Your Personal Pop Culture DYSTOPIA Timeline

We've seen people's pop culture utopia - where things go right for everyone's favorite movies, shows, video games, music, etc. But what about BAD things happening to people's favorite movies, shows, games, and music? Some examples I can think of:

-Instead of the Hays Code, the US Government institutes a much harsher code that severely hampers Hollywood as an industry.
-Elvis Presley dies at birth - just like his twin brother - resulting in less/no rock n' roll.
-The plane that took The Beatles to New York for their famous performance on The Ed Sullivan Show crashes on the way - butterflying the best of their music and potentially killing rock music.
-The John Jympson cut of Star Wars (read: A New Hope) is released instead of OTL's cut, causing the film to be only average. A sequel - Splinter of the Mind's Eye - is poorly received and is a huge box office bomb - killing the Star Wars franchise and the blockbuster as a whole.
-Saul Steinberg's attempted takeover of Disney succeeds and Disney is broken up - with Bally's and Taft buying out the parks, and Turner buying the film library.
-Video games and western animation are still perceived as children's media - unfit for adult consumption.
-A worse Columbine/September 11 leads to a much more heavy-handed censorship of media, ruining the formative years of many people.
-The United States - or most of the world - falls under a fascist/communist/Orwellian dictatorship that replaces all pop culture with state propoganda.
-Reality TV is way more popular, to the point that media corporations replace most scripted content with reality shows.

What do you guys think? What would have been a pop culture dystopia to you?

EDIT: When I mean dystopia, I mean worse than our reality. I know life sucks right now, but I'd just like to see how it could get worse.
 
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OTL is a pop culture dystopia right now, with most of the best films and games having already been made. The films that are actually good are flopping due to the philistines flocking to dull Marvel films, and the AAA game companies nickel-and-diming consumers with NFTs and microtransactions, and making everything service games.
 
OTL is a pop culture dystopia right now, with most of the best films and games having already been made. The films that are actually good are flopping due to the philistines flocking to dull Marvel films, and the AAA game companies nickel-and-diming consumers with NFTs and microtransactions, and making everything service games.
I know right now is a dystopia. I was wondering if it can be worse.
 
Can you think of something worse? Like for example, 4Kids still existing to the current day and holding a total stranglehold on the anime market in America?
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...the issue with this premise is that by far the easiest method of making a pop-cultural dystopia is to make an actual dystopia. Whether it's Nuclear War causing a civilizational collapse, or global domination of one or more horrifying ideologies (theocratic, fascist, totalitarian-communist, etc), it's kind of the easy way out to make the world suck, so the media sucks.

Perhaps more interesting would be to figure out how to make a pop culture dystopia without making a full on dystopia, although doing that without it just being a personal "nothing I like exists" would be hard. For example: Sega is never 're-established' in the early 1960s and Nintendo goes out of business in the same period, never expanding into toys or video games. Between this and a delayed or averted Great Video Game Crash, the video game industry from the early 1980s onwards is almost completely different and remains dominated by Atari for much longer, preventing numerous beloved franchises from even existing (with further butterfly effects preventing everyone from Square to Maxis from existing or establishing a foothold). This would certainly be upsetting to me since the world would be without everything from SimCity 2000 to The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, and certain genres I enjoy might not even exist....but the other games that take their place might not be bad, and someone from that universe might be upset with our universe - their favorite video game console was made by Sinclair as Sir Clive went into consoles instead of home computers and wound up being Atari's fiercest competitor.
 
...the issue with this premise is that by far the easiest method of making a pop-cultural dystopia is to make an actual dystopia. Whether it's Nuclear War causing a civilizational collapse, or global domination of one or more horrifying ideologies (theocratic, fascist, totalitarian-communist, etc), it's kind of the easy way out to make the world suck, so the media sucks.

Perhaps more interesting would be to figure out how to make a pop culture dystopia without making a full on dystopia, although doing that without it just being a personal "nothing I like exists" would be hard. For example: Sega is never 're-established' in the early 1960s and Nintendo goes out of business in the same period, never expanding into toys or video games. Between this and a delayed or averted Great Video Game Crash, the video game industry from the early 1980s onwards is almost completely different and remains dominated by Atari for much longer, preventing numerous beloved franchises from even existing (with further butterfly effects preventing everyone from Square to Maxis from existing or establishing a foothold). This would certainly be upsetting to me since the world would be without everything from SimCity 2000 to The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, and certain genres I enjoy might not even exist....but the other games that take their place might not be bad, and someone from that universe might be upset with our universe - their favorite video game console was made by Sinclair as Sir Clive went into consoles instead of home computers and wound up being Atari's fiercest competitor.
Who's Sinclair and did they really make consoles IOTL?
 
Who's Sinclair and did they really make consoles IOTL?

The point is they didn't. They made home computers, which totally aren't video game consoles, honest - William Shatner will gladly explain to you the difference (look up on youtube the ads he did for rival Commodore's VIC-20).

Sir Clive Sinclair was a slightly goofy British inventor and businessman who was a pioneer in home computers back in the 80s. One of several businesses he started, also called Sinclair, made very cheap (by early 1980s standards) 8-bit home computers in the 80s and IIRC the Sinclair ZX Spectrum was the best selling British designed computer until the Raspberry Pi. The failure of the16-bit Sinclair QL and the ongoing price wars with other home computer brands led to them being bought out by rival Amstrad, which kept selling ZX Spectrums through the rest of the 80s but slowly dwindled away.

Of course, he never made consoles in OTL - most of Europe didn't even really go for consoles at the time - but we're talking about an alternate history with massive butterflies, and a guy who once tried to sell an electric three-wheeled recumbent tricycle. It's not exactly the most probable that he'd make a video game console but I wouldn't discount the possibility in a timeline where the video game and computer industry is substantially different from OTL.It wouldn't be a dystopia... but a lot of my favorite franchises wouldn't exist.
 
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George Lucas keeps Star Wars to himself. It would be way worse than Disney. There is no Mandolorian, no new films, and to make it worse, he re-edits the 2000s trilogy during pandemic.
 
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Also, I know I posted this in the other one, but here’s what I can think of.:

The Sonic the Hedgehog series ends after Sonic 06, thus ending it on a very sour note.

So without Sonic being the mascot of Sega anymore, who’ll be Sega’s new mascot now? Can Alex Kidd return as the mascot of Sega?
 
OTL is a pop culture dystopia right now, with most of the best films and games having already been made. The films that are actually good are flopping due to the philistines flocking to dull Marvel films, and the AAA game companies nickel-and-diming consumers with NFTs and microtransactions, and making everything service games.
Meanwhile traditional TV has increasingly become a wasteland of mostly-interchangeable crime procedurals, barely-funny sitcoms, and pointless reality shows as all the high-quality programming has moved to streaming services. Those good shows online? They're all spread out across like 8 different streaming services because every big media company (and a few wannabe big media companies) started their own, each focusing exclusively on their won self-produced content. And paying for all those streaming services together is almost the same as the 500 channel cable packages the streaming services have displaced. And then to top it all off, the streaming services treat their shows not much better than the old broadcast and cable networks (Not a big enough hit after 2 seasons? Cancelled!)

And that's not even getting into all the reboots that have spread across all forms of media like the plague.
 
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