When the Wind Blew: a P&S Open Thread
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I suggested a timeline about where all the SNL alumni up to that point were during and after, but it really went nowhere.
There's two things about P&S I think get under-covered, but which I think are huge. One is AIDS, because you're going to have a plague without proper infrastructure for screening, prevention and treatment. Two is that the Exchange is a scattershot of wherever OTL people were at the time, and that there is a whole drama to play out based on them being wherever they were. And I don't know the details of this, so this isn't fact, but these are just examples of possibilities: Bill Murray in LA doing an interview on the Tonight Show, Arnold Schwarzenegger driving through Illinois, Michael Jackson flying to Paris on a private jet, all at the moment nuclear war erupts, the world is instantly thrown into the apocalypse, and now it's a survival drama of an interrupted normal day. Again, I don't know what any of these people were really doing in the OTL on that day, but with enough research, you could probably find out and then it is an interesting thought experiment to interrupt that normal day with a wild card of atomic war.
Those examples of possibilities regarding the Celebrities you mentioned would likely be impossible in the P&S Universe probably due to these facts.
1. The Tonight Show (As well as all Entertainment programming on Television) would have likely halted all scheduled tapings until "Further Notice" on or before February 18 due to the events in Europe and preemption's would have likely occurred for those same reasons. And in the P&S Universe It's completely all but impossible to get even anywhere remotely near Los Angeles once the World War III begins (Roads are likely one way going out and Planes landing in the area are only likely doing so for Emergencies only).
2. I could not see Arnold Schwarzenegger driving through Illinois the moment the Exchange is underway if he was anywhere in that state it would likely already be somewhere not likely to get hit (Driving through any state at that point would be impossible due to Fuel rationing and Road closures).
3. In the P&S Universe private jets would not be flying anywhere near Europe due to the situation there. They would likely make a B-Line for South America (Avoiding Cuban airspace at all costs) or somewhere that they know would not get hit and all Commercial airliners fleeing North America would likely do so as well.
In a scenario that is similar to 1983: Doomsday those possibilities mentioned are plausible.
Wherever the OTL people were at when the Exchange had began would not be exactly where they were at that exact point IOTL (The POD would disrupt that after some time). I agree that none of us know what they were all doing at that exact moment on February 21, 1984 IOTL (I surely don't know that).
In regards to AIDS the infrastructure suitable for screening, prevention and treatment of the disease wasn't likely fully in place in February of 1984 IOTL since discovery of the virus (HIV) that caused AIDS wasn't confirmed until May of 1984 IOTL and the means for screening and the medications suitable for treatment only appeared some time after that. How the AIDS virus acts post Exchange can be anyone's guess it's safe to say that scores of those infected are killed as a result of the Exchange.
Chipperback established in Land of Flatwater, with a wink and a nod, that Johnny Carson had gone home to Nebraska and was working with FEMA.
That being said, Protect and Survive Miami: End of Watch continues onward, so if any of you haven't been reading, stop on over!
In knew that part about Carson going back to Nebraska since he had likely gotten out of the Los Angeles area before the situation got ugly and every road out of the area filled up with people fleeing which would make gridlock look like Disneyland.
They were..they were examples to provoke imagination, not suggestions.
I would imagine someone like Bill Murray would be on the set of Ghostbusters, for example.
I would imagine someone like Bill Murray would be on the set of Ghostbusters, for example.
One of my favorite movies, seen it more times than I can count, and its loss is the cherry on top of the dystopian sundae.
I feel the same way about the loss of Metallica's second album. We get left with the tacky bits of the 1980s ITTL.
A very undeveloped idea of mine that never went any further was a Columbia-style emergency capital for entertainment. It was going to spin off the wrestling P&S that I also never got off the ground, the common thread being Ted Turner. Some sort of sports and entertainment city in hiding that could theoretically produce radio and TV shows. But the logistics would have been nightmarish, and I came in really late on the whole P&S phenomenon, so more's the pity.
I don't think it would be feasible for that to work out in the cold, stark reality of the post-apocalypse. However, there have been ideas like this among many of us, of the big pie in the sky rebuilding project, which the reaction is then "eh, it wouldn't really work like that in reality". Therefore, I have had the idea of taking that and running with it as a timeline. I will never write it, but someone could. The idea being characters in the world actually decide to attempt a high concept thing after the end of the world, and try to make their daydream a reality...except it actually proceeds as well as it could be expected in the real world, and the narrative is this contrast of their dream against the crippling harshness of reality which will not allow it or horrifically distorts it, ending in the failure of the dream never happening. It's all kinds of meta. So you could have Ted Turner attempt to build entertainment city, when the reality is he just becomes a poor, broke hustler (since the banks went up with the mushroom cloud) trying to "Music Man" his way into funding and support, or something like that.
Unless you mean before the apocalypse. In which case, my suggestion also works: they have this grand scheme, try to arrange it, but the best laid plans go awry, and go even more awry when faced with the disconnect between a dream and reality. And it all collapses, and ends up half finished in a dead world, or going up in atomic smoke when the bombs get dropped. It is deliciously evil to have someone try to do something which will survive after everything is destroyed, only for that to get destroyed at the same time as well.
Am rererererererererereading protect and survive a timeline, they mentioned this fellow poking fun at Protect and Survive info,
In canon It Was Written Peel is part of the BBC holdout contingent pulled back to Norton Wood etc.
I made a comment a while ago about how the war and everything of the Cold War would be viewed in the context of the ending to it, and that there would potentially be an argument that we should have nuked the Soviets when we had the chance. The argument that Curtis LeMay was right, and we should have gone in and nuked the Soviets when we had tactical superiority because we were going to fight them someday, and we did. A WW3 in 1962 would have been far less devastating than the Exchange of 1984. But there are certainly the counter arguments to that. And if you cannot think of them, there's no point in listing them.
So I was thinking about doing something brief in terms of a timeline. It would be a C-SPAN panel on the 50th anniversary of the Cuban Missile Crisis, which would devolve into a flame war hostile argument between two author-historians (a conservative and a liberal) when the topic of how the Crisis related to the 1984 crisis, while the other historians just sit back very uncomfortably. And maybe Harry Turtledove could be on there discussing his book "1985" about the alternate history of no war.
So I was thinking about doing something brief in terms of a timeline. It would be a C-SPAN panel on the 50th anniversary of the Cuban Missile Crisis, which would devolve into a flame war hostile argument between two author-historians (a conservative and a liberal) when the topic of how the Crisis related to the 1984 crisis, while the other historians just sit back very uncomfortably. And maybe Harry Turtledove could be on there discussing his book "1985" about the alternate history of no war.