Harry "Snapper" Organs

Comments from Des Devlin.

On an incredibly small historical note, this was the last contest to date with a secret celebrity audio question. It used to be de rigeur for teams to try and scrounge up noted personalities (or at least compliant professors) to pre-tape questions, instantly transforming them into three-point plays (1 pt. for the answer, 1 pt. for the song, and an extra point for ID'ing the voice.) Our two celebs were baseball player Jay Johnstone, and "MTV's Remote Control" sidekick Colin Quinn.

This was also the first contest to feature the "Horrible Song Quartet." (At least organized into blocks and identified as such; naturally, ghastly music has long been a trivia staple.) Combining my bizarre musical trove with that of Gary Selinger, King of Spoken Top 40 Shit, was positively fissionable. Not nearly enough teams have maintained this, er, "proud" tradition.

I think we hit 101 questions, and many of them were rather good. Our prose was wont to get a little lugubrious, but as somebody who just used "wont" AND "lugubrious," you might have guessed that. Exhibit A: The Reading Of The Rules, which contained jokes, in-jokes, clever linguistic twists, and references so thickly packed that only occasionally did, you know, an actual RULE peek through the surface. Despite such self-indulgences, this was a dandy li'l contest with a couple of winners, and no major headaches.

As I recall, it was a pretty convincing win for The Evil Empire, playing this time as Son, You've Got a Panty on Your Head. The Empire was at its peak of dominance during this period.

QUESTIONS

SUPER BONI

1. (12:00) Sports -- Way, WAY too many questions about Sports of all shapes and sizes. Luckily, despite the 200-plus question crush, just 3 went unanswered by anybody. A lot of "stumpers" were de-stumpified by the overall top-notch performances by the overburdened teams.

2. (4 AM) Comics -- Again, WAY too long. Basically, the length problem was the result of two separate people thinking they'd been assigned to do the Super Bonus, and the inelegant way their totally separate, full Super Boni were shoehorned together. Some great stuff-- a Peanuts section, a Super-Vehicles section, a visual characters section, a Super-Quotes section (my favorite being Rorshach's "Hurm"), but the oppressive weight of it all flattened the performance levels a bit.

HOUR BONI

1. (12:00) Advertising Logo Ransom Note -- This was (I believe) a Dan Aramini special, extracting letters from various product logos and corporation letterheads to spell out a threatening letter from Spiny Norman to Doug Pirahna (of the Harry Organs skit from "Python" from which the team was named). The M from Mountain Dew, the H from Hoover, the O from Land O'Lakes butter-- they and 23 others were here. Name the source product, naturally. Judging from the fondness this still inspires from surviving players, a big success.

2. (1 AM) Descriptions (partial answers) -- 27 quotes describing someone or something. Teams had to name the speaker and their subject. "Blind people come to the ballpark, just to listen to him pitch," was Reggie Jackson on Tom Seaver. "Notice they do not fly so much as plummet" was farmer Graham Chapman on aerial sheep. "Written and played for by the most part by cretinous goons" was Frank Sinatra on the genre of rock & roll. A quietly good Bonus.

3. (2 AM) Cartoon Voices Audio -- A compilation of dialogue clips. They ranged from the obvious (Bugs Bunny saying "What's up, Doc?") to the so-obscure-it-shreds-the-enamel-off-your-teeth (The Captain from "The Katzenjammer Kids"). In those pre-Cartoon Network days, assembling this audio was much tougher then than an equivalent quote-hunt would be now. This bonus was.... ok. Most of the problems were the direct result of having just 25-30 voice clips to choose from. This included a few characters that WE had little familiarity with, but they pretty much all went in. Thus, like Wile E. Coyote, quality control kind of fell off the cliff and went "wumf!" Would be a lot better if done today.

4. (3 AM) Non-Musical Music -- A harmless collection of written questions about musicians (name the acts to perform at Monterey AND Woodstock, the two Top 40 acts to share their names with brands of margarine, etc.). Your basic generic, no-boos, no-cheers, no-trace bonus.

5. (4 AM) TV Floorplans -- Originally offered to Big Nasty Teeth in 1985, it was rejected due to fears about accuracy. Re-nominated for We Begin Bombing, it just didn't win over the 2 people with ultimate say-so. Four long years later, it emerged once again, made it in, and was a smasharoony success. A valuable life lesson for us all. Oh, by the way, the concept was 20 architectural floorplans, from which you had to I.D. the TV series. Only one team got a 10, because they alone realized that among the 20 floorplans were BOTH "Odd Couple" apartments (right next to each other, too). The "What's Happ'ning!" one also befuddled many teams-- as it rightly should have.

6. (5 AM) Woody Allen -- Take a wild guess on this one. 29 questions about Woody, and not a one about Woody's woody (well, this WAS 1989-- Soon-Yi wasn't even born yet). Most teams did pretty well on this, except for the mini-section on "Crimes and Misdemeanors," which had only been released a few weeks earlier.

7. (6 AM) Williamsiana

8. (7 AM) Graham Chapman Audio -- When word of Chapman's death reached the all-Python team that autumn, it was immediately decided to produce an all-Chapman voice clip bonus, preempting the audio which had been scheduled, a musical locations one. The concept was simple: Name the Python character (each portrayed by Chapman), and the skit or movie. Ted Benson hastily assembled this in his Raleigh-Durham recording studio, but could not make it to Billville that semester by midnight. I think his plane was due to arrive in Albany circa 2 AM. So this was scheduled for 7 AM to give him the time to arrive with the cassette. This Bonus, although the epitome of singularity in concept (how'd you like to be a NON-Python fan listening to 7 minutes' worth of Graham Chapman dialogue at the crack of dawn?!?), was liked.

ACTION TRIVIA

1. Neglected Senses -- A unique type of Action, where teams sent down one player each, to test their hearing, smell, touch, and taste, all while blindfolded. The sound was a Pop-a-Matic from the "Trouble" & "Headache" board games; the scent was from a pack of baseball cards, which still contained card-staining gum in 1989 (guess kids weren't as investment-conscious back then); and the touching involved tabulating the exact total of a handful of change by feel. Don't recall the taste sensation. A real good Action.

2. Perform Chekhov's "The Cherry Orchard" from "Gumby Theater"-- Starting to figure out why this group got "The Python Team" sobriquet? This was supposed to be the Gumbys from Monty Python. We got Gumby the claymation character. We got Chekhov the "Star Trek" character. I'm surprised we didn't get Cherry Garcia while they were at it. We got a whole lot of crazy performances, including the stray Python kind. Lots of fun.

3. Do the "My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean" scene from Abbott and Costello -- A friggin' mess, but an entertaining one. Only one team really knew what this was (guess it wasn't as memorable a scene as we'd hoped). Some teams tried "Who's On First" recitations. One team performed a mystery scene from NO existing Abbott & Costello movie, but one WITH pacing, characterizations, jokes, and a big finish. One team sent a player down to confess that although nobody on his squad knew Abbott & Costello, he'd like instead to entertain us with some acrobatics..... and proceeded to fling his body around the Rathskellar with terrifying lack of concern for the integrity of his own neck. Some absolutely great reactions to an absolutely rotten Action idea.

4. Come down and perform Boca-Maru -- This was some bit of physical business from a Kurt Vonnegut novel. I know that if I were playing, I would've been thoroughly bewildered. Apparently, the teams that did play felt the same way.