LONG OVERDUE TRIVIA UPDATE, EXPLANATION & LIKELY APOLOGY...PLUS AN UNEXPECTED FREEBIE:

NO QUESTION YOU ARE WAY OVERDUE
FOR A FREE GIFT FROM US!!!

We don't do a lot of free stuff here at Think Fast Ink, and that's on account of we like to eat and have gas money jingling in our pockets and buy the odd automotive or motoring doodad or geegaw that strikes our fancy.

Which brings us to the fine folks & like-minded friends at "AUTOMOBILIA" magazine, who cater rather completely & exclusively to folks who like automotive & motoring doodads & geegaws from the recent & distant past and especially how they tart up their garages, rec rooms, summer homes, jail cells & racecar/project car trailers. So just click on the link below and it will take you to a COMPLETELY FREE, thumb-through-it web copy of their latest--and HOLIDAY!--issue. Go ahead. It'll be fun! Just click on the cover image of the magazine below. Then, browsing, "oohing," "aahing" & oogling completed, continue on to the unrequited trivia sections below that.

So way back in the mid-summer (okay, so maybe it was early summer?) of this Year of Our Lord 2025. I fronted up a bunch of trivia questions that included some oddments and associations that were maybe, just maybe, a wee bit beyond the pale. I realized my error, of course (oh...of course!) and made amends by asking even more trivia without ever offering an explanation or answers to the first set.
See what I did there?
But eventually you've got to pay the piper and so, in the spirit of this Season of Giving, let me try my best to unravel all the confusion and obfuscation I have so gleefully engendered. See below:
Start with the "preamble" to the first salvo shown below in green:

1) You must answer FROM MEMORY. No hand-held googling allowed!

2) In my pre-youth and youth (the few years bracketing puberty in either direction), I was a big fan of horror/monster/outer space movies (can you say "geek?") and there was a whole phylum of them about giant insects out to devour the world. Interestingly, some of the featured stars in those movies became (or previously had become) justly famous for other roles on the big or little screens.

3) there were also, often, certain automobiles or bits of hardware associated with those stars. So here's a list.

All you have to do, dear reader, is name the movie and link the star, the insect, the offshoot trivia bits and/or the man-made metallic object(s) involved. And trhere's at least one purposely-wrong "clinker" involved...

Answers & explanations also in green

Leo G. Carroll played Cosmo Topper on the "Topper" TV series (1953-55/78 episodes) and also played kinda mad-scientist type Professor Gerald Deemer in the cheesy 1955 gigantic mutant spiders escape from a remote Arizona lab & highly suitable-for-drive-in double features Sci-Fi epic "Tarantula." High points (besides leading lady Mara Corday's bustline) is the part where Dr. Deemer gets his face essentially melted until it looks like the waistline of an "I lost 200 lbs. on Ozempic" Biggest Loser.

Matt Dillon Sure, we all know tall, handsome James Arness was the star of the tremendously successful and also satisfying "sheriff of a frontier town" series "GUNSMOKE," but he also played the wordless but plenty terrifying giant vegetable creature from outer space (no, really!) in the truly great early (1951) B&W sci-fi gem THE THING from another world. Really worth seeing (and far better, IMHO, than the "modern special effects" John Carpenter remake). Comments on Mara Corday's bustline in the answer above also apply to this flick's leading lady, Margaret Sheridan.

Matt Dillon's younger brother: Did you know that Peter Graves (story starter Jim Phelps on TV's "Mission Impossible" plus lots of other TV and movie roles including his straight-faced but hilarious turn in the Coen Brothers' "Airplane") was also James Arness's (see above) younger brother? He also, way back in the early days of his career, played the male lead in a handful of monster/sci-fi movies including "Killers from Space," "It Conquered The World" (perhaps the cheesiest movie monster ever?) and my personal favorite, "Beginning of the End" (1957) wherein a swarm of giant mutant grasshoppers attack Chicago and climb our exceedingly handsome Wrigley Building.

