The independence movement is still around, and quite popular, but it's more to the extent as Republicans in places like Canada or Australia OTL. Also, Hindutva continues to be a problem, but India's Muslim population are protected under law as relations between them & the Hindus remain tense, but cordial.
Not a lot. It's almost the the point where Franco-British control is only on paper & everyone knows it. It's why the independence movement isn't as big as it otherwise would be.
Not a lot. It's almost the the point where Franco-British control is only on paper & everyone knows it. It's why the independence movement isn't as big as it otherwise would be.
The Spanish Free Soviet Republic is currently led by Dolores Ibárruri of the PCE, in partnership with the PSOE and Republican Left. The coalition works with the CNT-FAI to manage the Republic's economy.
The Nationalists (who reside in the Spanish State) are relatively unchanged with Sanjurjo still retaining leadership, but the Falangist movement has gained a lot of ground between now and then.
There's a pretty strong communist movement, that's kept out of power, but come close at times, especially the "Red Summer" in the late 60's and early 70's.
The independence movement is still around, and quite popular, but it's more to the extent as Republicans in places like Canada or Australia OTL. Also, Hindutva continues to be a problem, but India's Muslim population are protected under law as relations between them & the Hindus remain tense, but cordial.
While the Revolution in America brought radical change to the film industry, the one thing that stayed the same was the audience's demands for more motion pictures.
The screwball comedies that grew out of Breen-era restrictions on content exploded in popularity with the production code of the MPPDA left in the dustbin of history.
Pre-revolution screwball comedies often tweaked the noses of Breen's censors by skirting the line as closely as possible without crossing it. The snappy fast-paced dialog, physical comedy, and lampooning of the class differences between the rich and poor were an enormous success.
Following the revolution, the sexuality that had been surgically excised from the screwball comedy was put back in, films that were forced to hide sexual and romantic tension behind verbal sparring between the sexes no longer had to hide it, but kept the same wit and dialog pace.
But an enormous shift in the way Americans would view motion pictures was coming, and from an unlikely place.
In the months and years following the Revolution, the Secretariat for Construction and Housing had put together standardized sets of floor plans for new housing communes as part of their war against the last vestiges of capitalism by replacing the cramped tenement housing with more modern communal living spaces.
What caught the attention of several film collectives, most notably Radford Street, Gower Street, and Larkershim, was that part of the standardized amenities for the housing commune was a communal kitchen and a common dining area. But what made the film collectives take notice was a small provision for a 16mm projector and an empty space to be occupied by a future television projector when it becomes available.
A film projector effectively being in every home was a game changer. Audiences no longer had to go out to the movies when the movie could come to them.
The Worker's Film and Photo League (and later PBS) would be providing newsreels to the new housing communes, to be played during meal times. But Nat Levine, the newly-elected head of the Radford collective saw an opportunity for more than just a simple newsreel or cinema newspaper.
In near defiance to the received wisdom of socialist realism being the accepted form of artistic expression and of the common practice of bringing the highbrow entertainment of the bourgeoisie to the people en mass, Radford would focus on light entertainment that focused primarily on entertainment instead of being part of a greater socialist project.
Although an evolution of the screwball comedy, the subscription comedy soon morphed into an entirely new genre of comedy.
The format chosen was that of a single 300 meter reel of 16mm film. This gave a running time of 27 minutes and 20 seconds, just long enough that two episodes could be played over the course of an hour long meal.
Levine found ways to reduce the costs without compromising on working conditions. The stories would be serialized, allowing them to use the same stable of actors for a particular series, the locations would be limited to a handful of sets, usually a home or a workplace.
By 1938, Radford Motion Picture Collective was in full production on their first subscription films. The inaugural series, Bringing Up Baby, starred Katherine Hepburn, Cary Grant, and Virginia Walker. Hepburn plays a scatterbrained socialite named Susan Vance who had lost her wealth in the revolution, leaving her with only her pet leopard Baby. Grant meanwhile plays a paleontologist named David Huxley who is in a relationship with Alice Swallow, played by Virginia Walker. The premise is that Vance meets Huxley and Swallow by chance, and having confused a paleontologist for a zoologist, and asks him to take a look at Baby, while there, Vance falls hopelessly in love with both Huxley and Swallow.
Bringing Up Baby ran for 13 episodes, usually focused around Vance's increasingly hare-brained stunts to get the amorous attention of both Huxley and Swallow. The series ended after 13 weeks, with all three of them getting together at the end.
Radford's subscription film business launched to a modest success, with the growth limited by the number of housing communes built. But for those who had moved in the housing commune, the light comedy fare was a welcome addition to their meal times, leading to many positive reviews.
Soon afterwards, many other collectives began to retool their film serial productions into the new format, with the 600 meter reel being used for hour long serialized dramas, with the 300 meter format being used for lighter fare.
