Ken Jennings has seen the widespread debate about who should be on the Mount Rushmore of Jeopardy! contestants. However, while naming the four people on his list, he actually left out all of the players who have been brought up in the conversation.
Instead, Jennings said his G.O.A.T. list is about the people who remind him of watching the show when he was younger. “I think, for me, there’s too many great contestants to fit on a mountain,” Jennings said on the Tuesday, January 21, episode of Good Morning America. While the hosts insisted that Jennings himself was an obvious choice for the Mount Rushmore list, he added, “My Mount Rushmore would be Alex Trebek — the reasons I liked the show as a kid. The announcer, Johnny Gilbert, is a legend. He’s in his 90s. And Merv and Julann Griffin, the husband and wife who created the show.
Jennings was on the morning talk show to promote Season 3 of Celebrity Jeopardy!, which he’s hosting. The third episode, starring Rachel Brosnahan, Margaret Cho, and Seth Green, airs on Wednesday, January 22. Jennings praised this season’s contestants, but also threw in a quip about celebrity intelligence.
“I just want to say, for the record, Celebrity Jeopardy! is not the SNL Celebrity Jeopardy! This is, like, legit. These folks are smart. A lot of them are broadcasters, standup comics. … This might be our smartest celebrities yet.” He then sarcastically added, “And that’s a high bar because we all know how smart celebrities are.”
Jennings also had the group cracking up when he recalled how his son — who was a year old at the time — would only call him “Ken Jennings” instead of “dad” during his iconic Jeopardy! run. He then reminisced about how he stayed in a rundown motel amid his original win streak in 2004.
“The sign said it had color TV and phones,” Jennings revealed. “I was like, ‘Wow, color TV AND phones?’ Once I had made a lot of money on the show, I kept staying there. Because you don’t want to shake things up. Apparently I’m just superstitious enough to stay in this terrible hourly motel.”
Celebrity Jeopardy!, Wednesdays, 9/8c, ABC
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