This was.... a contest with problems. Silly Me only managed to reach 78 questions, an historic low. Their bonuses were often less than thematically coherent; i.e. an audio section of musical countdowns ("1-2-3-4!") stuck inside a Movies Super, a Murder Mystery bonus that gave additional credit for origami, or a "live rock albums" audio attached to a bonus about fat men. The confusion might have been exemplified by their "Super Action" scavenger hunt, which wasn't a Super, nor an Action Trivia.
The Ultra Bonus was the most obtuse topic ever ("words used in the Williams Record in describing the current lighting situation on campus"). And its pacing was erratic. Silly Me only read one set of Ultra clues in the second half.... but that set included eight items. (No team solved it.) The specificity extended to the scoring, which required lots of exact wording and other little-loved sticking points. Handing out a 0 on an Action Trivia at 5:30 wasn't very team-friendly, either. It should be noted that 1980s Williams Trivia was a time when hosts would overdramatically warn that (for instance) getting 89.9% of the answers on a bonus would earn a score of 8, not 9.
There were some good on-air questions, but the stinkers reeked (some incredible minutia on the one hand, a ridiculous multiple-choice "which of these 5 items does not belong?" on the other). The accompanying music tilted to the obscure. And unluckily for Silly Me, their broadcast directly followed the equally eclectic, largely unpopular music of A Judo A Chop Chop's Spring 1988 contest. It's a fortunate thing for both those teams that the post-game listserver dissections were 7 years in the future. As it was, Silly Me fielded enough abusive Pus Line calls that they began harassing their harassers over the air. By contest's end, there was an element of joylessness which wasn't thoroughly disguised. Which was a shame for a contest that included bonuses on both "Fat Guys" AND "Vermin Abuse."
For those who'd been playing for a while, 1988 was a "down" year. There was a lot of grumbling among the regular teams, while the games were happening and afterwards. In Spring 1989, Cannolis would chortle about how "bad" recent Trivia music had been as part of their introduction, vowing that a competent team (namely, them) would now fix things. And if you go by the standards of 1987 or earlier, they did that.
But in retrospect, a more charitable observation is that 1988 was a line of demarcation. From 1966-87, contests had a certain reassuring sameness. With A Judo A Chop Chop Chop in the spring, and Silly Me, That's Not the Talking End in the winter, those underpinnings started to erode. The two 1989 contests (by Take the Cannolis and Five Is Right Out) can be seen as reactionary in their own way, fiercely swinging the traditional balance right back to the Top 40 music they'd cut their trivial teeth on.
But the genie was out of the bottle. And contests would soon be judged as much by how successfully they deviated from past Trivia norms, as by how well they hit the usual buttons.
Add to the above tumult a brutally uninteresting race, dominated by the monstrous behemoth, Leave the Gun, Take the Cannolis, and you get a contest that was never gonna be anybody's favorite. With a 65-point margin, Cannolis would have won even if the second-best team had been given 2 extra hours to catch up. To put it another way, Cannolis' margin of victory would have finished in 12th place, had it been a separate team.
(Actually, there was a terrific race for 2nd place, but no one cared.)
Leave the Gun, Take the Cannolis was the '88 edition of "The Evil Empire," the dominant Williams Trivia team of the late 1980s. After the ghastly Winter '86 "Tonga" overtime loss (details of which are available in about 400 other places on this archive), the Empire won their first title in their next attempt, as "I Don't Have to Answer That Question!" After hosting, they finished in third place the following semester (Spring '88).
It wasn't a great shock that a team that scored 368 points in the Tonga contest would rebound strongly one semester later in Spring 1987. But nothing about their decent Spring '88 performance properly prepared the Trivial multitudes for the total command displayed in this contest. It was just one of those games where all the planets were aligned behind Cannoli's destiny. After hosting the Spring 1989 Cannolis game, they'd come right back and win the Winter one, for their 3rd title in 4 tries (as "Son, You've Got a Panty on Your Head").
By the early 1990s, though, the Evil Empire had dissipated, with just a few scattered players remaining. They still had an impact, though. The two "Phasers on Stun: The Next Generation" teams who won back-to-back contests in 1991-92 were somewhat random amalgams of players formerly from the Evil Empire, Judo A Chop Chop, a smidgen of Phasers on Stun, and by '92, the folks who left the Python team after the controversial Winter '91 "Play to Win" implosion.
The 2nd- and 3rd-place teams weren't pushovers, either. "Ralph the Wonder Llama" was the long-running Python team who'd already won three times in the previous 5 years, and would come in first 3 more times over their next 4 attempts (although they declined to run following their third win). As "Harry 'Snapper' Organs," they (plus recruitee Des Devlin) would move up one notch to win the following contest hosted by the Cannolis.
Also moving up one notch in 1989, from 3rd to 2nd, was the Currier Ballroom team. They had won in 1984 and 1986, would win again in 1990, then would win 3 consecutive games in 1992-94. Playing this game as "Apes Don't Read Philosophy," the 1988 version of the Ballroom gang featured such Trivia stalwarts as Devlin, Joe Francis, Maggie Heaman, Dom Grillo, and others who are still playing regularly today.
7th-place "We're Not in the 8th Dimension..." was the precursor to the Currier Ballroom Team's second wave. A mostly-sophomore team featuring Bill Ayres, Joe Cruz, Liz Greenman, Amy Price, James Goodell, Dan Sissman, and an eager young frosh named Toby Elliott, they made little impact in this game, but were only beginning to percolate. The next semester, they'd merge with those who remained on the Ballroom Team (Apes). As "There Can Be No Dialogue with Fungus," they'd lose a 3-point squeaker to Harry "Snapper" Organs in Spring '89. But the brief window of Ballroom Team stagnation was slammed shut. Staying more or less intact (but not staying in the Ballroom), the reinvigorated team would win the last Williams Trivia contest of the 1980s. Then they'd rack up a bunch more wins through the mid-90's.
Missing this semester were "Phasers on Stun," who were otherwise always on hand during the entire decade of the 1980s. "The Manhattan Skyliners," the team that makes Phasers look like slackers, finished 13th this time.
The ever-mysterious "Bill Wants to Play Too" made another cameo, with 2 points.... this mighty non-team has been playing for two decades, and was still racking up credit in 2001. Tied for last were the "Costa Rican Volcanoes," who'd seriously challenged for 1st place one year previous. A lot of 1970s and '80s scoring rundowns include once-formidable team names listed in the depths of later contests. It's not usually known whether these were authentic members of the original teams calling in for perfunctory, token credit, or unrelated people saluting past foes (i.e. someone tried to call in as "Phasers on Stun" in the early 1990s, after the team had dismantled itself). At Williams Trivia, the line between tribute and mockery is often a thin one.
The prize for most misplaced hyperbole goes to "The Greatest Trivia Team" (3 points, 21st place).