This is a classic Sci-Fi trivia set... and by "classic" I mean it was printed in 1996. I've actually used this thing in preparing some quizzes before. I took a bit of inspiration from The Technical Difficulties podcast, which had the challenge of "if this is an answer from a 1984 Trivial Pursuit set, what's the question", and made comedy gold out of it. Seriously, need a proper deep belly laugh, go check out their podcast and later videos. Finding this particular set though made me decide it would be fun to have a brief look at the wide world of geekdom, and see what exactly has changed in the realm of SF & Fantasy since these questions were written.
At the time these questions were written...
- DVDs had only just been launched in Japan. Hell, Laserdiscs were still going by then!
- Batman & Robin was going to be released shortly, and "kill off" the comic book movie... at least for a year until Blade happened. Christopher Nolan hadn't even made Following by then!
- Paul McGann was still the current Doctor. In fact, not only had we only just had Russell T. Davies and Stephen Moffat's first contributions to Who (the novel Damaged Goods and the short story Continuity Errors), but there were 13 episodes of Classic Who still missing that we would later get back.
- Star Trek Deep Space Nine was halfway through season five (so we hadn't even gotten the acclaimed episodes In the Pale Moonlight, Far Beyond the Stars, or It's Only a Paper Moon yet), and Voyager was halfway through season three (no Seven of Nine yet).
- The last Battlestar Galactica aired on TV was Galactica 1980, we were still far off the reboot completely overwriting everyone's view on the property.
- Babylon 5 was still a thing, only just starting its fourth season. We hadn't even had Simon Pegg dissing it yet! (In fact, if you type "Babylon 5 is" into Google, the top suggestion is still "a big pile").
- The film based on a Marvel comic that had done the best at the box office was Howard the Duck. Of course, in two years Blade would change that... man, Blade needs more recognition for how it shook up comic book movies!
- We still had faith in George Lucas, he had yet to burn away a lot of goodwill with the Special Editions.
- A full scale anime boom had yet to happen in the West. There was some interest with Akira, and Ghost in the Shell having limited releases, but the floodgates opening with the success of Pokemon, Dragonball Z, and Sailor Moon was still a little way off.
- Final Fantasy VII was about to be launched, making a whole new wave of JRPG fans outside Japan.
- Doom was still king of FPSs, no Half-Life yet. In fact, a few months after this, long-running joke of the video game world Duke Nukem Forever would be first announced.
- The Hugo Awards were seven years away from a major shake up in splitting Best Dramatic Presentation into Short Form and Long Form.
- The mere idea of doing TV via the internet was still an amusing novelty in the days of dial-up, no Netflix for many years, so a long time before the mistake that someone who worked for Blockbuster probably still regrets to this day.
- The first Harry Potter book was yet to be published.
- Peter Jackson was still better known as the guy behind Braindead.
- The only Buffy the Vampire Slayer thing out there was the 1992 Kirsty Swanson film.
- Not enough people had woken up to Orson Scott Card, John W. Campbell, and quite a few others as being real pieces of shit yet.
- It was still a season or two away from The X-Files making clear that not even the show's makers could follow what the hell the conspiracy was all about anymore.
- The Alien franchise could still be referred to as a Trilogy (and I maintain that it works quite well as a trilogy) for another year.
- We were still looking forward to the American Godzilla movie, little realising that it would be another couple of decades for us to get a truly great American Godzilla movie.
Huh, that was fun to put together, might do another one of these at some point. To wrap up though, a few brief comments on this set itself. Firstly, this has something in comparison to The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy, for both "contain much that is apocryphal, or at least wildly inaccurate...". There are a lot of just plain wrong questions and answers in here, like one that says that in Superman II Earth is being menaced by a Space Bomb (eh?). The other thing I have note is that this contains The Worst Quiz Question I Have Ever Read In My Life! Just look.
That's not even a trick question!
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