Hey Kids! Comics!

[Mamorien]

...and other media.

I don't find anything in the outline about pop culture -- no comics, no movies, no music, no TV; the only mention of the word "media" is in the context of their occasionally bestowing super names. Which is kind of sad, because the history of pop culture in the IST world was one of the bits of sub-creation that really made it feel lived-in.

(Of course, I'm using the term "sub-creation" not in the Old Philologist's full meaning, that any "creative" act undertaken within the Primary World was merely a reuse of the materials wrought in the only truly Creative Act, but in the more common sense of corroborative detail intended to give verisimilitude to an otherwise bald and unconvincing Secondary World.)

Some of this stuff, obviously, is going to be on the timeline; dare I hope other bits would be covered in the history-chapter sections for the time-frames they come out of? (The rise of the Big Five comics companies in the WWII section; M*A*S*H and "Psi in the House" in the late-70s section...)

Whether or not that's how it ends up working, this would be a good place to brainstorm. I've just signed onto the Release of Rights thread, so any new ideas I come up with are available for the Silverbook. (My brain just spat out that name for it; I have no regrets that I can detect.)

[Bob Schroeck]

Don't worry, it'll be there. There was a sidebar about it in the original, and it'll be in IST25, too. I couldn't list every sidebar in the outline, but I do plan to have a box on pop culture for every era.

And while I'm posting in this board, I might as well note that I still haven't heard back on the proposal. The submission guidelines have an explicit "no prodding the editor" clause, so I am being a good boy and waiting patiently to hear something, anything, back.
-- Bob
---------
Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.

[Mamorien]

I still haven't heard back on the proposal. The submission guidelines have an explicit "no prodding the editor" clause, so I am being a good boy and waiting patiently to hear something, anything, back.

 

I figured it was something like that, and that you'd update us when you had something to update with. I assume you still don't, but I've been mulling over ideas for that thread, and I wanted to address that paragraph before I posted anything else. And with that said, my actual contribution as it currently stands (to go in a box accompanying the 1964-1975 section):

"Communism, Telepathy and the Beatles" (1964): Reverend Daniel J. Noble's self-published tract, denouncing the four lads from Liverpool as actually being sinister Soviet psychics brainwashing the youth of America to reject Jesus and embrace Karl Marx, was typical of a whole genre which warned against that newfangled "rock and roll" music as either a Communist plot or a Satanic one. It wouldn't be any better remembered today than the rest, except that Noble was a member of the far-right Fred Birch Society, and the media picked up on the ludicrous attempt to demonize the squeaky-clean mop-tops, tying it to earlier Bircher hyperbole (such as the statement that then-President Eisenhower was "a dedicated, conscious agent of the Communist conspiracy") and craziness (their continued wish that Joe McCarthy had been allowed to continue hunting for Reds under everyone's bed). The letter backfired on the Society, making them a national punchline. [Possible connection to Goldwater defeat. Is Reverend Noble an uncle of President Kenneth Noble?]

"Psi in the House" (ABC, 1972-1976): I don't have an *exact* OTL counterpart to work with, only 60s supernatural sitcoms, but here's my current rough draft: [Mike Brainard's life revolved around secrets -- his own attempts to keep his telepathic powers secret from nosy neighbors, and other people's attempts to keep their secrets out of his head. ("Can Becky keep Mike's surprise party a surprise?") Mike's power level and skill fluctuated as the plot, and particularly the comedy, demanded.]

"M*A*S*H" (CBS, 1972-1983) and "AfterMASH" (CBS, 1983-1995): The 4077th Mobile Army Surgical Hospital's resident psychic, Walter Eugene "Radar" O'Reilly, originated in much the same mold as Mike -- in the original novel and movie, his telepathy, clairaudience and precognition had served mainly as a means for zany antics, and he had even been the sort of person who would use his esper abilities to cheat at poker. Gary Burghoff, the only member of the movie's cast to carry over to the TV series, saw how the new actors were putting their own stamps on the established characters and felt freed to re-imagine Radar as basically innocent; his earlier raucousness was eventually explained as the result of him redacting his own personality to fit in with his squad-mates. [Or just reading their expectations from surface thoughts. Does he eventually leave the show as in OTL? Regardless, he's presumably a presence on the follow-up series.]