By the end of the post-revolutionary era, Radford had fully committed to the subscription film model, with Gower Street also fully committing to subscription films with the larger Olive Street and Lankershim Collectives also dipping their toes in it. Unfortunately, with the drums of war banging, the subscription film industry was placed on hold in order to accompany the war effort.
The Communal Theater - From Redundancy to Community
It has been said by scholars across the pond in the FBU that the capitalist mode of production is the most efficient ever devised. Their counterparts in the Comintern would vehemently disagree, that capitalism creates redundancies until it collapses in a crisis of overproduction. In no place is this more apparent than in the explosive growth of the Second Republic's movie theaters in the roaring twenties.
Prior to the revolution, it was not uncommon for film studios to own every step of the production chain, from production to exhibition. By 1933, 60% of all movie theaters in the old United States were owned by the big five studios (Paramount Pictures, Metro Goldwyn Mayer, Warner Bros., Fox Film, and Universal).
Due to the monopoly practices enabled by the 1904 Northern Securities decision, pre-revolution studios had a stranglehold on the industry, with the then-recent switch from silent to sound forcing many smaller studios to consolidate or go bust. Even the smallest of cities would have entire streets lined with only movie theaters, each one owned by a different studio that would only play that studio's respective oeuvre, with a handful of independent theaters that felt the squeeze from the big five.
By 1927, with more movie theaters than needed in towns that could conceivably support them, the average number of people per screening went down, even as overall movie theater attendance went up. Faced with a crisis of overproduction, Universal took the unusual step of lowering the price of their theater's tickets from 50¢ to 40¢. Fox Film followed suit and lowered their prices to 45¢, an act soon followed by Paramount and Warner Bros. The smaller "poverty row" studios like Columbia and Mack Sennet were already struggling with the transition from silent to sound, and a price war could ruin them.
With the impending price war on the horizon, the studio executives began to panic. To combat this, Louis Mayer called a meeting of the heads of the four largest studios in Hollywood and asked them to meet for drinks at the Wilshire Country Club's Clubhouse after hours.
It was here that the now infamous "Wilshire Agreement" was made.
Under this gentlemen's agreement, Paramount, MGM, Warner Bros. and Fox Film would lower their ticket prices to 40¢ and raise them by 10¢ annually. The agreement also instituted the practice of "checkerboarding." In each city, neighborhoods would be divided up between the big four, with each studio only placing their theaters in their specific neighborhoods. The resulting maps, when the movie theater "districts" were overlaid on top of them, gave the maps the appearance of a colorful checkerboard, leading to the name.
Figure 1. Studio Territory Divisions of Chicago c. 1930[1]
In 1928, the first year of the agreement, per-screen revenues rose, despite the lowered prices and increased number of theaters.
By 1929, the big five had raked in record-breaking profits, while the smaller poverty row studios were struggling to keep up.
In February of 1930, Black Monday, the stock market crash that precipitated the start of the great depression hit the movie industry hard. The American proletariat had seen their standard of living collapse almost overnight. The studio's massive amount of real estate assets had become a liability overnight. But for all of the ability for the big five to weather the storm, the smaller producers like Columbia, Mack Sennett and United Artists were in even worse straits.
From Black Monday in 1930 to the MacArthurite Putsch in 1933, the percentage of movie theaters owned by the big five skyrocketed from 60% to a whopping 80%. Facing bankruptcy, Columbia pictures was forced to sell off all of their theaters to the various big five studios, Mack Sennett Studios were having an increasingly difficult time finding exhibitors who could show their movies as independent movie theaters began disappearing as a result of the Depression.
The onset of the great depression forced the studios to divest their less profitable theaters. With the capitalist economy of the second republic in a tailspin, new tenants for the closed theaters frequently could not be found, leaving them abandoned. In many places, these now vacant theaters would be expropriated into union meeting halls for the W(C)PA.
The lobbies that once took tickets and sold concessions now became mutual aid kitchens, the auditoriums that had once screened Charlie Chaplin and Douglas Fairbanks became auditoriums for Norman Thomas' presidential campaign, and soon these abandoned cinema palaces became centers of community.
With the advent of the Second American Civil War, the theaters became bunkers, as white shelling drove people out of their homes, the ubiquitous movie theater became a place of shelter; for the few theaters that had begun to sublet space to concession operators, the kitchens that once sold popcorn became places of mutual aid.
By the time the dust settled at the end of the Second American Civil War, the many now-abandoned movie theaters had become places of community, with the restaurants that had popped up around them before the Great Depression having been turned into communal kitchens with the theater auditoriums becoming places for public speaking before becoming a place for the people to kept abreast of the post-revolutionary world through the WFPL's newsreels and cinema newspapers.
It was from this adaptive reuse of the existing theaters that the Secretariat for Construction and Housing that inspired the inclusion of an adaptive screening room into the standard designs for the new housing communes.
