Monopoly: Everything You Didn't Know

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Too Much Information is a production of iHeartRadio. Hello everyone,
and welcome to another episode of Too Much Information, the
show that brings you the secret histories and little alone
details behind your favorite movies, music, TV shows.

Speaker 2 (00:19):
And more.

Speaker 1 (00:20):
And today we are taking an adventure into the and
more category. We are your boardwalk barons of boredom, your
park place princes of pointless facts, your utilities of useless knowledge,
your luxury tax of trivia, your dice rollers of digressions,
your bankrupt buddies of banter.

Speaker 2 (00:39):
My name is Jordan runtalg.

Speaker 3 (00:41):
You shirk it a little too close with the bankrupt thing, man,
So just remember that it's America, and I'm a writer,
so that's you dial that one back. But I'm Alex Heigel.

Speaker 1 (00:53):
And today we are talking about one of the most
popular and also kind of most loath board games Street
that's right. Today we're diving into that jubilant celebration of
capitalism that has ruined holidays all over the world.

Speaker 2 (01:08):
Monopoly. Monopoly. It's monopoly.

Speaker 3 (01:11):
It's a fun, fun family activity that you you yeah, yay,
Monopoly monomena. It's phenomenas. Uh yeah, what do you gotta
say about? What do you gotta say about this, you
son of a bitch.

Speaker 1 (01:29):
This classic toy turns ninety years old in the spring,
and it has been enjoyed slash tolerated by upwards of
more than a billion people, and phrases like Monopoly money,
get a jail free card, and do not pass, go,
do not collect two hundred dollars have passed into popular lexicon.
Despite its global appeal, it's that most American of games.

(01:51):
The object, of course, is to bankrupt all of your
fellow players until you are king of the mountain. Much
like life, it changes on the role of a die.
Sometimes you're on top and sometimes you're on the bottom.
And also like life, it occasionally brings out the worst
than people. But it also teaches valuable skills like money management,
language skills, negotiation, and strategic thinking. And it's also a

(02:14):
platform for discussing free market concepts like supply and demand
and the consequences of monopolistic practices. For many kids, this
game is the first time they ever handled paper money.

Speaker 2 (02:25):
That's wild. I know, how do you feel about all this?

Speaker 3 (02:28):
You know, pretty bog standard Monopoly life For me, just
did it like a couple of times and then stopped.
I mean when I was a kid, I was about
and no, I'll just say when I still am, I'm
a pretty sore loser. Yeah, so you know, we didn't
have any like blowouts with it. But also it was

(02:49):
so long and forever taking. I think that's what led
us to abandon it more than me being strappy about it.
But yeah, so long, so forever taking, and you know.

Speaker 2 (03:00):
Really more of a clue family. Oh wow, okay, there
was a dead body. Yeah, Clue was a big one.

Speaker 3 (03:06):
Charades scategories that all kind of like took over as
we became adults because it was just easier at Trivia
pursuit was actually a huge We would go ham on
some trivia pursuit. Yeah, I don't know. I mean, there's
one side of my family that's more inclined to view
capitalism positively than the other, So.

Speaker 2 (03:24):
I'll just leave that there.

Speaker 1 (03:27):
My family was more of a family that played board
games that took forever to set up.

Speaker 2 (03:31):
Like in the mouse Trap vein there was.

Speaker 3 (03:34):
Love mouse Trap, How could you Yacht?

Speaker 2 (03:35):
Come on? Do you remember? Do you remember thirteen Dead
End Drive?

Speaker 1 (03:38):
It was it almost looks like the Munster's House whether
all these It was kind of like a clue or
three D. There was like a chandelier that would fall
on people. There was Yeah, there was like a haunted
house kind of thing that you maneuvered through or walk
through and stuff happened to you. There was Forbidden Bridge,
which was almost like the legend of the Hidden Temple Olmec.
It was this like big Aztec face with a bridge

(03:59):
that you would walk across the bridge and you'd press
a button in the bridge would shake and if he
fell off, he lost. And then we also played a
game called pig pong. This was hours of fun. Do
you ever heard of pig pong?

Speaker 2 (04:10):
No?

Speaker 3 (04:10):
I cannot say that I have. Does it involve hitting pigs?

Speaker 1 (04:13):
It does what it says on the tin. Yeah, it's
like basically like ping pong. It's got a net and
then you have these rubber pigs that shoot air through
the nose when you squeeze them, and have a little
like shuttlecock made out of some kind of really thin,
almost like tissue substance, and you just use these pigs
to spray air to knock the shuttle cock.

Speaker 2 (04:34):
Over the Uh. It's really fine. Yeah, it's really fun.
It sounds fine.

Speaker 3 (04:38):
We never had like a ping pong. We never had
like a table tennis situation.

Speaker 2 (04:41):
But oh small, it was very small. Yeah, yeah, it's
kind of it. I don't know.

Speaker 3 (04:45):
I mean, you know, we're kind of over that generation
that like video games quickly began usurping board games.

Speaker 1 (04:52):
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2 (04:53):
And my dad.

Speaker 3 (04:53):
Part of the reason I have such a competitive thing
around games is that my dad was a button masher.
That that's like sort of a derisive term for people
who don't put in any effort or strategy into playing
video games and just kind of literally what it sounds like,
what it sounds like on the tin, smash things randomly.
And I was like the person who like would engage

(05:14):
practice mode and like learn all the move sets and
then like set out with a strategy for each character.
And so whenever he beat me by just doing that,
I would I would like turn the game off.

Speaker 2 (05:25):
I would just it would make me so mad. What
were your games?

Speaker 3 (05:30):
Mostly fighting? If we were cooperative, like we would play
Street Fighter together. We played a little tech and together,
but then I you know, otherwise it was like hack.

Speaker 2 (05:40):
And Slash and RPGs.

Speaker 3 (05:41):
Oh, we played a play Twisted Metal. He was a
real fair I loved I loved swissed Medal. Yeah, so,
but yeah soundtrack, Yeah yeah, And I don't know that
was kind of it.

Speaker 2 (05:55):
I think I think if I'm inclined.

Speaker 3 (05:56):
To do like group games now, it will be like
scategories or charades or something that, you know, something that
I will dominate in.

Speaker 2 (06:05):
Obviously. Have you ever played Boulder Dash? You would love
see I.

Speaker 3 (06:10):
Get all these confused because they're made up words.

Speaker 1 (06:12):
Well, that's the idea, is that there's like some obscure
word that they like announced at the beginning of every round,
and everybody writes down a fake definition of it, and
you vuilte on what you think the real one was.
And you would be so good at that. You're you're
a man of letters, your words, your words.

Speaker 3 (06:28):
Man, And see where it's gotten me.

Speaker 2 (06:31):
Yeah?

Speaker 3 (06:31):
Man, Well what drew you to this in your What
continues to draw you to the story of monopoly?

Speaker 1 (06:38):
Well, I'll tell you what sparked it, and you will
never in a million years guess what?

Speaker 2 (06:43):
Maybe want to tackle this? That sounds right.

Speaker 1 (06:45):
I saw the movie Heretic with Hugh Grant, that psychological
horror movie.

Speaker 3 (06:50):
So out of character to see any psychological horror movie.

Speaker 1 (06:54):
Well, my friend from high school is an actress and
a writer, and she was in lot of horror movies
and she was literally on that VH one reality show
called Screen Queens, and she wanted to like educate me
in the realm of scary movies. So she got me
over a couple of weeks ago and she was like,
I really think you would like this movie. It's like
a I know you're not really super in the horror movies,

(07:16):
but it's like a smart, psychological horror movie.

Speaker 2 (07:19):
And it was really good.

Speaker 1 (07:20):
And you Grant had this whole bit about the surprising
origins of Monopoly, the dramatic some would say steeped in
betrayal origins of Monopoly.

Speaker 2 (07:31):
So that really put it in my head.

Speaker 1 (07:32):
But you know, I mean, like so many elements of
twentieth century Americana, I do have a begrudging affection for
Monopoly in the way that I do most aspects of the.

Speaker 2 (07:41):
Rapidly vanishing monoculture.

Speaker 1 (07:43):
And I'm sure, like you, I recall many happy hours
attempting to cheat at this game and a desperate bid
to make it end. I mean, was it like an
open secret that this game sucked before the Dane Cook bit?

Speaker 2 (07:54):
Was Dan Cook really the thing?

Speaker 1 (07:55):
That like the Hannibal Burist Cosby thing was Oh, Dane Cook,
Dank Cook, the guy made it okay to hate on Monopoly.

Speaker 2 (08:02):
No, I think it is.

Speaker 3 (08:03):
You know, I think it's totally it that I didn't
put together until I read this from you. I think
it's got to be like a children of the Depression
situation or like children of the Children of the Depression situation,
because like I, you know, I cannot imagine that my
like as my dad or my mom were like growing up,
there would have been any reason for them to have
any interest in this game if it had not been

(08:24):
probably just passed at something their parents just passed down.

Speaker 2 (08:28):
You know, there were chatty Kathy dolls to play with.

Speaker 3 (08:30):
I mean in one Boomers, you know, for they would
they would have been born like what ten fifteen years
after this thing like hit Critical Masks, so it's still
pretty much in the It would have been pretty much
in the wheelhouse.

Speaker 2 (08:41):
You know.

Speaker 1 (08:43):
Do we think the kids today actually sit through a
game of Monopoly?

Speaker 3 (08:46):
No? I mean, I don't know, man. I feel like
a lot of that analog stuff has actually come back
around to us and maybe Zoomers just because we're so
tired of being poisoned and lied to by every screen.
But somehow I think it's going to be like, you know,
I mean anecdotally, it's just like poker games and like
and puzzles and and you know, less involved things than

(09:10):
a game of Monopoly, because I think, I mean, yeah,
I don't know. I think everyone grew up with the
understanding that this is going to take forever. Enemies will
become friends, friends will become enemies, and we'll all be
begging for death by the time this is over, much
like living in America in twenty twenty five.

Speaker 2 (09:28):
Should I learn to play backgammon? Folks?

Speaker 3 (09:34):
I want to learn dominoes? You know, it seems like
dominoes is good.

Speaker 2 (09:37):
I want to learn. Hmmm.

Speaker 3 (09:40):
Really, just spring right to her, really, just accelerate right
into your senior citizen re All right.

Speaker 1 (09:46):
Well, folks, strap in for a surprisingly drama filled episode
as we talk about the wholesale theft at the heart
of the creation of this game, the murders it sparked,
the gigantic case of corporate fraud it inspired, and the
prisoners it sprung from German prisoner of war camps.

Speaker 3 (10:03):
The only good thing it ever did in its life
here's everything you didn't know about monopoly.

Speaker 1 (10:17):
I call this section Pasco young Man, the orgins.

Speaker 2 (10:22):
That's so dumb. That works. That works. You gotta keep that.

Speaker 1 (10:29):
According to state sponsored Monopoly lore, the game was invented
by Charles Darrow, an out of work plumber from Philadelphia,
who crafted it to bring some badly needed joy to
his friends and neighbors in the dark days of the
Great Depression. When he pitched the game the Parker Brothers
in the early thirties, the toy conglomerate supposedly rejected the
soon to be iconic game for having quote fifty two

(10:49):
fundamental errors, but nevertheless, he persisted, and Darrow was rewarded
for his tenacity by becoming a very wealthy man when
the game became an immediate hit upon its release in
nineteen thirty five.