[robkelk]

I vaguely recall in our timeline a TV series from the early-to-mid '70s called "The Girl with Something Extra" - the "extra" being esper abilities. I also recall the existence of an older TV series called "Doctor in the House", of which I only know the title. if you conflate the two, do you get a correspondence to "Psi in the House"?
--
Rob Kelk
"Governments have no right to question the loyalty of those who oppose
them. Adversaries remain citizens of the same state, common subjects of
the same sovereign, servants of the same law."

- Michael Ignatieff, addressing Stanford University in 2012

[Mamorien]

Wikipedia confirms the existence of The Girl with Something Extra (which in OTL only ran for one season, NBC 1973-4, when I was too young to notice), but tells me that the Doctor in the House series were British (1969-77, 1991) and Australian (Doctor Down Under, 1979-80), so strike me as difficult to merge. Mike and Becky in my version of Psi in the House are courtesy of an illustration on p.85 of GURPS Psionics (classic).

[Bob Schroeck]

I clearly remember The Girl With Something Extra; now that you've brought it up, I'm wondering if I shouldn't include it and other real "supernatural comedies" in the side bar -- like Nanny and the Professor and Bewitched. (The latter has its inspiration and origins far enough back that they might have been unperturbed by the timeline differences...)

Oh, and no further word yet from SJG. I'll give'em a year to ruminate on it and then prod Steve about buying the rights back, like I wanted to do ten years ago.
-- Bob
---------
Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.

[Mamorien]

Including at least an overview of supernatural/superhuman sitcoms sounds like a plan to me. And the mention of Bewitched reminds me of its role in inspiring the first "magical girl" manga, Mitsuteru Yokoyama's Sally the Witch, though this may not have played out the same if the history of manga on Krypton-1 follows Warriors' World. (I've actually come up with an in-universe justification for that, if you're interested in using it here and/or in DW.)

Are you counting the year from now, or from when you sent off the proposal? (In your shoes, I'd be tempted to do the latter; the part of me that thinks that way is the part that contributed Dezz Staarlinn to io.iou back in the day.)

[Bob Schroeck]

And the mention of Bewitched reminds me of its role in inspiring the first "magical girl" manga, Mitsuteru Yokoyama's Sally the Witch, though this may not have played out the same if the history of manga on Krypton-1 follows Warriors' World. (I've actually come up with an in-universe justification for that, if you're interested in using it here and/or in DW.)

I'd certainly be interested in seeing it, but I can't swear to usage until then.

Are you counting the year from now, or from when you sent off the proposal?

From when I sent it off, which was around the fifth of December. So we're very near the halfway point now.
-- Bob
---------
Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.

[Mamorien]

The germ of the idea came from knowing that, in OTL, Osamu Tezuka (father of the mukokuseki character design*), studied to be a doctor. Wikipedia provided more details and even an exact Jonbar hinge:

'When he was younger, Tezuka's arms swelled up and he became ill. He was treated and cured by a doctor, which made him want to be a doctor. However, he began his career as a manga artist while a university student, drawing his first professional work while at school. At a crossing point, he asked his mother whether he should look into doing manga full-time or whether he should become a doctor. At the time, being a manga author was not a particularly rewarding job. The answer his mother gave was: "You should work doing the thing you like most of all." Tezuka decided to devote himself to manga creation on a full-time basis. He graduated from Osaka University and obtained his medical degree, but he would later use his medical and scientific knowledge to enrich his sci-fi manga, such as Black Jack.'


Maybe the Warriors' World Tezuka took the other choice and became a kindly doctor who occasionally drew educational manga. The prospect... I won't say appeals to me, but it interests me strangely.

[* "nationless" aka "you gotta have blue hair and big eyes".]

[Mamorien]

And, while I'm having another of those breaks in the logjam:

* 1924-1945

The Shadow (CBS Radio, 1930): Pulp publisher Street & Smith created this character to host a radio show based on their Detective Story Magazine; when confused customers' requests for "that Shadow magazine" led to confused newsagents, Street & Smith decided to meet demand by giving the Shadow his own adventures in a twice-monthly magazine. Great War ace Kent Allard had learned the art of hypnotism in the Mysterious East; now, he turned his prodigious mental powers to fighting the evil that lurks in the hearts of men. The character influenced vigilantes both fictional (National Periodicals' Bat-Man, first published in 1939) and real (Joseph "The Stalker" des Champs, active in New Orleans in the early 1940s, who in a 1975 Playboy interview cited the Shadow and the Bat-Man as influences).

