Friday, May 26, 2023

I Lost on Jeopardy!



I well remember first hearing this song. I was familiar with Weird Al Yankovic from the Dr. Demento Show, and had played plenty of his parodies on air. But this was different, because the song parodied ("Jeopardy" by The Greg Kihn Band) was a recent hit and was still in heavy rotation. It was a sign that Weird Al had made it big. That was in 1984, and the TV show Jeopardy! had been off the air for five years. Just a few months after the song was released, Jeopardy! returned with new host Alex Trebek. The rumors started immediately that Yankovic's song had inspired the game show's revival, but it had already been in the works before the song was released. It was pure serendipity, as Yankovic could not resist the obvious pun possibilities in Kihn's song. That, and the music video (which is not embeddable), were completely off my radar in 1984 because I didn't have TV. Since then, "I Lost on Jeopardy!" has been the subject of the Daily Double three times, but was only answered correctly once.


3 comments:

newton said...

The story Weird Al gave for when he knew he had become famous: he was invited to this party and saw Paul McCartney come into the door. Paul looked over and saw him and said "Hey everybody! It's Weird Al!"

Miss Cellania said...

That had to be a rush!

Tim said...

The story goes that Don Pardo loved doing his part in this song.