Out on the Edge of Darkness Trivia Quiz

Answer: War

The song was about trying to maintain sanity under dire circumstances. Several members of the band received songwriting credits for the song but it started as an idea by band member Howard Scott. He was thinking about looking over a wall between sanity and insanity, peering over a bit and then coming back.

The loss of a friend was an example of what it might take to send someone over the edge. In the song the mother of the singer brought him back to reality. Scott also thought that the line between genius and insanity was very thin.

Answer: Dark Forest Hypothesis

The idea comes from the so-called Fermi Paradox, comments made by physicist Enrico Fermi in 1950 that with all the solar systems in the universe there must be advanced beings but we have no evidence of them. The "Dark Forest Hypothesis" term comes from the 2008 novel "The Dark Forest" by Liu Cixin. The supposition is that there are extraterrestrials out there, hiding like hunters in a dark forest, because they fear that contact with other species might be viewed as a threat and lead to warfare.

A similar idea was developed by Gene Roddenberry for "Star Trek": General Order 1 (aka the Prime Directive), stating that contact with other civilizations, especially those who hadn't developed space travel, was to be avoided at all cost, even if contact could save lives, so the civilization could develop naturally.

Other producers, primarily in movies, but also TV, have viewed the aliens as aggressors. "Sign", a 2002 movie starring Mel Gibson and Joaquin Phoenix, written and directed by M. Night Shyamalan was a science fiction horror movie that begins with a farmer noticing crop circles in his cornfield, then seeing beings running through it, then on to appearing all over the world.

"A Quiet Place" was a 1018 movie starring Emily Blunt and John Krasinski about an invasion by blind aliens with a superior sense of hearing.

And, of course, there was "The X-Files", starring David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson, which always left us wondering if anything was as it seemed. Eventually we found out that there were aliens among us who looked like the archetypical "little green men" - except they were gray.

Answer: H.P. Lovecraft

Picture the character of Davy Jones with the octopus-tentacled face from "Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest (2006). Now picture him being several hundred meters/yards tall and having a shriek so otherworldly it would make your blood curdle. He would be part dragon too. That's kind of what Cthulhu might be like. Lovecraft introduced the character in 1928 in the short story "The Call of Cthulhu" in "Weird Tales" magazine.

It was an immediate hit with writers and readers and spawned further tales by Lovecraft and other authors, eventually becoming the so-called "Cthulhu Mythos," a further imagining of the character and his environs.

There was even a "Call of Cthulhu" role-playing board game released in 1981.

Answer: The Firesign Theatre

This song, from the Firesign Theatre album "I Think We're All Bozos on this Bus" is sung to the tune of Gene Autry's "Back in the Saddle Again." The album is about a post-apocalyptic world that seems to be largely run by computers. The singers ("Holygrams") note that among things that are different outside of the Shadows, the vegetables are green.

The Firesign Theatre was a comedy troupe formed in 1966 by Los Angeles, California radio host Phil Bergman. He was joined by Philip Proctor, Phil Austin and David Ossman. The name of the group came from the fact that all were born under astrological fire signs (Sagittarius, Leo and Aries). Most of their comedy albums were styled like the half-hour radio dramas of the 1930s to the '50s. The subject matter was often absurd and surrealistic. Over the years they produced fifteen albums and performed in public until Bergman's death is 2012.

Answer: Mel Gibson

Gibson played detective Thomas Craven in the 2010 movie, based on a 1985 BBC TV series of the same name. When preparing to take his daughter, Emma (Bojana Novakovic), to a hospital, a masked gunman opened fire on them, killing his daughter. As Craven investigates the matter he became convinced that his daughter, not him, was the intended victim. She worked in an armaments factory, which, it turned out, had a secret agreement with the government to make nuclear weapons. Several people, including Craven, suffered radiation poisoning. Several people were killed as the attempt to cover it up ensued.

The film had a production budget of $80 million (U.S.) and grossed $81.1 worldwide, making it a "box office bomb".

Answer: Rod Serling

Rod Serling was the man behind "The Twilight Zone" and "Night Gallery." The first dealt with unusual, or scary or unbelievable situations - sometimes apparently produced in the protagonist's head. The show ran from 1959 to 1965. The latter series ran from 1970 to 1973. It dealt primarily with the supernatural.

Serling served in the U.S. Army in World War II, where one of his superiors said he was willing but really wasn't much of a soldier. He entered radio broadcasting after the war as a writer and actor. After a while he moved to writing TV scripts, some of which pointed to what would become his focus in years to come. Of the156 episodes of "The Twilight Zone" he wrote or co-wrote about 59% of them and had a great deal of control over the process. He had less control of "Night Gallery" and wrote fewer of those episodes.

Many actors got noticed because of their appearances in his episodes , including William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy, who would to on to "Star Trek" fame, and Robert Redford and Dennis Hopper. Steven Spielberg made his directorial debut in the second episode of "Night Gallery".

Answer: Dark Shadows

"Dark Shadows" ran for five years, from 1966 to 1971, on America's ABC TV network. An article in the AARP (American Association of Retired Persons) magazine said it was a favorite of teenage girls; my wife concurs (In fact, she was my first source of information for this question). It centered around the daily lives and upheavals of the wealthy Collins family. During the first year viewers met the family members including the patriarch, Barnabas - who turned out to be a vampire. As years passed more supernatural characters were introduced - werewolves, zombies, witches - the usual suspects. Some of the cast members played several parts. It was hugely successful, ringing up 1,225 episodes.

The Collins family lived in the fictional town of Collinsport, Maine. Hmm, there is a horror and suspense writer who sets some of his novels in the fictional Maine town of Castle Rock. You don't suppose he was a fan of the show, do you?

Answer: Edge of Darkness

Players in this game are the heads of guilds that must cooperate as well as compete against other guilds to get resources and gain abilities to save their city from demonic forces. It can take up to an hour (or more) to play through. It's not an inexpensive game, nor does it fit in a small space.

The main game board sections and additions can take up most of a dining room table. It's not a game for young children as it has a high learning curve with lots of directions on what to do and several "But if..." instructions.

There are some videos on how to play it on YouTube; one is seven and a half minutes long, another is 15. Good luck!

Answer: The Edge of Night

The Edge of Night" soap opera ran for twenty-eight years on two TV networks and was, in fact, produced by the Proctor & Gamble soap company. Its original title was to be "The Edge of Darkness." It was proposed to be the TV version of "Perry Mason," which had been a radio drama. Earl Stanley Gardner was Mason's author and copyright holder. An argument between him and the CBS network caused Gardner to pull his support and the Mason character and causing a total rewrite of the show's design. The show highlighted crime and police work rather than the usual relationship drama of most soap operas of the time, although there was that too.

"The Edge of Night" and "As the World Turns" premiered in April, 1956. They were the first half-hour soaps, the ones before them had been 15-minute productions.

Answer: Cat Stevens

"Out on the edge of darkness/There rides a peace train" was the vision Cat Stevens had. (It's also where the title of this quiz came from.) He wrote it to give people a sense of hope that things could, and would, get better; the train would keep ahead of the darkness. The song was on his fifth album, "Teaser and the Firecat" (1971).

Stevens, who was born Steven Demetre Georgiou, in London, England in 1948, has been recording since 1967. In 1977 he converted to Islam and changed his name to Yusuf Islam. After taking a two-decade hiatus from pop music he returned, usually just using the name Yusuf. He was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2014.