* 1982-1990

"If I Had a Blaster Rifle" (True North Records, 1984): Canadian singer-songwriter Bruce Cockburn wrote this plaintive, angry song after a visit to a refugee camp in Mexico, where he heard the stories of those who had fled the atrocities of the Lopez Hoyo regime in Guatemala.

* 1991-1999

Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone (Bloomsbury, 1997; Scholastic, 1998): This first volume in J.K. Rowling's story of a young wizard's magical education, set in a parallel world where mages exist in secret and other supers only in fiction, is an excellent book in its own right, and probably would have succeeded even if it hadn't been published as the Mage Age was dawning. Many critics saw parallels between the open magical warfare of the later volumes and the real-world progress of World War III; Rowling admitted to having drawn details from real life, but made it clear that the Wizarding War had been her plan from the start.

[Bob Schroeck]

Oh, nice. And I know someone brought up the IST version of the Potter books elsewhere but I think this is the first anyone's actually postulated what the series looks like there... I'm definitely going to use this, if I may...
-- Bob
---------
Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.

[Mamorien]

Go ahead. I tagged the release thread, after all.

And this gives me an excuse to elaborate on it: as I see it, the first three or four volumes look basically like the OTL versions. When the JKR of Krypton-1 asked herself "How can Harry not know he's a wizard?", in addition to him being raised by Muggles, she added the detail of it being on a parallel Earth (though, for the most part, this only comes up in the context of the Dursleys having so little "real life" context for Harry's mage-gift). If we're still keeping the notion that science-fiction became mainstream sooner than in OTL, then it's reasonable use of SFnal tropes.

For the last sentence, I had reference to OTL!JKR having said (in at least one interview) that any similarities between the GWOT and the Second Wizarding War are merely down to her drawing on real life for corroborative detail; I assume her counterpart would've done the same with WW3. In particular, she might well have felt free to have the War knock the Secrecy Statute into a cocked hat...

[Mamorien]

The Draka analogy I made on the parent forum, and specifically my latest elaboration thereon (imagining the version of the Draka novels that the Steve Stirling of Krypton-1 might have written) reminded me of a thought I've had about the Krypton-1 version of Star Trek -- that its equivalent of the Eugenics Wars replaced the "genetic tyrants" with military supers. (This also provides a reason why none of the Enterprise crew have really showy powers, are in fact limited to super-normals and the occasional esper -- more powerful supers are still distrusted "about two centuries" later.) I imagine Trek fandom holding its breath after the Chilean coup of 1973 and heaving a sigh of relief when the Edicts came down. (How the series coped with actual first and second contacts, or with the discovery of the power genes, is left for future development.)

Alternatively, both series could be part of what I have K-1 fans referring to as the "plainstream" genre -- that is, stories set in alternate worlds where metahumanity remained confined to rumor and legend until the march of science unlocked the power genes, or where those genes never existed and even the rumor and legend were based on wishful thinking and fear of natural disasters. (Wainscot fantasy like Harry Potter would be a subcategory of plainstream, at least until the final volumes.)

[Bob Schroeck]

I like that term, "plainstream". Did you coin it yourself, or is it from somewhere else?
-- Bob
---------
Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.

[Mamorien]

As far as I know or Google can discover, I came up with it myself (though I was pretty obviously inspired by the "slipstream" movement of the 90s).

[Mamorien]

How I know my brainmeats are the same as they ever were: Since the "Loon" named is canonized on p.IST67, I think it'd be an amusing meta-nod to say that he used the "Looney Toons" name early in his career, only stopping after trouble with Warner Bros.' lawyers. :->

And that, in turn, got me thinking about Krypton-1's Big Five comics companies and how they interact with other media outlets -- did Warner still acquire National Periodicals as they acquired DC in OTL, or was it the other way around in revoise? And which of the Big Five owns the Quality Comics characters? My top picks would be National, again in parallel with OTL, and Charlton, whom I envisage as successor in interest to sometime Phantom Lady publisher Fox Comics (the first company to publish a Blue Beetle character).

[Mamorien]

In GURPS Robin Hood, Edwin "Lightbolt" Washington is said to watch the Lethal Weapon movies mainly for Martin Riggs. IOTL, the movies got their name from Riggs' martial arts training, lampshaded with a title drop by Murtaugh: "I suppose we'd better register you as a lethal weapon." I occasionally wonder: in the K-1 versions, is Riggs a martial artist, a high-end super-normal, or a low-power super?