DBWI: A successful science fiction or futuristic TV series in the 1960’s

The Editor,
Archives of Alternate Histories
I have had an interest in the literature of ‘science fiction’ for some time. Science fiction was a form of fiction set most often in the near future, which in theory was based on currently known scientific knowledge or at least not inconsistent with it. I lament its decline and almost complete disappearance in the 1980’s, being overtaken by fantasy. There were several attempts to introduce a science fiction-based or futuristic TV series in the 1960’s. The BBC once considered a time-travel-based historical show for children, and Gene Roddenberry himself once pushed for a TV series set in the future. Even Sir Stanley Kubrick once contemplated a futuristic movie. I wonder if your readers can suggest what the world would be like now if one or even all of these attempts had been successful. Would science fiction have prospered? Would these successful shows have inspired new books and movies and perhaps even a new generation of scientists? Would this journal reach a wider audience?
Sincerely
ClassicOz.
 

Deleted member 137820

We all know the great science fiction boom of the 70s was space 1999 maybe had it been made a decade earlier.:)
 
You'd need for the Middle Earth film series to fail--or at least not have the TV spin-off. Who wants spaceships when you've got rangers and wizards? Never mind that the series warped the original novels, with a peasant girl taking up a wizard's staff. (Of course they cast the wizard as a woman; the wizard's the only one that never wears heavy clothes.)
Would as many young women and girls have taken up science and math studies without an example of a strong, SMART woman example? And I doubt that the Wizards and Warriors game would have become popular. After all, the Middle Earth TV series created the 5 person adventuring band trope.

(Using Middle Earth was ingenious--no need for plate armor, which distinguished it from King Arthur style movies.
 
Perhaps we'd get services like BellModem or Minitel as things earlier than the early 2020s in ttl. Maybe you can push it to 2010s or less likely the 2000s.

Woul TTL have some international network, like an expanded version of various EEC Minitels' integration? It wouldn't cover the US/USSR/China or the more authoritarian bits of the third world but maybe it'd be doable.
 
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