Speaker 3 (11:02):
I actually tried to look up all of the all
of the Yeah, no, you can't find them. No, they're
not They don't want you to know, they don't want
you to notice the patterns. Y. Yeah, it's weird, I
you know, And some of the ones that I worry
able to find were just so granular.

Speaker 2 (11:22):
Yeah that I was like, what does this how is
this how is this the basis for rejection?

Speaker 3 (11:27):
But you know, I'm not a I've never been. I've
never been an inside part.

Speaker 2 (11:30):
Of big game. I don't I don't know games.

Speaker 1 (11:33):
Yeah, for decades, this is wild. The story of Darrow's
rags to riches ingenuity was literally included in the Parker
Brothers rule book that accompanied every game. Allow us to quote,
I need to read this in like an old time
radio voice.

Speaker 2 (11:49):
Like nineteen thirty four, B.

Speaker 1 (11:51):
Darrow, Germantown, Pennsylvania, presented a game called Monopoly to the
executives of Parker Brothers. Mister Darrow, like many other Americans,
was unemployed at the time and played this game to
amuse himself and pass the time. It's the game's exciting
promise of fame and fortune. The prop to Darrow to
initially produce this game on his own.

Speaker 2 (12:07):
That was no. I think he kind of nailed it.
Oh thanks, Uh.

Speaker 1 (12:12):
The truth of this is a little more complicated in reality.
Charles Darrow effectively ball roads. Can you hear the air quotes?
That's a polite euphemism for legal reasons. The idea for
Monopolis his family is like old, right, they're old and rich,

(12:32):
so so.

Speaker 3 (12:32):
It's like fifty to fifty they squeak, we either squeak
under the radar or or they came us. All right, well,
I just want to say this guy and he's dead
and in hell.

Speaker 1 (12:44):
Yes, he borrowed the idea for monopoly from a pre
existing toy called the Landlord's Game, which was invented many
years before I think thirty years before his version by
a woman called Elizabeth McGhee.

Speaker 2 (12:57):
Poor Lizzy.

Speaker 1 (12:58):
I know she did not take kindly to this and
would take legal action against Darrow, which rules, but ultimately
she'd be denied recognition for her contribution to pop culture
for decades. This has all made so much more poignant
slash ironic, slash frustrating by the fact that McGee developed
her game as a cautionary tale against capitalism it is,

(13:18):
and then in a perfect twist, it was taken by
a man for financial gain and the meaning was completely
inverted into a full throated celebration of capitalism.

Speaker 2 (13:30):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (13:31):
I mean, it's just also sort of like it's really
everything that's gross about America is like summed up in
this story. It's like, yeah, theft, corporate whitewashing of that theft,
and then just how much men hated women at the time,
and it was like legally societally totally cool for them
to do so, Like I mean, ah god, yeah, it's

(13:54):
disgusting anyway. So Lizzie McGhee, it's a fascinating woman. She
was very far ahead of her time. And look where
that got her. The lesson is fall in line. The
bottom line of this country is that deviation from the
norm will be punished unless it is exploitable for profit.
She bought her own home and property as an unmarried woman,

(14:16):
which already was probably caused her being hanged as a
witch in the late eighteen hundreds if she were in
you know, ironically, if she were in Salem, where Parker
Brothers is headquartered anyway. So yeah, she worked as a
scenographer and typist at Washington, d c. In the dead
letter Office of the Post Office, which is many of

(14:38):
you know, is the nation's repository for undeliverable male What
is the state of the dead letter office in two
twenty five?

Speaker 2 (14:45):
Man?

Speaker 3 (14:46):
How about whither the dead whether the dead letter office?

Speaker 2 (14:49):
Anyway.

Speaker 3 (14:50):
Outside of her day job, she performed in plays and
penned poetry and short stories, and in eighteen ninety three,
she secured a patent for an inventive device that could
feed various sizes of paper through typewriter, enabling more words
to fit on a single page. So she had a
lot going on as an unmarried single, unmarriage, a name,
as a name, as just a magnificent flappam. She sat

(15:13):
on flagpoles and got passed earlier. This was nineties. Yeah,
I know, so she narrowly avoided being beat to death
in the street for holding a patent. An outspoken advocate
for women's rights, McGee did not marry until her mid
forties and used her writing to speak out on behalf
of working women and against sexism and societal expectations for years.

(15:33):
Her most notable claim to fame was an innovative piece
of political performance art, a mock newspaper ad in which
she offered herself for sale as a young woman American slave.

Speaker 2 (15:46):
That's the quote.

Speaker 3 (15:46):
The stunt was both a protest against the wage gap
that left women earning far less than men and a
satire of the transactional nature of many traditional marriages, and
pretty freaking bold for doing that. Not that far from the.

Speaker 1 (16:02):
Civil War, Yeah, I was like when you could not
vote hey got their asses.

Speaker 3 (16:08):
Got their asses, and McGee was intrigued by the philosophy
of the then influential economist Henry George. Henry George had written
a book in eighteen seventy nine called Progress and Poverty,
which detailed his belief that land and natural resources belonged
to all members of society, and therefore wealthy landowners should
have to pay higher taxes. His basic argument was that

(16:29):
land was the only thing that could be taxed because
land couldn't actually belong to anyone. Many progressive thinkers and
activists of the era integrated Georgist proposals for single tax
plans into their political platforms and stump speeches, and to
help spread this premise, McGee developed The Landlord's Game in
nineteen oh three as both a teaching tool and a
political statement to teach people about quote the evils of

(16:52):
accruing vast sums of wealth at the expense of others.

Speaker 2 (16:56):
Where's the wind up?

Speaker 3 (16:58):
And of course, as players of monopoly are aware, the
game is actually a demonstration of that. The more money
you win as one player, the more the others go bankrupt.
There's the pitch, and this was her intent. She wanted
to illustrate the economic dangers and fundamental unfairness of monopolies.

(17:22):
She wants told a reporter, and just a further demonstration
of what a brassy old broad McGee was. In a
short time, I hope a very short time, men and
women will discover that they are poor because Carnegie and
Rockefeller maybe have more than they know what to do with. Boy,
she was so wrong to hope that, oh twenty years ago. Yeah, well,

(17:46):
I mean, you know, this is actually kind of interesting.

Speaker 2 (17:48):
I have this.

Speaker 3 (17:48):
You can forget this, but I do want to kind
of have your thoughts on it. I think one of
the worst problems that we are facing right now is
that this generation's crop of wealthy have no concept of
nobless obli which was something that I think was completely
imported in from Victorian moral principles, and that was the
only reason that we got people like Carnegie, Alfred Nobel,

(18:10):
and Rockefeller to give large swaths of their money back.
And I mean, you know, I think because I work
at a conservatory, I see this most readily in classical music,
because part of the reason that classical music was sustained
as such an institution in America was because philanthropists funded orchestras,

(18:31):
and you know, they paid for these educational programs like
Lenny explaining the Symphony to kids on NBC, and that continued,
and now those people are.

Speaker 2 (18:44):
Dying and their errors are not.

Speaker 3 (18:48):
Similarly motivated towards philanthropy, and nor are you know, your
current class of billionaire So I don't know you think
there's anything to that.

Speaker 2 (18:59):
Yeah, oh, I mean that's a really interesting point. It's
a really terrifying point.

Speaker 1 (19:03):
With the our current crop billionaires not giving back and
the arts program is being cut left, right and center.

Speaker 2 (19:09):
I don't know what will happen.

Speaker 3 (19:11):
Yeah, well, you know, we'll be dead. We'll be dead
and it doesn't matter to these people because it did
hell people. Yeah, because people who work in tech do
not have souls, and everything.

Speaker 2 (19:23):
Is just they won't be dead. That's the that's the
sad part. Well, you know, I mean it's just you think.

Speaker 3 (19:27):
About like the last ten or fifteen years of tech innovation.
The last one that really broke the mold was the iPhone,
and since then, every big app that has struck big
has just been a variation on another idea or a
pointless insertion of said tech people as a middleman into
various industries that did not need another middleman, you know,

(19:50):
uber let, Ubert, Yeah, disrupting the tech they call it
disrupting though, you know Taxis and seamless, grub Hub, all
those places. Disrupting the restaurant industry, like you couldn't just
order pizza from a restaurant before music, Spotify, Pandora. Oh,
you know, we just it's really too much. We'll just
take all the effort of you know, of choice away

(20:12):
from you, and in doing so we just impoverish all
the creators.

Speaker 2 (20:16):
But but you know, it'll.

Speaker 3 (20:16):
Be slightly more convenient for you to never have to
think about a constant stream of music coming into you.
Delete all that I just wanted to get I needed
to get it out anyway. The Landlord Game. McGee's Landlord
Game looks pretty familiar to the game that we know
as Monopoly today. It is a square board with nine
rectangular spaces on each side, designed to trap the devil

(20:37):
in an arcane No, I'm kidding, God, that would rule verbally,
trademarking that a game of monopoly that unlocks a primeval
god of avarice and greed by a certain game, a
game being played in a certain way, and then it's
unleashed upon.

Speaker 2 (20:54):
It's like a vengeance.

Speaker 3 (20:55):
It's like Pumpkinhead, and we just get to see a
bunch of thinly veiled versions of of Elon and Zuckerberg
just horrifically tor to shreds. And this just happens for
ninety or so minutes, and then the movie just kind
of ends.

Speaker 2 (21:11):
Anyway.

Speaker 3 (21:12):
You know, there's corners of course that label go to
jail and public park, which, man, that's an outdated concept, right,
you know, we're losing public We're losing third spaces baby,
at a faster than we can count them. Players circle
the board, buying up railroads, collecting money, and paying rent
as you do in society. Honestly, like the biggest mockery

(21:33):
of this game is the idea that you would get
to do anything in life other than pay rent.

Speaker 1 (21:37):
Yeah, the eighteen nineties, though, Railroads was like probably like
your apartment rent.

Speaker 3 (21:45):
I guess that's true. Mege's description of the game published
at the time also sounds familiar to people. Representative money deeds, mortgages, notes,
and charters are used in the game. Lots are bought
and sold, Rents are collected, money is borrowed either for
the bank or from individuals, and interest in taxes are paid.

Speaker 2 (22:03):
The railroad is also represented, and those who make.

Speaker 3 (22:06):
Use of it are obliged to pay their fare unless
they are fortunate enough to possess a pass, which in
the game means throwing a double. There are two franchises,
the water and the lighting utilia. It's like utilities, right, Sorry,
I was like, is that a typo for lightning?

Speaker 2 (22:20):
Is this ship?

Speaker 3 (22:21):
The four elements into this? There are two franchises or utilities,
the water and the lighting. The first player whose throw
brings him upon one of these receives a charter giving
him the privilege of taxing all others who must use
his light and water. And in the case of California,
this evolved into PG and E, who are now responsible

(22:42):
for causing the bulk of wildfires in California. We're gonna
get so you got to cut all this because we're
gonna have some real pissed off boomers coming in and
being like, I just wanted to learn more about the
game of my youth, and the woke people just kept
the woke one just kept saying things that are true.

