Triviaddiction

What did Louis, the prefect of police, throw into the trash can at the end of Casablanca? Who was Bob Hope's radio announcer? What was the consolation prize on The $64,000 Question? Who cares? Thousands upon thousands of Trivia players do, and to them the answers* are so much duck soup. They have made Trivia--a campy game of inconsequential questions and answers about radio, TV, movies, comic books and popular songs--a nationwide fad.

Last week 1,000 college-age students filed into Columbia University's McMillin Theater to watch Columbia's defending champions battle it out with teams from Princeton, Yale, Pennsylvania, Mount Holyoke and Barnard for the Second Annual Ivy League-Seven Sisters Trivia Contest--the closest thing to a world series that the game has spawned. On hand to officiate were Trivia's inventors, former Columbia Students Dan Carlinsky and Edwin Goodgold, whose two books on the subject, published by Dell, have sold 450,000 copies in the past year.

Misspent Youth. To their amusement, only Pennsylvania could recall the famous 1946 Ajax song ("Use Ajax, bumm, bumm, the foaming cleanser . . . "). To the question, "What flavor ice cream did Harpo Marx sell in A Day at the Races", the judges ruled out Princeton's "tutti-frutti" for Yale's more colorful and accurate "tootsi-frootsi."

Columbia led until well past halftime, when Princeton's Tom Tulenko and Mark Liss began to tiger ahead by naming the singer of Come On-a My House (Rosemary Clooney) and the Walt Disney character with nine lives (El Fago Baca), clinched the title by correctly identifying the format of the short-lived TV series It's a Man's World.

The championship trophy--a green Woolworth mixing bowl worth 49-c---was then ceremoniously presented to the new champions, while one of Columbia's King's Men gave a rousing rendition of the Mr. Trivia Song--"There he goes/ Think of all the crap he knows."

"You have to get your basic training from the time you are six until perhaps twelve or 13," says Trivia Champ Tulenko. "After that you refine your ability." He credits his success entirely to "my garbage-filled mind." But for Inventor Goodgold, the essence of Trivia is not so much in the facts themselves as the nostalgic recognition they evoke. "Trivia is concerned with tugging at the heartstrings," says Goodgold. "It's enjoyed by those who have misspent their youth and don't want to let it go. It's the least common cultural denominator."

* A bottle of Vichy water, Bill Goodwin, a new Cadillac.

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