1986
0Loading crowd target
0Loading crowd target
7correct to beat the crowd
50 free 1986 trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
1986 was a year the whole world watched on live television. Two disasters, one in the sky and one at a power station, shook public faith in technology, while a popular uprising in Asia and a tense superpower summit hinted that the Cold War order was starting to shift. This quiz covers the full sweep of the year: the blockbuster films and comedies that packed cinemas, the albums and videos that ruled the charts, the debuts that changed television, and the sporting moments still argued about today. There are questions on politics, space and science too, with most pitched for anyone who remembers the 1980s and a few tougher ones for news and sports buffs. It suits class reunions, 1980s nights, milestone birthdays and anyone born or married that year. Every answer comes with a short explanation, so you can play it straight through or print it for a group.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which NASA space shuttle broke apart 73 seconds after liftoff in January 1986 with teacher Christa McAuliffe aboard?
Challenger
Challenger was doomed by rubber O-ring seals that lost their flexibility in the record cold of launch morning. Engineers had warned that the seals might not hold at such low temperatures.
Q 02Which Soviet nuclear power plant, close to the city of Pripyat, suffered a reactor explosion in April 1986?
Chernobyl
Chernobyl went unacknowledged by Moscow for two days, until radiation set off alarms at a nuclear plant in Sweden more than 1,000 km away.
Q 03Which Tom Cruise film was the highest-grossing movie of 1986?
Top Gun
Top Gun made flying jets look so thrilling that the Navy set up recruitment booths in some theaters to catch enthusiastic fans.
Q 04Which talk-show host's daytime programme went national in September 1986 and ran for twenty-five seasons?
Oprah Winfrey
Oprah Winfrey went national months after an Oscar nomination for The Color Purple. Her show became the highest-rated daytime talk show in US television history.
Q 05In a live 1986 television special, Geraldo Rivera opened a sealed vault said to have belonged to which gangster?
Al Capone
Al Capone's vault, beneath Chicago's Lexington Hotel, held only dirt and empty bottles. About 30 million people watched anyway, a record audience for a syndicated special.
Q 06Which Hollywood star was elected mayor of the small town of Carmel-by-the-Sea, California, in April 1986?
Clint Eastwood
Clint Eastwood won in a landslide over the sitting mayor, then set about overturning a local ordinance that restricted the sale of ice cream cones.
Q 07Which Argentine footballer scored the so-called Hand of God goal against England at the 1986 World Cup?
Diego Maradona
Diego Maradona knocked the ball in with his left hand, unseen by the referees. Four minutes later he scored again, a solo run hailed as the Goal of the Century.
Q 08Which famous comet returned to the inner Solar System in 1986 and is not due back until 2061?
Halley
Halley was met by a fleet of spacecraft, and Europe's Giotto probe sent back the first detailed look at a comet's nucleus. Seen from Earth, though, it was the least favourable showing on record.
Q 09Which video game, released in Japan in February 1986, introduced the hero Link and the kingdom of Hyrule?
The Legend of Zelda
The Legend of Zelda took its princess's name from Zelda Fitzgerald, wife of the novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald. Its US cartridge was among the first with a built-in battery for saving progress.
Q 10Which May 1986 fundraising event tried to form an unbroken human chain from Manhattan to Long Beach, California?
Hands Across America
Hands Across America drew about five million people, but the chain was broken in many places, particularly in the Southwestern desert.
Q 11Which 20-year-old boxer beat Trevor Berbick in November 1986 to become the youngest heavyweight champion in history?
Mike Tyson
Mike Tyson stopped Berbick in the second round to take the WBC belt, aged 20 years and four months.
Q 12Which team won the 1986 World Series after a famous Game 6 error by Boston first baseman Bill Buckner?
New York Mets
The New York Mets were twice one strike away from losing the Series before the error let them steal Game 6. They then took Game 7 for their first title since 1969.
Q 13What nickname did 335-pound Chicago Bears rookie William Perry carry into the Super Bowl in January 1986?
The Refrigerator
Q 21Which rock band joined Run-DMC on a 1986 remake of Walk This Way, the first hip-hop single in the Billboard top five?
Aerosmith
Aerosmith's Steven Tyler breaks through a wall separating the two acts in the video, which stages the song as a duel between neighbouring studios.
