Trizivia, Family Style

My family plays a movie trivia game that is very fun but that can only be played within our own family. It's your pretty basic movie quote game ("What's this from . . ."), but the quotes are all from the eclectic bunch of movies that we watched when we were growing up. I grew up in a household where almost all of our movies were taped off of television, usually from PBS's fundraising week or from free Disney channel week. Besides those, we had religious movies for our Sunday viewing pleasure, Feature Films for Families, and the store-bought videos that we'd get as Christmas gifts from extended family. These are the films from which the trivia must be pulled.

My family watched the same movies over and over and over again until we could pretty much quote the entire movie from start to finish, including the commercials and PBS donation promos in between. I couldn't tell you what Big Red's advertising campaign is like right now, but I can easily remember it's jingle from about 1987 ("So kiss a little longer, hold tight a little longer . . ."). In fact, all of the gum commercials from those days had pretty snappy jingles: Big Red, Doublemint, Juicy fruit, Extra, not to mention Fruit Stripes and Bubble Tape.

Anyway, the joy of the trivia game is to think of the perfect quote and to offer it in such a way that it cannot be mistaken for another movie. We have seen these movies ten million times, so it's hard to get something that not obvious. For example, "Maurice, the baguettes," is a laughably simple one from Beauty and the Beast. A better, though not perfect, quote would be "Come into the light," if you could say it with Belle's exact same inflections. The perfect quote would be one that rings familiar, but takes some thinking before you can figure out exactly who said it. A response to the perfect question should go something like this: "It's from a cartoon, post-Little Mermaid, she's in a dark room when she says it, hmm, "come into the . . . ," Oh! I know, I know! At this point, the respondent would be shushed before she blurted out the answer and spoiled the game for the other people playing.

The game gets tricky when the movie quoter starts offering quotes from movies with made-up languages, such as a popular family quote from "The Brother of Jared's Journey" that sounds something like "Boos vama nee! Boos vama nee!"

This game is pretty much impossible to replicate in written format because everything depends on how well the speaker can imitate the voice from the movie. Nevertheless, see if you can guess the following quotes from my family's illustrious VHS collection (in no particular order of difficulty):

"M-m-Merry Christmas, Papa!"

"I hope he doesn't eat any of you..."

"Hooray for me!"

"Oh well. Guess he got away."

"I respect you, Pop!"

"These are desperate times."

"They were there when he came!"