Alternate History / Western Animation

Alternate Histories in western animation TV shows.

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• Blue Eye Samurai: The show takes place in the early Edo Period, with the main action in 1656 and 1657. While the show is very accurate on details of Japanese life at this time, it makes two major changes to history for the plot: the Itoh clan rule instead of the Tokugawa, and Japan is unfamiliar with rifles, notable because many pivotal battles of the earlier Sengoku Era made use of them!. The final episode also features the shogun being murdered by a white man alongside the majority of his royal court, things that would be pretty major deviations of history one way or another.
• The Boondocks episode "Return of the King" involves a (non-canon) alternate history scenario, in which Huey Freeman imagines what would happen if Martin Luther King Jr. had been put into a 32-year-long coma instead of dying from his attempted assassination in 1968. He wakes up in the year 2000 and experiences the social changes of a post-9/11 America, and is deeply mortified by the modern state of African-American culture. He finally snaps and launches into a huge N-word-laden tirade about how all his sacrifices are being wasted by today's generation of black people, and then goes into self-imposed exile in Canada, where he dies of old age in 2020. But King's rant triggers a massive new social movement, Oprah Winfrey being elected President of the USA, and the founders of BET apologizing for its existence.
  Huey: "It's fun to dream."
• Castlevania (2017) is a Historical Dark Fantasy show set in the 15th century, in which southeastern Europe (and apparently other regions of the Old World as well) were infested with and terrorized by evil sorcerers, vampire warlords, and their armies of undead demonic monsters, with some of those vampire warlords having conquered and ruled their own personal fiefdoms with enslaved human subjects. Also, the famous fictional vampire Dracula seems to exist in this world in place of the real Vlad Dracula Tepes.
• In Evil Con Carne, the League of Nations never disbanded, Abraham Lincoln is still alive and President and the world is fairly peaceful, save for the Villain Protagonist leading a terrorist group trying to Take Over the World. Since it pretty much shares canon with The Grim Adventures of Billy & Mandy, it seems that the Soviet Union never fell either.
• The Fairly OddParents!:
  • The show has one of the screwed-up wishes of Timmy Turner result in England winning the Revolutionary War; the biggest changes in the present day are things like people drinking tea instead of coffee, flying the Union Jack, saying things like "Pip pip and cheerio," and society tending to Victorian dress, clothing, etc. The usual mayhem results as Timmy tries to set things right; naturally his parents don't notice any difference at all.
  • When Jorgen banned Timmy and his fairies from ever returning to March of 1972, he said they'd still be allowed to visit other months of that year on the proviso they don't interfere with the election of President George McGovern. However, nothing in the series has been described as being a consequence of Richard Nixon losing that year's presidential election.
• Family Guy:
  • The episode "Road to the Multiverse" had Stewie and Brian travel through multiple universes, some that fall under this.
    • Stewie's ultra bred pig came from a universe where Christianity never existed, causing the world not to experience the Dark Ages and technology thus being more advanced by a whole millenium.
    • The duo also travel to a universe where the U.S. never dropped the bomb on Hiroshima, causing the Japanese to take over America and possibly other countries.
    • In another universe, the Cuban Missile Crisis resulted in World War III due to Nixon being President at the time, all because Frank Sinatra was never born and so never campaigned to get Kennedy elected.
  • In the episode "Back to the Pilot" Brian and Stewie went back in time to January 31, 1999, the date that the series began. While they are there, Brian (against Stewie's wishes) warns his past self about 9/11, which allows Brian to prevent the Twin Towers from falling. As a result, however, George W. Bush doesn't get re-elected because he was unable to use terrorist propaganda in his favor. Bush recreates the Confederacy in Texas and spreads it through eight states , which triggers the Second Civil War. In the future, because of the Second Civil War, the world has been turned into a post-apocalyptic warzone due to nuclear war.
  • In "Meet the Quagmires", Peter asks Death to go back in time to the day he first asked Lois out. He ends up partying the entire day and messes up his chance. Peter and Brian go back to the present and find that things have radically changed for the better. Al Gore became president and turned America into a green paradise. Crime is virtually nonexistent, and technology has, apparently, reached the level of The Jetsons. However, Lois is married to Quagmire. Brian begs Peter not to go back in time again, but Peter is determined to get Lois back. He ends up fixing things... almost. Roger lives with them now for some reason.
• Freakazoid! found himself flung back in time a little before 07 December 1941, and saw a few Japanese planes coming towards Hawaii. The end result after he interferes? The Cubs win the World Series, world peace breaks out, cold fusion works, Rush Limbaugh is a bleeding-heart liberal, Euro Disney is a success, Sharon Stone becomes a good actress, no more Chevy Chase movies, and President Brain rules over the US.
• There was a similar variation in Futurama as Fry, Leela, Bender, etc try to restore things after scrambling the American Revolution in a vain attempt to "improve" the Fry family history.
  • For some reason changing the Revolution often tends to be played for laughs, with the alternate outcome largely cosmetic.
