Comic Strips Adapted to Movies – Pop Quiz

From The Times Union:

This got us thinking about…movies adapted from the funny pages.
Draw on your memory banks for the latest quiz.

1. Penny Singleton played Blondie Bumstead … based on the long-running comic strip by Chic Young. In the 1960s, she turned to cartoons themselves, voicing one of the main characters in what animated TV sitcom rival to “The Flintstones”?

 

2.    Radio serials based on comic strips were popular beginning in the 1930s. Two played prominent roles in 1983’s “A Christmas Story.” One was “Little Orphan Annie”; what was the other? 

 

3.    Speaking of “Little Orphan Annie,” … Which of these actors did NOT play the Daddy Warbucks character (or its equivalent) in film or on TV: Albert Finney, Harry Connick Jr., Ben Kingsley, Jamie Foxx or Victor Garber? 

 

4.    The notorious 1992 flop “Brenda Starr,” … was filmed in 1986 and starred Brooke Shields as Starr and Timothy Dalton as her love interest, Basil St. John. True or false, it was originally supposed to star Debbie Harry and George Hamilton? 

 

5.    2006 could have been known as the Year of the Squirrel; three animated films that year featured the rodent as a major character. Which one was based on a still-running comic strip, and was also the highest-grossing of the three: “Over the Hedge,” “Open Season” or “The Wild”?

 

6.    … 2004’s “Garfield: The Movie” and 2010’s “Marmaduke,” starred Bill Murray and Owen, respectively, as the title cat and dog. The two actors have worked together in seven movies from the same director, one last year. Who is the director?

 

 

7.    “Dennis the Menace,” the comic strip begun in 1951, spawned a 1959-1963 sitcom … but the character never appeared in a theatrical film until the 1993 Walter Matthau comedy of the same name. True or false?

 

8.    In 1996, Billy Zane donned the skintight purple costume of “The Phantom” in a big-screen adaptation … It was a box office disaster. Zane rebounded, though, the following year with a movie that did a great deal better. Name it.

 

9.    What actress made her big-screen debut in the 1980 Robin Williams/Robert Altman adaptation of “Popeye,” followed it with an Oscar win for her next film, then appeared in a movie partially shot in Troy, “The Bostonians,” before heading to space for David Lynch’s “Dune” in 1984?

 

10.    Kristin Chenoweth voiced Fifi, Snoopy’s love interest, in 2015’s “The Peanuts Movie” … It was a full circle moment for the Broadway legend because her only Tony win came from what show?

 

The answers, with the full text of the questions,
can be gotten at The Times Union’s pop quiz.

3 thoughts on “Comic Strips Adapted to Movies – Pop Quiz

  1. There was a book printed way back when dedicated to this subject: The Comics Come Alive: A Guide to Comic Book Characters in Live-Action Productions by Roy Kinnard (Scarecrow Press, 1991)

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