A Trip around a "Neverending Story" Monopoly Board Quiz

Answer: Youth

After losing his faithful horse Artax to the depressing nature of the swamp, Atreyu finally finds the wise, ancient, giant tortoise Morla and manages to talk to her to get further clues for his quest, although, during that time, he is twice thrown back into the swamp by a massive sneeze from the poor tortoise who is allergic to youth - and, given her age, that pretty much means everyone who doesn't measure his age in centuries.

Answer: Gmork the Werewolf

After being swept from Falkor's back in a storm, Atreyu wakes up at the shore and finds he has also lost the invaluable Auryn amulet. On his search for Falkor, he ventures into the ruins, finding centuries-old, crumbling paintings of his past adventures. The last tableau shows a black, fierce werewolf Atreyu has not encountered before - but he soon will. With the creature chained and half starved, it is still dangerous to the unarmed warrior boy, but when it charges at the story's hero, he grabs a sharp shard of stone and the wolf impales itself on it during its attack.

Gmork is shown in the movie as a black, large but otherwise anatomically normal wolf.

Answer: A hand

While, in the first movie, the main villain was the impersonal Nothing, the second one has a classic evil witch, portrayed by Clarissa Burt, as the villain. While her motives and methods somewhat differed in the book - mostly in the fact that in the film, Bastian's gradual loss of memories was her doing, while in the book, it is an inevitable side effect of using the Auryn - escaping her influence was an important step in finding the way back to reality in either medium.

The depiction of her castle remains true to the book, as a black hand with fingers stretched out to the sky.

Her metal servants, more prominently seen in the movie than the novel, also keep the key aspect that she can mentally control them because they are hollow.

Answer: The Will-o-the-wisp

In the novel, the four beings who meet in the Hauling Woods come from the four compass directions and find that the strange, impersonal, Nothing is encroaching from all sides. With one of them missing (it would have been a quite difficult effect to do right in 1984), there are only three, but they still come from very different regions of Fantasia and, true to the novel, decide that the Empress needs to know immediately - but by the time they do arrive at the Ivory Tower, they discover they are hardly the first to do so and pretty much every other area of the limitless world has seen the same.

The "Free Parking" spot on my board shows Atreyu and Artax taking a break at the stream from the first movie, leading over to the next set of properties.

Answer: The production could not come up with a convincing make-up.

Any of the wrong answers would likely have made for a great story in the tabloids, but the reason the green skin was dropped is far more prosaic - the producers could simply not manage to come up with a make-up that would consistently look realistic under the many different lighting conditions required for shooting the movie, so that plan was scrapped early in favor of casting a boy who had some native American ancestry and dropping the "greenskin" in favor of a simple "plains warrior" background for the character.

On my board, I picked "The Spires", "Crystal Canyon" and "Rainbow Beastlands" as the most memorable the many beautiful locations from the riding montage seen in the movie just after Atreyu got picked as the last possible savior of Fantasia.

Noah Hathaway, the actor ultimately chosen to portray Atreyu, performed many of his stunts himself in spite of being only 12 at the time of shooting.

Answer: Silver City

"City Gates". "Harbor" and "Bridge" are the locations I chose from Silver City, a location much more central to the second movie than it has ever been in the book. In the novel, it is a city of extreme beauty floating on the lake of tears and built by the ever-depressed Acherai. Bastian uses a wish to turn them into a new, ever-happy, carefree race that only destroy their previous work. In the movie, Silver city serves mostly as a battleground where Bastian and Atreyu first encounter Xayide's hollow giants. Bastian later returns to the city for the final climactic moment in which he uses his last remaining memory and wish to give Xayide a heart, which destroys the evil sorceress and saves Fantasia.

In terms of production and stage design, the sequel could not live up to the elaborate first installment and especially Silver City felt more like a theme park decoration than a mythical city built of a valuable metal.

Answer: Urgl - she healed Atreyu's wounds

While the Oracle scene takes a few liberties from the novel in the depiction of the gates and the Oracle itself, it stays rather true to the lovable gnome couple of Engiwook and Urgl. Engiwook is a self-proclaimed scientist who wants to research the Oracle but only does so via its visitors; he never actually went there himself so he can only use what he can see from his cave (the first of the gates) and second hand accounts by travelers. Urgl, on the other hand, is a slightly overbearing motherly figure who treats Atreyu's and Falkhor's wounds sustained in the Swamps of Sadness with ointments and a soup that Atreyu finds, to put it mildly, less than appetizing.

Answer: A magnolia bloom

The locations on my board are named "Outer Courtyard" and "Magnolia Pavillion" and the, rather small, throne room and domicile of the Childlike Empress is shaped just like a flower. Its petals open and close depending on the presence and the wishes of the empress alone.

One of the main production issues of the first movie concerned the scene near the beginning in which Atreyu is chosen to be the hero and last hope of Fantasia. While several dozen highly detailed costumes for all kinds of unusual species had been commissioned and made, it was only found upon actually filming, that even with the substantial number of creatures, the vast stage of the outer courtyard felt almost empty. Additional, more traditionally humanoid characters were added to the lineup of envoys reporting the destructive Nothing and even with that, filming angles had to be adjusted on the fly to make the place look as crowded as it should be with all Fantasian races represented.

Answer: No, they have been skipped entirely

While the winds appear neither by name nor as characters in the movies, the special effects team of the 1984 first movie has done some excellent work on making the skies appear fantastic and vivid, so it is not too difficult to find four beautiful sky images, properly representing the north, south, east and west wind.

Answer: Bastian's classroom

After the school bullies had chased Bastian into the dumpster at the very beginning of the first movie, Bastian entered Coreander's bookstore and got the book, before going to school. However, he was way late and the class was in a math test, so he rather hid away in the school attic to read the tome.

In the second movie, we do see where Bastian lives with his father as they have breakfast and the swimming pool also plays a pivotal role because its diving board is where Bastian originally fails to overcome his fear of heights.