15 Years Ago, Inaccurate Post-it Trivia Put Fox’s ‘Million Dollar Money Drop’ in a Sticky Situation

If the researchers of Million Dollar Money Drop were thinking about Post-it notes, perhaps they could have used a Post-it reminder to double-check their work. For it was a trivia question about the adhesive stationery that caused a stink for the Fox game show 15 years ago now.

Debuting on December 20, 2010, Million Dollar Money Drop was unique in that it gave contestants the jackpot upfront. Each team of two was awarded $1 million at the start of the game but then had to answer seven multiple-choice trivia questions correctly to keep that not-so-small fortune. For each question, the teams had to bet their remaining money on the answer (or answers) they believed might be correct.

And in the series premiere, the game show’s very first contestants lost $800,000 of their remaining $880,000 when they answered — correctly, as it turns out — that the 3M Post-it note was sold in stores before the Apple Macintosh computer and the Sony Walkman. But as Gabe Okoye and Brittany Mayti (pictured below) watched in horror, the stack of $800,000 in cash that they bet on the Post-it dropped through the floor of the game show’s set. The answer, according to the show, was that the Walkman was sold first.

Mike Yarish/Fox/Courtesy: Everett Collection

Now comes the tricky part. Post-it notes were sold in stores across the United States starting in 1980, after the Walkman’s 1979 debut. But the on-air question only asked which product was sold in stores first, not which was sold in stores nationally first, and the Post-it note was market-tested in four cities in 1977, as Gawker reported.

But Jeff Apploff, an executive producer of Million Dollar Money Drop, initially defended the show’s research. “The integrity of the questions and answers on our show are our No. 1 priority,” he said in a statement to Gawker. “In this case, our research team spoke directly with 3M, and they confirmed that although they had given out free samples in test markets in 1977 and 1978, it wasn’t until 1980 that Post-Its were sold in stores. Million Dollar Money Drop stands behind the answer that was revealed on the show.”

But Arthur Fry, a former 3M employee who co-invented the Post-it note, begged to differ. He told TVWeek that the Post-it was indeed sold for money in 1977, not given away for free.

“In 1977, we went to four markets. Richmond, Virginia; Tulsa, Oklahoma; Tampa, Florida; and Denver, Colorado,” he said. “Salesmen in each market sold them, and then they were sold to the public. We offered two sizes. The three-by-fives were a dollar. And the ones that were one and a half inch by two were 35 cents. That’s to the public. We sold them at wholesale. It was a 50 percent mark-up and then 10 percent for the distributors.”

In fact, Fry even paused his telephone interview with TVWeek so that he could retrieve the framed copy of the first order. When he returned to the phone, he said the first Post-it note order occurred in Denver on May 26, 1977.

Three days after the Million Dollar Money Drop premiere — and just hours after the TVWeek story went live — Apploff released another statement, this time issuing a mea culpa. “Unfortunately, the information our research department originally obtained from 3M regarding when Post-it notes were first sold was incomplete,” he said.

But Million Dollar Money Drop host Kevin Pollak told The Hollywood Reporter that Okoye and Mayti “never had a chance to win that money,” since they bet their remaining money on an incorrect answer one question later.

“This story is a moot point,” Pollak said. “They lost everything on the next question. It’s a non-story. There’s one aspect of the story that hasn’t been covered that much.”

In his second statement, Apploff said that producers would invite Okoye and Mayti, who were boyfriend and girlfriend at the time, back to the Million Dollar Money Drop for “another shot to play … even though this question was not the deciding question in their game.”

But Okoye wasn’t sure at the time whether he and Mayti would take up that offer. “To go through that again — maybe to lose again — that’s a lot of stress,” he told The New York Times.

As it turned out, it was that do-over invitation that was a moot point. Fox canceled Million Dollar Drop after just one season, and by the time the Post-it note controversy erupted, all the Season 1 episodes had already been filmed, so Okoye and Mayti just had to find another way to make a cool mil.