A sports Timeline about Nebraska Cornhuskers running back Lawrence Phillips who cleans himself up, wins a national title at Nebraska, and becomes an NFL sensation in his hometown of Los Angeles playing for the Rams. His signature endzone dance move is called the worm. In said timeline, Phillips is the career rushing leader in the NFL.
AH Title and Description Game
- Thread starter Emperor Norton I
- Start date
A sports Timeline about Nebraska Cornhuskers running back Lawrence Phillips who cleans himself up, wins a national title at Nebraska, and becomes an NFL sensation in his hometown of Los Angeles playing for the Rams. His signature endzone dance move is called the worm. In said timeline, Phillips is the career rushing leader in the NFL.
In this timeline, after hundreds of deadlocks at the 1932 DNC from delegates loyal to Smith and Garner fervently blocking Roosevelt, the weary delegates narrowly nominate the uninspiring, conservative and all-around-terrible-candidate Chairman John J. Raskob. Come election day, Raskob is elected with barely 40 percent of the vote, and socialist candidate Norman Thomas breaks 15%. The whole ordeal triggers a mass wave of third parties and demagoguery across the USA, one that sees Kansas Governor John R. Brinkley rise to the top as the man who was cheated out of a win and came back swinging. Brinkley's radio show out shines even that of Coughlin's, and he soon becomes the major opposition figure to President Raskob. A well tailored media campaign disguises his insanity as "eccentricities", allowing him to win the presidency in 1936 as an independent after sweeping the Midwest and the South. Americans soon realize their mistake when one of Brinkley's first acts in office is threatening Italy with war unless Mussolini personally reinstates his medical degree. The country revolts, and as veterans flood the streets of DC up in arms, Brinkley flees to Kansas where his fanatical followers welcome him back with open arms. The fabric of the USA quickly disintegrates, with Sinclair's EPIC legions swarming the West Coast and Long crowning himself King of the Mississippi among other atrocities. When the dust finally settles all that remains of the United States are Missouri and Kansas, the only states Brinkley can exert effective control over from the new capital of Kansas City. The TL ends with Brinkley giving a speech proclaiming the United States to be "greater than it ever has been, an empire stretching from Miami to Canada!"
The Car Men of San Diego
Insects and Pepperspray
How Ubre Blanca Ended the Cold War
A timeline focusing where the California Motor Company never suffered its catastrophic fire and through a handful of butterlies, growing to steal the title of Motor City away from Detroit throughout the 20th century - but gets the same economic problems too.
Kingdom of the Cassowary and Dragon, Kingdom of the Cockerel and Bull, Kingdom of the Eagle and Horse: The Wars for Australia
Local Lake Monsters: Folklore and Mythology of a Spanish Great Lakes
Forged in Lego
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A timeline focusing where one of the Lego factories suffered its catastrophic fire, and killing half of the employees of the factories. The founder of Lego Headquarters decided to merge with Mattel toys because of the incident, and thus the toy industry is forever changed.
Hollywood Dies After 55 Years
The Famous Starship Wouldn't Be Back in the Screens for Many Decades
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A timeline focused on Earth after the launch of a generation ship, the TSS Hopeful. Initially, the Hopeful was headline news all over the world. But after a few years, bandwidth limitations mean that no more than audio messages - and then, soon, text - can be sent, and any exchange is delayed by months. While the ship remains in intermittent contact with Earth, it quickly drops out of the headlines and is forgotten about as the space program is downsized by budget concerns.
And then, a hundred twenty years later, a video message is received from a ground-based transmitter on the planet of Newhope.
