1. In the song “What’s This?”, this animated film character looks back and forth and sings, “There are children throwing snowballs, instead of throwing heads, they’re busy building toys and absolutely no one’s dead!”
2. While digital editing has allowed this pop culture icon to continue his plan to appear in every movie inspired by his work, his last actual, live appearance was in Ant-Man and the Wasp.
3. Which pop artist’s work often depicts coy young women, in a comic book style, expressing anguish, talking on the phone, and/or breaking down in tears?
4. What astronaut, one of the three who died in the Apollo 1 launch rehearsal fire, worked at a school bus manufacturing company in Indiana, before attending Purdue University?
5. If you’re ever holding the key to a Chrysler, you can thank this man, who is credited with turning the company around in the 1980s.
6. The monosyllabic first names of these five men, in this order, form the beginning of a set written and published in 1975. We’re promised that the list is actually ten times as long, though we are only ever told about these five. To help you figure it out, I’ve included a particular, important word in each question. For this Q6, please come up with another name that could go on this list, and for bonus points, compose it as a trivia question (with the extra word, like questions 1-5 above).

Hints and solution

Answers

1. Jack Skellington is the character from The Nightmare Before Christmas who is surprised at the sight of not-dead children frolicking with fluffy white stuff. Reader Adam wrote in to point out something distressing about the lyrics to this song. Moments after Jack says "there's white things in the air", implying he's never heard of snow before, he sings about "children throwing snowballs". 😳 What the heck, Danny Elfman?!
2. Stan Lee has been featured in 23 MCU movies, according to this extensive Wikipedia page dedicated to the topic. He's also cameoed in lots of non-MCU films, some video games, and even theme park attractions. The original version of this question credited Stan Lee as a famous artist, but one of my testers (also a comics illustrator, by chance), reminded me that while Stan Lee wrote, edited, and published Marvel comics, he wasn't an artist.
3. Roy Lichtenstein is the pop artist who produced many works that mimic the style of comic book panels, like Drowning Girl, which is on display at MoMA. I just learned that the technique of using small circles of color to produce a larger swath of a different color — which Lichtenstein used to great effect — is called the Ben Day process, and those dots are Ben Day dots.
4. Gus Grissom (born Virgil) died tragically along with Roger Chaffee and Ed White when the module they were sitting in, as part of a launch rehearsal, was engulfed in fire due to an electrical malfunction. The mission wasn't actually named Apollo 1 at the time; NASA bestowed that title afterwards as a way to honor the late astronauts.
5. Lee Iacocca (born Lido) is credited with bringing Chrysler back from the brink of bankruptcy. If you didn't grow up in America in the ’80s, like I did, and Iacocca doesn't have a permanent place in your psyche, perhaps you recall him as a character in Ford v. Ferrari, where he was played by Jon Bernthal. Favorite fact about Iacocca is that employees of Chrysler apparently created a backronym mnemonic to remember the spelling of his name: I Am Chairman Of Chrysler Corporation of America.

These are the five gents Paul Simon sings about in 50 Ways To Leave Your Lover, the song that famously shirks us out of 90% of what we paid for.

• Slip out the back, Jack
• Make a new plan, Stan
• Don't need to coy, Roy
• Hop on the bus, Gus
• Drop of the key, Lee

As a hint, in each question I included the rhyming word from the song. (e.g. the third question said "… depicts coy young women…".) Then I asked you to respond with another question that fits this pattern — that is, a question that includes a word which rhymes with the first name of the answer.

For the collection of questions submitted by readers, see this newsletter.