I'm going to assume that EA's Command & Conquer: Generals probably doesn't get made.
WI: Pop Culture in a world without 9/11?
- Thread starter woweed
- Start date
Maybe Super Robot Monkey Team Hyperforce Go! will be a real Nicktoon ITTL then?
The Civil War nostalgia was fading though. The only two films from that era were Cold Mountain and Gods and Generals and the latter is especially horrible as a film. By that point it had been fifteen years since Ken Burns’ documentary and the History Channel was more or less in Hitler Channel mode.
Also, I think you mean 150th. Maybe you’d see more of an interest in it around 2010 when the 150th anniversary was.
Yeah, I feel we wouldn’t be so sensitive to the term. I think we’d also see less focus on middle eastern terrorism end maybe we’d have more focus on domestic terror. Granted would Bush try to focus more on the by then false narrative of left wing terror being common? Granted maybe to seem more compassionate it’d still pay to be against all types of domestic terror, even those that might be closer to conservatives.
Some thoughts:
- A LOT less anti-Muslim sentiment. Before 9/11 most North Americans hardly knew what Islam was. Afterwards Islamophobia was absolutely everywhere and it took many years for there to be any significant level of push back. To this day it is still far more common than it was before 9/11. I have a hard time imagining it will ever go back to pre-9/11 levels in my lifetime. The Muslim terrorist stock villain would be less common in pop culture.
- A bit more sympathy for various Muslim groups around the world. In the 2000s all sorts of nasty stuff going on in Chechnya, Palestine, Xinjiang, Kashmir, etc was justified as counter-terrorism and a lot of westerners were inclined to accept all that without question and dismiss any criticism out of hand.
- A bit more anti-China sentiment. Before 9/11 pop culture was starting to put a lot of energy into building up China as the new enemy. I remember there was a big furor over that crashed spy plane in 2000. Pundits were saying it was the end of the thaw in US-China relations, that it would cost China the olympics, etc. All of that was quickly forgotten after 9/11 and focus didn't really shift back to China until the Obama years, and even then it got sidetracked by conflicts in the Middle-East. Also criticism of China's treatment of Uighurs has only really become common in the last few years, without 9/11 it may come sooner.
- A bit more anti-Russia sentiment. Before 9/11 the post Cold War honeymoon with Russia seemed to be coming to an end. There was the dispute over the 1999 Kosovo war. Around 1999 is also when Russia was starting to complain about Nato expansion, something it had been open to as recently as 1996. There was a lot of western criticism of Russian war crimes in the 2nd Chechen war. Then 9/11 happened and overnight everyone decided that Putin was a cool badass and Chechens were all evil terrorists. Suspicion of Russia didn't return to pre-9/11 levels until the Russia-Georgia war, and arguably not fully until the 2014 conflict in Ukraine. Russian mobsters and disgruntled ex-Soviet politicians/soldiers/KGB were sort of becoming stock villains in the 90s and this would probably continue through the 2000s.
- Before 9/11 there was this growing pop culture preoccupation with white male ennui. Movies like the Matrix, Fight Club, and American Beauty all tapped into. Stories about people who didn't face any particular oppression, were doing ok in a material sense, but were still dissatisfied and unfilled with their lives. This stuff mostly went away after 9/11 when the sense of ennui was replaced with constant anxiety about real dangers.
- 9/11 changed the way building explosions looked in movies, with giant dust clouds becoming a lot more common.
- There were plans for an Independence Day sequel but after 9/11 they decided it wasn't the right time to continue a cheesy light-hearted series that was full of landmarks getting blown up.
- There were also plans for a Forrest Gump sequel that the creators said they abandoned because of 9/11.
- Others have mentioned the removal of the WTC from the first Spider-Man movie. The movie also probably wouldn't have that cheesy shot of Spider-man under the gigantic flag that was shown in all the ads.
- 24 would be very different and a lot less popular on televison.
- Homeland probably never exists at all.
- The second half of Star Trek Enterprise is completely different. The 3rd season was all about a 9/11 allegory and much of the 4th season was about dealing with the consequences of the 3rd.
- The entirety of Battlestar Galactica is completely different. The show is less preoccupied with debating freedom vs security, torture etc. No Iraq war allegories on New Caprica, no Saddam trial allegory with Baltar.
- A lot fewer shooter games set in the Middle East.
- No Command and Conquer Generals as we know it. Westwood might still experiment with a new game and a different style gameplay in the C&C series but the tone of the new game would be a lot different, and it would not feature the Global Liberation Army.
