10 Interesting Jeopardy Game Show Facts

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"Think!", originally composed by Merv Griffin as "A Time for Tony" as a lullaby for his son Tony, has served as the Final Jeopardy! round countdown music since the show's debut in 1964.  Over the years, Griffin estimated that royalties from the theme song earned him roughly $70 million.

The original name of the show was What’s the Question?  After pitching it to the network brass, Merv Griffin decided to change the name to the catchier one we know today. The reason? One of the execs thought that the game was a great idea, but that the game needed more jeopardies. NBC ended up buying the show without even seeing a pilot.

If you land on a "Daily Double" answer and you decide to bet all of the money you have acquired, this is known as "True Daily Double".

During one episode of the original series, which began in 1964 and featured Art Fleming as the host, all three contestants failed Double Jeopardy! by ending the round with $0 or less.  The Final Jeopardy! round was filled by having Fleming chat with the contestants.

Just the opposite happened on March 16, 2007. All three contestants ended Final Jeopardy! with the exact same dollar amount – $16,000.  They answered the final question correctly and all managed to bet an amount that would even them out. After the show, Jeopardy! execs contacted a Game Theory expert who calculated the odds of such a thing happening at 1 in 25 million. All three contestants returned the next day to face off again, the first time all three contestants had ever returned the next day in the show’s history.

Only the Jeopardy winner receives his winnings to make the show more competitive.  The second place contestant gets $2000 and third place receives $1000. On the Fleming version, contestants would occasionally decide that they only wanted to win a certain amount of money, and stop ringing in when they reached that amount, instead of attempting to become a returning champion. Others would refuse to write down a question for Final Jeopardy! if another contestant had a significant lead.

Jeopardy gets tens of thousands of applicants every year for just 400 spots—mathematically, getting into Harvard or Yale is about eight times more likely than getting on Jeopardy! Auditioners take a 50-question written test, with clues taken from the harder rows of Jeopardy! material, and then the few who pass that test role-play a little mock game and mini-interview. And then, if you get lucky, nearly a year goes by and one day you get a call out of the blue inviting you to be on the show.

Despite Ken Jennings’ impressive run, the highest cumulative amount won by a single contestant belongs to Brad Rutter, a player whose combined totals of his 2002 streak and 2005 “Ultimate Tournament of Champions” streak netted him $3,255,102. Ken Jennings has racked up $ 2,520,700 thus far. Ken does, however, hold the highest one-day total record: $75,000.

The winner with the smallest amount of earnings at the end of the game managed to triumph over the other two contestants by keeping a mere dollar. On January 19, 1993, Air Force Lt. Col. Daryl Scott cleverly bid just enough to keep him afloat. The other contestants got the question wrong and lost everything. No one else has ever won by keeping a single George Washington. The answer? “His books ‘No Easy Walk to Freedom’ and ‘The Struggle is My Life’ were published during his imprisonment.” The question? “Who is Nelson Mandela.”