Thande

Donor
I'm afraid I'm late to the party on concluding this one due to being distracted by work, the UK leaving the EU and Sea Lion Press, but I have finally kept my promise to finish this TL. And how appropriate that I post on the 50th anniversary of Star Trek!

That Wacky Redhead will definitely go down in AH.com history as our finest popcultural timeline, or perhaps even our finest timeline focused on any subject other than the usual of politics and war. Brainbin had sunk five years of his time into this, during which time I have been privileged enough to meet him twice, and it is a measure of what he has achieved that this TL enjoys such a loyal and diverse readership. I cannot take the credit offered to Cronus Invictus for inspiring this as a niche and poorly researched TL about video games cannot compare to the level of depth put into this work. I will however take credit for encouraging Brainbin to keep things optimistic as a neat counter to all the dystopias we see too many of.

In summary then, it only remains to wish Brainbin well with his future projects and congratulate him on the completion of this epic.

(I know he'd prefer a TOS gif, but I can't find one...)

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Captain's Log, Stardate 1513.1. Our position: orbiting planet M-113. Onboard the
Enterprise: Mr. Spock, temporarily in command. On the planet: the ruins of an ancient and long-dead civilization. Ship's Surgeon McCoy and myself are now beaming down to the planet's surface. Our mission: routine medical examination... of archaeologist Robert Crater and his wife Nancy. Routine but for the fact that Nancy Crater is that one woman in Dr. McCoy's past...

Those were the first words first heard throughout the United States (excepting, perhaps, along the Canadian border, where they had already been heard two days before), 50 years ago today, at 8:30 PM Eastern, on NBC, where Star Trek was brought to viewers in living colo(u)r. So many of those involved in the show's production have passed since then, but a few are still with us. Most prominent among these is the show's star, William Shatner, though the other surviving cast members include George Takei, Nichelle Nichols, Walter Koenig, John Winston, and Eddie Paskey. There are several surviving members of the show's key production staff as well, including story editors John D.F. Black, Steven Carabatsos, and D.C. Fontana, and, yes, executive in charge of production Herbert F. Solow. (Glad you're still with us, Herbie.)

Today, as we celebrate how inestimably and immeasurably Star Trek has changed culture, and the future, we should take a moment to remember the cast and crew of that original series, who were, in their own way, as much pioneers and trailblazers as the spacemen (and, yes, spacewomen) they depicted.

(I know he'd prefer a TOS gif, but I can't find one...)

Luckily for you, I was keeping one in reserve for just this very occasion...

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Isn't it a thing of beauty? Look at Bill and Nichelle go (in opposite directions from everyone else)!

That's what I love about Star Trek, warts and all.

May the franchise live long, and prosper.

(No, seriously, this new show had better be good.)
 
I have a question, but was anime and manga are the same or different in this time line.
My inference was that it would be a little more popular a little sooner, or at least more accepted more quickly (as opposed to being stigmatized as "cartoons" for "children"); but the Timeline has come to it's intended stopping point before such time as there would be many more series than IOTL.
 
I must say it was something of a surprise to get an email alert for this thread, but the bump, in addition to a couple hours of free time this evening, spurred me to threadmark most of my updates, although I had to take a few breaks to tweak the formatting on some of the updates (which seem to have not survived the forum upgrades intact). In any event, the index omits the More to Come teasers, the Star Trek episode guide entries, and most of the guest posts for the time being, and the formatting is still wonky on a few of the updates, but all of them should now at least be readable. So if you ever wanted to re-read TWR, or if you've just come across this thread and are wondering what the deal is, why don't you, well, give it a whirl? :)
 
I only just came across Star Trek History somehow, but the site has a fascinating page on the 40 Acres Lot that Brainbin mentions several times in this Timeline and that was scandalously razed in the 1970's!

The site has a neat 'Trek Locations' feature for 40 Acres too!
 
I wish there was a sequel for this timeline, this timeline is so good!
A belated thank you very much for your kind words, 245! Honestly, though, the idea of writing a sequel never really appealed to me when I was writing TWR, nor does it particularly appeal to me now, a year on from having finished. However, I will admit to occasionally being possessed by the urge to rewrite what I already have (which, incidentally, is the reason why I largely wrote by the seat of my pants, so as to suppress that urge at the time) - and although I won't commit to a TWR Mark II (or Redux, or Extended Edition, or however you might be inclined to describe it), I did feel that, as the first anniversary of THE END approaches, and as belated thanks to all of you for having bestowed 1.4 Million views upon this thread (sidenote: Huzzah! The viewcount has returned!), I thought I share some of my ideas for what it might look like with you:

One of my greatest laments looking back is how little coverage I devoted to the late-1960s - even with regards to television. The 1966-67 season - the first covered by this TL - was also the first with an all-colour network primetime schedule. Many popular shows were cancelled, relegated to daytime, or colourized in order for this to be achieved - a tumult almost as significant as the Rural Purge of five years later.

Another milestone in the history of television took place in the 1966-67 season: the series finale of The Fugitive, the first real "grand finale" as we understand the term today. Frankly that deserved an entire post of its own, and not just because "The Judgment" was such a satisfying and worthwhile piece of television. (The Fugitive might just have been the best straight dramatic series of the 1960s - which is not nearly as backhanded a compliment as those descriptors, taken in combination, might suggest to those with our more "sophisticated" palates.)

