I should mention first that you need to take into consideration that many Trivial Pursuit cards are right when they are printed and simply get outdated(world records and things).
What questions have you known the answer to only to find that the makers of Trivial Pursuit are idiots?
The classic question is “What is the only man-made object visible from space?” The answer they give is “The Great Wall of China”. Of course, many objects can be seen from space.
Here’s one I’ve seen. “What actor has portrayed the same character on television for the longest period of time?” Their answer? “Kelsey Grammer.” I’m almost positive the real answer is Carol O’Connor. One thing I do know is that Kelsey Grammer is wrong.
What are the three phases/types (I don’t remember the exact wording) of matter? (In the science category)
According to them, they’re animal, vegetable, and mineral. I lost a pie piece when I said solid, liquid, and gas (leaving out the more esoteric stuff, like plasma).
Actually, I think Kelsy Grammer is correct. Remember you have to add Cheers and Frasier together.
Anyway, in science and nature one read “what is one tenth of a bel?” The answer is of course a decibel. The problem is that decibels are a logarythmic scale of pressure measured in pascals. There is no such thing as a bel, centibel, kilobel, whatever. There is only the decibel.
Oooooh, don’t get me started. I remember this night like it was only 15 years ago.
I was playing Trivial Pursuit Baby Boomers[sup]TM[/sup] with my parents and some friends of theirs. I was somewhere in the late teens, earlier twenties phase of life. Now this phase of life for me is most prominently noted as “Rabid Beatles Fan” phase. I knew everything about The Beatles. If a question came up in the game about The Beatles, it was pretty much forfeited to me, because I would get it right.
Then “the question”: On The Beatles’ White Album, what is the title of the song which is a slowed down version of Revolution?
Me (as I’m reaching for my wedge): Revolution 1
Response: No. Ha! It’s Revolution 9. It say’s it right here, look.
Me: That is so totally f**king wrong. Revolution 9 is an avante garde piece!
I was absolutely apoplectic. I even got the album out and played both songs for them and they still wouldn’t give it to me. The bastards!!
Thanks for dredging up that traumatic experience for me.
Keep in mind that Trivial Pursuit includes “spoiler” questions that are intentionally wrong. This is intended to make it obvious if some other trivia game just swipes all their questions without doing research on its own.
Of course, this means that players have to suffer with their stupid spoilers.
What frustrates me is the “science” catagory. They have questions like “In Palmistry, what does the Love Line represent?” That’s science??? Give me a break.
Is this what the manufacturers of TP claim? If so, it smacks of lame excuse-making to try to cover up their own ineptitude and lack of research.
Anyway, the one that always cheeses me off is some question about what the Duchess’s baby turns into while Alice is holding her. Everyone knows it’s a pig. There’s even a famous Tenniel illustration showing Alice holding a pig which is wearing a baby bonnet. Trivial Pursuit says it’s something else, which my latent rage will not allow me to recall at this moment. Fortunately, my wife, who knows the correct answer as well as I do, always concedes that question to me.
Dunno about the original Genus edition, but the others use many questions & answers submitted by customers. With everything they publish, it stands to reason that some are wrong.
My contribution: in the 80’s edition, there’s a question about Michael Keaton’s highest-grossing movie of the decade. The answer given, “Beetlejuice.” Batman out grossed Beetlejuice in the first two weekends alone! If I’m reading the question, I’ll accept either answer.
last night my older sister and i were playing trivial pursuit and in the blue geography questions it asked
"what is the capital of thailand’
now we all know that bangkok is the answer but for some reason the card said ‘Kuala lumpur’ which is malaysia’s capital my sister didnt let me have the wedge but i was positive i was right.
One night in Krungthepmahanakhon Amonrattanakosin Mahintharayutthaya Mahadilokphop Noppharatratchathaniburirom Udomratchaniwetmahasathan Amonphimanawatansathit Sakkathattiyawitsanukamprasit makes the white man humble…
There’s something in the original one about what kind of animals group in pods. I answered dolphins, and the bastards I played with wouldn’t give it to me because the card said “whales”. Or maybe vice versa. No amount of protesting or evidence that a group of dolphins is *also *called a pod would get me that wedge.
So, I guess the game wasn’t entirely wrong, but it wasn’t right enough. Also, this was 20 years ago and I should probably just let it go…
This is ironic since Chris Haney and Scott Abbot (the inventors of Trivial Pursuit) were sued by Fred Worth (author of a metric shit-ton of trivia books) for pillaging his life’s work to create their game. And he (Fred) knew this because he laid the same traps as described in the above post. Ken Jennings details the shenanigans in his book “Brainiac”.
From Wiki:
The courts, though, ruled in favor of the TP dudes, stating that facts are not protected by copyright.
I “learned” from Trivial Pursuit that the inventor of the brassiere was the aptly-named Otto Titzling. Several years later, I was taking a Games magazine quiz which required the reader to distinguish factual tales of invention and origin from fictional ones. I got to the question about Titzling and Phillip de Brassiere and thought, “Aha! Otto was real, but de Brassiere was made up, since the origin of ‘brassiere’ is related to the Spanish brazo, for arm!” Imagine my surprise when I checked the answer page and learned Titzling himself was a figment of Wallace Reyburn’s imagination!