Common Archetypes and Stock Characters
The Abandoned Heir: Many subscription films from the 1930's feature the abandoned heir as a comic relief character. The abandoned heir is somebody who had been an heir to a large fortune before the revolution, and now functions as a fish out of water in the post-revolutionary world. This character is notable for their clumsy ineptness at basic tasks the American proletariat would have found commonplace. Most commonly appearing in pre-war films, and almost entirely disappearing after the war.
The Out of Touch Apparatchik: A mid to low level functionary for the Stavka. Frequently characterized as being out of touch with the local workers and unintentionally replicating the behavior of the old bosses. Began to appear in films and serials with more prominence after the Revolt of the Cadres.
The Eternal Revolutionist:Havana Delenda Est. To this character, the revolution should not have stopped at Florida Straits and that MacArthur's regime in Cuba needs to be overthrown immediately. During the detente period in the 1970's, they were often considered by the other characters to be an out of touch crank.
The Liberated Woman: One of the few stock characters of the subscription film that was gender-specific, the liberated woman is somebody who took to the new forms of liberation with great gusto after the revolution, often shirtless as a symbol of liberation and in order to titillate audiences. Often portrayed as ambisexual, the liberated woman was determined to tear down the social shackles of the old society and woe be upon those who stand in her way.
List of Notable Subscription Films from the 1930's and 1940's
Bringing Up Baby (1938-1939): Katherine Hepburn, Cary Grant, Virginia Walker. A formerly wealthy Heiress (Hepburn) sets her sights on a mild-mannered paleontologist (Grant) and attempts to insert herself into his relationship with his partner (Walker). Ran for 13 episodes.
The Bluth Family (1939): Edward Horton, Walter Connolly, Oliver Hardy, Olive Borden. Follows the story of the heirs of the once-wealthy Bluth Trust real estate empire who suddenly have to adapt to the post-revolutionary world after their parents absconded to Cuba and Britain with the majority of the family fortune, leaving them stuck in the UASR. Ran for 10 episodes.
Flash Gordon (1936): Buster Crabbe, Jean Rogers, Charles Middleton, Priscilla Lawson and Frank Shannon. Focuses on the adventures of the titular hero against the menacing Adolf the Abominable, Emperor of the Planet Doitsu. Based on the Alex Raymond comic strip of the same name. Ran for 13 episodes
The Squad (1937): Centers on a group of female Public Safety agents ("Pubs") as they foil a plot by the sinister "Sons of the Cross" to destroy several key dams and flood large areas across the United Republics. Ran for 10 episodes.
Othello (1938): A modernized retelling of Othello, with Othello a Caribbean born WFRA officer and Iago an abandoned heir. Ran for 5 episodes
Esther and Mark (1938): A riff on Romeo and Juliet, with feuding Irish and Jewish families. A rip-off of Anne Nichols Abie's Irish Rose. Ran for 9 episodes
John Carter and the Red Star (1940): Tells the story of ex-Union soldier John Carter and his encounter with the strange collectivist society located on the planet Mars. Combines elements of Edgar Rice Burroughs' John Carter with Alexander Bogdanov's Red Star. Second John Carter adaptation after Bob Clampett's animated version. Ran for 12 episodes.
Batman (1943): Lewis Wilson, Douglas Croft, J. Carrol Naish, Shirley Patterson. Follows the titular vigilante (and his alter ego, ex-bourgeois apparatchik Bruce Wayne) and his young ward Robin (Dick Grayson) as they foil the sinister plot of a Japanese fifth column hidden on the West Coast. Based on the popular Syndicated Features character of the same name. First and only appearance of the Golden Age Batman in live-action. Ran for 15 episodes.
From Screen to Screen
With the war effort on, the work on television quickly turned towards it's using in military applications, with the Workers and Farmers Revolutionary Navy interested in using it for missile and bomb guidance. Both of the Radio Research Laboratories in Camden New Jersey and Princeton New Jersey continued to work on television in their off hours, with the daytime work being reserved for improvements to RADAR and more standard radio communications.
Across the Atlantic, however, word from MDSS agents had revealed that Germany had been developing a TV guidance system for their existing steerable bombs and missile (Referred to by the military shorthand, Manual Command to Line to Sight, or MCLOS). Fearing that this could be used to improve the precision on bombing attacks on American and Soviet shipping, the Navy ordered a reactivation of their previously dormant television projects in order to develop a counter to this new technology.
The breakthrough came in 1944 with the invention of the Image Orthicon tube. A joint effort by Albert Rose, Paul K. Weimer, H.B. Law, and John Logie Baird had produced a tube that could be made inexpensively and operate in daylight conditions.
By 1945, the Mark I Ordinance Visual Guidance System (ORVIGS) had entered into mass production, seeing limited use in the final days of the war as a way to make precision bomb drops that would minimize proletarian casualties.
With the war over, the work turned towards the development of television as a form of mass communication. Baird's experience with Berlin's television salons and with his own electromechanical system in Britain had shown him the limitations of a small picture size, and thus he had focused on creating a projection system that would allow a televised image to be projected onto a larger screen, aiding in clarity.
