pop culture

After Tim Burton was fired from Batman III, Michael Keaton also considered leaving the project. But despite his misgivings about Schumacher's new direction for the franchise, Keaton ultimately agreed to return as Batman on the condition that he have input on the film's story and character...

I recently posted a thread about what 1980s culture might've been like with a Democrat in the White House. Now, I ask what the culture of the 1970s might have been like if Humphrey had beaten Nixon in 1968.

Welcome all to Golden! A passion project of mine in the works for a couple of months, due to my love for the pop culture timelines on this site and popular culture in general. So I wanted to give a try at making a timeline of my own, in the style of a more optimistically* pathed one. Along with...

Prelude Hello everyone. This is a new timeline, taking place in the same universe as my Beatles-centered Off-White timeline. This one is centered around Pink Floyd... and the first two posts will really just be intermission #1 from that timeline, since I liked the idea and wanted to build...

Suppose that Gerald Ford had never made his infamous gaffe about Eastern Europe and he narrowly defeated Jimmy Carter in 1976. Four years later a Democrat is elected President. How would US and world culture evolve with the Democrats, not the Reagan Republicans, in charge during the 1980s?

Okay, so this is a pretty shameless ripoff of another thread I saw floating around here about a potential alternate timeline with "Araboos" insteas of weaboos, which you can check out here. However, your goal in this timeline is to create a world where Russian culture and media becomes wildly...

In an ATL, Al Gore wins the Presidential Election in 2000 against George Bush, going to lead the United States for the next 4-8 years. How would this affect movies, books, television, music, video games, the internet, and other forms of entertainment throughout his years in office and beyond...

This is a thread to discuss people playing characters you would have liked to see them play. It could be in a work that exists OTL, or a hypothetical work that you or somebody else came up with. I'm going to start with a fairly obvious one: Telly Savalas as Lex Luthor. Not necessarily in the...

Prelude Hello everyone. This is my first alternate timeline, centered around The Beatles. Unlike a lot of Beatles-centered alternate timelines, which ask "what if The Beatles never broke up?", this one shall ask the question "What if The Beatles broke up during the White Album sessions?"...

The horror genre is considered the black sheep of the pantheon of Hollywood genres. Films of that genre ended up as marginalized second-rate B-movies done with low budgets and sub-par talent. Those films were filled with cheesy special effects and hammy acting. Due to the Production Code, many...

This is sort of a spin-off of @The Director's thread Pop Culture Oneshot Scenarios. Only now, it describes various aspects of what ever it is you can think of as if it was on a series of TV Tropes articles. YMMV, Nightmare Fuel, WMG, the works. Fire away, all.

After viewing Macfarlane’s Larry & Steve shorts in 1996-1997, Matt Groening offers Seth Macfarlane a position as a writer/showrunner for The Simpsons which he accepts instead of making Family Guy like IOTL. How does this affect both The Simpsons and Macfarlane’s subsequent creative decisions?

Similar to my thread on "Return of the Jedi," your challenge is to improve the sequels to "The Matrix." While the original was widely panned, the sequels received mixed to negative reception. What could the filmmakers have done to make them better?

Suppose that The Simpsons had been made explicitly adult-oriented like Family Guy or South Park. Would the show had reached the same level of critical success that it did IOTL or would it have been shot down due to controversy?

Your challange is the create a timeline in which Sega gains more success and prominence in the gaming industry than Nintendo. Extra points for having Sega beat both PlayStation and Xbox from the fifth generation of gaming onwards.

Let’s prevent happy hardcore. Obviously the simplest way is to trigger REFORGER and put one Soviet device each on Rotterdam and Amsterdam, resulting in less party gabber and highlighting the more negative themes of actual hardcore techno. But this is a sledge for a nut. Eliminating the 909...

What if Frank Herbert, sometime before 1962, lost interest in putting together his "desert novel" and never shopped it around? Or if Campbell had never started publishing his "Dune Stories" in Analog magazine? Or if Chilton Books never made the risk of publishing the novel itself? How is...

As the tin says. Feel free to suggest your own! HELP - Hendrix, Emerson, Lake and Palmer (1970-1973) One of the most influential supergroups of the early 70s, it was composed of Jimi Hendrix (The Jimi Hendrix Experience, Band of Gypsys) on guitar and vocals, Keith Emerson (The Nice) on...

Mods vs. Rockers. Disco Demolition Night. The East Coast–West Coast hip hop rivalry. The anti-emo riots of Mexico. There have been many cases where musical subcultures have warred with each other for different reasons. One popular narrative is that the rise of garage rock revival bands of the...

Most everyone will agree that "Return of the Jedi," while an entertaining and satisfying movie, is by far the weakest entry in the original "Star Wars" trilogy. Your challenge, should you chose to accept it, is to propose how the filmmakers could have turned "Return of the Jedi" into an overall...