Never Smile at a Crocodile Trivia Quiz

Answer: Paul Hogan

In "Crocodile Dundee" American journalist Sue Charlton (played by Linda Kozlowski) travels to the Australian outback to report on Michael J. "Crocodile" Dundee, a bushman who was supposed to have lost two legs fighting a crocodile. When she meets him she find out he only has a scar and at first she is appalled by his coarse behaviour. After a while she is impressed by his ability to deal with the wildlife, especially when he saves her from an attack by a crocodile. They travel to New York where Sue refuses a marriage proposal from her editor and longtime boyfriend Richard (Mark Blum). At the end of the movie Sue and Mick get together on a crowded railway platform, after Mick walked on the hands of the crowd to reach her.

The story was written by Paul Hogan, who also played the leading role. It was based on the life of Rodney Ansell, a bushman who survived in the wild for 56 days. The movie was made with a relatively small budget and became the second-highest grossing movie of 1986. Two sequels were made but none came close to the success of the first movie.

Before "Crocodile Dundee" made Hogan a global celebrity he was already famous in Australia for "The Paul Hogan Show", a comedy sketch program. After filming the movie Hogan divorced his wife and married co-star Linda Kozlowski.

The three wrong answers are all Australian actors, too.

Answer: Elvis

"Miami Vice" was an American crime series, starring Don Johnson and Philip Michael Thomas as vice cops Sonny Crockett and Ricardo Tubbs. The series was produced by Michael Mann and ran for five seasons.

The series was a huge success and stood out more because of its flashy, glamorous style, with cops driving a Ferrari and living on expensive boats, than for its realistic scenarios. Sonny Crockett's typical look, wearing a T-shirt under a white designer suit, sunglasses, no socks and a five o'clock shadow, made him a fashion icon. Jan Hammer's synthesizer music was also part of the appeal of the series. The "Miami Vice" soundtrack reached number one in the US album chart in 1985.

Answer: Elizabeth Peters

Elizabeth Peters is one of the two pseudonyms used by Barbara Mertz (nee Gross), who was born in Canton, Illinois in 1927. She studied Egyptology and her first two publications, published under her own name, were non-fiction books about archaeology. She then turned to thrillers and mystery fiction.

The Amelia Peabody series consists of nineteen books set in Egypt between 1880 and the discovery of the tomb of Tutankhamon. "Crocodile on the Sandbank" is the first book of the series. The reader is introduced to the character Amelia Peabody, a young heiress who travels to Egypt and gets involved in the discovery of Amarna, the old capital of pharaoh Akhenaten. There she also meets her future husband.

"The Snake, the Crocodile and the Dog" is the seventh book from the series and continues the story of the previous volume, "The Last Camel Died At Noon". Amelia and her husband go back to Egypt while her adopted daughter Nefret tries to adapt to life in rural England. Back in Egypt her husband is kidnapped and, when finally rescued from his captor, seems to suffer from amnesia.

The three wrong answers are all protagonists of other series written by Mertz. The Vicky Bliss series consists of six books that centre around a professor in art history who gets involved in international crime. There are four novels in the Jacqueline Kirby series, a librarian who solves mysteries. Ruth Bennett is a character from the Georgetown Trilogy.

Answer: Kruger

The video starts with a couple of buffaloes who run into a small pride of lions. The lions start chasing the buffaloes, try to grab a baby buffalo and knock it into the river. The lions go for the kill when suddenly a crocodile appears and tries to steal the calf away from the lions. The crocodile tries to pull it further into the river while the lions try to pull it ashore. Eventually the crocodile lets go and the lions manage to pull the calf onto the shore. When the fate of the calf seems sealed a large herd of buffaloes appears and chases off the lions. At one instance one of the buffaloes takes a lion on its horns and throws it in the air. Amazingly the calf seems to escape unscathed from the ordeal.

The video was shot by David Budzinski and was put on Youtube where it was viewed 66 million times by 2011 (source: Wikipedia). National Geographic first aired a documentary about the video in 2008. If you haven't seen it yet you might find it worthwhile to take a look.

The Everglades (USA), Kakadu (Australia) and Bhitarkanika (India) are other national parks where you can spot crocodiles.

Answer: The Bay

"The Bay" tells the story of an environmental disaster in a seaside town shown through compiled images from surveillance cameras, amateur videos and a TV crew. When the town is preparing for the 4th of July festivities a number of people suddenly break out with a strange kind of rash all over their bodies. In the end it is revealed that they are carriers of a mutant of the parasite cymothoa exigua, which feeds on the tongue of its victim.

