2001: A Space Odyssey Trivia
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57 free 2001: a Space Odyssey trivia questions with answers — entertainment quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
2001: A Space Odyssey opened in April 1968 to walkouts, baffled reviews and a New York critic calling it 'monumentally unimaginative'. It has since topped Sight & Sound's directors' poll and is routinely named the greatest science fiction film ever made. Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke built it from a handful of Clarke's short stories, four years of argument, and a rotating 30-ton set. This quiz covers the whole odyssey: the plot from the Dawn of Man to the Star Child, the cast and the voice of HAL, the writing and the abandoned titles, the effects work (the centrifuge, front projection, the slit-scan Star Gate), the classical music that replaced Alex North's score, HAL's real-world roots at IBM and Bell Labs, the premiere-night walkouts, the awards, and the 1984 sequel. Difficulty ranges from questions any film fan can answer to details for people who own the Blu-ray commentary. Every answer was verified against the Wikipedia articles on the film, HAL 9000, the soundtrack and the sequel, and each question shows its source.
30 of 57 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which board game does HAL play against Frank Poole aboard Discovery in 2001?
Chess
Chess: HAL wins easily, yet he misdescribes one move and skips a defence that would have delayed the mate, a slip some viewers read as an early hint that the computer is flawed.
Q 02Which facility on the Moon shuttle in 2001 comes with a long placard of printed instructions?
The zero-gravity toilet
The zero-gravity toilet carries a wall of small print that a passenger stops to study, a sight gag often called the film's only intentional joke.
Q 03Which other science-fiction film won the honorary make-up Oscar that 2001's own creature suits missed?
Planet of the Apes
Planet of the Apes won John Chambers an honorary Oscar because the Academy then had no make-up category; 2001's man-apes, the work of Stuart Freeborn, went unrewarded.
Q 04Which Arthur C. Clarke short story was the main inspiration for 2001: A Space Odyssey?
The Sentinel
The Sentinel was first meant to supply the film's climax, the discovery of an alien artefact; as the plot grew, that discovery moved to the start of the story instead.
Q 05What does the little girl on the videophone finally ask her father for as a birthday present in 2001?
A bush baby
A bush baby is her second choice, after a telephone; she was played by Kubrick's own daughter Vivian, and a scene of her father ordering one by videophone was cut.
Q 06Which planet is Discovery One bound for in Kubrick's 2001?
Jupiter
Jupiter replaced the novel's Saturn because the effects team could not produce rings convincing enough for the screen.
Q 07Who plays astronaut Dr Dave Bowman in 2001: A Space Odyssey?
Keir Dullea
Keir Dullea plays Bowman; three years earlier Noël Coward had greeted him on another film set with the quip 'Keir Dullea, gone tomorrow'.
Q 08Who plays Dr Frank Poole, the astronaut HAL sends tumbling into space?
Gary Lockwood
Gary Lockwood plays Frank Poole, who is sent a recorded birthday greeting from his parents on Earth not long before the ship's computer turns on him.
Q 09Who provided the voice of HAL?
Douglas Rain
Douglas Rain got the part after Kubrick heard him narrate the Canadian space documentary Universe; Martin Balsam's earlier recording had sounded too American.
Q 10Which character travels to Clavius Base to inspect the buried lunar monolith?
Dr Heywood Floyd
Dr Heywood Floyd keeps the find secret on the way: when Soviet scientists ask about rumours of an epidemic at the base, he declines to discuss them.
Q 11Near which lunar crater is the buried monolith dug up in 2001?
Tycho
Tycho: the slab betrayed itself with a magnetic field far too strong for natural rock, so the diggers named it Tycho Magnetic Anomaly One.
Q 12How does HAL learn that Bowman and Poole plan to disconnect him?
By lip reading
By lip reading: Bowman and Poole retreat to an EVA pod to talk in private, but the computer watches their mouths through the pod window.
Q 13How does Bowman get back aboard Discovery after HAL refuses to open the pod bay doors?
Through the emergency airlock
Q 21Which waltz accompanies the space plane docking with the space station in 2001?
The Blue Danube
The Blue Danube began as a temporary track for editing, but Kubrick liked his stand-in classical recordings so much that he kept them in the finished film.