Of course I'd want to talk more about other shows from the era as well, particularly in response to some reader requests. Family Affair. Hogan's Heroes. That Girl. Hogan's Heroes. Batman. Hogan's Heroes. Get Smart. Hogan's Heroes. In addition, I might devote some coverage to Hogan's Heroes, as a result of one or two inquiries about it.

On the movie front, the 1960s saw the very painful decline of the movie musical, with such notorious flops as (yes) Hello, Dolly! nearly bankrupting the movie industry (yes, again).

Since I'm a lot less timid a writer than I was in 2011, I would probably also cover more serious sociopolitical aspects in more detail earlier on. Given that my POD is in 1966, I really should have properly introduced the hippies as opposed to just assuming the reader knew what they were (unlikely, outside of the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco).

Moving into the 1970s, and on a lighter note, a lot of topics which I found intriguing pertained to food preparation: the drip coffeemaker which remains (more-or-less) standard today (or at least in a co-dominant position with espresso machines) first supplanted the traditional percolator in the early-1970s, and so given coffee's paramount importance to the day-to-day lives of so many people I would probably devote at least part of a post to that. The early-1970s also saw the mass market emergence of the microwave oven, which would be difficult to resist tying into the microwave power storyline I already have running through the TL: "microwave" could be to the 1970s what "atomic" was to the 1950s. Less dramatically, whole categories of food were drastically changed in the move from stovetop or oven to microwave: TV dinners, for example, as well as popcorn. Other food preparation phenomena we today fondly remember as 1970s fads include the chafing dish and the fondue pot. The 1970s also saw the rise of edible bacterial cultures - otherwise known as yogurt. Given its modern ubiquity, it would be hard not to resist the urge to remind readers that people were once resistant to eating bacterial cultures.

The 1970s also saw the emergence of an important fad in the world of athletics and exercise: running! People were crazy about Running in the 70s. Endurance running, cross-country running... you name it!

And then there are the 1980s. Fat-free and sugar-free were the order of the day, diet-wise. Diet Coke was introduced in the early 1980s, IOTL. In terms of exercise, the name of the game was aerobics, that most 1980s of anything there is. The spandex. The leg-warmers. The hairspray. The cocaine. Also, I should have probably talked more about cocaine, and the evolution of drug culture in general. The 1960s and early-1970s were big on hallucinogens, after all, whereas they were immediately and abruptly followed by the late-1970s and 1980s, an era of hyperstimulants. That's quite a drastic change.

Anyway, those are some of the things I lament not having talked about in greater (or any) detail, looking back. Not that I'm sure I would ever write them going forward either, but I thought some of you might be interested in thinking what more you might have seen in TWR, had I been so inclined.

With all that said, Happy Dominion Day (and Canada Day) to all my readers! Be glad I spared you all a rambling series of introductory paragraphs going back 150 years and featuring outbound links to over a dozen different Heritage Minutes...
 
However, I will admit to occasionally being possessed by the urge to rewrite what I already have (which, incidentally, is the reason why I largely wrote by the seat of my pants, so as to suppress that urge at the time) - and although I won't commit to a TWR Mark II (or Redux, or Extended Edition, or however you might be inclined to describe it), I did feel that, as the first anniversary of THE END approaches, and as belated thanks to all of you for having bestowed 1.4 Million views upon this thread (sidenote: Huzzah! The viewcount has returned!), I thought I share some of my ideas for what it might look like with you[.]
While that is a nice consolation and all, I still want "That Wacky Redhead: Extended Edition". Like you said, you aren't considering doing it, but...
 
Can you talk a tiny bit about the 1990s and the 2000s and 2010s, maby as a hilgit real, and how different is anime like in this timeline.
 
Anyway, those are some of the things I lament not having talked about in greater (or any) detail, looking back. Not that I'm sure I would ever write them going forward either, but I thought some of you might be interested in thinking what more you might have seen in TWR, had I been so inclined.
If you do ever feel like writing some of that, it wouldn't even be necessary to relaunch the entire thread. You could just do "Flashback Posts" (possibly in the style of OTL VH1's I Love the 80s/90s/70s specials, maybe ITTL they also make an I Love the 60s) about the extra material.
 
@Brainbin

To build off of the fellow who really wants to hear about anime, maybe you could have readers each offer up one (and only one) pop culture item, be it a movie, TV show, actor, director, comic book, whatever the case may be. Then, you could give a couple sentences worth of serious or semi-serious entries in a final coda, explaining what the status of each is in TTL 2017.
 
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To build off of the fellow who really wants to hear about anime, maybe you could have readers each offer up one (and only one) pop culture item, be it a movie, TV show, actor, director, comic book
I did write a look into comic history ITTL, which was rejected (which makes sense to me now, given I proposed it very late in the TL's run, though I was still incredibly disappointed after that rejection and my depression meant that disappointment stuck with me for a bit).
 
I did write a look into comic history ITTL, which was rejected (which makes sense to me now, given I proposed it very late in the TL's run, though I was still incredibly disappointed after that rejection and my depression meant that disappointment stuck with me for a bit).

Well, it Brainbin's timeline at the end of the day.
 
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