himself and you can relax he got them correct, both of them. Well, that's the only thing Reagan can do is the one word. 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 Ronald Reagan's. It depends on who you ask, yes.

Was one of them authorized to do so, or are they just like, come over here buddy, sign this thing? No, no, like they just happened to be the luck of the draw as far as the arrangement went. Like they bore witness or something? No, I think like, let's say it was Clark Gable who signed them. He would have maybe been like a higher up to Ronald Reagan. I gotcha. As Ronald Reagan was getting out, it happened to be Clark Gable rather than Colonel Joe

Schmo. Yeah, yeah. I'm glad I complicated that. Very clean and cool story. Another fun little trivial factoid, and yes, I'm saying factoid, was that QE2, Queen Elizabeth II, hosted in the first nerd cruise it sounds like, because she hosted an eight-day Trivial Pursuit Tournament cruise in I guess 85. And so at each Christmas, 1983 it was like you could not find that thing. Yeah. In 1984, same same deal like it was really hard to find but this time Selchow and Ryder

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 peak of this I think it really peaked in 84, but that certainly continued on into 1985. Oh yeah. In the spring of 1985, 15% of households in America had a Trivial Pursuit game in their house. I saw at some point it was 20%, one in five. Yeah, I think they're at about 80 million to date. Games?

Oh, I believe that. Totally. 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 the OG from whatever, 48 years ago. Yeah, I'm sure it's just a little bit frayed and like the parts where it folded and the rest of it's just fine. No, you can still read Richard Nixon on a third of those cards. Nice. and the rest of it's just fine. Nope, you can still read Richard Nixon on a third of those cards.

Nice, there's a little like cocaine in the little folds and like tequila stains on some of the spots. 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 loved 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 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 10 shares early on. And in 1984, she bought a house and then she retired not too long after that. Yeah. And Worsland, the guy, the 18-year-old who did all the art, he founded a company called Worsland 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 Haney's and Chris Abbott or Scott Abbott were just mega rich from this. I mean, this game made hundreds of millions of dollars in the 80s, like 80s money. God knows what West Egg would convert that to. But there was a lot of money made off this and you gotta 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 whether you had that idea, like you kind of referred to earlier, right? Yeah, there were two cases, at least like two notable court cases. One was a lawsuit in 1994 from a guy,

an Australian named David Wall, who said, hey, in 1979, 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, 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, and the court were like, well, where are those documents?

And he was like, I don't have those anymore. And they said, well, bring forward some witnesses. And he was like, no one's really coming forward. They moved. Yeah, they moved away. He said that Haney later offered him shares like, hey man, we're getting this game that you got told me the idea for going and I'm gonna 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, 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 $1.2 million in court costs. This is after a 13-year legal battle, but they reduced that to one million because they said, but you know what, your big corporate attorneys came in and sued two of his witnesses, so we're gonna knock off 200 grand

and just make it a million. Yeah, I mean, imagine being that guy, you're like, you owe me tens of millions of dollars, and then 10 years later, you owe them a million dollars. Like, 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. 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 goes from bad to worse. 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. Yeah, what I was trying to find out was, they said they sued to, first the judge said there was no witnesses. Then I find out that they had sued to the witnesses,

which they considered like 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 just, I couldn't find anything out. It's so hard to find out stuff about old court cases. Well, if it was like a David and Goliath thing where Goliath won, that would be very sad

indeed. Yeah, what about the other one? I can't imagine that. Yeah, we'll move on because this one's getting really sad. 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, books containing trivia for decades and decades now. I don't know if he's still alive, but if he is, he's probably still going strong. And he apparently published a three-volume encyclopedia of trivia at some point.

This was before Trivia Pursuit was launched. And he did something. You know how we've talked about map makers, like including a fake town to basically protect their property, see if somebody ripped them off? He did something with trivia question. He included a trick question in his stuff. He did. And that, well, it didn't bear fruit, but it played out in his stuff. He did. And that, well, it didn't bear fruit, but it played out in his favor.

It was a question on Columbo, the TV show, with, what's his name? Peter Falk. Peter Falk, I almost said Robert Blake. I used to get those confused. No, that was Beretta? Yeah, he's the one who murdered his wife in real life. Yeah.

Yeah, anyway, Peter Falk did not murder his wife as far as I know, but he was Frank Columbo. And in the question, the answer was Philip Columbo. Like what was Columbo's real name? And 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 300 million bucks, claimed that close to 1,700 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. 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. Yeah, 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 case was based on the idea that like the

facts of fact, like this guy didn't, it's not a creation of his own. Yeah. He found it, right? No, I get it. And I imagine Fred Worth probably thought that was like an iron-proof defense. Like, I tricked these people into 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 wanna 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 have a first name or else his first name is lieutenant So Frank Colombo 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. Right. Boy, do you think there are any Colombo pet ants?

Oh yeah, definitely. That listen to this? Sure. Yeah, we got all kinds. Takes all kinds, Chuck. So the 90s are now upon us, and these guys are, they said they feel like rock stars basically. They've got all kinds of money. Supposedly John Haney, the brother 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 that's just what they did. Haney and Abbott invested in racehorses. But for Abbott, it paid off. He spent 50 grand on a yearling named Charlie Bailey that ended up winning about $900,000 in total purses over the years. Oh, yeah? And lots of studying out for big money. And they both invested in, kind of built from the ground up these two golf courses in Canada. And Abbott bought, 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? Oh yeah. I think so. I mean, this article I found was from the late 2010s. Oh, yeah, probably then. Yeah. I don't see why he would have sold it. Oh, so they're now the Brampton Battalion, but they were the North Bay Battalion, right? No, no, no. They were Brampton, and now they're North Bay.

