MOVIES: What the hell was “EEE-O-ELEVEN!” in the original Ocean’s 11?
One of the biggest mystery of classic Hollywood movie was Sammy Davis Jr’s “EEE-O-ELEVEN” in the original Ocean’s 11 movie filmed in 1960 featuring his fellow singers from the Rat Pack, Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin etc. For those of us who loved or at least enjoyed the remake of Ocean’s 11 as well as the 12th and the 13th, it was a great movie that a fan couldn‘t miss, though with all the respect to the bygone generations of dashing movie stars with captivating voices, the movie was a tad too long and the filming technique a bit clumsy. As with watching any classics, it certainly does make you realize how much both the movie-making and (burglarious) technology have improved tremendously over the years. But for all it’s worth, the acting was satisfactory and the ending was fulfilling. There was one thing, however, that left the youth of the twenty-first century who re-visited this movie that made Las Vegas famous baffled. — What does “EO11“ , the title and lyrics of a song by Sammy Davis Jr. that was played over and over during the movie and eventually wrapped it up, actually means?
The internet community took a wild guess on “askearth.com”. For a forum that was populated by herds of pop-culture and gaming geeks, plenty educated guesses that were nonetheless wrong were proposed.
Someone said that “E means eleven, O means Ocean, 11 is of course eleven”. Now, this guy completely underestimated the linguistic abilities of the script/song writers. What kind of people would be paid millions of dollars to blatantly commit the error of verbal redundancy? If so, who’s were those who paid them? Illiterates or dimwits? One brave member said he couldn’t convinced himself of that explanation. If calling out the band that was led by Danny Ocean was the intention of the title, then it should be called “OE11” instead of “EO11”, he said. Gotta agree with him.
A couple other people suggested that “EO-11“ was the name of the troop that they all belonged to in the military. This explanation was even offered in the movie synopsis in one of the popular movie review websites. It sounds pretty sensible until you recall that at multiple places of the movie, Danny and Jimmy were specifically being called as the Lieutenant and the Sergeant of the “Troops 82“.
Here, I venture as far as offering my own explanation of what it means and I know y’all just can’t wait to hear it —- United States called their space expedition program EO s. In the movie, Danny Ocean (Frank Sinatra) and Jimmy Foster (Peter Lawford) were trying to convince Vince Massler to join in their operation and Vince was reluctant. He said, “If it’s so fool-proof, why hasn’t somebody done it yet?” and Danny replied him with this legendary exchange: “Same reason nobody’s gone to the moon yet - no equipment.”
So there he said it. “Same reason nobody’s gone to the moon.” Danny viewed this meticulously planned operation as grand and as breakthrough a feat as man landing on the moon. It then made perfect sense to refer to their operation the same way NASA refer to their spatial expedition. The movie was filmed before 1960, NASA started at 1958, man’s landing on the moon is on 1969. My explanation fits perfectly with the timing. It’s seamless, right?
Though it would have been pretty clever on the writers’ part if this is true, this isn’t the right answer.
“EEE-O-ELEVEN” was basically a way of calling out 11 points in a craps game. The shooters have fancy ways of calling out all the possible numbers that could be rolled by the combination of the two dices and it was habitual that they called 11 as “Yo-leven” which later got reduced into “YO” and eventually got turned into “YEE-OOO-ELEVEN”, a number that could make the shooters win (It was more complicated than that but I‘m obviously not the best person to explain casino games). Ever seen men murmur under their breaths in casino the number that they have just betted on with the concentration of a pious catholic praying with his/her rosary beads? That’s exactly what Sammy Davis Jr. was doing in his song. For a movie about a group of men coming together to win their money from the banks of casinos with high hopes of being the richest men on the US soil, the reference to the number that even the dumbest gambler would pray to get in a craps game was just extremely fitting.