Saturday, January 7, 2012

Top 10 "wrong answers"

For my first post of 2012, I have a childhood flashback.

When I attended school, I memorized the answers to multiple-choice tests so well that I couldn't help but giggled at the wrong answers, which got me in trouble sometimes.  Later, when I watched game shows on TV and played them online, I encountered even more answers that sounded right but were off the mark.

Here are my top 10 examples and the places they come from.
  1. Little Jill Horner (Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, original ABC version, 1999): Brian Fodera became the second contestant to leave this show without answering a single question right.  The question was something like, "What did Little Jack Horner find in his Christmas pie?"  Little Jill Horner was the "D", or least sensible choice.  Fodera answered "blackbird" - confusing this story with "Sing a Song of Sixpence" - instead of plum.  I then joked to myself, "Little Jill Horner made me do it!" in paraphrase of the late Flip Wilson who blamed the devil.   I love this wrong answer because I can imagine LJH as a bratty little girl, as I did in The Buddy Wayne Chronicles, or as an adorable child star, as in My Ideal World.  (Rehab does wonders!)
  2. Amy the woman scorned: Twice on Now You See It, which CBS aired in 1989, "AMY" was hidden inside 14-letter puzzles for which contestants had to find the right answers.  Both puzzles were tied to specific categories.  The first time, it was part of "SQUASHINGLEAMY" and contestants had to find types of worms.  The second use was part of "STEAMYNABORSON" and the right answers were associated with Oliver North, who made the news two years earlier due to the Iran-Contra scandal.  (North is now a weekend host on Fox News Channel.)  Both times, "Amy" was a wrong answer; in fact, there were no answers that fit the categories on either occasion!   Therefore, the "woman scorned" part.  I later called a winery Squashing Leamy, in honor of one of the puzzles, in My Ideal World.
  3. Chocolate-covered boogers: This was on page 125 of a book based on the once-popular CD-ROM game You Don't Know Jack, which I no longer own because my new laptop can't play it for some strange reason.  The category here was "Death by & with Chocolate" in the "jack attack" round (the last, rapid-fire round of the game).  As it turns out, page 125 was a bumper crop of such absurd answers: others included cherries, bananas, chipped beef, tuna fish, chicken, grasshoppers, and even snot. (Phew!)  But for some reason, boogers stuck with me more than any of the others.
  4. Rock star Pinky, queen of butt rock: I remember this from the CD-ROM of volume 3 of YDKJ.  It was another jack attack and the category was "The Name Behind the Band."  In other words, find the first names of the leaders of certain rock bands (e.g. Eddie Van Halen).  This reminded me of my Pinky McPipkin character - a rockabilly star - and her purported invention of "butt rock."  That I later found out that "butt rock" was just another name of the music done by 1980s hair bands didn't diminish my wonder.
  5. "Happy, Sleepy, Sneezy, Grumpy, Gloomy, Bashful, Doc!"  Think these are the names of the Seven Dwarfs, right?  Not according to an episode of the children's TV classic Saved by the Bell.  Only here do we learn that, in the original Grimm Brothers story (by the way, to be adapted into two cinematic retellings in 2012), the dwarves had no names!
  6. The television character who wears a birthday suit.  Welcome to the next big hit show on HBO!  Anyway, the source is YDKJ yet again, this time page 65 of a second book adaptation with TV-related questions.
  7. The brain that's striped and that you can get without trying it on first: This ridiculous combination comes from two more puzzles on Now You See It.  Both were adjacent to correct answers: zebra and bra, respectively.
  8. If They're Bounding Around Their Parents' Tie Leashes, the show about hyperactive children!  This comes from Camouflage, which aired briefly on GSN in 2007.  This was actually presented in three lines of text as larger "words" that masked a correct answer, if read from left to right.  What the show was looking for was the soap opera The Young and The Restless.  This is another entry in My Ideal World.
  9. Laura, Brenda, Rebecca, and Brendan, the ghosts of TV past: From page 51 of the second YDKJ book, the category was unseen TV characters ("We Haven't Seen Hide nor Hair of Them").  All of them were characters on the same shows as the unseen characters, however.
  10. Cindy Brady, the youngest one - in a bob?  It's the second YDKJ book one more time, on page 17.  Let's just say that, without the curls, the song wouldn't sound the same.