They Called It Laughter
The in-universe ASB TL written by an in universe author detailing the rise of Adolf Hitler in the 21st century after he was miraculously teleported to 21st century Germany. The book details his rise to political prominence as a 'satirist' and eventually Bundstag member from Bavaria. He is quickly removed from the government due to being literally the actual Hitler however, which leads to his supporters rioting for weeks and his eventual reinstatement after he takes an oath swearing off his racist beliefs. Hitler would rise rapidly and become Chancellor of Germany representing his new party, the German Unity Party made up of populists, Euroskeptic nationalists, white nationalists and radical Conservatives which peel off the CDU. The TL ends in 2013 with Hitler giving an interview to the author with the final line being "They called it laughter, I called it praise". Recently a sequel TL called Decisive Action was started in 2019 and continues to this day. While comparisons to the movie Look Whose Back and accusations of blatant plagiarism were levied after the TL moved past the scope of the movie it became well regarded for its interesting premise and execution.
14 Million to One: Another WWI TL
Dirty Cops
The Meatgrinder
The Militant Doberman
Banned
Picadora de Carne (English: Meat Grinder) is a military TL about the US invasion of Cuba in 1990s when the civil unrest and shortages resulting from the loss of the Soviet Union as its backer & trade partner spills over into an open civil war on the island. TL is told from the point of view of both Cuban soldiers, Cuban anti-communist rebels, US troops as well as more “unusual” viewpoints such as a Russian military attaché who was stationed in Cuba in the days of USSR now serving as an advisor to American forces or a North Korean diplomat in Havana ordered to keep track of the war & US strategy for the KPA. Name of the TL is derived from the final Battle for Havana.
Buddha, Bottle, Hat & Cat
Franz Ferdinand and his wife and driver escape Gavrilo Princip after his assassination attempt. Princip's capture and extradition to the Austrians, plus Ferdinand's own peace efforts and insistence that a war would not be in the best interests of Austria-Hungary, delays the start of WWI by 4 weeks; this has major implications during the Battle of the Marne, when the poor weather conditions of late 1914 both slows prevents allied reconnaissance of German maneuvers, plus inhibits their troop movements, enabling a German victory and an invasion of Paris. However, the poor weather also interferes with the German supply lines, so the advance is repulsed; the Race to the Sea is also more difficult as December and January come forward.
Franz Ferdinand is not quite during this time, quietly forming alliances in Austria-Hungary and outside of it. This proved especially vital in 1915 and 1916, when the war proved to be more disastrous than had been imagined; his efforts, among other things, helped preserve Italian neutrality. When Charles I ascends to the throne in 1916, Ferdinand's peace efforts have not gone unnoticed, and Charles I is able to be more open about his peace intentions. Using the United States as a neutral party, they're able to call a truce and create a peace conference in late 1916, after the Battle of the Somme; by offering minimal land grabs on the part of the Austro-Hungarians, they're able to begin peace negotiations with the Russians, who are able to recognize the dire straits that they're in. The Germans, realizing that this would close a major front, and that losing Austro-Hungarian support would be devastating, are willing to follow with it. The British and French, not quite wanting peace but realizing that they could not defeat even Germany alone, let alone Germany and Austro-Hungary, also later join the conference.
And thus it is that WWI ends in 1917 in a peace expensive and embarrassing to all sides, negotiated by the patronizing Woodrow Wilson threatening to support any side who chooses to break the truce. Borders scarcely change, nothing real is changed, so much is lost, but with two years of stalemate and the threat of the United States entering the war against them, an uneasy peace reigns.
Nobody (aside from Wilson) expects it to last. The British and French begin going through the expenses of industrializing and fortifying their empires; the Austrians and Germans begin courting the Italians, the Liberians, the Ethiopians, the Ottomans, and the Japanese into their sphere.... (Apologies is this seems unlikely; I was just disappointed that no one has taken the prompt in the past year)
Disney Fairies: Or, How I learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Capitalism
If the (Dragon) Emperor Had a Text-to-Speech Device
Star Wars: The Triumph of Hard Sci-Fi
After the Walt Disney Corporation declares bankruptcy in the late 1970s, Ron Miller makes the bold move of revitalizing the brand with a lucrative brand deal with toy company Hasbro to license Disney's characters and intellectual property as toys and themed play sets.
