Anaheim Trivia
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48 free Anaheim trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Anaheim was a German wine colony called Campo Alemán long before Walt Disney bought 160 acres of orange and walnut trees there. This quiz covers the whole arc: the 50 families from Rothenburg, the $2-an-acre land deal, the vine disease of 1884, Helena Modjeska's Polish circle, the boysenberry and the Klan takeover of 1924. Then it turns to the city Disneyland built: the 1955 opening, Jack Wrather's hotel, California Adventure and Cars Land, the Angels' arrival in 1966, the Big A and the Rally Monkey, the Rams years, Disney's Mighty Ducks and the Arrowhead Pond, the West Coast's largest convention center, the Packing House and ARTIC's glass wall. Every answer is sourced from Wikipedia pages on the city and its landmarks. Play in sets of ten, then try the Disneyland, Anaheim Ducks or California quizzes.
30 of 48 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which Orange County band formed in Anaheim in 1986 and later named an album after nearby Disneyland?
No Doubt
No Doubt. Gwen Stefani grew up in Anaheim, and the breakthrough album Tragic Kingdom took its title from what the guitarist's seventh-grade teacher used to call Disneyland.
Q 02Settlers from which country founded Anaheim in 1857?
Germany
Germany. Fifty German settlers living in San Francisco, most of them mechanics and craftsmen with no experience of wine-making, pooled their money in 1857 to plant vineyards.
Q 03Which river watered Anaheim's first vineyards?
The Santa Ana
The Santa Ana. A ditch dug from it brought water to the dry plain the founders had bought, so they joined the river's name to heim, their word for home.
Q 04Which future golf champion graduated from Anaheim's Western High School in 1994?
Tiger Woods
Tiger Woods grew up next door in Cypress and won the national Junior Amateur title while a 15-year-old Western student. His classmates duly voted him Most Likely to Succeed.
Q 05Anaheim's founders bought their land from what kind of estate?
A Mexican-era rancho
A Mexican-era rancho. Juan Pacífico Ontiveros had moved north to a new ranch the year before, and in 1857 he sold the settlers 1,165 acres of the old one at $2 an acre.
Q 06Which burger chain grew out of a drive-in barbecue restaurant opened in Anaheim in 1945?
Carl's Jr.
Carl's Jr. Carl Karcher started with a hot dog cart bought by borrowing against his car, then opened Carl's Drive-In Barbecue in Anaheim; the 'Jr.' outlets were its smaller offspring.
Q 07What destroyed Anaheim's wine industry in 1884–85?
A grapevine disease
A grapevine disease, new to science at the time, killed the vineyards within two seasons. Growers called it Anaheim disease; it is now known as Pierce's disease, after the plant pathologist who first described it.
Q 08Before choosing Anaheim, Walt Disney planned his park for a small site beside his studio in which city?
Burbank
Burbank. The plans soon outgrew the lot, so Disney hired researchers to find room, and their study of population trends, land prices and climate pointed to 160 acres of Anaheim farmland.
Q 09Anaheim once belonged to which county?
Los Angeles
Los Angeles. Orange County was split off from it only in 1889, by which time Anaheim was already an incorporated town, so the city is older than the county it now belongs to.
Q 10Which famous Polish actress settled in Anaheim in the 1870s?
Helena Modjeska
Helena Modjeska came with a party of Polish friends, among them the future Nobel novelist Henryk Sienkiewicz, to live off the land. None of them could farm, the venture failed, and she went back to the stage.
Q 11Which berry, made famous by Knott's Berry Farm, is named after an Anaheim park superintendent?
Boysenberry
Boysenberry. Rudolph Boysen had given up on his hybrid, so Walter Knott took a few scraggly, dying vines, nursed them back to health on his own farm and named the fruit after him.
Q 12Which secret society won control of Anaheim's city council in 1924?
The Ku Klux Klan
The Ku Klux Klan held the council for less than a year: its opponents got hold of the secret membership list and spread the names around town, and voters recalled the councilmen in 1925.
Q 13Which actor co-hosted the live television special on Disneyland's opening day in 1955?
Ronald Reagan
Q 21Which NFL team played at Anaheim Stadium from 1980 to 1994?
Los Angeles Rams
Los Angeles Rams. To fit them in, the open ballpark was walled in with about 23,000 extra seats, and it was opened up again only after they left for Missouri in 1995.