(23:03):
Sorry for saying things that are true. In a podcast
about verified Trivia. There are two tracks of land on
the board that are held out of use, neither for
rent nor for sale, and on each of these appear
the forbidding sign no trespassing go to jail, which I
guess now you're just likely to see in a lot

(23:23):
of public.

Speaker 2 (23:23):
Spaces, right right, Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 3 (23:27):
McGee's version had two variations of gameplay, one in which
players competed to capture as much real estate and cash
as possible, a lah the version we know today, and
then one in which the point of the game is
to share the wealth as equitably as possible. Heartbreaking.

Speaker 2 (23:42):
What happened to that role?

Speaker 3 (23:44):
Well, of course it was phased out of time because
of human nature, and also, you know, this game is
kind of interesting in terms of like American economic theory,
like this would have preceded kinsy and economics, so there
was a chance that people were still kind of interpreting
things through the more like Adam Smith, like the invisible hand,
and we're less less inclined to view it as like

(24:06):
the way that we are, which is like, you know,
trickle down economics are both unchecked. Growth is cancer, and
this whole system no longer works anyway. McGee argued, let
the children once see clearly the gross adjustment of our
present land system, and when they grow up, if they
are allowed to develop naturally, the evil will soon be remedied.

(24:29):
Every single one of these quotes is just like something
that should be nailed. I mean, every single one of
these quotes has become a horrible mocking of her words,
just just you know, a little over a century later.

Speaker 1 (24:41):
So now we're going to talk about how this the
sweet teaching tool.

Speaker 3 (24:48):
She earnestly believed that people being showed an alternative to
capitalism via a board gamp would one day rise up
and reject it. What a sweet, sweet fool. Instead, this
game was stolen and exploited.

Speaker 1 (25:03):
The Landlord's Game was sold for a while by a
small time New York City based publisher, but it soon
began to spread by homemade versions that were passed through
intellectual circles along the Eastern Seaboard. Fraternity brothers at Harvard Columbia,
Williams and other elite colleges, Quakers living in Atlantic City,
and writers in radicals like Upton Sinclair used it as

(25:23):
a means that discussed economic issues and inequality.

Speaker 2 (25:27):
As it traveled the rules.

Speaker 1 (25:28):
In terminology evolved, students of the Wharton School of Business
began referring to it colloquially as the Monopoly game, and
as it moved some people localized the game using locations
found in their home city. That was when it fell
into the grubby hands of one Philadelphian named Charles Darrow,
who we mentioned earlier. There have been multiple stories of

(25:50):
exactly how he first became familiar with the game thirty
years after McGee invented it. I'll go with the version
detailed in the twenty ten documentary Under the Boardwalk Theopoly Story.
A business professor from Arden, Delaware, where the game was invented.

Speaker 3 (26:05):
Oh, so you can't even you can't even blame him
for he's not Philly native.

Speaker 2 (26:10):
No shrend Oh no he is.

Speaker 1 (26:12):
He is Philly native. He is Philly native. No, no, no,
We're sorry. Where the where the Where? The Landlord's Game
was invented in in Arden, Delaware, and a business professor
from Arden, Delaware took the game to the students of
the Wharton School of Economics in so yeah, I think,
yeah yeah. One of the professors of Wharton took it

(26:34):
to his home in Reading, Pennsylvania, and one of his
friends took it to a college in Massachusetts, where it
was showed to a classmate who took it home to Indiana.
This classmate, who took it home to Indiana, made his
own version, who showed it to a teacher friend of his,
who then borrowed it and took a new job in
Atlantic City. And this teacher friend thought it would be

(26:55):
more fun if they changed the properties on the board
to the areas and their adopted hometown of Atlantic City.
And these people showed their new Atlantic cityized version of
the game to a friend from Philadelphia who made some
minor changes himself. And then one night, on an evening walk,
these people from Philadelphia ran into an old school friend

(27:15):
they hadn't seen in years, Charles Darrow and his wife.
He ran into an old school friend who I guess
happened to be carrying a homemade board game that he
then shared with this guy. It was a weird time.
It's a weird time. But I mean movie Pitch Butterfly
Effect remake, but about the creation of Monopoly. Think of

(27:36):
how this like all pinball across the Eastern Seaboard to
land in this guy's lap.

Speaker 3 (27:40):
Yeah, I mean there's an example, the Invisible hand of
the market talking about putting all of these people together
to create something that would be an unfettered celebration of greed.

Speaker 2 (27:51):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (27:51):
Yeah, well, I mean human beings are animals at least,
so yeah, that's true.

Speaker 2 (27:57):
It wouldn't have been hard. I mean, if there was
one guy would have another.

Speaker 3 (28:00):
Yeah, I mean, that's yeah.

Speaker 1 (28:04):
Darrow was taken by the game and decided to make
a version himself without to take it, yeah, without.

Speaker 2 (28:10):
Changing McGee's rules in any substantial way.

Speaker 1 (28:13):
But because he was a white man in the early
twentieth century, this seemed to pose no problem. Like most
people during the Great Depression, Darrow was out of work,
so he had a lot of time to workshop this.
He made copies using household items. The original board was
an oil cloth, the cards were handwritten, and the hotels
and houses were off cuts from wood molding. For reasons

(28:34):
that are probably best chalked up to pure laziness, he
didn't feel the need to change the locations on the
board from Atlantic City, which was the version he'd been
given to.

Speaker 2 (28:43):
His native Philadelphia.

Speaker 1 (28:44):
The lore put around in later years was that he
chose Atlantic City because it was a favorite vacation spot.

Speaker 2 (28:50):
But that's not true.

Speaker 3 (28:51):
See, we don't claim him. Man, that's not true Philly.
There's absolutely no true Philadelphia in the world. Who would
rather give New Jersey credit? Then they're on city. That man,
he's I know, here's something doesn't smell right about him.

Speaker 1 (29:07):
Check and see. Okay, I'll keep talking. Google him and
see where he was born. Maybe he's not native for Philly,
but I do like this. The homemade edition that he'd
received misspelled Atlantic City's Marvin Gardens as Marvin Gardens instead
of mar V E N, which is correct as mar
V I N. And in nineteen ninety five, Parker Brothers
apologized to the people of Marvin Gardens for the misspelling,

(29:29):
but not notably for screwing over.

Speaker 2 (29:31):
The original creator of the game. As we'll discuss.

Speaker 1 (29:35):
On a related note, people apparently take their monopoly locations
very seriously. In nineteen seventy two, the Commissioner of Public
Works in Atlantic City threatened to change the names of
the real Baltic and Mediterranean avenues, but public outcry vetoed
the bill.

Speaker 2 (29:52):
No, these are the monopoly spots. You can't change it.

Speaker 3 (29:55):
Okay, all right, So he was born in Germantown.

Speaker 2 (29:58):
Okay, that's not far from philling No.

Speaker 3 (30:00):
But it was. It was an independent borough until eighteen
fifty four. So he born eighteen eighty nine, so he
is technically a native Philadelphia. But I'm grandfathering him out
of that out of disgust. Okay, because Germantown was not
a real city. Yes it is now though, that's cool.

(30:21):
Shouts to Germantown. I'm just trying to get this guy
to Philly anyway I can. Good, thank you.

Speaker 1 (30:27):
At first, Darrow set out a modest goal for himself,
sell one game a day for four bucks, and if
he did that for a year, that's like three hundred
and thirty grand in today's money.

Speaker 2 (30:37):
So bully for him, you know.

Speaker 1 (30:40):
In nineteen thirty four, after he met with some success,
he took the ad Parker Brothers and Milton Bradley, the
two biggest toy manufacturers on the block, and both rejected it.
As we touched on earlier, Parker Brothers supposedly found fifty
two fundamental errors with the game, including the length and
complexity of the rules. Ultimately, Darrow decided to go it alone,

(31:01):
hiring a printer to make a number of copies I've
seen multiple numbers five hundred, five thousand, and seven thousand,
five hundred sided. But he sold these through Wannamakers, a
popular Philadelphia department store, and after the store sold out,
Parker Brothers reconsidered their decision and bought the game from
Darrow in nineteen thirty five, a year after he first

(31:23):
pitched it. This time, however, he was in a position
to negotiate the first time around. The company had the
option to buy the game outright from this out of
work plumber, and now he demanded a royalty for every
game sold, a move that would make him a multi
millionaire and continues to benefit his family to this day.

Speaker 3 (31:40):
I mean, this really is just like an example of
how America doesn't work. Like a guy steals something and
his kids or his dumb family would just get to
live off of it for the rest of their lives,
you know, like yep, and oh yeah, sorry, But first
they have to shave all the mainstream edges off of it.
They have to make a dumber less academic a more

(32:02):
rapidly pro communist.

Speaker 2 (32:03):
It's just a it's a pro capitalist.

Speaker 3 (32:05):
If you were writing, like if you were writing like
a parody of this for like your screenwriting class. Your
screenwriting class that you took, it probably would have been
dinged as a little too.

Speaker 2 (32:16):
On the nose. Jordan Jesus Christ, we live in Hell.

Speaker 3 (32:21):
One person who did not become a millionaire from Monopoly was,
of course, it's creator, Elizabeth McGee. She tried to sell
the game to Parker Brothers twice, once in nineteen ten
and another time in nineteen twenty four, and it was
turned down for fear of being too political. But because
she owned the patent to her game, Parker Brothers had
to buy it off of her in order to produce

(32:42):
Darri's Monopoly. For her troubles, she was paid a princely
one off sum of five hundred dollars. Just seemed as
more or less a way to head off a potential
pr scandal since people were starting to rightly ask the question,
why is this a new game? I've been playing it
for years. At first, he was thrilled that her game
was with its teachings, was going to be shared with

(33:04):
the hideous, unwashed masses of this ruinous failed state. It wasn't.
At the time, though people were happy about it. They
were pulling together. Rosie the Riveter had been created in
a lab. We can do it was the national mo motto.
A chicken in every pot, A chicken in every pot,
a Nazi war criminal, rocket scientist in every position of

(33:25):
American aerospace engineering, Tony two, Scado, Google operation paper clip.
And then she saw that her entire message had been
co opted, which left her horrified, and the terms of
her settlement left her completely without credit. She railed against
Parker Brothers and Monopoly in the press for the rest

(33:46):
of her life, accusing them of stealing her intellectual property,
and apparently some legal action was taken, which was resolved
when the toy company quietly settled in exchange for buying
some of McGee's other game ideas, but there's no actual
evidence that these games were ever even reduced. In the
nineteen forty census taken eight years before she died, she
listed to her occupation as maker of games. In the

(34:07):
column for her income, McGee wrote zero. Her critical role
in Monopolies history was not fully revealed to the public
until a nineteen seventy three lawsuit by Ralph and Spatch.

Speaker 2 (34:19):
And Spach he worked in aerospace, a.

