AH Brain Droppings

This thread is for those AH ideas and bits of ideas you have but you don't really have any TL or story to put them in, or they aren't specifically tied to anything. Basically, the tidbits and components.
Personally, I always have these, and I'd be interested in some of the one's you guys have.
 
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Here are a few I have.


  • Pacific War between America and Japan in the later 40s (instead of the early), involving the more advanced war technologies of that era, such as jet fighters. Also in existence are atomic weapons of Hiroshima/Nagasaki destruction capability, which both America and Japan possess, though they only exist in limited numbers on both sides (no more than a handful each). These atomic weapons are used by both sides on major enemy targets, leading to casualties and destruction not totally devastating as a WW3 would be, but horrific nonetheless. America invades the Japanese home island, using a few atomic bombs to aid the invasion effort, but it is won on the ground, and is bloody. Japan eventually capitulates and America wins.
  • Chevy Chase in "Ghostbusters" instead of Bill Murray.
    Chase was offered the film, and I don't know if he was offered the Venkman part, but I'd assume that was it. Bill Murray only did the film to get the studio to make a dramatic film he wanted to star in, so it's just a stroke of fate that he even did it. With Chase, I assume sequels would be easier to do than with Murray (since Murray was much against doing them), so long as the script was good. He already has a collaborative history with Dan Akroyd so I'd assume things go fine and they work on scripts and we get at least Ghostbusters 3, if not 4 and 5 (or more).
  • Formal dress and Fedoras not falling out of fashion in the post-war casualization of America, and t-shirts and jeans not becoming the fashion in its stead. Basically, like Tim Burton's Batman series. Technology doesn't have to be retarded, but fashion can keep that previous style.
  • HD-VHS coming before DVD and catching on, preventing or delaying digital disc technology. It did exist, but it came out in the era when VHS was on its way out and DVD was the new format. And, mind you, this was an HD format when DVD was standard definition, so the picture was far better. But since DVD was around, it didn't matter what you did with VHS since it was dead as a format.
  • "RCA tape cartridge" catching on. Think a bigger cassette, and that's what the RCA tape cartridge was. It came out in 1958, but never went anywhere. It was better than Reel-to-Reel given its self contained and simpler nature, and had all the advantages of Cassette tape.
    I've also thought it could be put into cars, which seemed a major untapped potential for this medium, creating an earlier mobile music revolution. That is something record formats could never do; they tried it, but the needle skipped due to movement of a vehicle, and putting pressure in place to keep that from happening and things from moving was damaging to the disc.
  • What if DVD/Blu Ray cover art didn't suck, and they didn't feel the need to use badly photoshopped and airbrushed images? Back in the VHS days, and even early DVD, the cover was the film poster or one of the film posters, or at least one of the promotional photos. They could easily not have gone with the bad cover trend.
 
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