And by the way, it'd be very easy to make Voyager worse.
True. It could be as bad as
Enterprise 
ColeMercury said:
It's also very easy to make the Star Wars prequels worse.
Here's where I'm not sure if I agree with you. The fatal flaw affecting the prequel trilogy (if RedLetterMedia is to be believed) is the overall lack of effort by George Lucas, who whenever possible, created a situation that required less work on his behalf (hence the static camerawork, the pedestrian blocking, the insane over-reliance on chroma key and lack of location shooting), in addition to his stubborn refusal to take advice and compromise (someone close to the production actually
warned him
repeatedly about Jar-Jar and how poorly he was testing, but Lucas brushed him off, insisting that Jar-Jar was added for little kids - who also became entranced by the political intrigues and the myriad scenes on the floor of the senate
). I would argue that a co-director and/or co-writer would at least eliminate some of these factors. Even on a "least change" path with regards to the prequel films, you can butterfly away Jake Lloyd pretty easily (one of the final three Anakins, as seen in the making-of special, was actually pretty good! Maybe pick him instead).
ColeMercury said:
And I heartily disagree with keeping George Clooney away from films. He's fantastic in Syriana and Good Night and Good Luck, and he's a lot of fun in the Ocean's movies. Batman & Robin seems to be the one exception -- I agree that Clooney shouldn't be Batman in any TL.
Sorry - I don't buy him as anyone or anything but George "The Facts of Life" Clooney. Anytime he smiles, nods, or opens his mouth, it's "Hello, I'm George Clooney. Look at me!" And yes, I know everyone else seems to have bought into that, but he wanted to take requests, so that's mine. (Besides, I have my own timeline, and I can eliminate Clooney's career quite painlessly there. Uh, spoiler alert.)
Clooney's a fantastic actor who has done some terrible films. He holds himself with dignity and swagger and I like him. I'm not sure I would keep him out of Batman, but I would keep everybody else from that installment. He could really have been a good Bruce Wayne in other circumstances, imho.
Replace the highlighted words with "overrated", "smugness", and "arrogance", respectively, and you have it
And I notice that people seem to like defending his Bruce Wayne, probably because he is
Clooney and they do not want to slight him. Look, it's okay. He was bad in
Batman and Robin. Full stop. We don't have to make excuses for him. Even Olivier gave a few bad performances (and Olivier he is
not).
TheInfiniteApe said:
And yeah, try to make the prequels better (I recommend watching "The Phantom Edit"). Perhaps less pretty and only the absolute necessary CGI would go a long way too. Cast them better as well, methinks. You should have NO problem doing that.
Now here's where I agree with you, 100%. (Please don't think I'm deluded for disliking The Great Clooney, everyone!
) The best way to get what you're suggesting done is for Lucas to collaborate more openly with others. His second-in-command, Rick McCallum, is unfortunately a yes-man of the highest order, so it'll have to be someone else. ColeMercury's suggestion of Darabont might work - or, if you're feeling particularly morbid, you could always kill Lucas off entirely - he specifically left the filming of the prequels to Spielberg, who
definitely would not do any worse than Lucas did. I also agree with casting changes, as already mentioned.
Maybe, maybe not. I'm not as knowledgeable on video games as I am genre TV and movies, but we'll see (if you have some suggestions, have at them).
All right, some general suggestions:
Prevent the EA Pac-Man from gobbling up some of the best developers in PC history: Origin, Bullfrog, Westwood, and Maxis. Origin is probably too late to save completely at this point, but at least keep them autonomous (and prevent Chris Roberts from leaving to pursue his ill-fated dream of becoming a movie director - that saves the
Wing Commander franchise).
And when the time comes,
please ensure more diversity in mainstream (or Triple-A, as they are known in the industry) titles than the endless parade of first-person shooters, all set in the same dreary brown-and-grey worlds. Spare the people of TTL the monotony we've all had to suffer through. That said, a neutral piece of advice:
Doom will probably do even better ITTL. But that might work to my advantage; burnout from these kinds of games early on could result in a "deader than disco" effect.
And, in the interests of full disclosure, as a Nintendo fanboy and loyalist:
Prevent the split between Nintendo and Square. This means
Final Fantasy VII (or 64, or whatever they'll call it) on the *Nintendo 64, which means the JRPG boom of the late 1990s will benefit
that system (notoriously RPG-dry in OTL). The reason they had a falling out was because Nintendo wanted to stick with cartridges instead of switching to CD-based media (after the falling out with first Sony - leading to the PlayStation - and then Philips - leading to the CDi), and changing that might overlap too strongly with
Cronus Invictus for your tastes, so I realize that's a long shot. But still... real, official sequel to
Super Mario RPG! (
Paper Mario never did it for me, sorry.)
A potential way to keep the relationship going is to have the 64DD add-on (think Sega CD for the N64) see the light ITTL. That might keep Square onside. It will also save "Earthbound 64", which later became
Mother 3 for the Game Boy Advance (and, unfortunately, never saw an official release outside of Japan). A 64DD add-on almost certainly means another main-line Mario platformer in the late 1990s (the six-year gap between
64 and
Sunshine IOTL remains the longest to date).
And, because I have a soft spot for Nintendo's old rival: keep Sega in the console game. Or at least have Sonic continue to appear in games similar to those from the Genesis era. (No weird redesign, no changing of Robotnik's name, no new friend in each game, etc.)
I realize I'm probably not going to have a lot of allies on some of my suggestions. Oh well. When all is said and done, vultan, this is
your timeline, and you should do things the way
you want them done. Thanks for giving all of us the opportunity to make some suggestions, but I'll definitely continue to read along no matter how many of them are followed
