I meant stuff like Young Justice, Sym-Bionic Titan. That kinda good stuff!
WI: Pop Culture in a world without 9/11?
- Thread starter woweed
- Start date
It made people pretty sensitive about showing American cities get destroyed in cartoons, for obvious reasons, as well as terrorism plotlines in general, but other then that I'm not sure it really directly affected them very much.
Pretty much yeah. I really don't think no 9/11 would change anything in that regard.
Maybe the economy would crash around 2009? Imagine that happening at the same time as a massive terrorist attack. The cultural shock would be hard to overestimate.
No, the crash happened when it did because that was the date a lot of the bad mortgages came due. There's a movie called The Big Short with Christian Bale that does a really great job of explaining exactly how the whole thing happened, I'd highly recommend it if you are curious.
But without 9/11, would the crash be put off by a couple of years? Or would it still have happened around 2008?
It would still happen at the same time it happened OTL, because that was the date that a lot of the bad mortgages and loans came due.
Wait. You could've predicted the recession by looking at payment dates?
Yes, and many analysists did. A lot of them even made money off of it because they knew it would happen. It's just that most people at the time chose to ignore them.
Wow! How did people profit from the economic collapse they foresaw?
They shorted varyious stocks and bonds that they knew would collapse. I'm not a finance student so I don't quite understand the details of how it works though.
There's a scenario where 9/11 happens exactly five years from the OTL date.
September 11, 2006 (A TL)
A note to all: This is my first-ever TL, so please be nice. If you see anything wrong, tell me. If you all don't like this, I'll stop. 4 February 1999 Kandahar, Afghanistan Al-Qaeda leaders sat in a circle, discussing the "Planes Operation", or "Operation Big Wedding". Khalid Sheikh Mohammed...
www.alternatehistory.com
So if memory serves, somehow George W. Bush manages to win a second vote in 2004 since 9/11 happening in 2006 would eventually result in an American invasion of Pakistan by 2008.
Did the TL explore the culture of the early 2000s? Would the cultural tropes of the 90s lasted a little longer?
It's been a while since I've read that timeline. I don't recall it explored the pop-culture of the 90s extending way to the mid-2000s.
But it can be assumed the pop-culture scene for September 11, 2006 is mostly unrecognizable from our perspective. Consider that Bush manages to get reelected in 2004 when most people predicted he would just be like his father as a possible one-termer.
The butterflies are interesting here.
I think there was a genre of film that might still be popular without 9/11: movies featuring normal suburban kids whose worst enemies were adults who acted like cartoon villains. One name for this genre is "kid empowerment." But here are some examples.
1. The Home Alone series.
2. The Problem Child series.
3. The 3 Ninjas series (produced by Shin Sang-ok, Kim Jong-il's hostage director, of all people)
4. Matilda.
5. The Dennis the Menace that features Walter Matthau.
6. Newsies, which combined this kind of thing with historical period pieces.
7. Snow Day.
To me, Max Keeble's Big Move and Big Fat Liar are the last dregs of this kind of movie, and it's not a coincidence they came out in the aftermath of 9/11. The former aired a month after the attacks, while the latter came out in February 2002. Both of them feel like refugees of a bygone era since they were produced in the 90s-ish cultural time period.
Also, I am going to throw in Fairly Oddparents, as the first Oh Yeah Cartoon premiered in 1998, and its first official episode aired in March of 2001, six months before 9/11. I consider FOP to be a de facto 90s cartoon of a similar milieu when the great enemy for many kids was affluent neglect and a mean babysitter (also, smartphones mean that it is harder to act like Vicky when your actions are easier to record. The character Vicky is very 1990s since she represents the kind of bullying that existed pre-Digital Revolution)
I think these kinds of movies were kid versions of movies like Fight Club, created in a time when a historical threat didn't seem to exist and our great enemy was a sense of boredom without some domestic threat to keep us on our toes.
I am guessing without 9/11, we'd see more movies where kids defeat the evil adults around them.
1. The Home Alone series.
2. The Problem Child series.
3. The 3 Ninjas series (produced by Shin Sang-ok, Kim Jong-il's hostage director, of all people)
4. Matilda.
5. The Dennis the Menace that features Walter Matthau.
6. Newsies, which combined this kind of thing with historical period pieces.
7. Snow Day.
To me, Max Keeble's Big Move and Big Fat Liar are the last dregs of this kind of movie, and it's not a coincidence they came out in the aftermath of 9/11. The former aired a month after the attacks, while the latter came out in February 2002. Both of them feel like refugees of a bygone era since they were produced in the 90s-ish cultural time period.
Also, I am going to throw in Fairly Oddparents, as the first Oh Yeah Cartoon premiered in 1998, and its first official episode aired in March of 2001, six months before 9/11. I consider FOP to be a de facto 90s cartoon of a similar milieu when the great enemy for many kids was affluent neglect and a mean babysitter (also, smartphones mean that it is harder to act like Vicky when your actions are easier to record. The character Vicky is very 1990s since she represents the kind of bullying that existed pre-Digital Revolution)
I think these kinds of movies were kid versions of movies like Fight Club, created in a time when a historical threat didn't seem to exist and our great enemy was a sense of boredom without some domestic threat to keep us on our toes.
I am guessing without 9/11, we'd see more movies where kids defeat the evil adults around them.
As a longtime fan of the show I don't disagree here. (see username)
While FOP is a little dated, hatred for Dinkleberg is universal.
Really?
At least what some people argue that,if you see the pipeline, after toy story those movies were reduced to a few outliner,even your two last examples feel like more Network vehicle than the kid movies of the 90's
Most pre-9/11 shows do have a 90s feels in them. One example is Samurai Jack (which aired a month before 9/11) and Time Squad.
Not really. Toy Story came out in 1995.
Matilda (1996), Snow Day (2000), Max Keeble's Big Move (2001), Big Fat Liar (2002), and Clockstoppers (2002) were all "kid empowerment" films.