• Justice League featured a relatively conventional version of this in the three-part story "The Savage Time". The immortal Vandal Savage sending back a laptop computer with detailed notes on the history of the Second World War, the German Reich and on advanced 21st century technology. Past!Savage then uses this knowledge to invent powerful weapons that the Nazis use to repel the Allies on D-day, and presumably the oncoming Russian armies (though there's zero mention of that). He then proceeds to... get this: sent warplanes with an invading army to America, probably because the situation at home was just that good. In the end, it resulted in a world where at least America (but most likely all of it) is ruled by Savage with an iron fist.
  • In that same episode, two high-ranking German officers groan that while Adolf Hitler himself was a pain to deal with, he at least listened to his generals, unlike Savage. Anyone who knows anything about Hitler knows that he was famous for ignoring his strategists' advice and making impossible demands of them. This may have just been a flub on the writers' part, though.
  • In another episode ("A Better World"), we're introduced to an alternate universe where Lex Luthor became President of the United States; this, The Flash dying before the episode starts, and a speech from Luthor on how he and Superman need each other to be of any importance to the world, end up leading the remaining members of the Justice League to become the Justice Lords.
• In Koala Man: a young Maxwell used Australia's state of being 15 hours in the future from America to send a telegram to the Titanic in the past to warn them of their impending doom, allowing them to avert it. This allows the ship to reach America safely, and a cursed Egyptian mummy queen to escape her sarcophagus in the ship’s cargo and lead America to victory in both World Wars, eventually becoming President. However, while signing a peace treaty with the U.S.S.R., she and Leonid Brezhnev fell in love and the two abandoned their people for the moon. As a result, America fell into a lawless, war-torn, chaotic wasteland, with the exception of Hollywood, which broke off and drifted out to see as an island.
• Neo Yokio: Aside from the history of demon slaying, the World Trade Center is still standing in "Neo Yokio" and everything south of 14th street seems to have been consumed by rising sea levels or sunken into the Atlantic (though people still live there in waterproofed townhouses accessible by bubble vehicles).
  • The Soviet Union is still a nation, suggesting that either A.) the Soviet Union did not dissolve in 1991 like in our timeline or B.) technology was more advanced than our own timeline.
  • Japan and Italy seem to have been combined into a single nation called "Giappone." The flag is a white field with a bifurcated red/ green circle in the center.
  • Additionally, Neo Yokio itself appears to be a sort of independent city-state, with its own participant in the international races and no reference to influence from the U.S. government.
  • There's evidently a place in the Southern US called North Cackalacka. Considering the implied politics of Neo Yokio, it's possible that it's an independent entity or that it's a U.S. state. (It might also be a region akin to Appalachia, if Sailor Pellegrino's twangy accent is anything to go by.)
    • Cackalacka is another way of saying Carolina, so she could be saying she's from North Carolina.
• Samurai Jack is set in an alternate version of Earth that has been conquered by Aku, a shapeshifting alien demon god, since the ancient past up to the far future. Under his tyrannical rule, the world has developed into an anachronistic dystopia where primitive, ancient societies somehow still coexist with advanced, futuristic civilizations. After taking over all of Earth, Aku has been expanding his empire across countless other planets in space, which has introduced all kinds of extraterrestrial species to Earth.
• Steven Universe, though this wasn't made explicitly clear within the show itself until the latter half of the first season.
  • Various differences include gem imagery on American currency, the existence of the state of "Delmarva"^note located on the real-life Delmarva Peninsula, and the fact that the Gems (Crystal or otherwise) and their artifacts have been on Earth for around 6,000 years.
  • In "Love Letters", it's revealed that the equivalent of Hollywood in the Steven Universe... universe is in Kansas. Specifically, their version of Kansas City, rather than the state ("Kansas" is apparently not used as a state name, so the city never changed its name).
  • It's revealed in "Keystone Motel" that Pennsylvania is instead called Keystone^note one of the real-life state's actual nicknames in their world.
  • It's been confirmed that World War II never actually occurred, at least not in the way that we know it.
  • There are also several geographic differences, implied by their general appearance as new channels of water on the map to be wounds on the landscape from the war 6000 years ago, which might also serve by the butterfly effect to explain some of the more unusual bits of alternate history.
    • The show consistently portrays Florida as being an island off the coast of Georgia rather than an attached peninsula.
    • Alarmingly, an enormous crater sea — with a Gem facility right at its center — has replaced about half of Russia's landmass.
    • A made-with-creator-input graphic novel has a globe in the background reveal the fact that there's a massive channel between the Mediterranean Sea and the Indian Ocean where the Nile Delta, Sinai, and Israel/Palestine should be, which has far more alternate history implications than the show could ever possibly address (or be allowed to address).
    • And that's not even getting into the continents! To start, Africa is missing a big chunk which has been relocated to South America, and that's ignoring the islands between the two. Iceland doesn't exist. The western part of Australia is further south and separated by a narrow sea. So, unless the Gems were responsible, the Point of Divergence was probably sometime during the Triassic Period.

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