Stripes Trivia
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This Stripes trivia quiz has 49 free questions with answers on the 1981 army comedy that Ivan Reitman first pitched as 'Cheech and Chong join the army' and ended up making with Bill Murray and Harold Ramis. It follows the plot from Louisville cab driver John Winger's worst day, through basic training under Warren Oates's Sergeant Hulka, the mud-wrestling bar, the graduation drill and the EM-50 Urban Assault Vehicle, to the accidental invasion of Czechoslovakia. Other rounds dig into how it was made: filming at Fort Knox and a shut-down Jim Beam distillery, the Pentagon deal that supplied real soldiers, the chipped tooth Oates got when the cast dragged him into the mud, the deleted LSD subplot restored in the extended cut, Elmer Bernstein's march, the box office and reviews, and the remarkable roll call of early-career actors in the platoon, from John Candy and Judge Reinhold to Bill Paxton, John Larroquette and Sean Young. It is written for 80s comedy fans, movie night hosts and pub quizzers who know 'That's the fact, Jack' but want the details behind it. Difficulty runs from easy plot questions to expert production trivia, and every answer was checked against Wikipedia and the film's own credits before it went in.
30 of 49 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01According to its tagline, the hero of Stripes wanted to keep the world safe for democracy and do what?
Meet girls
Meet girls: the lofty half borrows Woodrow Wilson's 1917 war aim, a world 'made safe for democracy'. John manages the other half too, pairing off with Stella, who ends up helping him rescue the platoon.
Q 02Harold Ramis made his directing debut a year before Stripes with which comedy?
Caddyshack
Caddyshack was Ramis's first film as a director. As an actor he was a harder sell: the studio disliked his screen test for Russell in Stripes and had to be overruled.
Q 03Ivan Reitman first pitched Stripes as which comedy duo 'join the army'?
Cheech and Chong
Cheech and Chong liked the script but demanded total creative control, so the leads were rewritten for Bill Murray and Harold Ramis. The stoner jokes were handed to the recruit Elmo.
Q 04In his barracks pep talk in Stripes, Bill Murray's character proudly calls Americans what?
Mutts
Mutts: 'our forefathers were kicked out of every decent country in the world,' he tells the dejected platoon, then praises the loyalty of the mongrel dog and asks who cried at Old Yeller.
Q 05What job does Harold Ramis's character, Russell, give up to enlist in Stripes?
ESL teacher
ESL teacher: Russell is first seen coaching an English class for immigrants through the words of a pop song. The studio did not want Ramis in the part, but his director and co-star insisted.
Q 06In which city does Murray's character drive a cab at the start of the film?
Louisville
The city scenes were shot there for real, and the Army scenes at a nearby base. Filming began in November 1980.
Q 07Which veteran of Sam Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch plays the drill sergeant, Sergeant Hulka?
Warren Oates
Warren Oates was cast because the director wanted a figure the misfit platoon would truly respect. It worked off screen too: the young actors sat rapt at his stories from The Wild Bunch.
Q 08Bill Murray later said he felt 'a little queasy' about carrying what in Stripes?
A machine gun
A machine gun: 'I felt if you were rescuing your friends it was okay,' he said in 1993. He added that the film did capture life on an Army base, down to the cold and the bad coffee.
Q 09Which SCTV alumnus plays the recruit Dewey 'Ox' Oxberger in Stripes?
John Candy
John Candy's Ox tells the platoon he has enlisted to get in shape, since the Army will do it for free. One reviewer called him a nice surprise as a 350-pound recruit.
Q 10Which future Night Court star plays Captain Stillman, the incompetent company commander?
John Larroquette
John Larroquette's Stillman causes the final crisis. To hide the loss of a secret vehicle he mounts an unauthorized search for it, and gets the whole platoon captured.
Q 11P. J. Soles, Stella in Stripes, was already famous for playing Lynda in which 1978 horror film?
Halloween
Halloween's Lynda followed her debut in Carrie. Stripes was her second Army comedy in a year, and she said wardrobe handed her the very uniform and boots she had worn in the first.
Q 12What Army job do Stella and Louise hold in Stripes?
Military police
Military police: the two are there to keep recruits in line, and spend the film bending the rules for John and Russell instead, even helping the pair slip away from a raid.
Q 13Which future Beverly Hills Cop actor plays the spaced-out recruit Elmo in Stripes?
Judge Reinhold
Q 21What is the EM-50 Urban Assault Vehicle disguised as?