Okay. I always get North Bay and Brampton confused. I do too. So, Olivia dug up a pretty interesting article written by who, Chuck? A guy named Ron Rodriguez. No, it's Juan Rodriguez. Oh, is it Juan? Yeah. Okay.

So, Mr. Rodriguez is what we're going to call him for now, because his name is really hard to say, it turns out. He wrote, I think, a daily quota of 40 Trivial Pursuit Questions a day, obviously, and only about half would get picked. And we kind of went through that too, because we helped out putting questions together for our version. And they 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 Mr. Rodriguez's pain. Yeah, for sure. It was a lot of writing. He said that he used the dictionary of 20th 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 a partner, they had some researchers on the team, and they would fact check and do corrections and tweaks and stuff like that. Yeah, I should say we weren't actually writing the questions, we were coming up with the source material for the questions from the podcast. You just sit there going, oh no.

There's some writer at Hasbro who's like, uh. As far as the nitty gritty goes, questions have a maximum of 45 characters. They prefer two lines even though there can be three. They just visually thought the two line questions look better, so they tried to edit them down when possible. Yeah. And then I think now, over the years, there's been about 300 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 compared to some of the editions that they've come out with now, those are still pretty generalist. So another one was Disney. Disney was the first tie-in that they had in 1985.

And that was still pretty general. It wasn't like Donald Duck facts specifically, right? Weirdly, here's a piece of trivia for you. The second brand tie-in that Trivial Pursuit released a game around was Fame, the TV show and movie. Oh, wow. Like, I'm Gonna Live Forever had its own Trivial Pursuit edition back in 1993. Was the first question, how long did the Fame people think they were gonna live?

That's a great question. I couldn't have been very... These editions weren't as big though, right? There's no way. No, in that Slate 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 was about 10 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 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, narrowed the pool so you have to have more and more additions to appeal to as many people as possible. Whereas if you just made more generalist versions of the game, then you were always going to appeal to the most people possible. 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 edition, that's your jam, then like, I love it. 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 a Seinfeld edition, because I know those pretty well. But I did today buy the Greatest Hits edition, which is mainly 80s and 90s 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. That's awesome. I will be very disappointed if the Seinfeld edition doesn't have a question about who invaded Spain in the 900s and the

answers the moops. Right. It's got to. It has to. Yeah, we could probably write a Seinfeld edition. You and I could. Probably. 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 18 and up. And it's a stamp game where if you get it wrong, they stamp an X under your forehead in ink. And once you get five stamps on your forehead, you're out. Interesting. It is interesting.

And then the weirdest edition I found, Chuck, was the EMS edition, Emergency Medical Services. Came out in 2012. Wow. And it had categories like trauma, illness, anatomy. It's just- Minor cuts, major cuts. 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. It uses generative AI to come up with questions. And if you are a TV watcher, you can watch the new Trivial Pursuit game on the CW that's hosted by the lovable Levar Burton. Oh, we love Levar.

Everyone loves Levar. Who doesn't? No one. Yeah. You got anything else? 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 probably due to the fact that it was written in the 80s and it was geared toward boomers. Gotcha. But it was written in the 80s and it was geared toward boomers. Gotcha. But it was still okay. Can you give an example of how it didn't hold up or a general example? Well just, you know, questions about Gunsmoke and Richard Nixon and over and over and over.

I thought you were going to say it was like deeply sexist or something like that. No, no, no, no, no, not like that. It just felt a little dated question-wise. Like, hey, I mean, supposedly the Masters edition is the one I think the gamer ranked in 2021 and a listicle and the gamer said that the 2021 Master edition was the best edition yet. Mm-hmm. But that Classic edition has sold the lion's share

of those 80 million versions. Yeah, pretty impressive stuff. Yeah. 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. It's coming soon.

Do you have a listener mail today? I do. 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. Hey guys, love your September episode on the history of music streaming.

I grew up in the 90s. I can vividly remember being at my friend Ross's house downloading Weezer songs off of Napster and burning pirated versions onto CDRs. As the 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 Bandcamp and SoundCloud.

Oh yeah. I feel bad we didn't mention these and we just kind of went with the big corporate monoliths. As an independent artist, especially like how Bandcamp 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 it interesting how the preferred medium of the day has informed artist choices, has informed their choices when releasing music. In the 90s, albums were so much longer. He says, I'm looking at you smashing pumpkins. Because a lone CD could hold more than a vinyl LP or cassette.

Today, there is so much music available at our fingertips. Musicians are releasing shorter albums, digital mixtapes, and a steady stream 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 in Seattle,

and we actually met and hung out with Chris. When? Many, many years Chris in Seattle, and we actually met and hung out with Chris. When? Many, many years ago in Seattle, he was a friend of our booking agent, at least at the time, Josh Lindgren. Uh-huh. Well, he's still our booking agent. They were friends at the time, as far as I know.

Oh, they're not friends anymore? Well, I don't know, I just didn't ask. But I was gonna text Lindgren and ask if he knew him, but he came to the Neptune show, and I even rode in a car with him with Emily to some after party we went to. Wowee. Yeah, so good to be back in touch with Chris.

Yeah, thanks a lot, Chris. Thanks for getting back in touch. I think that's no longer parasocial, that's just social. Yeah, you're right. Well, if you wanna 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 an independent version of something we talked about, we love that kind of stuff.

You can send us an email to stuffpodcast at iHeartRadio.com. Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts, my heart radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Today's episode is brought to you by Shipt. With Shipt same-day delivery, you get more than just fresh groceries delivered to your door. You get time to do the things you love with the people you love.

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