Speaker 3 (34:23):
Fresh import from Argentina until her critical role in Monopolies
history was not fully revealed to the public until a
nineteen seventy three lawsuit by Ralph and Spatch, a college
professor who created and tried to copyrate a game called
Anti Monopoly. We will talk about this later, but back
to the relatively sunnier climes of unfettered profits for the

(34:46):
straight white guy.

Speaker 2 (34:49):
We're going to take a.

Speaker 1 (34:50):
Quick break, but we'll be right back with more too
much information in just a moment. Wow Wow, spinning newspaper,
nineteen thirty five, Parker Brothers releasing.

Speaker 2 (35:10):
A new game.

Speaker 1 (35:11):
Monopoly's official birthday is March ninth, nineteen thirty five, the
day the rights were acquired from Charles Dara.

Speaker 2 (35:18):
It became an immediate.

Speaker 1 (35:19):
Hit, selling two hundred and seventy eight thousand copies in
its first year and more than one million, seven hundred
and fifty thousand the next Soon, thirty five thousand copies
were being manufactured each week, outstripping the capacity of Parker
brothers headquarters in Salem, Massachusetts, a haunted place if there
ever was one.

Speaker 3 (35:40):
Surely no coincidence they were headquartered in place that had
a wonderful and wil widely publicized history of punishing women
for existing, having thoughts, and the like.

Speaker 1 (35:54):
The game's success is partially due to the timing of
its release, hitting shelves in the midst of the Great Depression.
It's themes of wealth, property, and economic power resonated with
the public grappling with financial hardship. Even just physically handling
money was seen as a novelty in these times. In
nineteen thirty five, a year after the game's release, it

(36:15):
was licensed to John Waddington Limited, which, in case the
name didn't give it away, was a company in the
UK that produced games. To make the game relevant to
British consumers, the names of the properties were changed to
well known streets in London, and that's a practice that
continues today whenever Monopoly is introduced in a new country.
In the United States, the property with the highest rent

(36:36):
is Boardwalk, named for the famous Atlantic city Esplanade, But
if you're playing the Spanish version of the game, the
highest rent property is Pesl de Prado, named for a
street in Madrid. And in France the most expensive place
to rent is Rue de la pey uPAR Resian Street.
And in England, I think it's mayfair.

Speaker 3 (36:56):
You're going to say and in some Saharan Africa.

Speaker 1 (37:01):
This probably isn't news to any foreign listeners listening right now,
but we Americans forget that the world doesn't revolve around us. Ultimately,
Monopoly was recreated in one hundred and thirteen different countries
in over forty six different languages.

Speaker 2 (37:15):
To date, more than two hundred and seventy five million
games have been sold.

Speaker 1 (37:20):
The original Monopoly game sold for two dollars, which is
around thirty seven dollars when adjusted for inflation today you'll
pay about eighteen.

Speaker 3 (37:28):
Wow, it actually got cheaper.

Speaker 2 (37:30):
It got cheaper. Yeah, that's why on these people stopped
giving it.

Speaker 3 (37:34):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (37:34):
Also, it's like how many like who's buying a new
game of Monopoly?

Speaker 1 (37:38):
Like like somebody like you could get your hands on
a game of Monopoly. It is ten oh seven pm
right now for me, Like I could. I'm sure I
could find a game of Monopoly without going to a
store right now.

Speaker 2 (37:50):
That's true.

Speaker 3 (37:50):
It's like it doesn't go away so much as it
just shifts locations.

Speaker 1 (37:55):
Yes, yes, conservation of mass energy, conservation of monopoly.

Speaker 2 (38:00):
That's actually a good.

Speaker 3 (38:01):
That's a good for the for the No, it was
a good wrinkle for the horror movie where it's like,
where did this Monopoly game come from?

Speaker 2 (38:07):
I don't know, you know, the one that's gonna be
just a.

Speaker 3 (38:10):
Snuff film with thinly veiled versions of America's wealthiest class.

Speaker 2 (38:15):
Creepy be if you.

Speaker 1 (38:16):
Like went into an attic and you found an old
Monopoly game and you opened it.

Speaker 3 (38:20):
Up all of your faces were in there.

Speaker 2 (38:22):
Oh oh well, it's actually that's even better.

Speaker 1 (38:25):
Now mine's not gonna sound as good. I was gonna
see you opened it and just all the squares were
just blank.

Speaker 2 (38:32):
Oh yeah, that'd be kind of goods of creepy.

Speaker 3 (38:34):
Great if you could just kind of hear, like, you know,
dust bowl farmers screaming all.

Speaker 2 (38:40):
That's just that's it.

Speaker 3 (38:42):
That's my pitch for a historically un a world, historically unpopular.

Speaker 2 (38:47):
Game of Monopoly. It's one that would.

Speaker 3 (38:49):
Just play you oral histories of farmers from the dust
Bowlers Monopoly exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah, especially ill especially illustri
by the dory of the laying photos. You know, just
I really want you all to experience what this system
has wrought while you, uh, while you have a fun

(39:10):
time with your family.

Speaker 2 (39:12):
Oh you landed on Hooverville five dollars.

Speaker 3 (39:17):
Go to jail, but it's full, so I guess just die.

Speaker 2 (39:24):
Anyway, fun riff instead of railroads. It's just like the
push cart thing like that. I like that a lot.

Speaker 3 (39:34):
We could kickstarter it people. People buy anything these days
except for music anyway.

Speaker 2 (39:41):
Sorry, go ahead.

Speaker 1 (39:42):
Well it's a more movie tooopoly board. Oh yes, I
guess that's Jumanji.

Speaker 3 (39:46):
Yeah, yeah, but like a nice you know, we had
like a brief speed of these like Eat the Rich
movies that like didn't really move the overton window at
all on that, but they were fun to watch, so
I don't know verbal trademark.

Speaker 1 (39:58):
This is a good segue though, to the most expensive
monopoly set ever created.

Speaker 3 (40:02):
Oh yeah, just another indignity heaped upon poor poor Lizzy McGee.

Speaker 2 (40:09):
Yes.

Speaker 1 (40:09):
It was created by one of your fellow San Franciscans,
a jeweler named Sidney Mabel. It featured a twenty three
carrot gold board, eighteen carrot pieces, diamond studded dice, and
money made of gold leaf. Costing upwards of two million dollars.
It has never been sold and is currently on display
in the Smithsonian.

Speaker 3 (40:30):
It's funny about Mobil because what you just described was
commissioned or coincided with the nineteen eighty eight World Monopoly
Tournament then held in London. But prior to that, his
entire claim to fame was just making really expensive versions
of cheap pop culture crap. He had like a normal
jewelry business. But his first big splash was he created

(40:51):
a near perfect replica in all gold of the popular
Mickey mouse watch that had been going around. So he
eventually made a for Roy Disney, and then he made
a similar solid gold Charlie Brown watch for Charlis Schultz
for the birthday of Ray Kroc, who built a McDonald's
franchise into the disgusting empire that it is today, in

(41:12):
which we will touch on later. He designed a gold
mouse trap, and don't get it, he built a better
He built a better mouse trap. That's like the log
line about about McDonald's about McDonald's.

Speaker 2 (41:24):
Yeah, I've never heard that.

Speaker 1 (41:26):
Oh please, I would assume you wouldn't want to like
link mouse traps with food.

Speaker 2 (41:31):
Okay.

Speaker 3 (41:31):
The original quote is actually apparently from are apparently actually
credited to Ralph Waldo Emerson of all people, originally build
a better mouse trap, and the world will beat.

Speaker 2 (41:42):
A path to your door. Okay.

Speaker 3 (41:45):
Build a better mouse trap, and the world will beat
a path to your door. Originated in a slightly different
form with Ralph Waldo Emerson.

Speaker 2 (41:53):
He wrote in his.

Speaker 3 (41:54):
Journal under the heading common Sense in February of eighteen
fifty five, if man has good corn or wood, or
boards or pigs to sell, or can make better chairs
or knives, crucibles or church organs than anybody else, you
will find a broad, hard, beaten road to his house,
though it may be in the woods. So that should

(42:17):
have been edited for clarity and length, as we often
say about interviews. But in May of eighteen eighty two,
a month after his death, that quotation was altered and
attributed to him by the Cincinnati Inquirer with the line,
if a man can write a better book, preach a
better sermon, or make a better mouse trap than his neighbors,

(42:39):
though he builds his house in the woods, the world
will make a beaten path to his door. I'm not
sure when it popped into like popular consciousness, but you know,
it's just the title of every one of these books
about business.

Speaker 2 (42:52):
I can't believe I've never heard that. I've never heard that. Oh,
we know what. Here it is.

Speaker 3 (42:56):
Here's an interesting posit. The popular modern snap track version
of the mouse Trap was invented by William C. Hooker
in eighteen ninety four and then improved upon by a
guy named John Mass in eighteen ninety nine. So this
is just like twelve and under twenty years after that,
it had appeared as part of Emerson's like obituaries. So man,

(43:19):
that's interesting. But yes, it was a massacred quote from
Ralph Moldo Emerson's diary.

Speaker 1 (43:26):
And even weirder, we were talking about mouse Trap the
game earlier in this episode.

Speaker 3 (43:31):
They don't want you to notice the patterns. Anyway, that's
really cool.

Speaker 2 (43:37):
Thank you for that.

Speaker 3 (43:38):
Well, anyway, after he did that for Ray Kroc, he
then whimsically bought canaff sardines at the grocery store and
decided to make an eighteen carrot gold can of sardines
with diamond sardines inside.

Speaker 2 (43:51):
How do you feel about that stuff? What sardines? Oh? No,
I like, I'm very pro sardines. Oh you mean just somebody?

Speaker 3 (43:57):
Yeah, the lux warhol making luxury versions of common American
consumer goods.

Speaker 2 (44:04):
Well it's reprehensible, but what isn't you know? Was he like?

Speaker 1 (44:09):
I mean, was it like a Warholian approach of like
I'm going to elevate this to art or.

Speaker 2 (44:14):
I think he might have preceded Warhol.

Speaker 3 (44:16):
Actually, oh wow, well it actually might have coincided as
owner of a This is per the Smithsonian as owner
of a San Francisco jewelry store in the nineteen sixties.
Mowill said, I figured I had to do something as
far as competition, something different that nobody else does, and
that led him to making the gold Mickey mouse Watch.
But oh, it wasn't even commissioned that, did it. The

(44:41):
Monopoly Board, Yeah, it was. I contacted them and they said,
if you can make this thing look exactly like our
thirty dollars monopoly board, will send you to London and
that'll be the featured item.

Speaker 2 (44:51):
He says.

Speaker 3 (44:52):
When I got there, the news hit and it was
picked up in every television station in London. All of
a sudden, I had become famous. And so the Smithsonian
have twenty of this guy's works, not just the monopoly board,
but a golden diamond pacifier, a yo yo presumably also
made of just a regular yo yo, no obviously, you idiots,
an expensive yoyo, a gemstone covered cell phone, and his.

Speaker 2 (45:16):
Two thousandstone cell phone that.

Speaker 3 (45:20):
Gem Stone sell His two thousand and four replica of
the Smithsonian Castle is permanently on display.

Speaker 2 (45:30):
Uh well yeah, that's great.

Speaker 3 (45:32):
Just yeah, just love what you know, just love these
metaphors that just keep piling up the middle on the nose.

