The Swinging Sixties Trivia Quiz

Answer:

Let's start with the books - the 1960s saw a rising awareness of a range of social issues, some of which featured in the books I selected. Harper Lee's classic 1960 novel 'To Kill a Mockingbird' focused on the issue of racism, while Betty Friedan's iconic 'The Feminine Mystique' (published in 1963) became one of the icons of the Second Wave Feminism that sought to gain equal rights for women. In his anti-war novel 'Catch-22', Joseph Heller introduced a phrase that has come to be synonymous with bureaucratic red tape that keeps people trapped in the mess. Published in 1961, it was based on the author's experience in World War II, and had a decidedly cynical attitude to those events.

Both 'To Kill a Mockingbird' and 'Catch-22' were adapted into films released in the 1960s, so they qualify in two ways for this quiz. The other three films selected were chosen both because they were massively popular and critically acclaimed at the time and because they are remembered for the performance of their stars - both in these films and their later careers.
'Lawrence of Arabia' (1962) was the first film that established Peter O'Toole as an international star. It also featured Egyptian actor Omar Sharif in his first English-language role. The interactions between the two added a rich vein of both comedy and tragedy to the events.
'Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid' (1969) was the first film to pair Paul Newman (as the outlaw known as Butch Cassidy) and Robert Redford (as the Sundance Kid), a screen chemistry that was to prove magical. 1973's 'The Sting' reunited them with the same director, and won more Academy Awards, including Best Picture, but (in my personal opinion) failed to recreate the enchantment of the earlier film.
Robert Redford actually tested for the role of Ben Braddock in 'The Graduate' (1967), but was felt to not have quite the underdog look the director Mike Nichols had in mind. After considering a range of other actors, including Harrison Ford, he finally selected Dustin Hoffman, an unknown actor who had auditioned for a part in a 1966 Broadway musical (which went to Alan Alda because Hoffman's singing wasn't up to carrying the part).

Any consideration of the 1960s in music has to acknowledge the supremacy of the British music scene for most of the decade. The Beatles launched themselves from Liverpool to world domination starting in 1960 and continuing through the decade. (and beyond, as new generations of listeners discover the music of their parents, and more recently that of their grandparents, compares favorably with contemporary offerings). 'I Want to Hold Your Hand' was not their first hit, nor was it their biggest hit, but it was their first release in the US, reaching the top of the charts in January of 1964, a few weeks before their first tour brought Beatlemania to North American fans. I need to refrain from just writing forever about them, but will note that their musical and personal growth through the '60s was reflected in similar changes happening in western society, so they remain an iconic image of the era, whether you recall the suits of 1962 or the psychedelia of 1967.

From my memory, in the 1960s you were either a Beatles fan or a Rolling Stones fan, the latter having a much more aggressive feel to their blues-inspired rock. But no matter who you favored, you couldn't deny that Mick Jagger belting out '(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction' in 1965 just made you want to sing along! The song was one of many collaborations between Jagger and the lead guitarist for the Stones, Keith Richards.

And that provides a neat, maybe too neat, transition to the United States, where Bob Dylan released 'Like a Rolling Stone' as a single before including it on his sixth studio album, 'Highway 61 Revisited', in 1965. This album has often been cited as one of the markers for the start of the counterculture associated with the mid-'60s through to the mid-'70s. The song itself marked a definite move for Dylan into rock (as opposed to the folk music that had been his style in earlier years), but with a blues feel emphasized by the title of the album on which he included it.

Television in the 1960s had many more iconic shows than could be included here, but many of them either started in the 1950s or continued into the 1970s. 'Star Trek', now retrospectively known as ' Star Trek: The Original Series (TOS)" because the concept has been spun off into so many sequels on television, as well as movies, books and video games, ran between 1966 and 1969. It featured William Shatner as James T. Kirk, captain of the starship Enterprise, with Leonard Nimoy as his half-Vulcan first officer, Spock, on their mission "to explore strange new worlds; to seek out new life and new civilizations; to boldly go where no man has gone before!"

The book 'Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone was published in 1997, the first in a series of seven novels that were adapted into eight movies with the first released in 2001. The novel 'A Game of Thrones', the first in a series George R. R. Martin titled 'A Song of Ice and Fire', was released in 1996 and adapted into the television series 'Game of Thrones' starting in 2011. The film 'Gladiator' was released in 2000, also the year in which Eminem released his song 'The Real Slim Shady'. 'Breaking Bad' first appeared on television between 2008 and 2013. 'Pokémon', a multimedia phenomenon, first appeared in 1996.