Mostly Dedicated to Comics Published from 1955-1970
Thursday, November 10, 2011
Trivia Quiz #45: Answers
1. In what year did Ray Palmer graduate from college?
In the Atom #10, we learned that Ray was a 1954 grad of Ivy University. That would have made him about 32 in 1964, or a geezer of 79 today.
2. What do Lois Lane's lips taste like?
Clark Kent discovered at a Christmas party in Action #306 that her lips tasted like
peaches:
3. What holiday do people on Thanagar celebrate on the same day Americans celebrate the Fourth of July?
Folks on Thanagar celebrate Impossible Day, on which they are supposed to do three impossible things. BTW, for a really cool treat, check out Pappy's Golden Age Blogazine post on this story; he has the original Gardner Fox manuscript for the tale, complete with Julius Schwartz's editorial changes, plus scans of the actual story so you can see how it went from script to finished product.
4. What was Jay Garrick's address?
When Barry Allen discovered that he'd vibrated onto an Earth-like planet where Central City was known as Keystone City, he looked up Jay Garrick in the phone book:
And discovered that he lived at 5252 78th Street.
5. What was Perry White's favorite TV program?
Perry White loved to relax at home and check out Allan Funt and Candid Camera:
These were intended to be really tough, but Jim got four out of the five correct. I stumped a couple folks who usually do quite well. Nobody got the question about Lois' flavor of lipstick.
2 comments:
Anonymous
said...
One thing I've noticed about the Silver Age is that nobody had a problem with heroes in their early thirties or even older (given their WW II service, Reed and Ben could have been early 1940s). In contrast to what appears to be the current conviction that new characters won't grab readers unless the characters are twentysomethings or teens.
frasersherman, I think the editors/writers wanted to have it both ways; they wanted to say their characters were young when it suited them, and yet that they had been around for a long time. In a lot of the cases, we are left assuming that either the girlfriends were much younger or the men couldn't really be that old.
Look at Reed and Sue, for example. If we accept that Reed was in his 20s during WWII then that would indicate he had to be pushing 40 by the time the FF got underway. But then how old is Sue? She's got a teenaged brother; is it really likely that she's so much older than him that she's even 30? Possible, certainly, but unlikely.
Ditto with Ray and Jean Loring. Assuming she went straight to law school from college, she'd be 25 when starting her law practice; by the time she was 32 surely she'd be established and willing to start a family if she was ever going to do so. So she must be much younger than Ray, right?
And yet we never sense that in the relationships between Reed and Sue or Ray and Jean.
I think the real issue is just that they never thought that hard about it. These writers and editors were all middle-aged men and for the most part in the 1960s they didn't think of the guys who'd fought in WWII as being middle-aged. Gardner Fox probably thought that a man who graduated in 1954 was quite youthful.
2 comments:
One thing I've noticed about the Silver Age is that nobody had a problem with heroes in their early thirties or even older (given their WW II service, Reed and Ben could have been early 1940s). In contrast to what appears to be the current conviction that new characters won't grab readers unless the characters are twentysomethings or teens.
frasersherman, I think the editors/writers wanted to have it both ways; they wanted to say their characters were young when it suited them, and yet that they had been around for a long time. In a lot of the cases, we are left assuming that either the girlfriends were much younger or the men couldn't really be that old.
Look at Reed and Sue, for example. If we accept that Reed was in his 20s during WWII then that would indicate he had to be pushing 40 by the time the FF got underway. But then how old is Sue? She's got a teenaged brother; is it really likely that she's so much older than him that she's even 30? Possible, certainly, but unlikely.
Ditto with Ray and Jean Loring. Assuming she went straight to law school from college, she'd be 25 when starting her law practice; by the time she was 32 surely she'd be established and willing to start a family if she was ever going to do so. So she must be much younger than Ray, right?
And yet we never sense that in the relationships between Reed and Sue or Ray and Jean.
I think the real issue is just that they never thought that hard about it. These writers and editors were all middle-aged men and for the most part in the 1960s they didn't think of the guys who'd fought in WWII as being middle-aged. Gardner Fox probably thought that a man who graduated in 1954 was quite youthful.
Post a Comment