Interesting stuff! Put me in the "concordance" camp.
I can't say I'm at all surprised by your stance, vultan - your prior opinions on the subject helped to inform the creation of the concordant viewpoint in the first place
It was certainly known by the 80s (it's generally believed that cancelling Doctor Who is the reason why Michael Grade is the only BBC director-general who wasn't subsequently knighted).
Yes, I'm familiar with that story - although I
do note that she
did knight the director-general who
actually cancelled the show "for good" a few years later.
I know that you've gone beyond all this, and it looks like you are done, Brainbin, but I have to say that I am enjoying your TL. Reading through this part made my train trip home from Thanksgiving fly!
Thank you, and welcome aboard! I'm glad to have provided reading material for the voyage home
C. McKay said:
I am looking forward to seeing if Micky D will continue to be a working actor, escaping the typecasting he experienced ITOL. Just curious...will Michael Nesmith's career change as well?
He certainly won't be pigeon-holed as one of the Monkees when
Rock Around the Clock ends, that's for sure.
C. McKay said:
Also, I am curious whether we will see any other performers (especially women) trying to follow in TWR's footsteps and starting production companies (or record labels).
At least one has been mentioned in subsequent updates - and remember that the role of Marcia Lucas within Lucasfilm is largely analogous to That Wacky Redhead herself at Desilu during the 1950s - in fact, Marcia plays a far
more active role (as a creative partner, even if not a 50% partner) than TWR did before buying out Desi Arnaz.
C. McKay said:
But you have probably answered my questions already. Must read on!
If not, I hope that helped - and I hope you enjoy the rest of the timeline!
NCW8 said:
If you want something more recent, there's always
Phineas and Ferb, but I don't think that quite matches
Animaniacs where they not only got a lot of
crap past the radar but also had some parts that seemed aimed mainly at an adult audience - particularly the Runt and Rita segments.
If we're talking about "aimed mainly at an adult audience", I think Minerva Mink should be the prime example
NCW8 said:
I'm not so sure. It's not as if the canon had any shortage of would-be world dictators. There's
Ramon Salemander, to pick just one example.
I'm not saying that the Doctor wouldn't go up against
any megalomaniacs, I'm saying that he wouldn't go up against Khan specifically.
I hope that you go into detail on the John Glenn Administration, Brainbin. Would love to hear about all the policies and bills passed ITTL.
You'll get about as much detail as you did on the policies of the Humphrey and Reagan administrations.
You do realize that a lot of these things HAPPENED in the original OTL Star Trek fandom, right? Right down to the K/S slashfic? These things didn't just start because of the internet--all that did is spread it a bit farther.
Fun fact: the first recorded K/S slashfic dates to September, 1974 (IOTL - ITTL it might be earlier still). One reason I chose to isolate the slashers somewhat from the rest of the fandom is that the slashers tended to
be more insular: they watched the show for the relationship between Kirk and Spock, to the exclusion of all other factors. This attitude (putting the sacred couple above all else in the narrative) is actually quite common across fandoms (to the point that there's a term for it: "shipping goggles").
I made some research and now I'm afraid I couldn't have shown my ignorance more clearly. It's a strange feeling to be the one wondering that certain phenomena have dated from before internet era.
Isn't it? And, in fact, the term "canon", used in the modern, secular sense of reckoning what is "real" within the context of a fictional universe, dates to
1911, at which time it was first used in a paper about the
Sherlock Holmes fandom written by the great scholar Ronald Knox (who,
intriguingly enough, was among other things an Anglican priest).
Sherlock Holmes fandom also devised the literary agent hypothesis - basically a meta-fictional application of the unreliable narrator.
Fanfic goes back for centuries--hell, one of the great Italian Renaissance epics, Orlando Furioso, is essentially a fanfic continuation of the incomplete Orlando Innamorato, another great Italian Renaissance epic. And it got its own fanfic continuations.
And rather closer to home, I often like to imagine that William Shakespeare made a career out of writing
Fix Fic
And the Aeneid can be counted as a fanfic of the Iliad. What I meant I wasn't aware that 40 years ago fanfiction was so popular among amateurs - and so... countercultural. Well I didn't realised that Mary Sue has been so old.
There's the rub - what we call
fan fiction has really only existed for as long as modern copyright laws - which is to say, for the last few centuries. Before then, people could - and did! - write derivative works with impunity. Now, of course, we have this baroque yet tenuous gentleman's agreement between the two sides...
Work proceeds apace on the next update. I hope to have it ready for all of you within the next week - and possibly sooner, if all goes well.