Colonel Mustard and Sergeant Ketchup

Hasbro, Inc.

Consumer Affairs

P.O. Box 200

Dept. C-847

Pawtucket, RI, 02862-0200.

Dear Hasbro,

Recently I watched the 1985 film “Clue”, based off of the classic board game. It’s the masterpiece of the genre of board game films. Certainly its competition, “Candyland: Great Lollipop Adventure”, “Death by Scrabble”, and “Guess Who?” offered little. The third had almost nothing to do with flipping faces on tiles, though Ashton Kutcher was fairly two-dimensional.

            “Clue” (the movie) reminded me of Clue (the game). For reference purposes, I will refer to “Clue” (the movie) as “Clue” and Clue (the game) as Clue for the duration of this letter. The instructions to Clue (“Clue” doesn’t have any instructions) say,

Mr. Boddy—apparently the victim of foul play—is found in one of the rooms of

his mansion. To win, you must determine the answers to these three questions: Who done it? Where? and with What Weapon?”

Even if we take the grammatical errors above to be a clever use of colloquialisms designed to pique the interest of the aspiring detective, it is easy to pick out some of the fallacies that make the mystery far easier to solve than the game’s forced trial-and-error method would imply.
First, Mr. Boddy was found dead in one of the rooms of his house. This room should be our first guess as to where the murder occurred. Cordon off the area as a crime scene and certainly don’t allow the houseguests to go wandering into it searching for clues. If there is blood, it should be quite easy to determine whether the body was moved or not. You can follow the trail of blood using a UV Light, find the beginning of the trail and determine the site of the murder. Without blood, a diligent amateur detective will still be able to determine whether or not the body site is the site of the crime using clues on and around the body. Is there dirt from the conservatory? Chalk dust from the billiards room? Food particles from the kitchen? Has a shelf been knocked over in the library or pillows knocked out of place in the study? The site of the murder should be the first piece of evidence established and the easiest.

            Actually, the easiest weapon to identify should be the weapon. The revolver would have left a bullet hole, and probably a bullet that could be traced conclusively to the revolver, since the murderer would probably not have had time to forge an ice bullet. The rope would leave bruising around the neck. The knife, knife wounds. Lead pipe, candlestick, and wrench will all leave pretty similar wounds and at first you won’t be able to tell from the bloody crushed skull which one was the murder weapon. So here’s what you do. You freeze three honeydew melons and bash each one with one of the weapons. Compare the melons to the wiped-down skull to determine the murder weapon.

             If the body was moved, we must assume it was either carried or dragged, since the mansion is without an Elevator Room or Golf Cart Room.  If this is the case we can eliminate the petite Miss Scarlet and the elderly Mrs. Peacock, neither of whom are strong enough to have dragged 180 pounds of lifeless Boddy. We can also eliminate them if a murder with a lead pipe, candlestick, or wrench was accomplished with a single blow. In fact if the weapon was anything but the revolver, we can eliminate Professor Plum as a suspect, since he’s a bit of a dandy, spending all his time up in the ivory tower (not a euphemism for Mrs. White). Mrs. White, the cook, is most skilled with a knife and so I’d default to her if the knife is the murder weapon. Lastly, Colonel Mustard can’t be underestimated. An Army man, he could use any of those weapons, or the honeydew melons, to kill Boddy. But as an officer he’d want to do it honorably, facing his victim. If Colonel Mustard is the killer, you’ll find signs of a struggle both on Boddy and on Mustard.

Just sayin’.

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