First, a quick reminder of who’s who:
• Professor Plum – Christopher Lloyd
• Mrs. White – Madeline Kahn
• Mrs. Peacock – Eileen Brennan
• Miss Scarlet – Lesley Ann Warren
• Colonel Mustard – Martin Mull
• Wadsworth – Tim Curry
• Mr. Green – Michael McKean

When moviegoers purchased their ticket to see the movie, they also received a slip of paper just like the one that you use to keep track of the people, places and weapons in the game.

Jane Wiedlin of the GoGos played the Singing Telegram Girl. She was also Joan of Arc in Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure.

Tim Curry says each of the principal cast only received $100,000 for the film, and they all had teeny-tiny trailers. So there were definitely no ego-trippers among them.

Clue was the first movie ever based on a board game, but it’s certainly not the last – Universal Pictures signed a deal with Hasbro last year to develop films based on Monopoly, Candy Land, the Ouija Board, Battleship and Magic: the Gathering. Stretch Armstrong was also included in the deal.

And, brace yourselves, there’s actually another Clue in the works. It was announced in February that Gore Verbinski has signed on to make another version of the board game-based movie for Universal. Ugh. Although… Johnny Depp as Wadsworth…? Anyone…?

Check out the floor in the Hall – it’s no coincidence that it looks an awful lot like the parquet floor on the original Clue game board.

It looks like an awesome old Gothic Mansion, doesn’t it? It’s quite convincing. But nearly all of the scenes were shot on a soundstage, except for those in the ballroom and the driveway gate scene. Sadly, the mansion used for the driveway scene burned down, so picture-hunters can’t even pose next to the big gate.

To make the set look authentically mansion-y, 18th and 19th century furniture and décor was borrowed from all over the place, including the estate of Theodore Roosevelt.

Each character drives a car the color of their name.

Keep your eye on Tim Curry whenever he’s in a scene with Eileen Brennan – he said he could barely hold a straight face around her becuase she was so hysterical. This is especially evident, he says, in the scene where she says “Hold out the gun.” He claims his shoulders are actually shaking from trying to hold in his laughter.

The movie took about two and a half months to make.

Three different endings to the movie were shot, and all of them were used! Imagine the confusion if a friend went to one theater and you went to another – “Wasn’t that great when it turned out that Mr. Boddy was actually the Butler?” “What do you mean, Mr. Boddy was the Butler?” OK, that probably wouldn’t have happened… it was well known that there were three endings, and newspaper listings even told you when each ending would be shown. The DVD shows you all of them, but you can also tell it to pick a random ending for you. The part where the movie splits into the three different endings is right after Wadsworth cuts the power.

Here are the endings:
• Ending A: The killer? Miss Scarlet. Yvette the maid used to work for her as a call girl and helped her murder Mr. Boddy and the cook. Miss Scarlet killed the rest of the victims herself. But, she’s busted: Wadsworth secretly works for the FBI and reveals himself just as the police show up to escort her to jail.

• Ending B: The killer? Mrs. Peacock, who single-handedly killed everyone. Again, Wadsworth the FBI agent busts her, and although she escapes by holding the survivors at gunpoint, the police are waiting when she gets outside.

• Ending C, my personal favorite: The killer? Everyone. But Wadsworth isn’t Wadsworth – he’s really Mr. Boddy. The man everyone thought to be Mr. Boddy (you know, the corpse) was actually the butler. Wadsworth had been working with each of these people in his extortion scheme and figured they would all kill each other off if given the right circumstances, and they did… except for Mr. Green, who is the undercover FBI agent this time, and he kills Wadsworth and has the rest of the guests arrested.

• Ending D, which was scripted and shot but never released: Wadsworth admits that he killed Mr. Boddy, and now he has killed all of them, too: he poisoned everyone. Except the police show up and disarm Wadsworth, who then goes through the whole exhausting confession that he already gave to the guests, running around the house and reenacting the whole scenario. When he tells the part about meeting Col. Mustard at the front door, he steps outside and locks everyone in, then makes off in the police car… except there’s an angry German Shepard in the back seat.