- In comics Marvel doesn't do the Civil War storyline and that will have repercussions for a bunch of later storylines and the Marvel movies. My recollection is that X-Men was Marvel's biggest franchise from the 80s into the early 2000s, but around the time of Civil War and House of M the main franchise shifted from being X-Men to the Avengers. Not sure if that would still be the case without Civil War, I guess it might depend on what alternate storylines Marvel does in its place.
- Frank Miller and his comics probably remain widely popular, after 9/11 he became a lot more vocal about his politics and that turned a lot of people off of him.
- American flags wouldn't be plastered onto absolutely everything. Every news anchor wouldn't be wearing a flag pin in the 2000s.
- The worship of the military wouldn't reach such extreme levels. The constant "thank you for your service" stuff wouldn't be a thing.
- News, especially 24 hour news channels, are not as popular in the 2000s. They already existed for years before hand but after 9/11 everyone was watching them constantly.
- Before 9/11 there was a big chunk of the population that didn't pay much attention to politics or world events at all. After 9/11 everyone had an opinion on everything going on.
- In OTL a number of journalists who criticized the Iraq War and other actions of the Bush admin had their careers derailed because of it. These people would stay around without 9/11 and the news media landscape would look different.
- The Daily Show wouldn't become as popular, and it was the primary source of news and political commentary for a lot of young people in the OTL 2000s. The Daily Show might also just stick to pure comedy more, the shift to real commentary and news already started with the 2000 election but after 9/11 and the Iraq War it really kicked into high gear. The show might be less blatantly partisan too. It was always socially liberal but on other issues it still tried to be somewhat outside of partisan politics in the early 2000s. From the mid-2000s onwards the show no longer made any effort to hide the fact that it was rooting for Democrats over Republicans.
- Politically Incorrect wouldn't be cancelled, and would provide a more Libertarian-ish counterbalance to the Daily Show.
- There might be less of a backlash against South Park too which was another early influence on Millennial politics. Or at least the backlash would be delayed.
- The popularity of the New Atheists might be a bit lessened in the 2000s. A lot of their popularity can be attributed to backlash against the influence of the Christian Religious Right, but that wasn't the only cause. A lot of people who didn't identify as right-wing still hated Muslims and were looking for a "rational" justification for their views, and that drew them to people to Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens. While the New Athiests might be a bit less popular in the 2000s, the backlash against them in the 2010s would be lessened as well if they didn't get so intertwined with Islamophobia and the Alt Right. The Alt Right itself might be a bit less popular too.
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Evil Muslim as a trope would still exist. Al Qaeda was doing bombings throughout the 90s, Iran, Hezbollah, Hamas, PLO all existed in the popular consciousness as "enemies"
Wouldn't be as severe as OTL but it would still exist
Wouldn't be as severe as OTL but it would still exist
Cold Mountain is also very unlike most Civil War cinema in that it acts very specifically as the anti-Gone With the Wind
It's possible that there's still a civil war between Captain America and Iron Man but their reason for fighting is completely different.
The only thing I can think of right now is that Jackie Chan’s “Nosebleed” would probably get green lit and produced as a result.
Without 9/11, any story that features the Soviet–Afghan War will likely be more akin to how it was commonly portrayed in media when the war itself was happening in the 1980s: Heroic underdog freedom fighters taking on the evil Soviet occupiers in Afghanistan through subversive, guerilla tactics, if not just a major backdrop to a Cold War-based thriller story.
The whole (rather greatly oversimplified) part of "America backing the Mujahideen rebels, leading to Taliban and Al-Qaeda, thus 9/11 and War on Terror" has heavily colored retrospective portrayals of the Soviet Union's last big military operation. As such, media since then that features the Soviet–Afghan War often puts far more emphasis on the US's severely misplaced loyalties during that conflict and how badly it came to bite the country later on, and often the Mujahideen are portrayed as proto-Taliban fundamentalist/terrorists.
But 9/11, and without America being in a constant war of its own in Afghanistan, this war would be viewed in a similar vein as the '80s and this would be how Afghanistan is more widely known (as opposed to "that faraway hellhole we're fighting an endless war in").
The whole (rather greatly oversimplified) part of "America backing the Mujahideen rebels, leading to Taliban and Al-Qaeda, thus 9/11 and War on Terror" has heavily colored retrospective portrayals of the Soviet Union's last big military operation. As such, media since then that features the Soviet–Afghan War often puts far more emphasis on the US's severely misplaced loyalties during that conflict and how badly it came to bite the country later on, and often the Mujahideen are portrayed as proto-Taliban fundamentalist/terrorists.
But 9/11, and without America being in a constant war of its own in Afghanistan, this war would be viewed in a similar vein as the '80s and this would be how Afghanistan is more widely known (as opposed to "that faraway hellhole we're fighting an endless war in").