Speaker 2 (45:41):
World.

Speaker 1 (45:42):
Well here, maybe this will make you a little happier.
There was also a chocolate version of the game sold
by Neiman Marcus in nineteen seventy eight for six hundred dollars,
which is the equivalent of three grand today.

Speaker 3 (45:54):
Well, you know, I'm a big fan of chocolate. I often,
in times of sorrow think I'm a big friand three grand.
But I often in terms of trouble, Kathy comforts me
speaking those of wisdom.

Speaker 2 (46:08):
Ac ac act chocolate and who is landing? I love that.

Speaker 1 (46:16):
I love that here, this this really bothers me. There
will never be a complete list of Monopoly editions because
there are simply too many, plus an untold number of
exclusive additions that have been made for non commercial use forgiveness.
As of December twenty twenty four, the World Record Collector
has four three hundred and seventy nine different sets of

(46:38):
Monopoly in their personal archive.

Speaker 3 (46:40):
Would that satisfy you or you just it's just you're
the completest in use.

Speaker 2 (46:44):
Just that I'll never know, you'll never know. That really
bothers me.

Speaker 1 (46:49):
How many grains of sand are there on the Bijcne
Island and how many monopoly editions are there in the world,
and the fact that I can't know it.

Speaker 2 (46:57):
It really keeps me up at night. Is that grain
of sand thing from something?

Speaker 1 (47:00):
No?

Speaker 3 (47:01):
Because there's a spoken word passage in Philip Glass's Einstein
on the Beach that has this. It's actually quite lovely.
It's it's a section that starts with like two lovers
sit alone on a park bench and he's like, the
one line is count the number of grains of sand
on this on the beach?

Speaker 2 (47:21):
That is how much I love you? Yeah, that sounds familiar.

Speaker 3 (47:25):
Actually I openly wept at this when I saw this.
Uh okay, where was I?

Speaker 1 (47:30):
But we're going to take it back a bit. We're
going to talk about the famous man on the monopoly box.
This gentleman's name has been a hotly debated topic over
the years. Officially, according to Gamelore, his name is rich
Uncle Pennybags, and he actually had a Parker Brothers game
of his own for.

Speaker 2 (47:45):
A number of years.

Speaker 3 (47:47):
Lame.

Speaker 2 (47:47):
You tell me that he actually has several?

Speaker 3 (47:50):
Yes, Jordan, he actually had several. In nineteen forty, Parker
Brothers spun him off into a game called Dig, and
six years later starred him in a third Rich Uncle.
The latter remained in production through the nineteen fifties. He
was spun off again in nineteen eighty five into a
new game called Advance to Boardwalk, and yet again in
Free Parking, which is you guessed it about trying to

(48:12):
avoid parking fines or make money from them.

Speaker 1 (48:14):
I guess, but Michael Caine voice, not many people know
that that's the monopoly Man's name.

Speaker 2 (48:21):
Hasbro conducted a study.

Speaker 1 (48:22):
In nineteen ninety nine which determined that most people simply,
and in my opinion, rather lazily uncreatively called the mascot
mister Monopoly. So hasbroke cave to popular idiocy and officially
changed his name to Mister Monopoly later that same year.
Other official names within the Monopoly game include Jake the Jailbird,
supposedly designed by Darrow as a less than flattering self

(48:45):
portrait to make fun of himself.

Speaker 3 (48:47):
It's the way of admitting that he belonged to jail.
It does make him sound like a Philadelphia.

Speaker 1 (48:51):
Theo's officer Edgar Mallory as the guy in nego directly
to jail square and the decks of cards also include
Richard ll Pennybag's wife Madge, who have also seen described
as Maud, and his three nephews Randy, Sandy, and Andy.

Speaker 2 (49:08):
Oh you like that? Yeah?

Speaker 3 (49:10):
Well, the first mister Monopoly appeared in the winning pitch
of the version of the game that Darrow eventually sold.
It was drawn by his buddy, who is a political
cartoonist who went by Franklin fo Alexander. Fun fact that
winning version of the game that was accepted was inspired
by the Quakers version. So nothing did you rip off
a nice lady who just wanted to preach against capitalism?

(49:34):
He also ripped off the Quakers, the religious sect the Quakers, anyway,
friend of the pod, the Quakers. You know, I've the Quakers.
Actually go back and look at them. They've been on
kind of the right side of history of almost every
like military conflict and moral issue in the since their founding. Anyway,

(49:56):
fo Alexander drew the event cards for the initial much
smaller production run of the game in nineteen thirty five
when they first commissioned it and launched it. However, in
late nineteen thirty six, the design for the cards changed
and it was the newly commissioned artist whose name is
Daniel Fox, who created the version of the man we

(50:17):
now know is Mister Monopoly. For Fo's Troubles, he was
reportedly checks notes, never paid by the company, and received
no royalties. This is doubly horrifying because he continued to
do other work for the company, including on the same character.
He allegedly drew Rich Uncle on the box of the
aforementioned in nineteen forty six spinoff game Rich Uncle. In

(50:39):
twenty thirteen, though, a woman named Wendy Wolfe had read
an author named Philip or Bain's books The Monopoly Companion
and Monopoly, the World's Most Famous Game. In this book
there is a claim that the original artist behind Rich
Uncle was unknown. Wendy wolf turns out to be the

(51:00):
granddaughter of this artist named Daniel Fox, and she contacted
Orbans and her family came together and sent this author
material that identifies Daniel as the originator, Allegedly things like
receipts first drafts contracts between him and Parker Brothers. I
haven't bought the books and I wasn't able to find

(51:20):
them for free online, so I don't know.

Speaker 2 (51:21):
Exactly the depth of it.

Speaker 3 (51:22):
But the reason why why fo Alexander's name comes first
online is because of search engine optimization. A woman named
Mary Palon wrote a short article for the Smithsonian Magazine
online in twenty fifteen that was sort of in advance
in hyping up a book she wrote called The Monopolists,
which is an investigation of the game, and that in
that she identifies the artist as Alexander.

Speaker 2 (51:47):
I was able to find in her book.

Speaker 3 (51:50):
Though she doesn't mention Daniel Fox in the article, she
does allow exactly one mention of Fox in her book,
saying he is quote believed by many to be the
uncredited artist behind the Mister Monopoly character. So I don't
know what beef she has with this guy, or if
she did her own research and found that the materials

(52:10):
provided by his family were not up to snuff, but.

Speaker 2 (52:14):
At her own research.

Speaker 3 (52:15):
She did her own research, but in an effort to
perennially shine light on the uncredited among us, Daniel Fox
drew the modern incarnation of rich uncle.

Speaker 1 (52:27):
There's a mister Monopoly. He's a question mark wrapped inside
an enigma. There's a lot of mysteries about this man.
It's been said that his look was possibly inspired by
JP Morgan, the tycoon who helped finance the construction of
railroads and organize several major corporations, including General Electric. He
also owned International Mercantile Marine, the company that built the Titanic,

(52:48):
and he was booked to travel on the ship before
pulling out at the last minute, giving way to a
conspiracy theory that the ship was sunk on purpose for
an insurance scam. It's a theory that is so stupid
that it's not really worth our time.

Speaker 2 (53:00):
But if we want to google it, have at it.

Speaker 1 (53:02):
Others believe that the design of mister Monopoly was inspired
by a businessman at Parker Brothers who had business cards
printed up with characters of himself printed on them, wearing
a top hat and riding a train for some reason,
very whimsical. And then also some people theorize that the
design was based on Little Esquire, the former logo of
Esquire magazine.

Speaker 2 (53:22):
Your mileage may.

Speaker 1 (53:25):
Despite popular perception, however, mister Monopoly does not wear a monocle.
It's one of the bigger examples of the Mandela effect
that I can think of.

Speaker 2 (53:35):
And you know, while we're here, let's talk about the
Mandela effect for a moment, shall we.

Speaker 1 (53:40):
I first encountered it on that show How Too with
John Wilson, that HBO show. It is named for Nelson Mandela.
He died in twenty thirteen, despite the fact that countless
people distinctly remember him dying in prison in the eighties,
which is weird to me because his release from prison
was kind of.

Speaker 2 (53:57):
A big deal.

Speaker 3 (53:58):
Yea, yeah, The fact that this is named after him
is so weird because I was like, no, he'd gone
out of prison and lived for a while after.

Speaker 2 (54:09):
That, I know.

Speaker 1 (54:10):
But for some reason, a huge percentage of the population
distinctly remembers this event that never occurred, and so this
phenomenon of mass illusion of remembering things incorrectly has been
named the Mandela effect. And other examples of this include
in Star Wars The Empire Strikes Back, Darth Vader doesn't say, Luke,
I am your father, he says, no, I am your father.

(54:34):
In Snow White and the Seven Doors, the Evil Queen
says magic Mirror on.

Speaker 2 (54:37):
The wall, not mirror mirror on the wall.

Speaker 1 (54:42):
For the clothing brand Fruit of the Loom, many recall
the brand's logo as featuring a cornucopia or horn of
plenty behind the fruit very Thanksgiving, but no official version
of the logo for Food of the Loom has ever
included that bad got me.

Speaker 2 (54:55):
Yeah, I know, that's a tough one.

Speaker 1 (54:58):
The mister Roger's theme song, people recall, well, it's a
beautiful day in the neighborhood, but the opening lyric is, actually,
it's a beautiful day in this.

Speaker 3 (55:05):
Neighborhood because it was a white one. Sorry, that would
never have been Fred Rogers' intention. I'm just riffing.

Speaker 1 (55:15):
A large number of people remember there being a popular
children's book series called the Berenstein Bears, but it's actually
the Berenstein Bears. In Forrest Gump, he never actually says
life is like a box of chocolates. If you listen closely,
he says life was like a box of chocolates.

Speaker 2 (55:31):
Mmmm.

Speaker 1 (55:33):
And then I've seen full articles written about this. So
many people distinctly remember a movie from the nineties starrings
the comedian Sinbad Yes, called Shazam. Many argue that they're
actually confusing this memory with a movie Kazam starring Shaquille
O'Neal as a genie. But like people have strongly held

(55:54):
believes about like the plot of this movie and the cast,
it never existed.

Speaker 3 (55:58):
I think it's an influence that one, in particular, it's
like one of the more famous ones. I think it's
a confluence of nobody actually seeing the Shaquillo no Neil
movie and Sinbad one person seeing the Shaquillo Neil movie
and many people seeing various Sinbad comedies. But yeah, man,
I don't have an explanation for that, mostly because I

(56:19):
knew about Kazam because I saw it too. I say,
I guess, how are you people confusing this? That's that
movie was a movie?

Speaker 1 (56:29):
Yeah, apparently Sindbad for April Fool's Day in twenty seventeen,
like released like clips from this non existent movie.

Speaker 3 (56:38):
Isn't good for him?

Speaker 1 (56:39):
Yeah?

Speaker 3 (56:39):
I know.

Speaker 2 (56:40):
I hope he's doing okay. Didn't you have like a
really bad stroke? Yeah? Probably. We can't have anything nice,
but you know, we can't have that's nice? What's that?

Speaker 3 (56:48):
Jordan?

