50s TV Trivia
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96 free 50s TV trivia questions with answers — entertainment quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
The 1950s were the decade television took over the American living room, and this quiz covers the whole picture: the sitcoms (I Love Lucy, The Honeymooners, Leave It to Beaver, Father Knows Best), the Westerns (Gunsmoke, Maverick, Have Gun – Will Travel, Bonanza), the kids' shows (Howdy Doody, Captain Kangaroo, The Mickey Mouse Club), the variety hours, the anthology dramas and the quiz shows that ended in scandal. The 96 questions run from easy to genuinely hard, so a family game night can play it together: grandparents who watched these shows live, parents who grew up on the reruns and kids meeting Lucy for the first time. Expect Marshal Dillon and Sergeant Bilko, but also Elvis on Ed Sullivan, Nixon's cocker spaniel and the professor who was fed the answers on Twenty-One. Every answer was checked against the Wikipedia article for the show or event before it went in, and each question carries a citation you can open. Play through the questions on screen or use the answers page to run your own 50s TV trivia round.
30 of 96 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01In I Love Lucy's 'Job Switching', Lucy and Ethel fall behind wrapping what on a speeding conveyor belt?
Chocolates
Chocolates outran Lucy and Ethel at Kramer's Kandy Kitchen, so they hid them in their hats and blouses and ate the rest; Lucille Ball and Vivian Vance had practised beforehand at a real See's Candies factory.
Q 02Where did Desilu, the studio owned by I Love Lucy's married stars, get its name?
The couple's first names
The couple's first names, Desi and Lucille, were combined as Desilu; Ball bought Arnaz out in 1962, after their divorce, and ran the studio that launched Star Trek and Mission: Impossible.
Q 03What happens in the January 1953 I Love Lucy episode that drew a record 44 million viewers?
Little Ricky is born
Little Ricky is born in 'Lucy Goes to the Hospital', which aired the night before Eisenhower's inauguration and outdrew it; the date was chosen to match Lucille Ball's real delivery of Desi Arnaz Jr.
Q 04Why was I Love Lucy filmed in Hollywood instead of New York?
Stars refused to move
Stars refused to move east, so the show was filmed with three cameras before a studio audience; the sharp prints could be rerun for decades, while rivals had only blurry kinescopes of their live shows.
Q 05What job did Jackie Gleason's Ralph Kramden hold on The Honeymooners?
Bus driver
Ralph was a Bus driver for the fictional Gotham Bus Company, though he was almost never shown behind the wheel; New York City later named a Brooklyn bus depot after Gleason.
Q 06On The Honeymooners, where did Ralph Kramden's upstairs neighbour Ed Norton work?
The city sewers
The city sewers employed Ed Norton, and Art Carney made him so popular that Yogi Bear's outfit and personality were later modelled on the character.
Q 07Before the "Classic 39" on CBS, The Honeymooners began as sketches on Cavalcade of Stars on which network?
DuMont
The Honeymooners debuted as a sketch on DuMont's Cavalcade of Stars in 1951; when Gleason left DuMont the next year, Audrey Meadows replaced Pert Kelton, who had been blacklisted, as Alice.
Q 08Who played Marshal Matt Dillon on the TV version of Gunsmoke?
James Arness
James Arness, six foot seven, played Dillon for the show's entire run; William Conrad had voiced the marshal on radio, and John Wayne introduced the 1955 premiere, recommending Arness to viewers.
Q 09Gunsmoke was set in which frontier town?
Dodge City, Kansas
Gunsmoke was set in Dodge City, Kansas, where the Long Branch Saloon had been a real 1880s establishment; the modern town's Boot Hill Museum trades on the connection.
Q 10Which series passed Gunsmoke's 635 episodes, the American scripted primetime record, in 2018?
The Simpsons
The Simpsons marked its 636th episode with an opening gag in which baby Maggie outdraws Marshal Matt Dillon; the western it overtook had run for 20 seasons.
Q 11Who created and hosted The Twilight Zone, which premiered on CBS in October 1959?
Rod Serling
Rod Serling, tired of censors and sponsors gutting his realistic teleplays, turned to fantasy so that he could tackle the same issues in disguise.
Q 12What breaks at the end of The Twilight Zone's 'Time Enough at Last'?
His glasses
His glasses shatter outside a ruined library, leaving bank teller Henry Bemis, the last man alive, among books he can no longer read; Burgess Meredith played him.
Q 13In which fictional town do the Cleavers live in Leave It to Beaver?
