Where the answer is only a question

Today I'm celebrating the debut of the TV game show Jeopardy! in 1964

Jeopardy! has trademark status as "America's Favorite Quiz Show" and its accomplishments prove why that is so. It has ranked first in Nielson ratings for the quiz show genre for more than 1,000 weeks and has nearly 39 million viewers weekly. It has been honored with 27 Daytime Emmy Awards. The highest cumulative amount won by any single player exceeds $3 million by Brad Rutter. Ken Jennings broke the record for the most consecutive games, winning 74 games in a row to win more than $2.5 million. Each month, its web site receives nearly 400,000 visitors.

The show regularly includes celebrities. Special clues have been presented from the NASA astronauts from the space shuttle Atlantis and celebrities like Morgan Freeman, Adam Sandler, Charles Barkley, Bill Clinton, Al Franken, Rudy Guiliani, John McCain, Joel Schumacher, Jerry Seinfeld, and Andrew Lloyd Webber. Many celebrities have competed to raise millions for charity, including Jodie Foster, Ashton Kutcher, Al Franken, Chris Matthews, Harry Connick, Jr., Rosie O’Donnell, David Duchovny, Wayne Brady, Star Jones, Jane Seymour, Jason Alexander, Regis Philbin, Larry King, Buzz Aldrin, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Tom Clancy, Kirsten Dunst, Wolf Blitzer, Naomi Judd, Kelsey Grammer, General H. Norman Schwarzkopf, Stephen King and Carol Burnett.

Its theme song is called Think and was composed by Merv Griffin as a lullaby for his son. It has been performed on the show by a pipe organ and the Whiffenpoofs, the Yale acapella group. It is also well known on Youtube. You can hear it on YouTube performed on the sax, piano, and bass. You can even hear a gastric version of it by The Four Squeezins.

The show has been portrayed or parodied numerous times. In the series Cheers, the character Cliff Clavin, a trivia bluff, appeared as a contestant. Saturday Night Live has parodied the celebrity matches, with a twisted version with Sean Connery as a contestant. Weird Al Yankovic wrote a parody of Greg Kihn's song Jeopardy called I lost on Jeopardy that you can see here:


As posted on YouTube by a Roflmon

Reference: Wikipedia and the This is Jeopardy! sites