Baird had been working on the development of a projection tube for television since arriving in the United Republics, having built and demonstrated a prototype in 1939 for the People's Secretariat for Communication.
Figure 2. Baird's projection television demonstration from 1939. Please note the use of a two-projector setup as opposed to the later standard of three.[2]
Baird's 1939 demonstration had been convincing enough to the Secretariat of Communication that he had been requested to repeat the demonstration for the People's Secretariat for Construction about the possibility of adding a television projection setup into the standard designs for new housing communes. Having worked on and off on his projection television setup during the war, by 1946, Baird had refined the standard design for a television projector to use three tubes with overlapping pictures.
While Baird's original plans called for two projection tubes, Rose and Weimer had convinced Baird that a three tube setup would work better, as it would provide adequate brightness during daylight hours, while allowing each tube to be run at a lower power level in the evenings to preserve their life, and would allow for an easier upgrade path for a future color system.
With the standard plans for a housing commune calling for a 16mm projector in a common space alongside space reserved for a future television projection system, all that was needed was a clear standard on how that signal would be encoded and broadcast.
In order to create that set of standards for television going forward, the People's Secretariat for Communications formed the Television Standardization Commission (TSC) in 1946 to create a standardized method of broadcasting television.
Setting the Standard
The Television Standardization Commission was tasked with a single goal, to create a standard encoding and decoding format for television broadcasts to use. While England had settled on adopting Marconi and EMI's 405 line system, the UASR hadn't yet settled on a single standard for TV broadcasting, with the WFRN using a low-resolution 441 line system developed by the Camden Radio Laboratory for the purpose of bomb and missile guidance, and civilian experiments in TV broadcasting before the war using a wide variety of standards. Philo Farnsworth, John Logie Baird and Edwin Armstrong all felt that a standardized broadcasting format was needed and that a higher resolution standard than the pre-war 441 line system would be better.
The final agreement was released in 1947 with television signal encoders and receivers being manufactured shortly afterwards to support it.
The Commission had been able to come to a consensus rather quickly in regards to a resolution of 625 lines, as it was thought at the time that 625 lines could provide a high enough resolution to accurately capture all the picture information in a single frame of 35mm film. Where the conference nearly came to blows was over frame rate.
Representatives from the Office of Film Technology were pushing for a 48hz standard while the people from Camden labs favored a 50hz standard.
OFT wanted 48hz as it would mean that the subscription films and serials that they had already been producing could be played back without distortion due to the faster display. The Camden lab wanted a 50Hz standard as it was easier to integrate with the existing 50Hz electrical grid.
After back and forth arguments, it was decided to use 48Hz with broadcaster stations given the option of broadcasting at either 48hz or 50Hz, and that 48hz and 50Hz tuners would be made available.
The final standard called for a separate receiver box that would be a 4U 48cm box with 8 selectable tuning slots. This box would be connected to a television display via a 75 ohm coaxial cable, which was envisioned to be a projection type device, although it could also be connected to a direct-view display if desired.
ComIntern Television Standard
Format Name: Television Standardization Commission
Abbreviation: TSC
Year Adopted: 1947
Adopted By: All Comintern aligned countries.
Number of Lines: 625
Number of Visible Lines: 576 interlaced
Refresh Rate: 48hz or 50hz (48hz only after 1958)
Closed Captioning Support: Yes (Added to standard in 1971, mandated in 1975)
Secondary Audio Program: Yes (added to standard in 1977)
Channel Width: 6MHz
Related Standards: CTSC (Color Television Standardization Commission, adopted 1958, added color support) ATSC (Advanced Television Standardization Commission, adopted 1987, added 1152i high definition video), DTSC (Digital Television Standardization Commission, adopted 1999, standardized support for digital encoding of broadcast signals)
Alliance of Free States Television Standard
Format Name: CCIR System A
Abbreviation: System A
Year Adopted: 1936
Countries Adopted By: All AFS-aligned countries except for Cuba, South Italy and Rhodesia.
Number of Lines: 405
Number of Visible Lines: 376 interlaced
Refresh Rate: 50hz
Channel Width: 5MHz
Closed Captioning Support: Yes (Added to standard in 1973, mandated in 1992)
Secondary Audio Program: Yes (added to standard in 1975)
Related Standards: MBCS-A (Marconi-BBC Colour System, adopted 1952, Color broadcasting standard, backwards compatible with existing black and white sets)
Americuban Television Standard
Format Name: American Color Television / Sequential Color Modulation
Abbreviation: ACTV & SCM
Year Adopted: 1960
Countries Adopted By: Cuba, South Italy, Rhodesia*
Number of Lines: 525
Number of Visible Lines: 480 Interlaced
Refresh Rate: 60Hz
Channel Width: 6MHz
Closed Captioning Support: No
Secondary Audio Program: No
* Rhodesia switch from MBCS-A to SCM in 1965, though the RBC still broadcasts in both MBCS and SCM
/net/global/http:co.na/uchronia/forum/high-modernity-1848-to-1946/
Thread: Is an earlier adoption of television in the UASR possible?
