Mitch Loflin waited to listen to the Weird Al Yankovic song “I Lost on Jeopardy” until his three-day “Jeopardy!” run ended in defeat.
The Long Beach resident walked away with $38,700 after winning last Friday and Monday’s episodes of ABC’s longstanding trivia contest.
Competing on the show had always been a dream of Loflin’s. His “Jeopardy!” fandom began while watching it with his parents and grandparents growing up in North Carolina.
“We had it on pretty frequently, and I was really into it,” Loflin said.
Nevertheless, Loflin didn’t get his hopes up as he weaved through the process of online tests and Zoom auditions after applying to be on the show, he said.
When he got the call saying he would tape the episode in March, the real studying began.
Loflin buried his nose in his old college textbooks, focusing on relearning “stuff that I knew at some point and forgotten,” he said.
That ranged from U.S. History to the Bible, but he didn’t need to study up herpetology – the study of reptiles and amphibians. Loflin gets practice on that topic every day, tending to his seven pet tortoises.
Technically, nine tortoises currently roam the backyard, but two of them are staying at the house temporarily after his in-laws lost their Altadena home in the Eaton Fire that torched over 9,400 structures last January.
The tortoise bug was passed down to Loflin’s husband, Wilson, from his mom.
About six years ago, Loflin’s mother-in-law contacted the couple asking if they would hypothetically be interested in adopting baby tortoises if the tortoise she was adopting turned out to be pregnant, which was unknown according to the previous owner.
They said yes to that hypothetical, which is how they got seven tortoises – all siblings.
“They’re the light of our lives,” Loflin said.
The slow-moving pets eat everything from fruit to kale. Four or five months out of the year, they don’t eat or drink anything while in hibernation.
“It’s a weird pet because they do hibernate in the winter, so you lose your pet essentially,” Loflin said.
“I always say that they’re here for a long time, not a good time, because they live super, super long, but they don’t do anything,” Loflin said. “They just eat and sleep and walk between hot and shade.”
Unfortunately, no tortoise-related questions came up during his “Jeopardy!” stint, but Loflin did net $38,700 with his trivia knowledge and won two show episodes.
Loflin said he was hoping to at least tie his father-in-law’s run on the show, which spanned four episodes in June 1992.
He has no grand plans for the prize money, outside of some “more expensive than I could normally justify” tickets to see Lady Gaga, Loflin said.
He plans to save the rest of the money because his work as a set decoration coordinator is dependent on film production in Los Angeles, which “has been really slow lately,” he said.
Over the past few years, Loflin has worked on “The Gray Man,” “You People” and “Shrinking,” although he said his job isn’t as glamorous as it seems.
“It’s just me calling West Elm customer service over and over and over,” he joked.