The three wrong answers are all movies that revolve around attacks of a giant man-eating crocodile. "Lake Placid" is set in a fictional lake in Maine, USA. Three sequels were made of the movie. In "Rogue" a group of tourists is attacked in Kakadu National Park, Australia. "Primeval" is based on the true story of Gustave, a giant crocodile from Burundi. The real Gustave is supposed to have killed over 300 people on the shores of Lake Tanganyika, although those numbers are impossible to verify.

Answer: Vector

The first Sonic game, "Sonic the Hedgehog", was released in 1991. A blue hedgehog called Sonic has to save the world from the evil genius Dr Ivo "Eggman" Robotnik. In order to do so the player has to run and jump Sonic through a number of levels in a given time period, while collecting golden rings. At first the Sonic games were all platform games but the series later expanded into other genres.

In 1995 "Knuckles Chaotix" was released. While the story and gameplay was similar to its predecessors the game introduces the Choatix Group which consists of five playable characters: Vector the Crocodile, Charmy Bee, Espio the Chameleon, Mighty the Armadillo and Knuckles the Echidna. Knuckles and Mighty had already appeared in earlier games.

Answer: Steve Irwin

Steve Irwin was born in Essendon, Victoria, Australia, on February 22, 1962. His parents were wildlife rehabilitators who ran a small reptile and fauna park in Queensland, so Steve had experience with crocodiles from a very young age. He was only nine when he wrestled his first crocodile. After working as a volunteer for a crocodile wildlife program he took over the management of the zoo from his parents. He met his wife Terri, an American naturalist, when she visited the zoo as part of a visit of Australia's wildlife rehabilitation facilities. They used the footage of their honeymoon, spent trapping crocodiles, for the first episode of "The Crocodile Hunter". The show stood out because of Steve's enthusiastic presenting style and became very popular. It reached a global audience when it was broadcast in the USA and the UK. Later Steve also appeared in other TV shows such as "Croc Files" and "The Ten Deadliest Snakes in the World", as well as in several episodes of "The Tonight Show". In 2006, when shooting some underwater footage for his daughter Bindi Sue's show, he was stung in the chest by the tail spine of a stingray.

Austin Stevens is the presenter of "Austin Stevens: Snakemaster". Les Stroud and Bear Grylls are presenters of survival shows.

Answer: Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Fyodor Dostoyevski (1821-1881) was a Russian author well known for his novels "Crime and Punishment" and "The Brothers Karamazov". He was arrested for membership of a liberal literary discussion group and sentenced to death, although his sentence later was commuted to four years hard labour in Siberia. He suffered from epilepsy and gambling addiction, what led to financial ruin.

In "The Crocodile" the narrator and his wife go to see a crocodile put on display. After teasing the crocodile the narrator is swallowed alive. His wife wants to cut open the crocodile to free her husband but the owner refuses. She can't afford to buy the crocodile either. The narrator ends up staying inside the crocodile where he continues his job as a civil servant.

The story was seen as a parody on the fate of Nikolay Chernyshevsky, a Russian author and leader of a revolutionary democratic movement, who was locked up in a fortress in St. Petersburg. Dostoyevsky always denied that "The Crocodile" was about Chernyshevsky.

The two other wrong answers are 20th Century Russian authors.

Answer: Return to Eden

"Return to Eden" was originally planned as a three episode mini-series, but because of its huge success a 22-part weekly series was made. The original three part series starred Rebecca Gilling as heiress Stephanie Harper, James Reyne as her husband Greg Marshden and Wendy Hughes as Jilly Stewart, Stephanie's friend and Marshden's lover.

Because of the glamorous settings "Return to Eden" was considered Australia's answer to hugely successful American soap operas such as "Dallas" and "Dynasty". The weekly series centred around Stephanie's struggle to keep her business empire out of the hands of her enemies Jilly and Jake Sanders (Daniel Albineri), who in the end was revealed to be Greg Marshden's brother.

The three wrong answers are Australian soap operas, too.

Answer: Peter Pan

The music from "Never Smile at a Crocodile" was written by Frank Churchill, a composer who wrote a lot of music for Disney movies from the 30s until his death in 1942. The lyrics were written by American songwriter Jack Lawrence.

"Peter Pan, or The Boy Who Never Grew Up" was first written as a play by J.M. Barrie in 1904 and later reworked as a novel. In 1953 Disney produced the animated film "Peter Pan" based on Barrie's work.

The song was later used, with lyrics this time, in an episode of "The Muppet Show".