Monopoly

• For some reason, I always thought the Monopoly guy was Uncle Moneybags. Nope. But “proper” names for him include Rich Uncle Pennybags, Milburn Pennybags and Mr. Monopoly (his most recent name). Some sources say he’s loosely based on J.P. Morgan.
• Marvin Gardens is actually a misspelling of Marven Gardens, a housing area in Margate City, N.J. In fact, all of the properties on the “classic” Monopoly board are named after places or streets near or in Atlantic City, N.J.
• In the London version of the game, Trafalgar Square is a red property, Piccadilly is yellow, Regent, Oxford and Bond Streets are green and the blue properties are Mayfair and Park Lane. The railroads are replaced by Underground stops (King’s Cross, Marylebone, Fenchurch Street Station and Liverpool Street Station).
• Neiman Marcus once sold an all-chocolate edition. The whole set, including dice, money, hotels and board, was edible.
• F.A.O. Schwarz in NYC sold a $100,000 version, which included 18-carat game pieces, a rosewood board, real money, street names written in gold leaf and various gems scattered across the board.
• The most expensive board even made is a set worth $2 million It’s made of 23-carat gold and has rubies and sapphires embedded in the top of each house and hotel.
• Various versions of Monopoly include Batman, ESPN, Family Guy, American Idol, Nintendo, Sephora, and, honestly, just about any other version you can possibly think of.

Clue

What we in North America know as Clue, the rest of the world knows as Cluedo. Would you believe that it was invented by a part-time clown? Totally true. Anthony E. Pratt invented the game in England and it was published for the first time in 1949 by a British company. Bought by Parker Brothers, the U.S. version came out the same year.

• The dead dude is known as Mr. Boddy in North America, but he’s Dr. Black everywhere else. Also, Mr. Green is apparently alias Reverend Green in some parts of the world.
• Also, some of the Clue characters have little-known first names. They are: Colonel Michael Mustard, Miss Josephine Scarlet, Professor Peter Plum, Reverend/Mr. John Green, Mrs. Blanche White and Mrs. Elizabeth Peacock.
• Characters used in other or deluxe versions of Clue include Miss Peach (not to be confused with Princess Peach), Lady Lavender, Prince Azure, Rusty Naylor and Captain Brown.
• The original nine weapons were axe, shillelagh, bomb, rope, dagger, pistol, syringe, poison and poker.

The Game of Life

Life has been around since 1861… not in the format we recognize today, of course. Milton Bradley himself invented “The Checkered Game of Life” when his lithography business started to go down the tubes (his major product was a portrait of clean-shaven Lincoln… when Lincoln grew the beard, Bradley went out of business).
He had actually been circulating the game on a smaller scale before his clean-shaven Lincoln lithograph took off, but he abandoned it once demand for his lithograph increased. After that plummeted, he focused more attention on marketing and ended up selling more than 40,000 games in 1861 alone – no small feat for that time period!

• Milton Bradley used a spinner to count the number of spaces people could move because dice were associated with gambing.
• In the original Checkered Game of Life, landing on the “Suicide” square put people out of the game completely. Obviously.
• Other squares on the original game board included Prison, Infancy, Ruin, Gambling, Disgrace, Honesty, Truth, Cupid, Industry and “Happy Old Age” (the goal of the game).
• One interesting variant (among many) is The Game of Redneck Life. Careers include Mullet Salon Operator and Monster Truck Announcer. The goal of the game is to get out with as many teeth as you can – through the various fights and brawls you get into over the course of the game, this can prove to be pretty challenging. I’m dead serious.

Scrabble

Scrabble came about in 1939 when architect Alfred Mosher Butts modified a game he had been working on earlier – Lexiko. At first he called it Criss-Crosswords and based the values of the letters on based on letter usages from the New York Times (and other reputable sources). In 1948, he allowed James Brunot to manufacture the game as long as he got a cut of each board sold… which wasn’t much, at first. They actually lost money the first year they produced it. Legend goes, though, that the President of Macy’s played the game while on vacation and, upon his return to work, was shocked that his store didn’t carry it. When they did start to carry it, sales skyrocketed.

• There are 96 two-letter words that are “legal” in Scrabble… including 10 that are spelled with vowels only. I’m so learning those.
• A typical Scrabble board has 225 squares.
• The highest known score for a single word in competition Scrabble is 392. In 1982, Dr. Saladin Khoshnaw achieved this score for the word “caziques,” which means “Indian chief.”
• The highest possible score a player can get in Scrabble on a first turn is for the word MUZJIKS (128 points).

I realize there’s tons of beloved board games I’ve missed, so maybe I’ll turn this into a series… a three-parter, or something. Sorry!, Candyland, Chutes and Ladders, Risk, Trivial Pursuit. Lots of options. Have one you’d like to read about? Leave it in the comments and maybe I’ll add it to the list!