Trademark lines for impressionists quiz. UPDATED.

It's been a very long time since I had a trivia quiz, so I got an idea for a new one based on trademark lines that should be used by anyone trying to do a vocal impersonation of a famous person.

For example, if you are going to do Jimmy Cagney, you pretty much have to say the line "You dirty rat!"

As soon as you say "The name is Bond. James Bond." You're doing a Sean Connery. (NOT a Roger Moore or Pierce Brosnan or anybody else!)

Personally, I always use a line from Murder in the Sun when I do my James Mason impression "I could have sssssscampered down the hill and crushed her neck in thessssse powerful handsssss.", but that is obviously a much more idiosyncratic choice.

In any case, here are ten words or phrases associated with vocal impressions of people or characters from film or TV, spanning many decades. See how many of them you can get.

1. Pilgrim.
John Wayne, answered by danielk.

2. You realize of course, THIS means war!
Bugs Bunny, answered by Ken.

3. And not a lot of people know that.
Michael Caine, answered by the Googling Karlacita!

4. You betcha!
Sarah Palin, answered by danielk. (Would have also accepted Marge Gunderson.)

5. Engage.
Patrick Stewart, answered by danielk. (Jean Luc Picard would have been more precise.)

6. Eee-yeeeeeeeeees? OR Ooooooooooh, goody!
Frank .... oh hell, that guy who used to turn up on the Jack Benny show, answered by danielk. (Partial credit here. Frank Nelson, who also got work on I Love Lucy.)

7. Thankya ver'much.
Elvis Presley, answered by danielk.

8. Tenk you very much.
Latka, character played by Andy Kaufman, answered by danielk.

9. I know you are, but what am I?
Paul Ruebens, answered by danielk. (Pee Wee Herman would have been more precise.)

10. Well....
Ronald Reagan, answered by ken.

Well done to all who answered.

Small roles in a B-movie.

I'm catching up on my film noir watching on Netflix. It's fun to watch these movies from the 1950s. I enjoy the slower paced storytelling style completely devoid of big explosions. Last night's movie was The Asphalt Jungle, a 1950 crime thriller directed by John Huston.


After watching the movie through once, I decided to watch a little more with the commentary playing. The commenter was a film professor yakking away, mainly interested in why a crime drama would be made at MGM. What struck me was the difference between credits in films then and now. The cast list at the beginning of the film only had eight names. Brad Dexter, who plays a small but pivotal role, is not one of them. His name is in the list at the end of the film, a list of about twenty names on a single card. Dexter was a journeyman actor best known for playing Harry Luck, the trustworthy but avaricious gunslinger in The Magnificent Seven.

Nowadays, the end credits take five or six minutes to roll by and everybody down to the accountants and craft service company is given a moment of on-screen glory. It was a very different situation sixty years ago.


Also at the level of no credit in the pre-film list but on the final cast list card is Marilyn Monroe. She plays Angela, the mistress of the character played by Louis Calhern, the high living attorney who is asked to bankroll the caper at the center of the story. The DVD includes the original theatrical trailer, and Marilyn is important enough to get mentioned there. She was by no means a star yet, just a featured player under contract at MGM. This is one of five movies she worked on in 1950. The biggest role she had that year was as Miss Casswell in All About Eve. She wouldn't be a star on her own until she left MGM and went to Fox a few years later.


And then we get to the uncredited roles. Early in the movie, the main character Dix, played by Sterling Hayden, is picked up by the cops and put in a line-up. A night clerk who saw him commit a crime is asked to identify him.

The guy who gets a few lines as the night clerk is Frank Cady, known best to audiences as Sam Drucker on Green Acres. This is very common when watching 1950s movies. Many people who became regulars on TV in the 1960s were bit players at the movie studios in the 1950s. There were a lot of cast members I didn't recognize, even some who got billing before the movie started, but there were a couple of tiny roles filled by actors on their way to bigger things.


Which brings us to the line-up. The cops bring in two guys to be in the line-up with Hayden that look nothing like him. Hayden is extremely tall, listed at 6'5", the other two guys are an average sized guy who is very swarthy and has a mustache, and a tiny, fidgety kid brought in on a dope charge. None of the actors in the line-up get a line during that scene, but the fidgety kid is played by Strother Martin. Martin is one of the great fidgeters in Hollywood history. On another film, he had a scene with Jimmy Stewart. After the first take, Stewart said, "Okay, he can have a pen or he can have a clipboard, but he can't have both. No one is going to see anything else that happens in this scene if you let this guy have two props."

He had no props in this scene. He just adjusted his collar uncomfortably. Still, it was just enough time for a trivia nut like me to say, "Oh my God, that's Strother Martin!"

Let me say for the record that the yakking film professor in the commentary track did not note the work of either Frank Cady or Strother Martin. It makes you wonder what they are teaching kids at those fancy schools.

Useless skill sets and the people who love them.

It's remarkable to me that the Spelling Bee has become an institution on ESPN in this day and age. After all, it's not the 1980s when they had no programming to speak of and filled countless hours of time with Australian Rules Football. (Go, Geelong! All for you, St. Kilda!)

I understand the interest in watching it. It's people having to perform a difficult task under pressure. The drama is obvious. But the skill itself is nearly obsolete because of spell check software.

The operative word in the last sentence is "nearly". Here are the words from a late round of this year's contest.

foliocellosis, trompillo, pyroligneous, conjunto, nematodiasis, caprifig, brachydactylous, congener, marouflage, intercolline, genioglossal, borborygmus, Bayesian, lorimer, fazenda, gaminerie, icteritious, keratolysis, dysautonomia, lassi, paravane, metarteriole, Brumalia, mirin, Aufgabe, leguleian, hyleg, bacalao, siffleur, genethliac, meperidine, Bundestag.

My spell checker in Word and in Blogger only recognize Bayesian and Bundestag. I know conjunto because I like accordion music and lassi because I eat at Indian restaurants. These really aren't words people need to know how to spell on anything like a regular basis and there's no shame in hitting the dictionary when stuck with a really tough word with no good synonym.

I call the skill these young folks excel at useless with no disrespect, because I am also a master of a skill that is becoming less useful as time goes by. I still love trivia, but with the Internet, the actual value of having a head full of useless knowledge is becoming less and less useful every day.

Want to know who played Nero Wolfe on the TV show from earlier this century? Go to imdb.com. Or I can tell you. It's Maury Chaykin, the portly Canadian actor who passed away recently. Whether it's entertainment trivia or sports trivia or fun facts about dinosaurs, the computer you are currently sitting at can get you almost anything you want.

If you can ask the right question.

I went to see Inception this week with my niece Holly and her husband Cleavon, and before the film we were chatting about shows we watch and things that have been recommended. Cleavon had friends that talked about a show which sometimes they liked and sometimes they didn't. It was very strange and he couldn't remember the name, though he has seen at least one episode.

"Do you remember anything about it?" I asked.

"There's like... a milkshake?"


"Oh, yeah. Aqua Teen Hunger Force." I said in my most helpful quiz boy manner.

If you type "milkshake cartoon" into the Google, Master Shake and his pals show up three times on the first page of images but only once on the first page of the web search. Sometimes, it's better to have three pounds of gooey gray matter encased in skull bone and chock full to the brim with useless crap instead the best relational database the world has ever seen.

'Cos we are the Aqua Teens!
Make the homeys say ho, make the girlies wanna scream!

Just sayin'.