Oz in Jeopardy!

Last week, on the show for March 25, Oz popped up as part of the clue for Final Jeopardy! No surprise, actually, when you consider that the category was:

(In case you can't read that very well, it's The AFI's 100 Greatest American Movies.) I didn't think much of it at the time, since there are over a hundred movies on both lists (yes, they did it twice, in 1998 and again in 2007, so no guarantee that The Wizard of Oz would come up. But when Alex revealed the clue: ...let's just say I knew there would be a blog post about this. Now, I knew the correct response immediately, and even Laura managed to get it as well. And I think a lot of you just did, too. I was absolutely dead certain I was right when, after the famous "Think" music finished, Alex mentioned that both movies had been shot in the same studios that Jeopardy! now films. (Yes, the current Sony studios were the old M-G-M studios in the Golden Age of Hollywood.) However, the first challenger, Tyson, at the righthand lectern, responded with: West Side Story is indeed a great musical, but not only was it not in either of the AFI's top tens, it wasn't even made in the '50s (it was released in 1961). So he lost the $6,201 he bet, and ended the game with a score of $1,599. More success came to Tom, in the middle, who responded with: Tom was, of course, correct, and added $6,000 to his score, for a final total of $20,400. Finally, the response of defending champion Rachel was revealed, and she wrote: Being the canny player that she is, she bet $12,801, and won the match with a nice total of $28,801. A small nitpick: Tom and Rachel, technically, got the title of the movie wrong. It's Singin' in the Rain, not Singing in the Rain — note the apostrophe at the end of the first word in the first title, and the extra "g" in the second. They will ding you for an extra (or missing) "s" on the end of the word (Sally Field is correct, but Sally Fields isn't, to give one example), but apparently this was too little to be worth hassling over.