The surprise breakout success of the 'Fairies of Neverland', a fantasy adventure line starring Peter Pan's Tinkerbell and associated pixies, sprites, bogies, and a plethora of fantastical monsters, sparks the 'Renaissance of Girls' Adventure Fiction' when Hasbro applies the same integrated media program as their upcoming Transformers and G.I.JOE product lines.
Arguments over which of Cobra Commander, Megatron, or Queen Maab are the better villain plague schoolyard playgrounds for the rest of the decade.
No, Your OTHER Left! Comedy in the post-communist BBC
Round the World in 80 Hours: The Race to Circumnavigate the Globe by Air
A TL following Monty Python and its rise to fame in the 1970s, just after the fall of the last Radical Labour Government and the end of Social Communism in Britain. The BBC hired Monty Python to simply fill space while they found 'more tasteful comedic groups'. Python, having made a name for itself already as an outspoken critic of Gollan's more dictatorial politics, took the time to have a bit of fun with on the governments dime. They then wrote, directed, starred in and had the BBC release Monty Python and the Life of Stanley, a satirical tale about an up and coming CPGB/Radical Labour member just after the December Revolution highlighting the absurdity and contradiction of a Communist Revolution in a still rather aristocratic society.. The movie was fantastically well received and almost instantly became a comedy classic despite the BBC showing it in only three theaters across the Union. The Timeline goes on to follow the release of the four other Python movies Monty Python: So Left We're Right (which is a collection of skits from their earlier days), The Bane of Maine, and Monty Python and the Meaning of Life. Their last movie, released in 1985 took on a more pessimistic tone than the others as the Republic backslid into oligarchy and is considered the start of the mainstream current of pessimism and darkness in modern British comedy. The TL ends in 2005 with the death of John Cleese ostensibly due to a car accident, which the others take as a warning by the increasingly authoritarian government to back off and they disband the group and flee the Republic. The TL itself was and still is rather controversial, nothing as much as its downer ending but in the end the solid writing, great world building and fantastically Pythonesque comedy keeps it among the greats.
Dirty Cops
The Meatgrinder
The Age of the Weird
In 1983, disgruntled employees from the International Tobacco Information Centre mail thousands of documents to Parliament, Congress, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, President Ronald Reagan, and multiple UK and US news organizations. Included in these documents are:
1) Tobacco is both lethal and highly addictive.
2) All major tobacco companies and their management knows this.
3) There is literally an international conspiracy dedicated to obfuscating this knowledge, using methods gleaned from other variants that have occurred before in other industries, in order to ensure tobacco profits.
The TL follows the unraveling of the trail of corruption involved with this, the international accounts and communications that made tracking everything difficult, through Reagan's difficult 1984 election and (failed) 1985 impeachment that allowed for this to occur, finding the other government waste (like the bribery involved in the M247) and led to the official creation of an international investigatory body in 1987. Through it all, the impact on other people- such as the tobacco farmers, who give the investigators the name 'dirty cops' when they catch them sneaking into their worker's compounds for incriminating information, financial analysts worried about a return to recession when they're turned against the logging, mining and petroleum industries, and the Soviet media treating this as a tacit admission that capitalism still doesn't work. The last line, as said by the new director: "We're dirty, because we get ourselves dirty."
The follow-up, In Good Company, describes the effects of the Dirty Cops (the nickname stuck, especially as they went deeper into other industries- the term was both endearing and insulting, depending on who needed it to be which) finding out about Harvey Weinstein in 1998. As more and more sexual indiscretions, including the UK's Rotherham incident (a decades-long government coverup of child sexual abuse), public trust in media and government institutions drops significantly, while- with every seemingly every media company, major and minor, under investigation- the ability to produce and distribute media (especially in the US) is reduced. Thankfully, the growing Internet was able to supply those needs. The TL Ends with President Jerry Brown announcing that there would be tax incentives for those purchasing computers, both personal, educational and business, while proposing that the web infrastructure would be improved. Meanwhile, a Goldman Sachs stockbroker and new UK Prime Minister Tony Blair discuss the ending of a small market correction that especially hit certain internet startups, before deciding that real estate might be a good US investment.