Q 22Which Hollywood composer wrote an original score for 2001 that Kubrick then discarded?
Alex North
Alex North, who had scored Spartacus, recorded his music and then sat through the New York premiere to find none of it used; Jerry Goldsmith finally recorded it in 1993.
Q 23Whose ballet Gayane supplies the mournful adagio heard as 2001 introduces Bowman and Poole?
Aram Khachaturian
Through the emergency airlock: with no helmet, he blows his pod's door off so that the escaping air hurls him across the vacuum and into the ship.
Q 14Which song does HAL sing as Bowman disconnects his memory?
Daisy Bell
Daisy Bell was chosen because a 1961 Bell Labs speech-synthesis demonstration had a computer sing it, a feat the screenplay's co-author had witnessed in person.
Q 15According to HAL in 2001, in which city did he become operational?
Urbana, Illinois
Urbana, Illinois: as Bowman pulls out his memory modules, the computer regresses to its earliest memories and recites its start-up at the HAL plant there in January 1992.
Q 16What does HAL's name stand for, according to Clarke?
Heuristically programmed ALgorithmic computer
Heuristically programmed ALgorithmic computer is the novel's expansion of the name, which now also circles the Sun: asteroid 9000 Hal, found in 1981, is named after him.
Q 17Fans claim HAL's name is a coded jab at which computer company that advised the makers of 2001?
IBM
IBM is one letter on from H-A-L at every step, but Clarke called it a coincidence: the firm had helped them, and they would have changed the name had they noticed.
Q 18Which actor read HAL's lines on set, before the voice was dubbed in post-production?
Nigel Davenport
Nigel Davenport was Kubrick's first pick for the computer's voice and read the part on set, until the director decided against his accent and recast the role.
Q 19Which name had Clarke considered for the computer in early drafts, before HAL?
Socrates
Socrates was the computer's name in early drafts; a female-personality version called Athena followed before the final name was chosen.
Q 20Which Richard Strauss tone poem thunders over the opening titles of 2001?
Also sprach Zarathustra
Also sprach Zarathustra is heard in Herbert von Karajan's Vienna recording, which goes unnamed in the credits; the original soundtrack album swapped in Karl Böhm's Berlin version instead.
Aram Khachaturian wrote Gayane, and the contrast is hard to beat: the same ballet contains the frantic Sabre Dance, its most famous number.
Q 24Which composer's eerie choral Requiem accompanies the monolith on the Moon in 2001?
György Ligeti
György Ligeti's Requiem greets the monolith and his Atmosphères carries the Star Gate; nobody had asked his permission, and he later sued the studio over how his music was cut.
Q 25What nickname, punning on a Hollywood epic, did Kubrick and Clarke privately give 2001?
How the Solar System Was Won
How the Solar System Was Won riffed on the western How the West Was Won, and it fitted their first outline: a string of adventures set during the exploration of the Moon and planets.
Q 26What title did Kubrick announce in 1965 before settling on 2001: A Space Odyssey?
Journey Beyond the Stars
Journey Beyond the Stars was announced in February 1965; two months later Kubrick replaced it with a nod to Homer, reasoning that space holds the mystery the sea held for the Greeks.
Q 27Where did Kubrick and Clarke first meet, in April 1964, to discuss a science-fiction film?
Trader Vic's in New York
Trader Vic's in New York was only the start: within weeks Clarke had sold Kubrick a batch of his short stories and signed on to write the film with him.
Q 28Which airline's logo appears on the Orion space plane in 2001?
Pan Am
Pan Am never reached the future it was given on screen: the airline went bankrupt and stopped flying in December 1991, a decade before 2001.
Q 29In 2001, Discovery's crew live inside a huge rotating wheel designed to provide what?
Artificial gravity
Artificial gravity is the idea; the set was a real Ferris-wheel-sized drum costing $750,000, which turned while the actors walked in place at the bottom.
Q 30While making 2001, Kubrick tried to buy insurance against which real-world event?
The discovery of alien life
The discovery of alien life before the premiere could have sunk the plot, so with Mars probes on the way he asked Lloyd's of London to insure him against it.