Outside "The A-Team" Trivia Quiz

Answer:

Before they became iconic 1980s action heroes on "The A-Team", the show's four stars built very different careers across film and television.

Long before he played Hannibal Smith, George Peppard was a major Hollywood romantic leading man of the 1960s. His most important film role was probably Paul Varjak in the 1961 classic "Breakfast at Tiffany's", where he starred as a struggling, kept writer who falls in love with his eccentric neighbor, Holly Golightly. Just a year later, he appeared as Zeb Rawlings in the 1962 epic "How the West Was Won", playing a young soldier who grows up to become a weathered lawman in a massive Western that tracks the expansion of America through a single family. By the early 1970s, Peppard moved to television as Thomas Banacek on "Banacek", which ran from 1972 to 1974. Playing a rich, smooth investigator paid to solve impossible thefts, he became famous for smoking fine cigars and quoting old family proverbs. Even though the production feels like classic 1970s cheese, the show surprisingly holds up, and his cool, confident performance was the perfect preview of the leader he would later play on "The A-Team".

Dirk Benedict also had a strong run as a smooth-talking leading man before stepping into the shoes of Templeton "Faceman" Peck. In the late 1970s, he became a household name and a major sci-fi star as Lieutenant Starbuck on "Battlestar Galactica" (1978 to 1979), playing a charming space pilot who loved to play cards, smoke cigars, and flirt. That exact charm is what eventually landed him the role of Faceman, though he was not actually the original actor cast in the part, as Tim Dunigan played the role first. Earlier in his career, Benedict took on a much stranger role as David Blake in the 1973 horror movie "Sssssss". In this weird film, he played a regular college student who takes a job as a lab assistant, only for a mad scientist to slowly drug him and turn him into a human king cobra snake. I personally love it (looking at you, Father Steve), though it is definitely more "MST3K" good than actually good-good.

Dwight Schultz, best known as the erratic pilot "Howlin' Mad" Murdock, actually played a brilliant historical figure on the big screen. Before Cillian Murphy played the role, Schultz portrayed J. Robert Oppenheimer in the 1989 film "Fat Man and Little Boy", playing the real-life scientist who built the very first atomic bomb. Unfortunately, the movie went about as well as you might expect, failing at the box office and earning back just over 10 percent of its budget. Schultz had much better luck in science fiction when he played Lieutenant Reginald Barclay across "Star Trek: The Next Generation" and "Star Trek: Voyager" from 1990 to 2001. As a very smart space engineer who suffered from bad anxiety and spent too much time in the holodeck, Barclay had relatable human flaws that set him apart from the usual perfection of "Star Trek" characters. Schultz played this fan favorite across multiple TV series and at least one movie, and while I remember hating him when I first saw the character, he definitely grows on you.

Rounding out the team is Mr. T, who became a global superstar in 1982 when he played the fierce boxing champion Clubber Lang in "Rocky III". He brought an incredible amount of anger to the screen as Rocky Balboa's rival, and amazingly, his most famous catchphrase, "I pity the fool!" actually comes from this movie rather than "The A-Team". I am sure that is well known, but I only found it out while doing this research. At the height of his fame in 1983, he starred as Samson in "D.C. Cab", playing a tough taxi driver who wore lots of gold chains and led a ragtag group of drivers trying to save their failing company. Essentially playing himself, the movie is not great, though it is still worth a watch if you are bored. Right after "The A-Team" ended, Mr. T landed another lead TV role as T.S. Turner on "T. and T.", which ran for three seasons from 1988 to 1990. He played a former boxer who gets framed for a crime, clears his name, and teams up with a smart lawyer to become a private eye. It was glorious for a young kid who could not get enough of Mr. T, but trust me, it does not hold up today thanks to bad acting, hair teased to the clouds, and plot holes you could drive a 1983 GMC Vandura van through.

Of course, if you are playing this quiz, you will also run into a few famous characters who were never played by members of "The A-Team". For instance, the flashy heavyweight champion Apollo Creed from the "Rocky" franchise (1976 to 1985), who starts as Rocky's biggest rival before becoming his closest friend and trainer, was played by Carl Weathers. Another famous movie boxer, Rubin "Hurricane" Carter in the 1999 biographical drama "The Hurricane", was played by Denzel Washington, telling the real-life story of a middleweight contender who spent nearly twenty years fighting to overturn a wrongful triple-murder conviction. Over on 1980s television, Bruce Boxleitner starred as the suave secret agent Lee Stetson, code-named "Scarecrow", on "Scarecrow and Mrs. King" (1983 to 1987), where he accidentally drags a suburban housewife into his spy world. Jumping to modern cinema, Ryan Reynolds brings the wisecracking mercenary Deadpool to life in the "Deadpool" franchise (2016 onward), playing a mutant with healing powers who wears a red and black suit and constantly breaks the fourth wall. Finally, going all the way back to 1956, comedy legend Leslie Nielsen played the completely serious starship captain Commander John J. Adams in "Forbidden Planet", leading his crew to a distant world in one of Hollywood's very first big-budget sci-fi films.