The third sequel, Pink Scare, was taking place in 2008, and took a much wider perspective of the world than either of it's predecessors and experimental in form, including such things as 2chan threads and political forum debates in it's narrative. In theory, it covered an investigation into the 2008 election, the most contentious since 1988. However, a lot of effort went into showing the development of the internet, as well as US, UK and international politics. Most notably, the issues shown were:
1) Concern about the US election being 'stolen'- Vladimir Putin's reorganization of the Russian Communist Party in 1996 has made for a resurgent communist Russia, which may or may not have been massively expanding it's cyber and information warfare capabilities, and may or may not be trying to influence the US election. The incident shown is Saddam Hussein trying to align Iraq with Russia in order to avoid US pressure. China, Russia and North Korea have had major economic booms since then, with Pyongyang's Ryugyong become an international symbol of their ascendancy- at least, before 2007.
2) The 'Dirty Cops' failed to catch the Web Bubble before it burst, despite the 2000 warning, leading to the October 2006 stock market crash and the subsequent US and UK housing market corrections, which led to a massive financial crisis in June of 2007- the worst since the Great Depression.
3) The Fairness Doctrine was reinstituted in 1990, and survived a Supreme Court challenge in 1993. It does not apply in any meaningful fashion to online publications, even those owned by major companies with other content broadcast over covered media.
4) The 2004 Disney production Disney's Fairies proved an unexpected and massive success, due in part to the efforts of imageboards and forums (and especially 2chan) for it's strong characters, followed by Nickelodeon's Avatar: The Last Airbender in 2005 for it's strong storytelling. These shows were noted to be strongly supported by those who were young and/or supported the LGBT political issues, with many people 'coming out' on forums about the shows. Coupled with the 1998 success of Cartoon Network's The Powerpuff Girls and the significant merchandise revenue collected from Disney, as well as Blockbuster's Webflix service, ViacomABC allowed Cartoon Network to premier Galaxy Girls and HasbroOnline! premiered My Little Pony in 2007- both story-driven narratives with strong LGBT (and racial in the latter) themes to great commercial success.
5) This created a strong backlash during the 2008 primaries, wherein the New Moral Majority made George W Bush the frontrunner, while Donald J Trump's MAFA (Make America Free Again) campaign gave him the Democratic nomination. Neither side trusts the current President (unnamed), his administration, and the government's organizations; Russian and Chinese interference are worried about by the cops, though no evidence is given, while online conspiracy theories (especially perpetuated by 3chan) helped both candidates arise. Trump is noticeably cooler on LGBT rights than past Democrats, though he focuses more on Communist influence, while the Bush campaign- effectively an Evangelical coalition- is distinctly hostile. The 'Dirty Cops' are investigating both campaigns, which does not lead to much trust on either side. Additionally, there's still a lot of concern- with much of it being propagated online- about another "electoral failure" like 1988, where H.W. Bush won the electoral college, but not the popular vote.
The Pink Scare thread was locked in early 2020 for including modern politics.
If the (Dragon) Emperor Had a Text-to-Speech Device
If the (Jade) Emperor Had a Text-to-Speech Device
In Good Company
Pink Scare
There's 90 minutes of researching 90s Presidential campaigns and 2000s TV network owners, most of which didn't get in here. Fun fact, though: Trump actually ran a 3rd-party campaign in 2000!
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In August 10, 2003, an episode of Sonic X entitled, "The Ghost of the Old Castle, King Boom Boo" aired, featured a scene where the ghosts of King Boom Boo possessed Amy Rose, it scared Japanese audiences (mostly children). Which forced TMS Entertainment to ban the episode from airing again in Japan and banned from airing in the rest of the world, because of that 'Pink Scare'. It became a part of the Top 10 Banned TV Episodes list on WatchMojo.