Speaker 1 (56:49):
The pieces in Monopoly, like our beloved race car talk
to us about.

Speaker 3 (56:54):
Oh that's so true.

Speaker 2 (56:55):
Jordan.

Speaker 3 (56:57):
The homemade versions of the game were played with whatever
was available around that house, and so the early manufactured
versions of Monopoly followed suit. The instructions encouraged players to
search around the house and find things that made sense,
like buttons, coins, and thimbles. It made reference to the
fact that Darrow's niece initially enjoyed playing with charms from
her charm bracelet, which inspired the set. So the first

(57:18):
official tokens were added in late nineteen thirty five that
included a cannon, thimble, top hat, iron like clothes, iron battleship,
and a boot. In nineteen thirty six, the race car
was first added to the six token sets, and then
after that the purse was added to make eight tokens.
In late nineteen thirty six and early nineteen thirty seven,

(57:38):
the lantern and rocking horse were added to make ten
token sets. To date, the current pieces are race car
nineteen thirty five, top hat nineteen thirty five, thimble nineteen
thirty five to twenty seventeen, absent for five years and
brought back in twenty twenty two. Scottish terrier nineteen forty six.
Never understood that one are they a particularly luxurious brand

(57:58):
of dog, No but sure, Sack of Money from nineteen
to eight just dispensed with any subtlety here. Sack of
Money was a token from nineteen ninety eight to two
thousand and seven, and then again in twenty twenty five,
Cat twenty thirteen for Cat penguin.

Speaker 2 (58:16):
Peter Chris as the cat.

Speaker 3 (58:17):
Yeah, I was gonna say, it's just a Peter bust
of Peter Crace Penguin in twenty seventeen, presumably inspired by
Danny DeVito's role and Batman returns and a rubber duck
in twenty seventeen, which is just stupid.

Speaker 1 (58:34):
Yeah, it's wild to be that some of these classics
have been retired.

Speaker 2 (58:37):
Talk about the ones that we can no longer find.

Speaker 3 (58:39):
Sure, So from nineteen thirty five to nineteen forty one,
we all we had access to a cannon, a lantern,
a purse, and a rocking horse. Clothing Iron was held
from nineteen thirty five to twenty thirteen, and the Boot
originally went from nineteen thirty five to nineteen forty six,
absent for four years and then was brought back from
nineteen fifty to twenty seventeen. The battleship lasted from nineteen

(59:03):
thirty five to twenty twenty five. Car with driver is
different from race car, I assume. So that's like, oh,
because you had to have a chauffeur, because it was Yeah,
you had to have a little little slave driving you
around in your fancy car. A car with driver was
there from nineteen forty six to nineteen fifty three, wheelbarrow

(59:24):
present from nineteen forty to twenty seventeen, an airplane for
just four scant years forty six to nineteen fifty, Howitzer
from nineteen forty six to two thousand and seven. Presumably
you know some raw raw army ship, horse and Rider
nineteen forty six to two thousand and seven, a train
from nineteen eighty to two thousand and seven, and a

(59:44):
t Rex from twenty seventeen to twenty twenty two. Obviously,
as is known to you and I, Jordan and everyone,
the race car is the most popular piece. However, every
piece does have his supporters. Pop like the clothes iron
because it's the smallest and can kind of slide in
under the radar on the board. Others prefer the wheelbarrow

(01:00:05):
because it helps you visualize carrying out your winnings.

Speaker 2 (01:00:08):
After a successful game.

Speaker 3 (01:00:09):
The top hat has elegance, but many others love the
Scotty Dog because, as one fan observed, it's the only
piece with a heart.

Speaker 2 (01:00:16):
All.

Speaker 3 (01:00:17):
A monopoly board has forty spaces with twenty eight properties.
The most landed on space is jail. This is due
to just like in real life baby.

Speaker 2 (01:00:28):
H Christ.

Speaker 3 (01:00:31):
This is due to various factors, including players landing on
the go to jail space, drawing go to Jail cards
from Chance or Community Chest, or rolling doubles three times
in a row. According to dice related probability, after jail,
Illinois Avenue is the most landed on property. This is
because it is located near the jail space and many
players are frequently moving from jail. Least likely is Chance,

(01:00:53):
Community Chest, Mediterranean av all using the same.

Speaker 2 (01:00:57):
Probability rules from just rolling the eye.

Speaker 3 (01:01:01):
Jail may seem like the worst place to be during
game of Monopoly, but being locked up could actually be
a winning strategy. According to Natalie Fitzsimmons twenty fifteen UK
Monopoly Champion, which we will talk more about at the
end of the game, it's best to just sit in
jail and collect money from your opponents rather than land
on their properties and end up owing money, which I
don't think you can do in America's car seral system.

(01:01:24):
We just, you know, in California, we take that. Yeah,
in California, we just make you fight fires and pay
you pennies for it, and then when you get out,
you actually can't get a job as a firefighter because
you have a criminal breaker.

Speaker 2 (01:01:36):
You do, I didn't know they Yeah, yeah, dude, you
tell me more about that.

Speaker 3 (01:01:41):
It's just that once again, as I mentioned, you know,
our California's beloved PG and E Utilities company is responsible
for the vast swaths of the state's forest fires because
they are too cheap to keep up with their upkeep.
It's just spread too far around and they just simply
can't be fighted to you know, keep up with all
of it. So as of January eleventh, though in twenty

(01:02:05):
twenty five this is related to the Los Angeles wildfires,
over nine hundred prisoners have been battling those Inmate firefighters
make up about twenty percent of California's wildfire force and
save the state up to one hundred million annually. Wow,
this is a slavery loophole. In the thirteenth Amendments first section,

(01:02:30):
which is neither slavery nor involuntary servitude except as punishment
for a crime.

Speaker 2 (01:02:36):
Shall exist in the United States.

Speaker 3 (01:02:38):
So, of course, a document that has virtually zero grounding
in the modern world continues to for us over just
in the same way as the whole gun thing does.
But let's hear let's droll down into this. Inmate firefighters
are only assigned to firefighting positions with their consent. However,

(01:02:59):
fire firefighting is one of only three types of work
available to inmates, and the other two are daily prison
labor and prison industry works. Firefighting is actually coveted in
California prisons because it pays more than those other roles.
That said, their hourly rate is sixteen or seventy four
cents per hour and a maximum day rate of five

(01:03:22):
eighty to ten twenty four per hour. California's minimum wage
is sixteen fifty Wow. They face an injury rate four
times higher than other firefighters, an eightfold risk of smoke
inhalation compared to other firefighters, and a higher likelihood of
experiencing burns because they're just not as well equipped. Okay,
so here it is the rules for the California Emergency

(01:03:44):
Medical Services bar someone with one felony conviction from getting
an Emergency Medication Technician certification, which is a certification that
is virtually a requirement for aspiring firefighters ten years post release.
Someone with two felony convictions can never get that. So

(01:04:05):
you can't come out of jail after fighting fires.

Speaker 2 (01:04:08):
And if you have a felony, you.

Speaker 3 (01:04:10):
Can't even face the possibility of getting hired as a
firefighter for ten years. And if you have two felonies,
which by the way, many people are in jail for
low level drug offenses that are classified as felonies, someone
with two felonies can never get that. Governor Newsom did
sign a law that allows released non violent inmates who
worked in prison fire camps to petition courts to expunge

(01:04:32):
their records. This was in twenty twenty and programs. There
are programs that exist called the Future Fire Academy that
exists to provide training, certification, and job placement to former
inmates who fought fires as part of this while incarcerating. However,

(01:04:52):
in twenty twenty four, California voters rejected Proposition six, which
would have banned forced labor in state prisons by removing
the slavery.

Speaker 2 (01:05:01):
Loophole from the state constitution.

Speaker 3 (01:05:03):
So that was just something the whole state did. We
all just voted for that. Well not me, but we
all just voted for that.

Speaker 2 (01:05:09):
What were I talking about again? Oh? Yeah, the little
greenhouses and red hotel.

Speaker 3 (01:05:14):
The little green houses and red hotels in Charles Darrow's
original game were originally off cuts of little wooden wall moldings,
and to date more than six billion of those little
houses have been made, which is enough to circle the
world twice around if laid end to end.

Speaker 2 (01:05:30):
Isn't that fun?

Speaker 3 (01:05:31):
And better than people putting life in limb in danger
to fight fires while they're in jail. Isn't that fun?
The thing about the statistic I put in there, does
it make you forget? Forget it? Try and forget it.
You'll sleep better.

Speaker 1 (01:05:47):
Oh this is probably a goodest segue as any to
talk about the coal hard cash of this game. The
total bank in the game of Monopoly is twenty five
eighty dollars, which, inflation from nineteen thirty five bucks is
four hundred and eighty twoy nine hundred and one, so
less than half a million. Still not a lot for
all the stuff that's being bought for Monopoly's eightieth anniversary.

(01:06:11):
Has Bro, the company that makes the game, engaged in
a Wonka esque activity of putting real money into eighty
game sets distributed in.

Speaker 2 (01:06:19):
France for some reason. Yeh look cute. Yeah, I know.

Speaker 1 (01:06:23):
So they were with eighty game sets in France that
had twenty grand apiece.

Speaker 3 (01:06:27):
Distributed to the Nazis' most enthusiastic collaborator.

Speaker 1 (01:06:30):
Today earn that John Travolta also apparently plays this game
this way with real cash, but given how he's described it,
I have a sneaking suspicion that he's doing it wrong.
Talking to James Corden on The Late Late Show, he said, look,
it's twenty dollars, it's one hundred dollars.

Speaker 2 (01:06:47):
It's not that much. I think in totality it's about
two thousand dollars.

Speaker 1 (01:06:51):
If he replaced the whole thing, he is ten times off.

Speaker 3 (01:06:57):
That's aspire sweet.

Speaker 4 (01:07:00):
Yes, as you meditate on that, we'll be right back
with more too much information after these messages.

Speaker 1 (01:07:20):
Every four to five years, Hasbro hosts a US Championship
any world championship for Monopoly, and their winners can earn
up to twenty and eighty dollars equal to the amount
of money at play.

Speaker 2 (01:07:32):
In Monopoly, the.

Speaker 1 (01:07:33):
Location is chosen specifically in a city that's a reputation
for finance and glamour. Prior sites include Tokyo Money Carlo
and Check's Notes Toronto in two thousand and three, Hey,
I like Toronto.

Speaker 3 (01:07:46):
They're trying a great They're trying.

Speaker 2 (01:07:49):
They are, They're great playing. They're nicer than us. They are.
In two thousand and three, it was hosted on a
moving train.

Speaker 3 (01:07:55):
Okay, there were many fatalities.

Speaker 1 (01:08:01):
The first championship was held in nineteen seventy three in Liberty,
New York, so clearly the glamour rule is new.

Speaker 3 (01:08:08):
Got their ass.

Speaker 2 (01:08:09):
In order to play, you must qualify.

Speaker 1 (01:08:10):
To compete, there is an online quiz with five short
essays Seriously, I don't know what the stopics are, and
the top seventy five entrants must play each other online.
From that pool, twenty three winners are brought together along
with the previous years champion to duke it out. One
longtime Monopoly champ could bankrupt players in fifteen minutes. Training

(01:08:34):
consisted of studying the odds, analyzing tapes of previous games,
and writing computer simulations to determine what.

