Tarzan and Mowgli

There are too many movies in the world. I say this with the utmost respect to the filmmakers who make them, the actors who star in them, the makeup crew, the lighting staff, the costume designers, the sound effects guys, the gaffers, the extras who play background: there are way too many movies to remember. Often when watching Jeopardy there will be certain books or certain countries that get used over and over in clues and you can just guess that they'll come up once or twice a month, like there will be a reference to "Moby Dick" all the time or "Liechtenstein" in geography or the moon "Titan" (Saturn's moon) in astronomy......movies almost never repeat, and there are an endless array of movies to ask about. I'm reading a book right now that lists all the filmographies of the major movies stars, Bette Davis, Marilyn Monroe, Clark Gable, Helen Mirren, Judy Dench, Brad Pitt....it's impossible to remember every single movie. And yet people do....there are just movie buffs out there who can get every single movie question right (Yogesh Raut has played about 30 games of Jeopardy, including the most difficult Masters level, and I've never seen him miss a movie clue ever) and also Ken Jennings's best category during his 74-game run was movies. My problem with movies is they're too repetitive, plots get recycled and reused, often a clue will describe one movie and I'm thinking it's another and you have to choose one of two: Is the movie about a young boy raised in the wild who swings around on trees Mowgli or Tarzan? Kind of hard to tell, right? Both Rudyard Kipling and Edgar Rice Burroughs wrote those books about the same time period and with the same idea of a half-man, half-animal boy. I confuse a whole lot of gangster movies like "GoodFellas" and "Casino," is Sixteen Candles substantially different than Pretty in Pink? And you're telling me West Side story is just the plot of Romeo and Juliet, just in the streets of New York City? Good luck naming the right Dracula movie about vampires, and there's no way I can differentiate between To Russia with Love, Thunderball, Dr. No, You Only Live Twice, and also be expected to remember which English actor played in all of those movies. It's a hero's journey to try to learn all those differences if you haven't actually seen the movie, and therein lies the other problem: There's no time to watch the movies now, there's just too many of them. I could watch 5 movies a day for the rest of the year (75 days left) and still not make a dent in the movie "must-know" list for trivia purposes. Even if I DID watch the movie there's no guarantee I get it right: Jeopardy (not Pop Culture Jeopardy) asked about a Princess Bride scene with Billy Crystal talking about a MLT (Mutton lettuce tomato). I watched Princess Bride once, on a plane going somewhere, I remember Cary Elwes, I remember Robin Wright, Wallace Shawn, Andre the Giant, Inigo Montoya......where the heck did Billy Crystal come from? Pop Culture Jeopardy season 2 is coming out, and this problem doesn't exist if I don't try out for Pop Culture Jeopardy, but you have to know very specific things that happened within a movie, no way of knowing without having watched the movie. But maybe that's the intent of Pop Culture Jeopardy, to root out all the casuals and go for the hardcore enthusiasts who have dedicated their lives and time to knowing all about everything in pop culture. Ideally that's where your 2 teammates come in, to help bridge those gaps in knowledge, but I feel like most friends watch similar things, have similar tastes in movies, and are generally around the same age group, so not a whole lot of diversity of viewing interests, it's not a perfectly symbiotic relationship where what you know perfectly matches up with teammates' weaknesses, lot of overlap involved. And the worst thing is, there are still more movies coming out to remember! At least with countries there's a relative finite number of them, rivers, moons in the solar system, books (kind of the silver lining to the death of the book industry is you have to know fewer book titiles), but movies? Every year there's a new batch of Oscar front-runners, box-office leaders (it's The Minecraft movie this year), cult favorites, viral sensations (K-Pop Demon Hunters is everywhere). Good luck to everyone gearing up for PCJ season 2!