Mystery Hunt Puzzle 3000
by Bowen Kerins, with help from Adam R. Wood
ANSWER: CARBON
The answers to the Jeopardy! questions are:
$200 | |
Galileo called it the perspicillum, but we know it as this | TELESCOPE |
Jude Law and David Tennant recently spoke the speech as this title character | HAMLET |
Peter Boyle played Frank Barone on this sitcom -- he's the tall one | EVERYBODY LOVES RAYMOND |
Pinky and the Brain was a spinoff of this Warner Brothers cartoon show | ANIMANIACS |
On this movie's poster, Woody's in black and white with red sunglasses | NATURAL BORN KILLERS |
All six members of this family appear in its "Pinball Party", even Abe | (THE) SIMPSONS |
$400 | |
Neils Bohr theorized that light could be both a particle and this new Google service | WAVE |
This Bruce Campbell movie series somehow became a musical | (THE) EVIL DEAD |
Before Bert and Grover, Frank Oz played the right hand of this musical Muppet known as "Ol' Brown Ears" | ROWLF |
Over a century ago, five colleges formed a basketball league called the EIBL, better known today as this | (THE) IVY LEAGUE |
For this poster, Tim Robbins strikes a pose in the rain | (THE) SHAWSHANK REDEMPTION |
A famous dolphin | FLIPPER |
$600 | |
Watching water pass through membranes may give cartoon blood cells this "jones" | OSMOSIS |
This musical, inspired by a pay-per-use toilet, was Ken Jennings' last Broadway role -- sadly, not the Jeopardy! champ | URINETOWN |
Frank Welker provides the voice of this tiny Futurama character who pushed Fry into a millenium of sleep | NIBBLER |
Four survivors fight brain-eating zombies in this flick shot mostly at the Monroeville Mall | DAWN OF THE DEAD |
It's Michelle Pfeiffer with really long fingernails | BATMAN RETURNS |
This colorful coward is last, alphabetically, of the opponents in "Banzai Run" | YELLOW BELLY |
$800 | |
When seen in reverse, this five-letter celestial object becomes a mountain range | SEDNA |
This musical's title is also the only official state song written by Rodgers and Hammerstein | OKLAHOMA |
He played Frank Burns on M*A*S*H | (LARRY) LINVILLE |
Each week, her column reminds the world about a decades-old "Highest IQ" world record | (MARILYN) VOS SAVANT |
The question of whether or not we are alone in the universe has been answered | INDEPENDENCE DAY |
Wink wink, it's skillfully pushing a pinball machine, say no more | NUDGE or NUDGING |
$1000 | |
Consecutive elements in the periodic table are sometimes alliterative -- these form pair number 3 | GALLIUM AND GERMANIUM |
Though an AARP member, Debbie Reynolds proved she ain't down yet by singing in a national tour of this musical | (THE) UNSINKABLE MOLLY BROWN |
Frank Caliendo as this actor played a movie critic, partnered with Frank Caliendo as Al Pacino | (ROBERT) DE NIRO |
Recent research by Robert Deaner suggests that these animals, not chimpanzees, are the most intelligent non-human animals | ORANGUTAN(S) |
Advertising Volume 2: "The Bride is back" | KILL BILL |
Scoring a goal in Bally's "World Cup Soccer" earns this type of bonus feature | ULTRA |
The responses form an acrostic that reads left-to-right across categories: THE ANSWER IS FOUND BY SOLVING UDOKU. "Udoku" refers to a Sudoku variant where there is a number missing from each region (now more commonly known as Deficit Sudoku). Two details are necessary to proceed:
- The "givens" in the grid are in the clues; some clues have numbers in them (or in one case, a number homophone), and all are from 1 to 6.
- The "regions" for the Udoku are the six "light-up" regions that appear when the page is loaded -- and yes, this is the same light-up that occurs at the start of any episode of Jeopardy!, beginning September 2009.
Using the digits in the top row as an index into the category names (SCIENCE, THEATER, TV'S FRANK, BEST BRAINS, WE'VE GOT MOVIE SIGN, PIN BOLUS) spells the answer CARBON.
Upon completing this puzzle, the following animated image is revealed on the round page: