Popcorn Crunchers, Reel 01 Trivia Quiz

Answer: It was irradiated with gamma rays.

Not only was the specimen frozen for shipment from Madagascar to the United States but it was also subjected to gamma rays as a strategy for its preservation. The premise is that coelacanth blood treated in this manner is capable of causing any animal to revert to its prehistoric ancestral state.

Answer: The Monster that Devoured Cleveland

Three of these movies are real: "Attack of the Crab Monsters" (1957), "I Married a Monster from Outer Space" (1958), and "Monster on the Campus (1958)." In the American television programme "The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis" (1959-1963), every time Dobie mentioned a movie to Maynard, it was called either "The Monster that Devoured Cleveland" or "The Son of the Monster that Devoured Cleveland," neither of which were real.

Answer: giant ants

As was the case with many motion pictures made in the 1950s, atomic-bomb tests were identified as the cause of the mutation of common insects. In the trade, these films are called "nuclear monster" movies, in general, and "big bug" movies, in particular.

In "Them!" the giants were common ants. The thesis was that the bomb tests in New Mexico caused underground colonies of ants to become enormous. And they killed people. And then they headed for Los Angeles.

Answer: David Janssen

David Janssen starred in four different television series: "Richard Diamond, Private Detective" (1957-1960), "The Fugitive" (1963-1967), "O'Hara, U.S. Treasury" (1971-1972), and "Harry O" (1974-1976). In "Cult of the Cobra," Janssen plays Rico Nardi, one of the five airmen who violate the privacy of the cobra cult.

He owns and operates a bowling alley back in the US. And he meets an unfortunate herpetological end.

Answer: Venus has no moon(s).

Queen Yllana led a revolt against the men of Venus, killed off almost all of them, but kept the mathematicians and scientists in a penal colony on Venus' moon Tyrus. Venus has no moons; it is one of the only two planets in the solar system without at least one. There is no moon named Tyrus. In the video game "Gears of War", Tyrus is a planet.

Answer: Jules Verne

French author Jules Verne wrote "L'Île mystérieuse" ("The Mysterious Island") in 1875. It was an imperfect sequel to "Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas" (1870) and "In Search of the Castaways" (1867-68). The chronologies of these three works do not fit well together. To the elements in Verne's books, the makers of this serial (and the feature film stitched together from it) added a woman from the planet Mercury who wants to conquer the Earth.

The theatrical 15-part serial was made in 1951 and a feature film in 1961 (with special effects by Ray Harryhausen).

Answer: Dr. Van Helsing

Harker is employed to catalogue books at Count Dracula's castle in Transylvania. His actual mission is to kill the vampire. He is bitten by one of Dracula's brides and sealed in a crypt by the count. Doctor Van Helsing, played by Peter Cushing, arrives in Klausenburg, looking for Harker.

Answer: acting

Lee Ann Meriwether (b. 1935) won the Miss America pageant in 1955 and went on to a career acting in motion pictures and television. She was a regular on the TV series "Barnaby Jones," played Catwoman on "Batman," and co-starred in "The Time Tunnel." She played Linda Davis, the monster's girlfriend, in the motion picture "4D Man" (1959).

Her other horror and science fiction film credits include "Batman" (1966), "Abaddon" (2014), "Sunny in the Dark" (2015), and "Hell's Kitty" (2018).

Answer: Japan

This motion picture is a commentary on the use of nuclear weapons, a topic of particular interest to the Japanese against whom two such weapons were used in World War II. The premise is that the atomic bombs woke centuries-old monsters from their sleep and sent them rampaging against the islands of Japan. Later installments in the Godzilla franchise place the monster elsewhere.

For example, "Godzilla" (1998) puts the creature in New York City.

Answer: stop-motion animation

Stop-motion photography is a form of movie making in which objects are moved in tiny increments and each frame separately exposed such that, when shown, the objects appear to be moving. The brain-creatures in "Fiend Without a Face" were filmed using stop-motion animation.

It is more common to see this technique in characters such as Gumby, Mister Bill, and Wallace and Gromit. It was perfected in Ray Harryhausen's films: "The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms" (1953), "It Came from Beneath the Sea" (1955), "Jason and the Argonauts" (1963), "The Golden Voyage of Sinbad" (1973), and "Clash of the Titans" (1981).