TheAVGeek said:
I was reading about the early history of television in both the UASR and the FBU. It struck me at how many articles at the time made a huge deal out of the slow adoption of TV in the comintern, and that seems almost paradoxical to me given that Television was invented in the UASR, and yet the comintern was so late to the game on widespread adoption.
So I guess my question is, if the UASR was able to have wider spread TV adoption earlier, how would that change things culturally?
Not this myth again… Farnsworth didn't invent television, John Logie Baird and Issac Shoenberg were far more responsible for inventing television than Farnsworth. But to answer your question, I don't really see much of a difference, maybe the Second Cultural Revolution doesn't go as far as it does if people have other things to do than each other I guess.
First of all, there are lies, damn lies and statistics. People in the UASR had just as much access to television in those days as anybody in the FBU. Those numbers you cited assumed that only one person could watch a TV at a time. In actuality, most of the TV systems that were in use after the war were projection setups that allowed hundreds of people to be watching the same thing. Compare that to the FBU where you had a single family of five all cramming around a 15 inch tube.
Second of all, the reason that the UASR was so slow in adopting the TSC and later the CTSC systems was that their engineers looked at the unholy mess that was the MBCS-A standard used by the FBU and tried to get it right the first time, which they did. And again, even though officially the UASR didn't adopt the CTSC color system until 1958, plenty of shows from that time were filmed in color and distributed via color film on 16mm, so again, it's extremely misleading to say that nobody in the UASR was watching color TV until 1958.
But OP's question is pretty much moot. It wasn't what we'd call television now, more like home cinema, but it was a major source of entertainment for people in the post-war period.
Like FallingOutsideTheNormalMoralConstraints said, the UASR had a wider audience for TV shows than the number of TV sets produced would imply. I think though that the question that the OP is really asking is: 'What if the UASR's TV programming was more like the FBU?'
That's hard to answer for the simple fact that most of the TV shows from the 1950's in the FBU are simply lost. A lot of those shows were broadcast live with only the most popular shows being recorded on kinescope or onto tape if they were very lucky. Had the UASR gone down a similar road, with an almost immediate jump to live programming for everything, the styles of shows that early TV's production limitations favored would have been more popular at the start, and you'd see more multi-camera shows like The Hancock Show or The Goon Show in the UASR, as opposed to what actually happened where they'd just broadcast film serials.
The first installment of my favorite series, The Quatermass Experiment, is mostly lost for this reason. Goddamn live broadcasts.
It also led to wackiness like the EBC live broadcast of Thomas Lawson's flight being lost, except for a crappy home recording. I believe the loss of the Lawson broadcast led to all broadcasts being recorded.
Ah yes, the EBC and their wonderful policy of erasing anything that's been stamped as "No further interest." Honestly, as badly aged as the Hancock Show is, I'm like 90% convinced that the reason that film/TV scholars over there hold it out as the most historically significant TV of all time or whatever is just because it's one of the few shows from that era that's still around.
Even if it's because it's on endless re-runs during the day on the 'eeb. As poorly aged as it is, and oh boy has it not aged well, it's still better than the talk shows on ITV.
It's especially fun and not at all annoying when you're trying to write a paper about the ITV Pop Quiz controversy and none of the shows in question have any surviving copies, which means that you have to write the entire paper using secondary sources. Go on, ask me how I know this.
I know the film Quiz Show with Geoffrey Rush and Joanne Willey as the two contestants at the heart of the scandal had to use set photos, surviving contestants, and like three surviving kinescopes to recreate each episode.
I know that movie! It's good but it has a lot of the usual caveats about making a movie about actual events. Namely that the events are shown in a compressed time scale and so on. But the personalities and the events are accurate, it's just that in real life it took place over several years while the film compresses it down to a few months.
I wrote a whole goddamn paper on this so buckle your seatbelts. So, it's 1955 and the FBU's first independent TV network is launched, called ITV. Unlike the EBC, ITV is not funded by the FBU's government so it has to rely entirely on private capital for funding, which means that it earns its revenue by selling advertising slots during the shows, which was a new concept for TV at the time. (Yes, I know that for most people in the FBU this is obvious but I'm used to having to explain the concept of advertising supported television here)
So you have a good number of companies who are signing up to ITV to start sponsoring shows. And the genre that is far and away the most popular are the "Pop Quiz" shows. These are your basic game shows where people from around the Union are invited to the ITV studios in London and they try to answer a bunch of trivia questions for a monetary prize.
In 1958 a former contestant named Jack Reed on The £25,000 Question gets a letter published in The Times that says that he was given £5,000 to take a dive on the show. His letter is an explosive controversy and several other former contestants write letters that get published about how they were either given answers ahead of time or told to take a dive, depending on how photogenic they were.
