REEL LIFE / FILM & VIDEO FILE : Local Improv Performer Gets Smart on Quiz Show : TheatreSports’ Tom Mueller turns up on ‘Jeopardy!,’ survives a case of the jitters and goes home with a refrigerator for his mental efforts.

It’s often difficult to recognize a face out of context. Take Tom Mueller, for example.

Locally, Mueller is best known as one of the wacky members of Ventura Area TheatreSports, an improvisational troupe that specializes in antics, such as performing famous scenes backward.

But wasn’t that the same Tom Mueller on “Jeopardy!” Wednesday night?

Indeed it was. When the technical writer from Ventura wasn’t exercising his alter ego with the troupe, he was preparing to become one of those hyper-literate, button-pushing guests on the popular game show.

“Every night I would stand in front of the TV with a ballpoint pen in my hand and click it for practice,” Mueller said.

The preparation worked. He was ahead at the end of the first round. During a commercial break, a stage hand gave him a cup of water from a tray, and Mueller, a guy who’s used to standing in front of an audience and acting off the top of his head, was shaking so badly that he needed to use both hands to avoid spilling the water.

By the time Final Jeopardy came around, he was ahead by $4,000, in part because he knew that the pancreas produces insulin and that the only U.S. state capital that has three words is Salt Lake City.

But Mueller bet too much and answered wrong on an English lit question in Final Jeopardy. He finished in last place.

“I’m kind of glad I finished third,” he said. “Second place was a dining room set, which we don’t need. Third place is a refrigerator, which we can use.”

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Thousand Oaks TV producer Marty Humphreys’ revisiting of the 1991 Tailhook convention has been getting lukewarm reviews since it aired Monday on ABC. The two-hour docudrama starred Gail O’Grady, (“NYPD Blue”) as the helicopter pilot who blew the whistle on the sexual battery at the rowdy naval aviators convention.

The New York Times, Entertainment Weekly and The Times’ Howard Rosenberg all give O’Grady good marks for her performance, but the praise ends there. Rosenberg called the movie “moderately good,” while Entertainment Weekly called it a “generic little-person-fighting-the-system fairy tale.”

“She Stood Alone: The Tailhook Scandal” got an 11.4 Neilsen rating, finishing third in its time slot behind “Chicago Hope” on CBS and an NBC biography of Elizabeth Taylor, according to KABC.

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In Santa Barbara tonight: a special preview of “Casper,” an Amblin Entertainment production about the friendly ghost. It starts at 7 p.m. at the Arlington Theatre, 1317 State St. Tickets are $7.