Hollywood: The Film Industry Dies After 55 Years
It deals with worse mcCarthyism in America. Due to Joseph McCarthy's hollywood blacklist being worse. Resulting mass Cultural revolution similarity resulting many actors and filming studios moving to UK. Resulting in death of hollywood. Although American Film industry recovers by 2000s and wins awards in Venice film festival and Cannes, it is very similar to European Film industry: one focused on arthouse films.
Do you hear my voice?
Do You Hear My Voice? is a 2003, 65-minute direct-to-TV comedy produced by Comedy Central, starring Paul Marcarelli, and heavily sponsored by Verizon Wireless. Heavily based on the "Can you hear me now?" ads played by the company, the film was made on a $500,000 budget, but became surprisingly popular owing to Marcareli's performance and the film's self-deprecating tone, earning over $150 million between syndication and DVD sales between 2003 and 2012. Most famously, it launched Marcarelli as a popular member of Saturday Night Live, television host, and stand-up comedian.
The film stars Marcarelli as an John Wright, executive at an unnamed cell phone provider, on vacation in Hawaii with his pregnant wife. However, he discovers what he realizes what could be a tremendous opportunity in the islands, as they only have minimal service, and he secretly writes a report and tries to fax it to his office without his wife noticing. However, the phone lines are down, leaving him searching the island for a working satellite link for email, all while telling his wife that he's "looking for a good vacation spot." However, the cell phone signal keeps cutting off. In the end, he accidentally sends his report to what is implied to be Verizon; Verizon's CFO, in order to avoid unspecified tax penalties, then grants Wright a bonus for his actions, despite Wright not actually working for them; Wright's wife believes that he was trying to give her the bonus as a gift, which helps prevent a divorce.
A remixed version of the theme is used on Colbert and Marcarelli.
If the (Dragon) Emperor Had a Text-to-Speech Device
If the (Jade) Emperor Had a Text-to-Speech Device
A spin off of the wildly successful "If the Emperor Had A Text to Speech Device" which was a TL about if the Emperor of Mankind came back to life in WH40K, this spinoff concerns the Jade Emperor of ASOAIF, a little known fantasy world created by Disney writer GRRM in his free time. Ruling the distant land of Yi Ti in the extremely distant past, the Emperor oversaw the Yi at their height, and he returns to Yi Ti on the brink civil war as the Diamond Emperor faces off against a usurper from the Grey Wastes. The TL is also wildly sucessful as the political intruiges of the Yi Tish court put even Westeros to shame. All the characters in the TL save for the Jade Emperor are totally original characters and the author of the TL was eventually contacted by GRRM to write a short story (or several) dealing with Yi Ti as some additional content while he worked on his books. The author reportedly declined due to having two TL's and a developing web series.
Just a Leaky Pipe: An Alternate Nixon Administration
A burst pipe in the Nixon office destroyed all of Nixon's tapes in November 1972. As such, there was never enough evidence to impeach and convict Nixon, whose record with China and Vietnam kept him in office and gave Spiro Agnew a 1976 Electoral College victory. However, Walter Mondale won the Presidency in 1980, succeeded by John McFall after Mondale's assassination in 1983 until 1993, when Geraldine Ferraro became the first female President. Among the major themes of the TL was a surging White Nationalist sentiment, especially in the GOP; this was most noticeable during the 1992 election, when Barry Goldwater was the GOP candidate and David Duke ran a third-part campaign; this helped get Ferraro elected after 12 years of Democrat rule.
A Song of Ice-Nine and Atomic Fire
That Time That Time Began
Falling on Sharp Things: Not Living to Tell the Tale
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Wow, this game is much less popular than the AH Quote Game and the AH Cultural Description Game. Is it just because it's in a different forum? Should it be moved?
I'd say it's not less popular, just less intense and a good deal slower too. 'Happens when you demand a contribution from your writers that's on average twice as long as an average Cultural description game post. Still, on page count, this thread, the cultural description thread and the quote thread are roughly equal. So don't write this thread off yet.