The controversy raged on from 1958 with Reed's letter until 1961 when ITV management finally admitted to fixing their Pop Quiz shows to milk them for drama. The following season, all of ITV's slate of pop quiz shows were taken off the air, and the tapes wiped. Only a handful of kinescopes of the "fixed" shows still exist, although there's a good number of newspaper articles about it.
If you happen to be curious, that's actually why American game shows like Jeopardy or Wheel of Fortune don't give out cash prizes. They saw what was happening across the pond, and the PBS director had staunch rules in place in case something like it happened there.
How did you post about ComIntern Game Shows and leave out Klub Veselykh i Nakhodchivykh, the most popular game show in The ComIntern? I mean, yeah KVN also didn't give out cash prizes and instead had the winning team's idea implemented by the Stavka that was doing the judging.
Yeah that's gonna be a key difference. Better preservation. Although with how much power the film collectives of Hollywood have, I bet you'd see some kind of hybrid system, like having three or four film cameras on pedestal mounts like TV Cameras are and just filming it like it's live and then cutting that film together afterwards so that it's the best of both worlds. This sounds weird but it was actually a setup that Lucille Ball had proposed for The Lucy Show in order to give it a more play-life feel than the traditional single-camera method.
LeninsBeard writing out the full Culture name instead of abbreviating it seems odd, but in a good way. Like it says something about the character that seems to align with previous appearances.
Also, the idea of a quiz show without a prize seems strange to me. The idea that these prizes are needed in order to attract viewers is deeply entrenched in my brain without question. And the fact that Fake felt that TV advertising had to be explained really shows how different their world and ours are.
LeninsBeard writing out the full Culture name instead of abbreviating it seems odd, but in a good way. Like it says something about the character that seems to align with previous appearances.
Also, the idea of a quiz show without a prize seems strange to me. The idea that these prizes are needed in order to attract viewers is deeply entrenched in my brain without question. And the fact that Fake felt that TV advertising had to be explained really shows how different their world and ours are.
I mean, I assume a Quiz Show without Prizes would be about that satisfaction of knowing things or learning things?
Quiz Shows are about seeing a question and going, "Oh, Oh, I know that one!" or "Oh, I never knew that" and that's an experience that doesn't really need a cash prize, tbh.
Also, the idea of a quiz show without a prize seems strange to me. The idea that these prizes are needed in order to attract viewers is deeply entrenched in my brain without question. And the fact that Fake felt that TV advertising had to be explained really shows how different their world and ours are.
OFT wanted 48hz as it would mean that the subscription films and serials that they had already been producing could be played back without distortion due to the faster display. The Camden lab wanted a 50Hz standard as it was easier to integrate with the existing 50Hz electrical grid.
I enjoyed everything about this post but this part jumped out for me particularly: has a 50 Hz grid in the UASR been mentioned before? I love details like this
It always bugged me that converting film to analog video presented a choice of two icky kludges (shudder 3:2 pulldown or retch 4% speedup). A 24p/48i conversion is very clean but I'm curious how 40s/50s tech handles it while timing with 50 Hz current. I guess if making the kit more costly isn't a huge concern maybe it doesn't have to matter? Was that tradeoff hypothetically available IOTL? I'm not knowledgeable enough to say.
In any case I guess TTL still has to wait for square pixels...
I enjoyed everything about this post but this part jumped out for me particularly: has a 50 Hz grid in the UASR been mentioned before? I love details like this
It always bugged me that converting film to analog video presented a choice of two icky kludges (shudder 3:2 pulldown or retch 4% speedup). A 24p/48i conversion is very clean but I'm curious how 40s/50s tech handles it while timing with 50 Hz current. I guess if making the kit more costly isn't a huge concern maybe it doesn't have to matter? Was that tradeoff hypothetically available IOTL? I'm not knowledgeable enough to say.
In any case I guess TTL still has to wait for square pixels...
The time of the revolution, the grid was all over the place, with most of being 25Hz due to most of the industrial equipment using 25Hz, while other places used 60Hz or 50Hz depending on which company built their generators.
Los Angeles, for example, was on a 50Hz grid (which they were on IOTL until 1948). Post-revolution the grid was standardized.
IOTL the US didn't standardize on a grid frequency until after WW2. Here, the damage to the grid by the whites during the civil forces a rebuilding with Soviet assistance that also forces a standard of 50Hz.
Sample images of station identifier images and test images as broadcast in the FBU, with the UASR for comparison:
EBC1 Station Identifier, Circa 1952
EBC Test Card F, circa 1967
Screenshot of an early EBC Colour broadcast, circa 1952, one of the few colour programmes from the 1950's to have been recorded to tape and saved:
(Source: British Experiments with NTSC Colour)
For comparison, here is a PBS1 Station Identifier Graphic from 1955.
I'm done with a first draft of Pro Wrestling looks like in Reds! (working my way up to Owen Hart and his murder, but that's way out), could I submit this somewhere?