Mayfield
Mayfield is never placed in any state on the show, and it outlived the original run: the 1980s sequel series brought the grown-up Cleaver boys back to the same town.
Q 21Howdy Doody's 48 freckles stood for what?
US states
US states: one freckle for each of the 48 in the Union when he was built, a count that went out of date when Alaska joined in January 1959, while the show was still running.
Q 22Which future children's TV star first played Howdy Doody's mute clown?
Bob Keeshan
Bob Keeshan, who later created and starred as Captain Kangaroo, was the original Clarabell; the clown communicated only with a horn and a seltzer bottle.
Q 23Jack Webb played which Los Angeles police sergeant on Dragnet?
Joe Friday
Webb created, produced and directed Dragnet as well as playing Sergeant Joe Friday; the cases were drawn from real LAPD files, with names changed to protect the innocent.
Q 14'Beaver' Cleaver's real first name is what?
Theodore
Theodore was the Beaver's given name; what set the show apart from other family sitcoms was that all 234 episodes were told from his point of view rather than his parents'.
Q 15Which Leave It to Beaver character was polite to adults and a wise guy behind their backs?
Eddie Haskell
Eddie Haskell, played by Ken Osmond for the whole run, returned in the 1980s sequel as an adult contractor with a son, played by Osmond's real son, who was just as two-faced.
Q 16Under what title did The Ed Sullivan Show originally air from 1948?
Toast of the Town
Toast of the Town premiered in June 1948; viewers called it The Ed Sullivan Show for years before that became the official title in September 1955.
Q 17Twenty-One champion Charles Van Doren, later exposed as having been fed the answers, taught at which university?
Columbia
Van Doren was an English instructor at Columbia, where his father Mark was a celebrated professor; his run made the cover of Time in February 1957 before the fixing was exposed.
Q 18Herb Stempel was ordered to lose on Twenty-One by missing which Best Picture winner?
Marty
Stempel was told to miss Marty, the 1955 Best Picture winner, and name the prior year's winner instead; Marty was one of his favourite films, which made the dive sting more.
Q 19Before which body did Charles Van Doren admit in 1959 that Twenty-One was fixed?
A House committee
A House committee heard his confession on 2 November 1959: "I was involved, deeply involved, in a deception," said the man who had long denied any wrongdoing.
Q 20Which actor-director made the 1994 film Quiz Show, about the rigging of Twenty-One?
Robert Redford
Robert Redford directed Quiz Show, with Ralph Fiennes as Charles Van Doren and John Turturro as Herb Stempel; the real Van Doren was offered a consultant's fee and turned it down.
Q 24Under what title was the 1950s Dragnet later syndicated?
Badge 714
Badge 714 was the number on the hero's shield, so the reruns took it as their title; when Jack Webb died in 1982 the LAPD retired the number and gave him a funeral with full police honours.
Q 25Which cosmetics company sponsored The $64,000 Question, lending its name to the isolation booth?
Revlon
Revlon sponsored the show and gave its name to the Revlon isolation booth; broadcasts went out live from Studio 52 in New York, the building that later housed the disco Studio 54.
Q 26Psychologist Joyce Brothers became famous by winning The $64,000 Question on which subject?
Boxing
Brothers won the top prize in 1955 answering questions on Boxing, a subject she had crammed from reference books; the win launched four decades of advice columns and television.
Q 27Raymond Burr originally auditioned for which role on Perry Mason?
Prosecutor Hamilton Burger
Prosecutor Hamilton Burger was the part Burr first read for; told he suited the lead but was 60 pounds too heavy, he crash-dieted for a month and came back to test as Mason, a role he kept for nine seasons.
Q 28Perry Mason was based on detective novels by which lawyer-turned-writer?
Erle Stanley Gardner
Erle Stanley Gardner spent years as a California trial lawyer defending poor clients before Perry Mason made him rich, and later founded the Court of Last Resort to help people he believed wrongly imprisoned.
Q 29American Bandstand was broadcast from which city before it moved to Los Angeles in 1964?
Philadelphia
Philadelphia's WFIL-TV launched Bandstand in 1952 with disc jockey Bob Horn; after his 1956 drunk-driving arrest the station turned to 26-year-old Dick Clark, who took the show national on ABC the next year.
Q 30Which Mouseketeer guest-starred in a three-episode story on Disney's Zorro?
Annette Funicello
Annette Funicello played Anita Cabrillo in three Zorro episodes, reportedly Walt Disney's sixteenth-birthday present to a teenager with a crush on the show's star, Guy Williams; pop hits and the beach-party films followed.