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CTHULHU MATATA

The 63rd Semi-Annual Williams College Trivia Contest December 5-6, 1997

THE QUESTIONS

SUPER BONI

  1. (12:00): Colors -- The first time this team ran, one of the three overtime tiebreaker questions was about some insanely obscure word that meant both "red" and "green." This time, they asked about those two, plus all the rest. And how. Starting with a carefully hand-crayoned first page with FORTY different hues (!), this bonus provided umpteen variations on the theme, from "Yellow Submarine" to the Scarlet Pimpernel to green Jelly Bellys. Roy G. Biv, come home.

  2. (4 AM): Forces of Darkness -- Touted as "almost as big as Cthulhu and just as evil," it amply provided colossal size and ample virulence. Bad guys from mythology, serial killers, vampires, Lovecraft, Dante's Inferno, and Gotham City, among many, many other nastified locales, cavorted through over THREE HUNDRED questions (talk about amoral villainy).

HOUR BONI

  1. (12:00): 1980's Kid's TV -- Smurfs, Smurfs, Smurfs, get 'em offa me! Plus 150+ questions on My Little Pony, the Care Bears, the Transformers, He-Man and She-Ra, the Bloodhound Gang, and oddly, classic Warner Brothers cartoons from the mid-1950's.

  2. (1 AM): Moans and Groans Audio (no answers) -- More gasps, grunts, and guttural groans than all of Traci Lord's movies combined. (Unless you count the audience.) For an all-sex noise audio, a little brief, but that sometimes happens to all teams, honey.

  3. (2 AM): Death -- Many movies have "death" or a variant in their titles. Many folks said something as they crossed the threshold to their tombs. Many tombs have inspirational verbiage for us to enjoy. More than a hundred Q's on these and other rotting subjects, including a substantial section on embalming.

  4. (3 AM): Potato Chip Samples -- Teams had to identify 24 different brands and/or types of the ever-popular cholesterol shingle.

  5. (4 AM): Liberal Arts -- Diagnose the condition, draw the chemical diagram, calculate the physics differential, provide the phylum, integrate the integer, translate the doggerel, identify the triumvirate, and much more. Hey, wasn't YESTERDAY the last day of classes?

  6. (5 AM): Video -- 35 clips, very loosely based around a theme of bad guys, mayhem and pernicious malignity. Teams had to ID the movie, featured actor, and character name.

  7. (6 AM): Comedy -- Five bios of Keaton, Chaplin, Gracie Allen, the brothers Marx and Jim Carrey with lots of fill-in-the-blanks, 15 who-played-the-role Q's, and some extra bits. But, no real sense of frivolity. "Does anybody remember laughter?"

  8. (7 AM): Disease -- Does this look infected to you? A pustulent end to a nasty-tinged collection of boni. Every contest should end with sickle cell anemia trivia, don't you agree?

ACTION TRIVIA

  1. Come down and do Disney's version of Heaven's Gate or Waco
  2. Come down and do The Smurfs' Magic Flute or Ducktales' MacBeth
  3. Mister Rodman's Neighborhood
  4. West Troy Story
  5. From the Land of Oz, do "The Ruby Shoe Diaries"
  6. Oliver Stone's "Lady Di.Di.Die"
  7. Come down and do "The Grinch That Stole South Park"

THE DREADED ULTRA BONUS

4 AM

    "Send down your meanest member." People were given a deck of the card game 'Lunch Money' and told to play.

FINAL SCORES