Global Trivial Pursuit, 1967 style

March 1, 2006 12:20 PM

Help me create fun trivia questions about 1967 for a friend's upcoming birthday party. The crowd will be very international (he's from Scotland, his wife is from Japan, they now live in the US, at least one friend is from Germany) so I need to come up with questions of a global bent. (more inside)

One question I thought of might be a multiple-choice question...what was the world's population in 1967 vs today? But I'd also like livelier, fun ones. Not looking for absolute stumpers, either.

I'm also not ruling out the idea that a couple questions will be America-centric, or Scotland-centric, or Japan-centric, just that not all of them should be, and the more global and entertaining the question, the better. Thanks for any help!

posted by GaelFC to society & culture (8 comments total)

Have you checked out Wikipedia's page on 1967?
posted by jrossi4r at 12:26 PM on March 1, 2006

Spaceflight questions are international and go around the world. Also, decolonization was in full swing, so guessing the countries that became independent is good too. Stay away from Vietnam and Six Day War questions and opt for the international movie questions, which may be crowded with Italian directors. Was there a Bond movie that year? Movies are better than TV because they travel internationally.
posted by Ironmouth at 12:46 PM on March 1, 2006

What country celebrated its centennial by hosting the World's Fair that year?

(Canada -- Expo 67 in Montreal)
posted by acoutu at 1:04 PM on March 1, 2006

When I was doing trivia, I sometimes would use the "what happened on this day" stuff from the history channel or Library of Congress. They have some other archives that are timelines that might help you out. Go to the main page and search for 1967 or try this link. The trick to good trivia is to be able to ask questions that have a main question but have a clue of some sort in the rest of the question, to help people out who have no clue.

So instead of asking "What is the gift you are supposed to get someone on your fifth anniversary?" you can ask things like "Which of these gifts would be appropriate...?" and then people have something to go with and you can make your answers more wacky. I'd also suggest searching loosely for the sixties to find background on things like toys, movies, art & celebrities. If you think your guests are going to be mostly from one of a short list of countries, you can do comparative sets of questions about say, popular music, where one person would have the obvious advantage but others would have a fighting chance. Getting international groups to play in teams is also pretty nifty because you learn a lot more about what the other people know and how they grew up.

Other topic ideas: politician trivia from that era, book covers with titles blanked out (better sounding than it seems to be after surveying Google Books and Amazon), stamps from various countries ("how much did it cost to mail this envelope?") or copies of things that were published in 1967 and ask questions loosely pertaining to them. Clips from newspapers, for example, or magazines, see what the library has.
posted by jessamyn at 1:19 PM on March 1, 2006

Here's wikipedia's page specifically on music. Some possibilities that jump out that might be big enough for international participants:

- Which soul singer died just weeks after his biggest hit was released? (Otis Redding)
- Who was the biggest selling group of 1967? (A tricksy one: the Monkees)
- Which hugely popular British band performed in the U.S. for the very first time? (The Who)
posted by scody at 1:27 PM on March 1, 2006

All in 1967:

Oct. 9 Ernesto "Che" Guevara, 39, Argentine-born revolutionary, was executed without trial by Bolivian authorities.

Dec. 3 Dr. Christiaan Barnard and a 30-man surgical team performed the first human heart transplant in South Africa.

Montreal staged Expo '67.

Feb. 20 The National Gallery of Art in Washington reportedly paid $6 million for Ginevra de' Benci, a portrait by Da Vinci.

June 5-11 Israel stunned the world with a lightning victory over Egypt in the "Six-Day War."

June 17 Peking: "China successfully exploded her first hydrogen bomb over the western region yesterday."

Slightly off-topic - when you get enough trivia and facts, you can take some of it and design a printer-paper sized front page of a newspaper, like this one (pdf), and print it out and use it to wrap presents. I did that a few years ago for a birthday party and it went over really well.
posted by iconomy at 1:56 PM on March 1, 2006

You might check out if your public library has 1967 yearbooks for various encyclopedias. (encyclopedia, encyclopedae?)

There's probably question fodder in those.
posted by sevenless at 2:25 PM on March 1, 2006

Thanks, all! Great tips.
posted by GaelFC at 9:48 PM on March 1, 2006