This coming weekend, I’ll participate in The World’s Largest Trivia Contest^TM. As per tradition, this week is filled with idle reminiscing about memorable answers in past years. For this go-around, I’m further commemorating an anniversary. The weekend before the contest, the radio station sponsoring Trivia holds a midnight movie screening as a kickoff event, a practice that just celebrated its twenty-fifth straight year. Though it had been done a couple times prior to my tenure at the student-run radio station, I was the one who revived the practice, drawing upon my dual status as an on-air movie critic and a popcorn slinger at one of the local theaters. I booked Richard Linklater’s Slacker in April of 1992. The event has been happening ever since.

It was a tough problem of movie algebra every year. The movie needed to be broadly appealing for a wide swath of Trivia players, and the model required it be difficult to see unless tickets were bought for the station screening. So the film was ideally an idea, but also a comedy that wasn’t too dark or too kinky. And it needed to be something that had largely expended all the energy of its theatrical run, since studios were reluctant to spare a print for only a midnight show or two if they could book it for a full slate of screenings somewhere else. As the window between cinemas and home video was rapidly shrinking through the nineteen-nineties, it was increasingly challenge to find the title that hit the event’s sweet spot. The Kickoff Movie of 1997 was one of the instances when the tumblers fell into place perfectly. I knew Swingers was the right movie for Kickoff from the moment I saw it, the preceding fall. It was even a boon that the film was released by Miramax, which was one of the more accommodating studios to work with (there was a sense that they would have been happy to ship a print to someone planning to project the film on a screen door as long as any amount of payment was going to change hands). The actual Trivia fodder in the film might have been a touch light, but what was there was choice. I still remember the pure delight my teammate had in shouting out the answer “Big Bad Voodoo Daddy” when the on-air announcer asked for the name of the band that performed in the film. Sometimes answers are satisfying because they represent the culmination of hard work or the chance to plumb deeply embedded knowledge. Sometimes answers are satisfying for no other reason than they’re fun. I suppose that answer qualifies as all of the above.

More info about 90FM’s Trivia can be found at its official website or at the radio station’s online home. There’s also a feature documentary about the contest, but it’s fairly hard to come by these days. To see how my team is faring over the weekend, Twitter is probably the best bet.