Q 22What is Angel Stadium's unofficial nickname?
The Big A
The Big A is also a thing you can see: a 230-foot letter A with a halo that once held the scoreboard in left field. It was hauled out to the edge of the car park when the stadium was enclosed for football.
Q 23Which star won two unanimous MVP awards as an Angel yet never reached the playoffs with the team?
Shohei Ohtani
Ronald Reagan anchored the live show with Art Linkletter and Bob Cummings, a quarter of a century before he became president. All three reunited at the park in 1990 for its 35th anniversary.
Q 14What grew on the 160 acres where Disneyland was built?
Orange and walnut trees
Orange and walnut trees. Clearing them and building the park drained Walt Disney's funds before he could buy the land around it, so other people's motels and shops soon boxed the park in.
Q 15Which TV network broadcast Disneyland's dedication live in July 1955?
ABC
ABC had agreed to help pay for the park in return for a weekly Disneyland television series, and owned a share of it for the first five years. Four decades later Disney bought the whole network.
Q 16Which Hollywood producer built and ran the original Disneyland Hotel?
Jack Wrather
Jack Wrather, a Texas oilman turned producer, stepped in because building the park had drained Walt Disney's funds and the big hotel chains said no. Disney only bought the hotel from his company in 1988.
Q 17Which cancelled Anaheim theme park plan gave way to Disney California Adventure?
WestCOT
WestCOT, a West Coast answer to Florida's Epcot, was announced in 1991 and dropped in 1995 as its costs climbed and Disneyland Paris lost money. Executives then settled on a cheaper California theme.
Q 18The 2012 re-dedication of California Adventure added Buena Vista Street and which area?
Cars Land
Cars Land. It capped a five-year, $1.1 billion rebuild that cost more than the original park, which had disappointed from the day it opened.
Q 19A family beside Disneyland refused Disney's offers for 20 years so that it could keep farming which crop?
Strawberries
Strawberries. Hiroshi Fujishige turned down millions for 56 acres he had bought for $3,500 and became a local folk hero; his family agreed to sell only in 1998, weeks before he died.
Q 20Before moving to Anaheim, the Angels were tenants in which ballpark?
Dodger Stadium
Dodger Stadium. The Angels spent four seasons there as the Dodgers' tenants and called the place Chavez Ravine, until their own ballpark opened in Anaheim in 1966.
Shohei Ohtani both pitched and hit for the Angels in Anaheim from 2018 to 2023, then left for the Dodgers on a record contract and won the World Series in his first season there.
Q 24Which motorsport championship has run at Angel Stadium since 1976?
AMA Supercross
AMA Supercross. Each winter truckloads of dirt bury the baseball field under jumps, and the stadium often stages two rounds a season, the first of them, Anaheim 1, as the series opener.
Q 25Who founded the Angels franchise in 1961?
Gene Autry
Gene Autry, the singing cowboy, only wanted the new team's radio rights for his stations. Baseball's executives were so taken with his pitch that they talked him into owning the club instead.
Q 26Which team did the Angels beat in seven games to win the 2002 World Series?
San Francisco Giants
San Francisco Giants. They led Game 6 by five runs in the seventh inning, but the Angels came back to win it and then took Game 7 for the club's first championship.
Q 27Which owner renamed the team the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim in 2005?
Arte Moreno
Arte Moreno wanted 'Los Angeles' to sell the team across Southern California, and kept 'of Anaheim' only because the stadium lease required the city's name. Anaheim sued over it and lost.
Q 28The Angels' Rally Monkey was born in 2000 from a clip of which film?
Ace Ventura: Pet Detective
Ace Ventura: Pet Detective. Two scoreboard operators dropped its jumping monkey into a ninth-inning deficit, the Angels won, and the team hired a capuchin called Katie to film new clips.
Q 29When new owners bought Anaheim's NHL team from Disney, which word did they drop from its name?
Mighty
Mighty. Disney had founded the club in 1993 and named it after its own 1992 film The Mighty Ducks; the Samueli family bought it in 2005 and kept the ducks but not the movie title.
Q 30Which Canadian team did the Ducks beat in the 2007 Stanley Cup Final?
Ottawa
Ottawa. The Senators lost four games to one, and the Ducks became the first California team to lift the trophy, ahead of the state's two older clubs, the Kings and the Sharks.