A family motorhome
A family motorhome: in the last act John and Russell drive the secret weapon into a Soviet base and use it to break out their captured platoon.
Q 22In which country is the platoon stationed when it is assigned to guard the EM-50?
Italy
Italy is where the general sends the platoon straight after graduation. John and Russell then borrow the secret vehicle for a weekend with their girlfriends across the Alps, and the trouble starts.
Q 23Chasing the missing EM-50, Captain Stillman leads the platoon into which country, where they are captured?
Czechoslovakia
Czechoslovakia was also the director's birthplace. Ivan Reitman's family had fled its communist regime in the hold of a barge when he was four, and he grew up in Toronto.
Judge Reinhold, in one of his first film parts, got the pick of the jokes left over from the script's first draft, written before Bill Murray and Harold Ramis came aboard.
Q 14Sergeant Hulka's deadpan reply in Stripes tells which touchy recruit to 'lighten up'?
Francis
Francis has just told the barracks that everyone calls him Psycho, and that he will kill anyone who uses his real name or touches his things. Hulka uses the name at once.
Q 15In Stripes, the recruit Ox vows that basic training will turn him into 'a lean, mean' what?
Fighting machine
Fighting machine: Ox explains that he picked a tough drill sergeant over a pricey self-improvement course he could not afford, and expects the Army to transform him for nothing.
Q 16Which future star of Aliens appears briefly in Stripes as an unnamed soldier?
Bill Paxton
Bill Paxton had started in films behind the camera, as a set dresser, before he turned to acting. His nameless soldier came three years before James Cameron first cast him.
Q 17Which two SCTV cast members play a border guard and the M.C. in Stripes?
Joe Flaherty and Dave Thomas
Joe Flaherty and Dave Thomas were old colleagues of Harold Ramis from SCTV, where he had been the first head writer before he left the show for films.
Q 18After Hulka is hospitalised, the leaderless platoon sneaks off base to visit what kind of establishment?
A mud-wrestling bar
A mud-wrestling bar: Ox is shoved into the ring when the emcee calls for a volunteer, and when the place is raided Stella and Louise help John and Russell get away.
Q 19Why does Sergeant Hulka put John and Russell's whole platoon on kitchen duty in Stripes?
They briefly went AWOL
They briefly went AWOL. Stung by the punishment, John then tries to desert for good, and it is Russell who stops him, pointing out that enlisting was John's idea in the first place.
Q 20Why does the Stripes platoon turn up late to its own graduation parade?
They overslept
They overslept after drilling through the night to avoid being made to repeat basic training. They arrive mid-ceremony and perform a routine of their own invention.
Q 24The poster for Stripes puts Bill Murray in the pose of which famous figure?
Uncle Sam
Uncle Sam's 'I Want You' poster, made for Army recruiting in the First World War, was reworked with a photo of Murray pointing at the viewer while two blonde women look on.
Q 25At which Army post were the training scenes in Stripes filmed?
Fort Knox
Fort Knox is also where Bill Murray and P. J. Soles tried training with the real troops at dawn. By her account they planned two weeks of it and gave up after three days.
Q 26Before acting in Stripes, Harold Ramis had co-written which hit comedy?
Animal House
Animal House shared more than a writer with Stripes: Ivan Reitman had produced it, and Roger Ebert wrote that the Army film 'could have been titled National Lampoon's Animal Army'.
Q 27Stripes director Ivan Reitman later teamed Arnold Schwarzenegger and Danny DeVito in which 1988 comedy?
Twins
Twins cast the two as long-lost brothers. Schwarzenegger had sought Reitman out to say he could do comedy, and the film remade the action hero as a comic star.
Q 28Bill Murray and Harold Ramis both came up through which Chicago improv theatre?
The Second City
The Second City training showed on the Stripes set: the director let the pair improvise around the script, and nearly every scene ended up with some invention of theirs in it.
Q 29Who composed the score for Stripes, including 'The March from Stripes'?
Elmer Bernstein
Elmer Bernstein, the composer of The Magnificent Seven and To Kill a Mockingbird, had by then turned to comedy: Airplane!, The Blues Brothers and Trading Places date from the same few years.
Q 30In an improvised scene in Stripes, Bill Murray's character woos Stella in a kitchen with which utensil?
A spatula
A spatula: he tickles her with it until she admits she is crazy about him. The scene was moved indoors and made up on the day, after rain washed out a hillside kiss.