This article was previously published on GuelphToday.
A group of trivia buffs from Guelph are putting their knowledge to the ultimate test for the world to see.
Eric Sipkens, George Hutchinson and Tom Minard are appearing as a team on the show Pop Culture Jeopardy!, streaming on Amazon Prime Video. Their episode drops Jan. 29 on the streaming service.
Minard spearheaded the effort after he got a link from a friend of his about six months ago, notifying him of the call for contestants in teams of three.
“I’ve been playing trivia with George forever, especially some pop culture trivia we’ve done before, so I recruited him immediately,” Minard said. “And then we realized we needed a bit of diversity in age, so we went to the younger Eric to handle some of the Gen Z questions to make us a little more well rounded.”
Sipkens, who admittedly has been to a handful of pub trivia nights in his lifetime, decided to give it a shot.
Hutchinson and Minard have known each other for 16 years, meeting at the University of Guelph on the school’s Quizbowl team.
The trivia enthusiasts had a stretch where they were doing pub trivia nights four times a week.
They also play softball together, along with Sipkens – hence the team name The Bullpen.
Both Hutchinson and Minard are in their mid-30s, while Sipkens is 27.
Minard moved to Waterloo in 2023, but the other two still live in the city.
After doing a test on the Jeopardy website in early June, the three were invited to do a video audition later in the month.
In late July, they found out they were selected as contestants for the show, giving them about a month to prepare.
“We had what we were already okay at (in terms of topic knowledge), but we had a lot of holes, Hutchinson said.
“We had a big long Google doc with here’s everything we need to learn before we go on the show, and we just distributed it, and see how much we could learn before we went.”
“George was studying Tony Award-winning musicals,” Minard added. “We tested Eric with all the TikTok and (Gen Z) stuff. I was listening to the Billboard Hot 100 non-stop the entire time.”
Going in, Minard had a handle on movies dating back to the 1990s and TV shows after the turn of the millennium. Hutchinson is more of a classic older cinema buff, and Sipkens doesn’t have a specific category, but can handle much of the modern answers.
But knowing the answers is one thing. In Jeopardy, the key is buzzing in first.
It’s a skill so specific, Fritz Holznagel – a Jeopardy! Tournament of Champions winner – wrote a book on it, Secrets of the Buzzer.
The crew picked up the book, and was able to apply some of the techniques.
“I switched it up multiple times,” Hutchinson said with a laugh. “You’ll see me holding (the buzzer one way) sometimes, you’ll see me holding it and (pointing my finger at it), banging it on the table. I was switching it up if I felt like I wasn’t getting in.”
The trio even got to practice with a replica Jeopardy buzzer, designed by a friend of Minard’s, who had no clue they were going to be on the show.
“He just brought it up in conversation, and I was like ‘hey, can I borrow that sometime,’” he said.
In late August, the group flew to Culver City – just outside of Los Angeles – and spent about a week there to tape the show, all expenses paid.
Since then, they’ve been sworn to secrecy not to reveal the results.
“It has been difficult,” Hutchinson said about holding onto the secret.
“We couldn’t tell people we were going on the show until maybe a month ago,” Minard said.
The spinoff to the classic quiz show is already underway, with 81 teams participating in knockout round episodes. Unlike the traditional show, teams collect points instead of money, and winners advance to the next round. The last team standing collects a cash prize of $300,000.
Colin Jost of Saturday Night Live fame hosts the show, who the three had nothing but good things to say about.
“Hilarious, very quick on his feet,” Minard said.
All three say it was a positive experience, though admittedly there was some nervousness too.
“It was still a tremendously fun experience, but it was also the most nervous, the most stressed, the most anxious I have ever been in my life,” Minard said. “I’m generally a pretty chill and calm person, but I absolutely was not leading up to filming.”
He said he had a “fleeting moment of hesitation” of wanting to do another game show. That feeling quickly went away a couple weeks after getting back from the west coast, when he and Hutchinson both got an email invite to the next phase of the audition process for the standard Jeopardy show.
“By far the most stressful day in my life, I was shaking all day,” Sipkens said. “But looking back on it, and even after we got out and we went to dinner to have a drink, I was like ‘that was so much fun.’”
“It was just a ton of fun, it made me want to go on more game shows,” Hutchinson said, adding he’ll be more nervous watching the show, fretting over what he said or how he appears.
The three plan to watch the show when it drops mid-week, and are also hosting a private viewing at The Bookshelf for friends and family a few days later.
