Quiz Answer Key and Fun Facts
1. "Turn-On" is widely regarded as one of the worst shows to air on American television. It was aired in 1969 and, according to Wikipedia, " consisted of various rapid-fire jokes and risqué skits." The jokes and skits were almost universally held to be in bad taste, and the show was cancelled very quickly. According to Tim Conway, who was the first episodes' guest host, when was the show canceled?
2. In another enormously sadistic show, the British satellite channel Galaxy commissioned a sitcom about Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun. On the show, which aired in 1990, the Hitlers were portrayed as a family living next door to a Jewish couple. Although conceived as a satire, the show offended virtually everyone and was cancelled after one episode. What was the name of the show?
3. In 2001, Vince McMahon, the owner of World Wrestling Entertainment, unveiled a new American Football league, which crashed and burned. The league was going to play a schedule during the NFL's off-season and featured a number of rule changes intended to make the game more exciting. Except most of the changes were confusing, many of created a high risk of injury, and some were just dumb. One thing that turned out to be dumb was letting the players put anything they wanted on their jersey, as professional American football players are not known for their rapier-like wordplay. Fundamentally, though, what killed the league was the fact that the players weren't very good and the games were torture to watch. What's the name of the failed league?
4. Sometimes the sadism comes not from what airs, but what it replaces. In one infamous example, on November 17, 1968, NBC was showing a football game between the New York Jets and the Oakland Raiders. The Jets were leading, 32-29 with 65 seconds to play when NBC cut away from the game to show a made-for-TV movie. The Raiders then proceeded to score 14 points in a fantastically exciting comeback. Of course, everyone watching on TV was involuntarily watching the movie. What was the name of the movie?
5. Steven Bochco was the mind behind some great television shows - "Hill Street Blues" and "LA Law" leap to mind - but he was also the mind behind "Cop Rock", ranked among the worst TV shows ever. "Cop Rock" was one of those ideas which, in retrospect, sounds like a joke rather than a real show. Bochco's idea was to combine the police drama with what other style of theatrical performance?
6. Some ideas are so awful, so cruel to the audience, that they become synonymous with failure or disaster. One of these appeared in the third episode of the fifth season of "Happy Days." In that episode, Fonzie, who had become the most popular character on the show, traded in his motorcycle for a pair of skis and jumped over an animal. "Jumping the _______" has since become synonymous for the precise moment when a TV series has started its inevitable death spiral to utter lousiness. What animal goes in the blank?
7. There are good TV shows that come from movies ("M*A*S*H"). There are good TV shows that come from other shows ("Maude", "The Jeffersons", "Laverne and Shirley"). There are good TV shows that come from animated shorts ("The Simpsons"). I have absolute confidence, though, in saying that no good TV show has ever come from a commercial. But in 2007, someone decided to buck the conventional wisdom and make a show based on nothing more than one-joke characters from GEICO commercials. Six episodes aired before someone had mercy on the audience. What was the name of the show?
8. In 2002, "TV Guide" published a list of the top 50 worst TV shows. Number one was the "Jerry Springer" show. Number Two was this show, which aired from September 1965 to September 1966. The premise of the show was that a man went out shopping to fulfill a need for his family and returned with a piece of technology that represented the reincarnation of his deceased mother. The name of the show tells you the name of the possessed technology. What was the show?
9. One might argue that the entire game show genre was designed by sadists, but there's a show where sadism played a specific part in the show. Specifically, the contestants have to answer questions while trying "...to rise above such trivial distractions as cactus buzzers, nude middle-aged dancers and electrocution" (according to the British Channel 4 website). Furthermore, in the final round, the winner must answer additional questions or their prizes will be damaged or destroyed. The name of the show focuses on the difficulty of coming up with the right answer while one's attention is diverted by, say, having to pee to activate the buzzer. What's the name of the show?
10. It's 1978. Your favorite movie of all time was released a year earlier. You went to the theatre over a dozen times. You bought the action figures and played with them (an economic decision you will come to regret twenty years later, when you see them on eBay). You can recite whole chunks of dialog. You hear that CBS has made a two-hour program to air in November. You eagerly await it, only to see a show so awful, so horrific that you want to take an ice-cream scoop to your brain. It has never aired again and the mind behind the movie (NOT the show) has admitted to a burning desire to locate and destroy any copies that exist. What's the name of the show?
Source: Author
Correspondguy
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kyleisalive before going online.
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