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Without 9/11, I know that a few country songs probably won't be made. I'll list a few of them now:
- Where Were You (When the World Stopped Turning) by Alan Jackson
- Where the Stars and Stripes and Eagles Fly by Aaron Tippin (Tippin had written the song with Kenny Beard and Casey Beathard for his 2000 album People Like Us, but it didn't make the cut and was only recorded on September 13, 2001 and released four days later. However, given that this song was written a year before 9/11, it still might be recorded and released at a later date)
- Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue (The Angry American) by Toby Keith (The song was both inspired by 9/11 and Keith's father, who died on March 24, 2001, less than six months before the attacks. Without this song, Toby Keith's feud with The Dixie Chicks probably won't happen)
IIRC, every single Spider-Man film has at least one shot with Spidey next to an American flag. That probably doesn't happen at all (or as much) ITTL.
I suspect that the Hawaii 5-0 remake is also rather different.
Instead, they might actually get the chance to do the Romulan War, instead of just the build up to it. Unless the executives shoehorn even more Temporal Cold War shenanigans in.
*Slaps forehead*
Oh man, I forgot! Muhammad Hassan! Man, that whole run of WWE would be basically non-existent without 9/11. Mark Copani would probably just go on to be a forgettable midcard act that had a few years on Smackdown.
Oh man, I forgot! Muhammad Hassan! Man, that whole run of WWE would be basically non-existent without 9/11. Mark Copani would probably just go on to be a forgettable midcard act that had a few years on Smackdown.
Ah yeah, if anything he would play a latino character or be a proto enzo amore?
He'd have like, a week where he's in the FBI and then stop having him be in the FBI without explanation.
Per tradition when wrestler playing a foreign character drop the accent later on
Ecoterrorism was a media fear in the nineties, it would probably continue. In my main TL there's still a second Iraq War (for different reasons) but Kaczynskian Anarcho-Primitism is the War on Terror boogieman and spawns a whole cluster of competing schools of thought.
Power Without Knowledge, it's the worldbuilding thread for a book I want to write 🤔
From what I gathered in @Iwanh 's story:
- Spider-Man (2002) would probably feature that scene with the helicopter stuck in the WTC.
- Resident Evil (2002) might be titled as Resident Evil: Ground Zero (its original working title) and might have featured the scene where Alice and Matt drive to a zombie-infested New York with guns on their vans. The outer establishing shot shows a ruined New York City with the WTC still standing. Also worth to note RE was released just less than a year after 9/11 and the anthrax attacks. Then there's also 28 Days Later, which kicked on the fast zombie trend.
- Speaking of zombies, 9/11 did have an impact on the genre, especially on the genre of bioterrorists. The later releases of Resident Evil games focused on this. I think it would just be slightly modified from OTL.
- Collateral Damage (2002) might have been released in late 2001 instead of early 2002.
- GTA III (2001) might feature that level with a terrorist.
- Lilo and Stich would have that plane-hijacking scene as well.
- We would have also seen more movies about plane hijackings.
- American Idiot would not be released.
- Where Is The Love by Black Eyed Peas is either butterflied away or would come in a different form, instead focusing on famine, disasters, or another regional conflict.
- South Park and the controversial rapper Rucka Rucka Ali will still make parodies, without the stereotypes of Arabs and the Bush foreign policy.
- American Dad would probably be a parody of Tom Clancy's techno-thrillers instead of Arab terrorists as the main opponents.
- The enemies shown in most movies and video games might be the stereotypical renegade Russian, Chinese, Saddam-like figure (Saddam himself is portrayed as the villain in The Simpsons, as in the case of Metal Slug), or Val Verde type of Latino villain. Consider that in the 1990s, techno-thriller novels had China as the villain since the USSR was now gone. While we did have Arabic characters as villains in True Lies and Executive Decision, they were still overshadowed by rogue Russian generals, Eastern European terrorists, or Latino drug cartels during this period.
- The sequel to Forrest Gump may have been made here.
- SOCOM: U.S. Navy SEALs might take a different route, as with most U.S. Special Operations fictional media.
- Call of Duty: Modern Warfare might still be made, but it might not have that level that was a carbon copy of Iraq. It might be like Splinter Cell or Metal Gear in which operators would need to stop a renegade general of some sort.
- True Lies probably gets a sequel.
- Brickmania and Brickarms do not produce the terrorist LEGO minifigure.
- The song Empire State of Mind by Jay Z and Alicia Keys might not include the lyrics "Long Live the World Trade".
- We would probably not have seen the Doomsday/Apocalypse Craze in the 2000s-early 2010s.
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