I'm done with a first draft of Pro Wrestling looks like in Reds! (working my way up to Owen Hart and his murder, but that's way out), could I submit this somewhere?
Discord is great for playing games and chilling with friends, or even building a worldwide community. Customize your own space to talk, play, and hang out.
Liberal Party of Australia
United Party of New Zealand
Leader
Kaila Murnain
Deputy Leader
Hutama Idris**
Ideology
Liberal Third Position
Centrism
Multiculturalism
Economic Liberalism
Pan-Australasianism
Federalism Factions
Social Liberals
Classical Liberals
"Neoliberals" (Objectivists/Market Liberals)
Motto
"A fair go for Australasia"
Political Position
Centre-left to centre-right
Colours
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The Australasian Liberal Party/澳大利亚自由党/オーストラレーシア自由党/호주 자유당 is the main opposition party in the Australasian Commonwealth and the largest centrist party in the country.
Following the merger of Australia and New Zealand into Australasia, the Australian Liberal Party and the United Party of New Zealand likewise combined into a liberal bloc in the country's new parliament in 1950. Since its formation, the Liberal Party has been a dominating force in Australasian politics, even when not in power.
Compared to other parties such as National Solidarity or the Green-Progressives, the Liberal Party is more popular among regions with higher white, Indian or otherwise highly wealthy, urban populations in "core" Australasia, maintaining a chokehold on most of the country's state capitals.
When it was formed in 1950 with the merging of Australia and New Zealand's parliaments into Australasia via the Anderson Protocol, the Liberal Party under the leadership of George Forbes won the nation's first ever federal election with a slim majority government. Over the years, Liberal has been the incumbent party in parliament on and off again against their rivals: the National Solidarity Party, to whom they recently lost the 2017 federal election to after spending most of the 21st century as the reigning party.
Ideology
The Australasian Liberal Party, hence its name, supports liberal policies wherever possible. The major ideological current is that of the so-called "Third Way": a centrist ideology inspired by the Keynesian school of economics taking right-wing market economics and combining it with social progressivism in an attempt to create what they believe is "a truly meritocratic and permissive Australasia", though this is often criticised from both the left, who accuse the party of moving the overton window further right, and conservatives who see the Liberals as "ceding ground to the communists".
The federal branch of the ALP also has frequently pushed for more power to state governments, so, unsurprisingly, they're regarded as the party most willing to work alongside state governments, even if they're from opposing parties. This has led to a common joke among Australasians that "When the Liberals are in power, it's like New Zealand never joined".
The party's other main policy is encouragement of immigration to the country (provided said immigrants don't hold "extremist views"), as they view Australasia as "a nation of immigrants" and "the world's cultural melting-pot". While this is considered a radical move by some, particularly by those of more conservative mindset, this is considered to be an expected result of the "Populate or Perish" policy implemented in 1936. Similarly, they've taken a supportive stance on the promotion of Aboriginal, Maori and other Pacific Islander cultures.
The Liberals push hard for greater relations with the rest of the Alliance of Free States, particularly the Franco-British Union and other Commonwealth nations. They've even gone a step further, and have advocated for a "Commonwealth Federation" for members of the Commonwealth, as well as Franco-British dependencies, calling to mind the "Imperial Federation" proposals from the late-19th and early-20th centuries. Though other nations have yet to sign onto the idea, this has not deterred the Liberals in their pursuit for this goal.
Perhaps the Liberals' biggest pitfall however is their bad tendency of making enemies with the parties on the crossbench stemming from an unwillingness to cooperate. Ironically throwing their self-proclaimed nickname as "The party of compromise" out the window, at least on the federal level.
Factions
In the 70+ years that the Liberal Party has existed, the party has developed several internal factions within its structure. However, these mostly fall into one of three major factions designated by the media.
Classical Liberals - The oldest of the factions and still quite influential to this day, the Classical Liberals, often called "Liberal centre" tend to be moderate or even ambivalent towards social issues, and prefer focusing on pushing free-market reforms. When the other two factions need to pass legislation, the Classical Liberals are often the lynchpin needed to get bills through. They are presently led by former Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull.
The Classical Liberals originally made up the core of the party, and were the main founders of the Australasian Liberals from the Australian Liberal Party and United Party of New Zealand, including Prime Minister Forbes. They dominated the party for many years up until the mid-80's with the Australasian Labor Party's dissolution, with many leftists and activists moving onto the Liberals and allowing the Social Liberals to gain a foothold in the party.
The Classical Liberals, as the name suggests, promote Smithsonian economic policies, favouring a free market, laissez-faire economy with economic interventionism when necessary in order to assure political and economic freedom. They often present themselves as the rational, moderate alternative to not only National Solidarity and the Green-Progressives, but to the other two factions within the party.