Q 22Which rock band's third album, Slippery When Wet, was released in August 1986 and became their best-seller?
Bon Jovi
Bon Jovi recorded it in Canada over the first half of the year. It kept selling so well that it was the best-selling album of 1987 in the United States.
Q 23Which singer's album True Blue, released in June 1986, was the best-selling album of the year worldwide?
Madonna
The Refrigerator got the name at Clemson, when a teammate squeezed into an elevator beside him and said he was about as big as one. He scored a touchdown in the Bears' Super Bowl win.
Q 14In the 1986 comedy Ferris Bueller's Day Off, which make of sports car do the truants borrow from Cameron's father?
Ferrari
The Ferrari seen on screen was often a stand-in: the production had a number of replicas of the 1961 250 GT California Spyder made for filming.
Q 15Which 1986 sequel earned Sigourney Weaver a Best Actress Oscar nomination?
Aliens
Aliens brought the first Best Actress nomination ever given for a science-fiction film, at a time when the Academy gave the genre little respect.
Q 16Which Vietnam War film, drawn from director Oliver Stone's own time as an infantryman, won Best Picture for 1986?
Platoon
Platoon was Stone's answer to the heroic picture of the war in John Wayne's The Green Berets. He appears in it briefly himself, as a battalion commander.
Q 17Which animation studio became an independent company in 1986 with funding from Apple co-founder Steve Jobs?
Pixar
Pixar began as part of the Lucasfilm computer division. Its desk-lamp mascot comes from Luxo Jr., a short film the studio made that same year.
Q 18Which US television network launched in October 1986 with a late-night talk show hosted by Joan Rivers?
Fox
Fox was launched by News Corporation to take on ABC, CBS and NBC, and became the most successful attempt at a fourth US network.
Q 19Which prime-time soap opened its autumn 1986 season by revealing that the whole previous season had been a dream?
Dallas
Dallas used the twist to bring back Bobby Ewing, killed off a season earlier. Pam Ewing woke to find him alive in the shower, and a year of plot was erased.
Q 20Which composer's musical The Phantom of the Opera opened in London's West End in 1986 and on Broadway in 1988?
Andrew Lloyd Webber
Andrew Lloyd Webber's then-wife, a classical soprano, starred as the heroine Christine. The show went on to become the longest-running in Broadway history.
Madonna drew on her marriage to the actor Sean Penn for the album's themes of love and devotion, and it topped the charts in a record twenty-eight countries.
Q 24Which singer's 1986 album Graceland was partly recorded in Johannesburg with South African musicians, despite a boycott?
Paul Simon
Paul Simon was hooked by a bootleg cassette of South African street music. Anti-apartheid groups attacked him for breaking the boycott, yet the record won the Grammy for Album of the Year.
Q 25Which singer's 1986 album Control followed her break from her father's management and yielded five hit singles?
Janet Jackson
Janet Jackson had just fired her father as her manager, and she teamed up with the producers Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis to find a sound of her own.
Q 26Which British singer's 1986 hit Sledgehammer came with a stop-motion video that went on to win nine MTV awards?
Peter Gabriel
Peter Gabriel lay under a sheet of glass for 16 hours to shoot a single scene of the video, which was animated one frame at a time.
Q 27Which city, where DJ Alan Freed championed early rock and roll, was chosen in 1986 to house its Hall of Fame?
Cleveland
Cleveland won after its civic leaders pledged $65 million in public money. The first inductees, honoured that January, included Elvis Presley, Chuck Berry and James Brown.
Q 28Which group's debut album Licensed to Ill, released in November 1986, became the first rap LP to top the Billboard 200?
Beastie Boys
Beastie Boys never made another record for Def Jam, moving to Capitol Records before their next album. Licensed to Ill later passed ten million US copies.
Q 29The alien from Melmac in ALF, the sitcom that began on NBC in September 1986, longed to eat which household pets?
Cats
Cats were never quite safe in the Tanner household, where the furry visitor kept eyeing the family pet, Lucky, as a meal.
Q 30Which pop star, who once wore a dress made of raw meat, was born Stefani Germanotta in Manhattan in March 1986?
Lady Gaga
Lady Gaga owes her stage name, by her early producer's account, to a phone spell checker that changed the Queen song title Radio Ga Ga in a text message.