Speaker 2 (01:08:42):
Makes the game tick before you leaf.

Speaker 1 (01:08:45):
Two thousand and three champ Matt McNally dated Day Vegas
Showgirl for.

Speaker 2 (01:08:49):
A number of years, so your mileage may vary.

Speaker 3 (01:08:53):
Yeah, I mean, it just sounds so insane to me
to try and wrangle a live online game of mine.
Like you know how hard it is to schedule a
zoom meeting with like three people at your job. But
I guess people competing for this are not particularly tightly
scheduled individuals.

Speaker 2 (01:09:12):
If I was making an uncharitable assumption, continue.

Speaker 1 (01:09:16):
So we mentioned how some Monopoly champs can bankrupt players
in fifteen minutes. That probably sounds like a bit of
a relief to a lot of you listeners, because everyone
knows that Monopoly games can drag on to an interminable length.
The longest game on record lasted seventy straight days.

Speaker 3 (01:09:32):
I would kill I would kill myself. I know no
part of my being has that much I would rather kill.
I would be like the saw Traps where it's like
you must to survive, you must play Monopoly. Nope, close
the big metal jury rigged jaw in my face, man,
not going to happen. Don't really don't really want to
live that much, you know, moving on.

Speaker 2 (01:09:54):
For some reason.

Speaker 1 (01:09:55):
Another stat I have on hand is that the longest
underwater game was seventy two hours.

Speaker 3 (01:10:02):
Why was it stopped at seventy two hours?

Speaker 2 (01:10:04):
That's all the oxygen they had.

Speaker 3 (01:10:07):
I was gonna say, an eye.

Speaker 2 (01:10:10):
The air pocket the boat finally went out.

Speaker 3 (01:10:13):
Holy, that's grim. I'm sure it's all very above board,
but it's much more fun imagining. Like the longest underwater
of game, Monopoly lasted seventy two hours. Tragically, all lives
were lost.

Speaker 2 (01:10:28):
Good times.

Speaker 1 (01:10:29):
Because of its extreme length, tempers have been known to
frey when playing this game, as we'll touch on in
murderous detail later. The late Queen of England, you know,
of England, banned the Royal family from playing Monopoly at Christmas,
as quote, it gets too vicious. One royal even turned
down a gift of the game that's a lamb Royal

(01:10:50):
gift that he was officially presented with, saying, quote, we're
not allowed to play Monopoly at home.

Speaker 2 (01:10:56):
Mother says, I can't.

Speaker 1 (01:10:59):
Not to speak of the dead unless Heigel was reading
this section, in which case absolutely speak ill of the dead.
There is a high likelihood that her majesty was playing
the game wrong. As any nineties comic will tell you,
a lot of men don't read instructions. Instead, in the
case of monopoly, you're just kind of taught by a
friend or loved one that's passed down. As a result,

(01:11:20):
a lot of incorrect rules have been passed down, and
the popular rules of monopoly have drifted further from the
actual rules, which would actually.

Speaker 2 (01:11:28):
Yield a shorter game.

Speaker 1 (01:11:29):
The biggest rule, which is ignored in the oral tradition,
goes as follows. If you land on a property and
choose not to buy it, the property goes up for
auction and it goes to the highest bidder. This speeds
up the game, which lasts from sixty to ninety minutes
in this case.

Speaker 2 (01:11:44):
But because games.

Speaker 1 (01:11:44):
Were played by children, a lot of parents decided to
skip the auctions because it caused the kids to fight.
And then also the whole putting five hundred dollars in
the center of the board when you land on free
parking thing that's not real in the.

Speaker 2 (01:11:57):
Game, and the real rules that's made up. Yeah, it's
made up. Jesus, no wonder everyone grows up hating this thing.
I am I play.

Speaker 1 (01:12:07):
With these rules, you can conceivably emerge victorious from a
two player game in twenty one seconds. A sociology professor
at Notre Dame worked out the fastest route. Four turns,
nine rolls of the dice. Player one starts by rolling
double six's, landing on community Chest and drawing the bank
error in your favorite card for an instant two hundred dollars.

(01:12:30):
Then the second player rolls and lands on Income Tax
Square loses some money. Next player one rolls double twos
and lands on park Place and buys it, and then
double one because when you get doubles you can go again,
and then double ones to reach Boardwalk and purchases that
as well. Because they roll doubles, they go again past
Go and collected none to two hundred dollars. With the

(01:12:50):
cash in hand, they can buy three houses on park
Place and two on Boardwalk. On player two's next turn,
they draw a chance card reading go directly to Boardwalk,
landing there triggers the rent.

Speaker 2 (01:13:01):
Payment that they can't afford, and the game is over.

Speaker 3 (01:13:03):
Jesus Christ, you know, the thing is this is just
a way of doing business for like black Rock and
all these real estate consortiums.

Speaker 2 (01:13:10):
So like.

Speaker 1 (01:13:13):
Well, according to a klubby University professor, this lightning fast
win would only occur once in roughly two hundred and
fifty three trillion, eight hundred and ninety nine billion, eight
hundred and ninety one million, six hundred seventy one thousand
and forty games.

Speaker 3 (01:13:30):
Wow, that's crazy because it feels like a chance. I
was just gonna say, so, it's much less probable than
it for you than it is for the wealthy class
in this country.

Speaker 2 (01:13:41):
Yeah. Yeah, how fun, so much fun? Okay?

Speaker 3 (01:13:45):
As I mentioned, as we mentioned in the intro or
towards the top of the episode, there's exactly one good
thing Monopoly has contributed to, aside from I guess joy
and family togetherness and whatever abstract.

Speaker 2 (01:13:56):
Concepts you want to try and sell me on this
thing for but I ain't by.

Speaker 3 (01:14:01):
During World War Two, the British Secret Service used Monopoly
boxes to smuggle escape supplies to pow stuck in German
war camps. This sounds like a plot point on Hogan's Heroes,
but it is entirely real. It came about due to
a weird mix of practicality and coincidence. Paper, for example,
is a terrible material from which to make maps because

(01:14:22):
it's noisy, it rips, can't get wet, and so forth.
Silk is a much better material. So in nineteen forty
one the British enlisted silk manufacturing company Jawn Waddington Ltd
to print maps that would be sturdier and easier to
hide than paper ones. As we mentioned earlier, that company
was also responsible for licensing Monopoly games in the UK,

(01:14:43):
so they decided to print silk maps, place them inside
boxes of Monopoly, and distribute them to camps via humanitarian
aid groups where they would not have drawn much attention.
In addition to the silk map hidden in the game board,
the box contained hidden compartments for tools like metal files, matches,
and compasses, and under the fake money were real actual banknotes.

(01:15:03):
There were six different maps created for areas around German
pow camps and other maps for Italy. Thousands of prisoners
are believed to have escaped camps thanks to these maps,
but they were all destroyed following the war, the maps,
not the prisoners. In fact, it was forty five years
until the British government admitted to the scheme, and this
was only after many many reports of families in the

(01:15:24):
UK finding quote unusual versions of Monopoly in their attics.

Speaker 2 (01:15:29):
I know that that's really really funny.

Speaker 1 (01:15:31):
In the USSR, Monopoly was banned as a symbol of
Western greed. However, black market copies flourished. Some families created
homemade versions, hand drawing game boards and writing in Russian cyrillic,
using scraps and bootleg materials, which is fitting considering the
game's origins, and these were passed around privately as subtle
acts of rebellion and curiosity about capitalist systems.

Speaker 3 (01:15:54):
Phenomenools, you complete fools.

Speaker 1 (01:15:59):
This phenomen well became a cult symbol of resistance and
fascination with the West, and the game's supportedly still not
available in Cuba. The World Championship of Monopoly was held
in Berlin in nineteen ninety two, just after the Wall fell,
and in more recent years some of the best players
in the world have come from Eastern Bloc countries.

Speaker 3 (01:16:17):
That's nice, Yeah, yeah, so is it?

Speaker 2 (01:16:20):
Yeah? I like that.

Speaker 3 (01:16:21):
Okay, now you know they're like they're taking.

Speaker 1 (01:16:24):
It back, yes, yes, but Monopoly teaches more than just
capitalism sort of. During the Yugoslav Wars of the nineteen nineties,
humanitarian organizations distributed board games like Monopoly and refugee camps
to help children process trauma, rebuild social trust, and engage
in structured activity.

Speaker 3 (01:16:44):
You did that with a game that espouses capitalism.

Speaker 2 (01:16:48):
This is how it works in the country.

Speaker 3 (01:16:51):
They just bombed a shit out of us because they're
only arming one side in this conflict. You understand it's
advantageous of them to do so.

Speaker 2 (01:17:00):
Sorry.

Speaker 1 (01:17:01):
In some cases, Monopoly became a symbol of escapism and routine,
helping children learn trade and negotiation in safe environments in
Tito's Yugoslavia. At the other end of the spectrum, an
economics professor named Ralph Anschblosch, who we talked about earlier
in this episode, created a game called Anti Monopoly in

(01:17:21):
nineteen seventy three to critique monopolistic practices and promote competition.

Speaker 2 (01:17:26):
Parker Brothers reaction was a little on the those.

Speaker 1 (01:17:29):
They sued Ashblash for trademark infringement, which resulted in a
protracted legal battle. He argued that Monopoly's origins predated Parker
Brothers patent, using Lizzy McGee's previously untold story to.

Speaker 2 (01:17:40):
Support his case. Hell yeah. After a decade of legal wrangling, he.

Speaker 1 (01:17:44):
Won the right to produce his game. Nice victory. That
helped shed light on the true origins of monopoly.

Speaker 2 (01:17:52):
I wonder if this so you said that, when was
that nineteen seventy three?

Speaker 3 (01:17:54):
Okay, so that was before the people versus Larry Flint,
when that legalized satire, that set the precedent of satire
as protected speech.

Speaker 2 (01:18:03):
That was how late that was?

Speaker 3 (01:18:04):
Yeah, it's crazy, right, when you actually look up is
satire protected speech?

Speaker 2 (01:18:08):
It only goes back to that case.

Speaker 3 (01:18:11):
Because wonderful, you know, right, no problems here, make it
great again. So now we have to talk about perhaps
the biggest monopoly scandal in the minds of millennials. Certainly
we're speaking, of course, about the McDonald's Monopoly game incident.
For more than a decade. The McDonald's Monopoly game is
one of the fast food chain's most successful promotions. Launched

(01:18:32):
in nineteen eighty seven, it mimicked the classic board game
by offering customers peel off game pieces attached to drink cups, fries,
and burger wrappers. Collecting properties like boardwalk in park places
could win you millions, while other combinations awarded smaller prizes,
free food, vacations or even new cars. Millions of customers
played each year, drawn by the tantalizing chance to turn
a happy meal into a jackpot and eat a nutritious

(01:18:55):
and delicious meal.

Speaker 2 (01:18:58):
At the same time.

