We’d like to extend a big thank you to our loyal readers and community at ReadWriteWeb. As part of that, we’ve partnered with ThinkGeek to give away a few geeky and fun prizes. Here’s how it works, we’ll give you a few trivia tidbits of interest on a topic, and then close with a trivia question that we hope will be a stumper.
So read on, dig deep into your brain (or Google), and give us your answer in the comments. The best answer, according to the ReadWriteWeb staff crack team of trivia experts, wins the prize of the day.
The Prize: Star Trek Enterprise Pizza Cutter
The prize today? A coveted Star Trek Enterprise Pizza Cutter from our friends at ThinkGeek. You can be the hit of the office parties with your officially licensed Star Trek weapon of pizza destruction. Pepperoni with mushrooms never tasted quite so good as when it’s been sliced through with a replica of the original Enterprise. No pizza can stand up to Federation technology.
Seriously, we’re not sure that we’d actually use the Enterprise for cutting a slice, but you’d have to admit it looks good. Naturally, this prize demands that we throw a little Sci-Fi trivia your way.
The First Science Fiction Film
Trek may be the first big franchise in science fiction, but it’s far from the first Sci-Fi to grace the small or large screen. That honor goes to a film that’s now more than 100 years old: A Georges Melies film titled A Trip to the Moon. The film is a hair shorter than 2001, clocking in at only 14 minutes long.
The film was based (very loosely) on “From the Earth to the Moon,” by Jules Verne and “The First Men in the Moon,” by H.G. Wells.
Though the special effects leave something to be desired by today’s standards, it wasn’t exactly cheap. According to Lang Thompson, it cost 10,000 francs and required four months to make. “Melies used machinery and techniques from theater but also experimented with clay models and costumes of paper-based board.”
Surprisingly, Hollywood hasn’t remade A Trip to the Moon yet.
Go Go Godzilla!
Well, if Trek isn’t the oldest, maybe it’s the longest-running franchise? Nope. How about the venerable British classic, Doctor Who? Again, no. That honor goes to everybody’s favorite lizard, Godzilla.
The first Godzilla film was released in 1954, originally titled Gojira. What could have been a film about a giant octopus (if Eiji Tsuburaya had gotten his way), has become a long-lived franchise with more feature films than you can shake a stick at. Did you know, the name came from the Japanese words for gorilla (“gorira”) and whale (“kujira”)? Now there’s a concept I’d like to see someone run with.
A lot of fun has been poked at the Godzilla suit over the years, but you should have tons of respect for Haruo Nakajima, who donned the more than 200lbs suit. According to IMDB “it was not uncommon for a cup of Nakajima’s sweat to be drained from the Gojira suit.”
Or Maybe Superman
Science fiction is open to interpretation, though. If you lump in comic book superheroes, then Godzilla actually came in a bit late to the big screen. The first Superman cartoon short was released in 1941. Superman and his mild-mannered alter ego Clark Kent were voiced by radio actor Bod Collyer.
The live-action films also beat our sore tempered lizard friend to the theaters. The Superman serials appeared in 1948, with Kirk Alyn as Supes, and Noel Neill as Lois Lane.
If Neill’s name rings a bell, it’s because she had a part in the most recent film installment Superman Returns. Don’t look too hard for Lex Luthor in the early serials or the later Superman film with George Reeves. Luthor didn’t turn up until the 1978 Superman film starring Christopher Reeve.
Your Trek Trivia
Bringing it back to Star Trek, let’s see how many RWW readers can get this one. Yesterday we touched on women in computing. Did you know several of the original writers for the Star Trek television series were women? One of the writers was told by Gene Roddenberry to change her name, in order to be hired by the network. Who did Roddenberry tell to change their name, and what women wrote for the series during its original run?
Submit your answer in the comments to this post, and we’ll announce the winner tomorrow. Good luck!
Update: Congrats to Irene Yuen, who submitted the best answer and won the Enterprise Pizza Cutter. Stay tuned for the rest of the week for more trivia and more chances to win.