The faction is also the most committed to Australasia's role in international affairs, being the ones to place the Australasian Pound on the London Stock Exchange. They seek to further integrate Australasia into the world economy and seek trade deals with any willing capitalist power.
They see most of their support from upper and upper-middle class white voters in continental Australia and the North Island of New Zealand.
Social Liberals - The currently-reigning wing of the party. Nicknamed "Liberal left", the Social Liberals are progressive liberals who prioritise the implementation of stronger progressive reforms, social programs and welfare schemes, as well as placing an emphasis on the multicultural policies of the party. The current leader of the party is former party General Secretary Kaila Murnain.
The Social Liberals have existed in the party since at least the early 60's, though they never truly rose to prominence until the collapse of the Labor Party in the 80's, leading to many former Labor supporters moving over to support the Liberals. Under the leadership of Paul Keating, the Social Liberals would take the party to win the 1993 federal election, and an unbroken streak of Liberal governments from 1999 to 2017.
The faction has since undergone an overhaul in its image thanks to the press generated from the Deputy Opposition Leader: Hutama Idris from when he was still Minister of the Interior. Presenting a more populist appeal to the party, reinforcing the Social Liberals' image, as well as the Liberal Party's as a whole as "the party of the young" due to both his start as a grassroots activist and his early use of the internet and his podcast "Question, minister" in the mid-2000's as a vehicle to spread his message and policies to a younger and more tech-savvy audience at a time when the internet wasn't as essential to everyday life as it is today.
Compared to the other factions, the Social Liberals are less keen on Smithsonian economics, instead preferring a Keynesian model of production to prevent the market from becoming uncompetitive with stronger safety nets for the less fortunate, as well as more socially-progressive policies, such as the legalisation of gay marriage in 2011.
Most of their support comes from middle-class white and Indian voters, though Idris's rise to prominence in the party has given them a lot of support from Papuan and Southeast Asian voters.
"Neoliberals" - A newer, fringe wing of the party. Often called "Liberal right" by the media, the so-called "Neoliberals" were formed from former members of the Liberty League of Australasia who were considered too moderate to tow the party line and left to join the Liberal Party. They believe in a government that leaves the machinations of society to the individual level, with as little intervention as possible. Their current leader is former Treasurer Josh Frydenberg.
In the late-90's the objectivist party, the Liberty League of Australasia, ended up purging many of its membership for being what they described as "statist infiltrators and communist spies", which more or less just amounted to extremist elements of the party removing moderates from the organisation. Many of these former Liberty League members were welcomed into the Liberal Party, and syncretised the "Third Way" with Randian economics to create an ideology they called "Neoliberalism".
While not nearly as extreme as their party of origin, the Neoliberals retain many of the core tenets of Objectivism, such as the hands-off approach to the handling of the economy and other issues. While views on social issues among Neoliberals vary, some of them tend to lean conservative on so called "positive freedoms" such as socialised healthcare and public transport, though are kinder towards "negative freedoms" like same-sex marriage or the legalisation of recreational marijuana. All Neoliberals however are united in their opposition to Australasia's trade unions, attempting to curb their influence at every turn.
They're also the most lionish towards the Comintern and the global spread of communism, seeing it as Australasia's and the AFS's duty to stop its rise and contain, possibly defeat it wherever they can. This policy has drawn the ire of both the Classical and Social Liberals, as well as the other major parties and the Australasian public as a whole, who don't want Australasia to join another war so soon after the Indonesian war.
Though not as popular as the other two wings, the Neoliberals hold about 20% of the party's membership and support base, and are more popular than the Liberty League from which they came from. Most of their support comes from CEOs, shareholders and other white upper-class voters.
Leaders of the Australasian Liberal Party
George Forbes (1950, died in office) (Classical Liberal)
Harold Holt (1950-1961) (Classical Liberal)
Nazeef Bowne** (1961-1967) (Classical Liberal)
Neville Roland** (1967-1969) (Classical Liberal)
Akemi Nakajima** (1969-1979) (Classical Liberal)
Paul Keating (1979-83, 1991-2003) (Social Liberal)
Whitney Dobson** (1983-1991) (Classical Liberal)
Jennifer Zhao** (2003-2007) (Social Liberal)
Malcolm Turnbull (2007-2013) (Classical Liberal)
Gilligan Rumsfeld** (2013-2014) (Classical Liberal)
Kaila Murnain (2014- present) (Social Liberal)
Prime Ministers of the Australasian Liberal Party
George Forbes (1950, died in office) (Classical Liberal)
Harold Holt (1950-1956, 1958-1961) (Classical Liberal)
Akemi Nakajima** (1973-1976) (Classical Liberal)
Paul Keating (1993-1996, 1999-2003) (Social Liberal)
Jennifer Zhao** (2003-2007) (Social Liberal)
Malcolm Turnbull (2007-2013) (Classical Liberal)
Gilligan Rumsfeld** (2013-2014) (Classical Liberal)
Kaila Murnain (2014-2017) (Social Liberal)