Speaker 3 (01:19:00):
Only twelve years, the top prizes were never truly up
to grabs. Behind the scenes, a former cop shocker named
Jerome Jerry Jacobson had reached the game in one of
the most elaborate frauds in promotional marketing history. This plot
ultimately netted him over twenty four million dollars. The ex

(01:19:21):
cop Jacobson worked for Simon Marketing, the agency that McDonald's
contracted to run the Monopoly game. As the Director of Security,
a cushy job that many cops who are forced to
leave the force in disgrace then fall into. Jacobson was
entrusted with safeguarding the game's integrity. His responsibilities included transporting
the high value winning pieces and overseeing their secure placement

(01:19:42):
at packaging facilities. McDonald's and Simon Marketing took elaborate precautions
to prevent tampering, sealed envelopes, armored transport, and even fake
security measures to throw off potential thieves, but the real
threat came from within as a so off.

Speaker 2 (01:20:00):
In the case.

Speaker 1 (01:20:01):
In the mid nineteen nineties, Jacobson discovered a loophole during
one of his trips to deliver game pieces to packing plants.
He discreetly slipped into a bathroom and switched a high
value winning sticker with a decoy, hiding the real piece
in his sock. Emboldened by how easy this was, he
continued to steal winning pieces over and over again. At first,

(01:20:22):
Jacobson passed the pieces to close friends and family, which
does not seem smart, who claimed the prizes and shared.

Speaker 2 (01:20:29):
The winnings with him. But soon he grew even more ambitious.

Speaker 1 (01:20:33):
He began selling the pieces to a growing web of
supposed winners across the country. The scheme involved into a
black market lottery. Jacobson would sell winning tickets for cash
up front, sometimes tens of thousands of dollars, and then
take a cut of the prize money after the winners
collected from McDonald's. To avoid detection, Jacobson coast his accomplices
on how to lie to McDonald's investigators. They were told

(01:20:56):
to say they found the piece stuck to a fry
box or received it as a random gift from a friend.
Winners were instructed to claim their prizes from different cities
and states to avoid raising suspicion. In many cases, he
used middleman, using mob connected figures and members of his
extended social circle to recruit fake winners. The web of
frauds spread across the country, but McDonald's never realized it

(01:21:19):
was being manipulated from within. The scam unraveled in two
thousand and one thanks to a tip to the FBI.
An anonymous caller claimed that someone named quote Uncle Jerry
was rigging McDonald's monopoly game.

Speaker 2 (01:21:32):
The FBI launched an.

Speaker 1 (01:21:33):
Investigation dubbed Operation Final Answer, a reference to Who Wants
to Be a Millionaire, and quietly traced the connections between winners,
discovering a strange pattern. Many were related or linked through marriage,
lived in the same areas, or had suspicious financial histories.
The FBI set up a sting where they wiretapped phones,
interviewed suspects under false pretenses, and even created a fake

(01:21:56):
production company to record supposed winter testimonial housing the pretense
of filming a commercial to get suspects talking on camera.
What they uncovered was a sprawling conspiracy involving more than
fifty people in over twenty four million dollars in fraudulent winnings.
In August two thousand and one, the FBI made their move.

(01:22:17):
That was why they had their eye off the ball.
Jacobson and several accomplices were arrested and indicted on charges
of mail fraud and conspiracy. The story made headlines across
the country, not just because of the deception, because of
how long it had gone undetected. Jacobs impleaded guilty in
two thousand and two and was sentenced to thirty seven

(01:22:37):
months in prison, which is not that long in shock,
and was ordered to pay twelve point five million dollars.

Speaker 2 (01:22:45):
In restitution so that PRIs doing now.

Speaker 1 (01:22:48):
Many of his co conspirators also serve time, though some
received lighter sentences for cooperating with investigators. McDonald's, though not
legally culpable, suffered a PR nightmare and immediately shut down
the promotion. To make amends, McDonald's ran a new game
in two thousand and one and gave away ten million
dollars in prizes, this time ensuring strict security and transparency.

(01:23:09):
Years later, the bizarre caper became a subject of renewed
interest in twenty eighteen, The Daily Beast published an in
depth feature that went viral, sparking a bidding war for
film and TV rights. HBO ultimately produced the docuseries titled mcmillions,
which was executive produced by Mark Wahlberg, airing in twenty twenty,
chronicling the FBI's investigation with interviews from agents, conspirators, and.

Speaker 3 (01:23:34):
McDonald's really Fascinating Stuff from CNBC. At one point, Jacobson
even anonymously mailed a one million dollar game piece to
the donations clerk at the Saint Jude Children's Research Hospital
in Tennessee. The size of that naturally made national news
at the time, though a source close to Jacobson later
told CNN he had sent them the winning game piece

(01:23:56):
in the hopes that the good deed might secure him
a more lenient sentence should he ever be caught.

Speaker 2 (01:24:01):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:24:03):
Well, now, should we move on from monopoly related white
collar crimes to full scale capital offenses?

Speaker 2 (01:24:08):
Yeah?

Speaker 3 (01:24:09):
I just want to find out if this guy's dead
and in hell. According to the Daily Beast, he's now
in his late seventies. Well, this is in twenty twenty.
According to that Daily Beast article, he is in his
late seventies and in declining health, living a relatively secluded
life in Georgia. He still keeps in touch with some
of the members of his fraud ring that twenty twenty five.

(01:24:31):
Maybe he's dead now. I hope so dead and in hell. Anyway,
here's a more monopoly crime, less or more severe, depending
on whatever weird moral code you live by. On July nineteenth,
nineteen ninety one, two best friends decided to play a
friendly game of Monopoly in Ben Salem, Pennsylvania. They were

(01:24:53):
twenty five year old Mark Sinkowski and thirty one year
old Michael J.

Speaker 2 (01:24:57):
Klu klucks Nick. Yeah, they were wol hunter ass naves.

Speaker 3 (01:25:02):
They didn't even start the game, though, before an argument
broke out over who would get to be the race car.
Sinkowski argued that since they were at his house, he
got to be the car. Thimble and hat be damned.
Klux Nick insisted that he was going to be the car,
and continued to insist this after Sinkowski hit him in
the face. Sankowski then grabbed his compound bow and shot

(01:25:26):
his friend through the heart. Kluxnik staggered outside and, in
a truly heroically manful act, pulled the arrow from his chest,
broke it in half, and got into his car attempted
to drive away. Sadly, he was dead before the car
reached a neighbor's garden. Sinkowski later pleaded guilty to criminal
homicide and got murder in the third degree. It was

(01:25:48):
the charge that they gave him snoomdug anyone murdered, Yeah
you're white. Apparently there was some jealousy as Kluznik stepped
out to smoke a joint with Sinkowski's on and off
again girlfriend. Earlier that evening. A monopoly game for a
family in Tulsa escalated disastrously as recent as twenty twenty

(01:26:09):
two after a heated argument in the midst of gameplay.

Speaker 2 (01:26:12):
Joan Jesus, I've read that as Joan Armor trading obscure
singer songwriter.

Speaker 3 (01:26:19):
A monopoly game for a family in Tulsa escalated disastrously
in twenty twenty two after heated argument in the midst
of gameplay, John Armstrong reportedly overturned the board and furniture,
and then, after being told to take the confrontation outside,
pulled a gun and chased his stepfather and stepsister down
the street, firing one shot, albeit towards the ground. Thankfully,

(01:26:41):
no one was injured, but Armstrong was arrested and charged
with assault with a deadly weapon. Police found Monopoly money
and game pieces scattered in the living room. Can you
imagine they were chalk outlined.

Speaker 2 (01:26:54):
Little Scottie Dog?

Speaker 3 (01:26:58):
Back In twenty eleven, to be precise, a Monopoly game
spiraled into violence in Santa Fe, New Mexico, when sixty
year old Laura Chavez accused her boyfriend Clive Butch Smith
of cheating. Laura, I think you could have done better.
According to police, her ten year old grandson, who was
also playing, was sent into the bedroom and Smith hit

(01:27:19):
Chavez with a wine bottle. Chavez grabbed a knife to retaliate.
Smith was stabbed around the chest, neck and face but survived.
Good for you, Laura, I'm awarding you the first ever
TMI Retribution winner award. A late night and the most
recently one of the most recent episodes in a late

(01:27:41):
night sidewalk Monopoly game in Belgium turned violent that what
an embarrassing series of words for them turned violent in
twenty twenty three, when a neighbor, upset by the noise
at five am, en listed his son to break up
the game. The Sun reportedly retrieved a katana sword, which
does rule, and injured at least two men during the dispute,

(01:28:02):
one of whom suffered a serious arterial cut. Both were hospitalized.
That's fine, that's an argument favorite of the Belgi, who
have so little going for them. And lastly, an apocryphal
and group.

Speaker 2 (01:28:17):
Indictment.

Speaker 3 (01:28:18):
Indictment in Russia, Monopoly fueled Russia, Monopoly themed, vodka fueled,
or as you might put it, vodka themed and Monopoly
fueled games have led to fist fights and stabbings which
are quote too numerous to mention.

Speaker 2 (01:28:36):
In Soviet Russia. Yeap, yep, yep, yep, go passes you.

Speaker 1 (01:28:43):
Honestly drawing a direct line between murder and a game
that teaches capitalism to children sounds like as good a
place as any to end this episode. Thankfully, our little
talk about Monopoly is about us tenth as long as
most games of Monopoly that I've played, So I'm happy.

Speaker 2 (01:28:58):
Just to leave it here. What do you think, Kyle?

Speaker 3 (01:29:00):
All I'll say is go to the kofee or tweet
at me if you want all the deleted Very real
said that Jordan wouldn't let in. Jordan's a good guy.
He's just trying. He's a cool guy. He's just trying
to help me. But I anticipate this being a censored
episode for your pal, Heigel, or alternately, if I wind

(01:29:24):
up dead somewhere, it was this episode that did it.

Speaker 2 (01:29:29):
I don't know.

Speaker 3 (01:29:29):
This whole thing is disgusting, which is what an awful,
sad like thing that I learned about, A classic quid
to say.

Speaker 2 (01:29:35):
Actually a perfectly fitting thing.

Speaker 3 (01:29:38):
That's the whole theme about this is that, like the depressing,
shitty side of monopoly, is more is just sadly in
keeping with America. Yes, so you know, enjoy that midterms
are coming up. Julius Ethel Rosenberg reframed, No, no, I
don't believe that Bacho and Vanzetti were framed. This has

(01:30:02):
been too much information. I'm Alex, Heigel Jordan on the tug.
We'll catch you next time.

Speaker 2 (01:30:14):
Too Much Information was a production of iHeart Radio.

Speaker 3 (01:30:16):
The show's executive producers are Noel Brown and Jordan Runtalk.

Speaker 2 (01:30:20):
The show's supervising producer is Michael Alder June. The show
was researched, written and hosted by Jordan Runtalk and Alex.

Speaker 1 (01:30:26):
Heigel with original music by Seth Applebaum and the Ghost
Funk Orchestra.

Speaker 2 (01:30:30):
If you like what you heard, please subscribe and leave
us a review. For more podcasts on iHeartRadio, visit

Speaker 1 (01:30:35):
The iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to
your favorite shows.

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Host

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