Giant Ants Of course you've seen "THEM" (surely the best giant mutant insect movie ever!) and they had some great acting talent squared off against the critters in James Whitmore and James Arness. And how about that leading lady Joan Weldon? Having a well-stacked female lead was de regur in that entire genre and generation of monster/sci-fi movies, and I was at an age where that amounted to a greatly appreciated "added attraction." Not PC of course these days, but I'm against re-writing the past to appease modern mores and values.

Six-shooter See James Arness above

Craig Stevens I loved him as Peter Gunn on TV (Blake Edwards' great, moody & atmospheric private detective show from 1958-1961) and particularly the oddball characters, the sexy, suggestive dialogue between him and his jazz-chanteuse girlfriend (Lola Albright as "Edie Hart") who sang at a cool jazz dive called "Mother's." But, earlier on in his career (1957) Craig Stevens played male lead Col. Joe Parkman in yet another, mostly forgettable giant insect movie, "The Deadly Mantis."

Hairy arachnid See "Tarantula" above.

David Carradine Geez, has this guy ever been in a LOT of movies & TV shows. But his dad (John Carradine) was in even more and played in a lot of old B&W monster movies, including the part of Count Dracula in "House of Frankenstein" and "House of Dracula."

Deadly Mantis See Craig Stevens above.

MOTHER'S Ditto

1959 Plymouth Sport Fury convertible That's what Peter Gunn drove in the first season. He went on to always drive a current-year Chrysler Corp convertible, including (I think?) a De Soto shortly before the brand went belly-up.

Henry Mancini: The pulsating and highly original Peter Gunn theme music was and is iconic, and I believe it was Mancini's first big "hit" both on the charts and in the movie/TV world.

Abraham Lincoln Jones; See James Whitmore from the classic giant ant movie "THEM" mentioned above, who also had a run as lawyer Abraham Lincoln Jones on TV.

Vegetable man from outer space: Of course it's James Arness as "The Thing from another world."

Mercedes-Benz 540K: That's what Cosmo Topper (here played by Roland Young) had and drove in the most excellent 1941 B&W ghost/mystery/comedy sequel "TOPPER RETURNS."

Flame Throwers: That's what they used to burn up the colonies of giant ants--especially the young queens--at the end of "THEM."

The Palmolive Building: This is the aforementioned "clinker." The giant grasshoppers in "THE BEGINNING OF THE END" climbed all over The Wrigley Building, not The Palmolive Building (which later became The Playboy Building)

Lola Albright: See "PETER GUNN" section above.

TRIVIA PT. II

Just identify the movie that the phrase appeared in:

1. "Into the lion's mouth" "THE RACERS" (1955) with Kirk Douglas, Gilbert Roland, Cesar Romero and Bella Darvi, Still the Gold Standard of fifties racing movies...and check out the cars!!!!
2. "Do you ever get tired of the driving?" Too easy. Yves Montand as ageing Ferrari ace Jean-Pierre Sarti in John Frankenheimers mostly exquisite 1966 F1 epic "GRAND PRIX." It's amazing to me that the cars looked like they were going so fast and the crash scenes & setup were phenomenal. And there was no Computer Generated Imagery involved! By comparison, IMHO, a lot of the cars in "FORD vs. FERRARI" and "RUSH" just don't look like they're going very fast...
3. "He ran out of road" From "THE GREEN HELMET" (1961), which is kinda cheesy, but the cars make it a worthwhile watch.
4. Also, what make/model sports car was Rusty having trouble with when she met Lucky at his garage? Rusty (Ann-Margret) pulled up to Lucky Jackson's (Elvis Presley) race garage in a white and ill-running Triumph TR3A or B in "VIVA LAS VEGAS!"
5. Identify the car, driver & event in the pic at the bottom. That's race driver/"Meister Brauser" team leader Harry Heuer with his nickel-rocket Bocar XP5 after the gas tank split and sidelined him. A reporter asked what he planned to do with it and, in typical Harry fashion, he replied: "I'm gonna park it in a bar and let anyone who drinks our Meister Brau beer piss on it."

And if you haven't plopped down the moolah to be a sponsor or advertiser in the new book, let me implore you to do so. Otherwise, you'll just have to leave it to your kids, and they'll probably use it to buy a self-driving electric car (insert terrifying maniacal laugh here).

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