1941 Events (Cultural)

Notable events, 1941 (Part II)

January 13th: Inner Sanctum, a radio mystery drama based on the popular series of the same name, debuts on Mutual Broadcasting.

January 20th: On an express run to DeLeon-Debs, the Debs Zephyr, a streamlined electric trainset, sets a speed record of 130 mph between Boston and New Haven along the Northeast Corridor.

January 30th: Produced mostly prior to the war, Hyperion’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is released, an adaptation of the Lewis Carroll novel of the same name. It receives mixed reviews, with its more psychedelic nature a stark contrast with Snow White.

February 6th: The Union Service Organization (USO) is created and officially sanctioned by the Revolutionary Military Committee, to provide live entertainment and other social functions for the soldiers serving in the Soviet Union. Haim Kantorovich becomes the “First-Amongst-Equals” of the organization (with former Cultural Secretary Louise Bryant becoming the first chairman”)

February 26th: Lincoln Films releases Colonel Washington, directed by Paul Robeson and starring James Baskett (37 years old) in the lead role of a 25 year old Great War soldier turned disillusioned veteran turned Spartacist (based on various Black soldiers serving in World War I), as part of their propaganda contract.

March 15th: Crystal Night , a drama about Kristallnacht , is released by Warner Bros and Columbia. The release was protested by the Silver Legion and denounced by Vice-President Charles Coughlin.

March 20th: After several months of resonating and swaying due to wind, The Tacoma Narrows bridge in Washington SR collapses into the Puget Sound. No casualties were reported, but work on a new bridge is stalled.

April 5th: Joe Simon and Jack Kirby’s Boy Commandos (created before the two were drafted into the war) is released, featuring an international group of “street kids” helping the war effort, including American “Brooklyn”, Soviet Fyodor “Freddy” Cherenko, Chinese Song Ling, and Mexican Pedro Salvador.

April 13th: The Commander Columbia film Iron Thunder set in South America releases, depicting the vicious battle against reactionary forces in the continent and the foiling of a plot by Salgado’s henchman; the Viridian Demon, to plunge America into darkness. Notably, this film heavily features Valiente over the others of the cast, and is often considered the film where he came into his own as a character.

June 12th: The first film of the Commander Columbia live action serials to not be overseen in any way by Samantha Waver, Trial in Fire at the Volga , is released. While her involvement in the live action serials was already rather minimal, leading to the serials diverging quite widely from the animated films in many ways, Rubyologists often consider this film to be the start of the process that would see Waver eventually recede from absolute creative control.

July 4th: Silver Streak, a thriller-comedy film about a murder on an express train from Boston to Debs, is released. The film features many big name actors and comedians at the time, and is loosely based on both the Debs Zephyr’s record setting run in January of that year and a non-fatal crash at New York Penn Station in 1935.

July 21st; The Chicagoland reactor is successfully brought online for the first time, to much fanfare from the team led by Enrico Fermi and Rudolph Peierls.

August 1st: A Brit in the Revolutionary Air Force , a British film produced by MGM (whose owner, Louis Mayer, is also a member of the Patriae Society) , is released, following Edmond Reilly (based off Esmond Romilly) a former British member of the XV International Brigade joining the American WFRAAF to join the fight in the USSR. The blatant pro-intervention, communist sympathetic slant of the film does little to dent its success, becoming the highest grossing film of the year.

August 8th: Rio Revolution! , a documentary on the crushed Rio Commune, is released by the First Motion Picture Brigade as a side project for Latin America.

August 12th: A conscript in a training camp in Phoenix, Arizona is found dead by the side of the road. It’s believed he was the victim of a “crime of ethnic hatred” for his Japanese heritage.

August 13th: An American adviser waiting for deployment to the Brazilian front is killed in a Tijuana bar fight. The incident highlights several similar incidents with American soldiers in Mexico, prompting a review by the WFRA supervised by General Sing Kee; commander of the American Expeditionary Force in the Southern Cone.

August 30th: Jack Warner and Harry Cohn are called before the United States (Americuban) Senate to testify about so-called “anti-German” films produced by their studios Warner Bros and Columbia, respectively, like Crystal Night and I Was Hitler’s Driver. Both state that, while they oppose Nazi anti-semitism and support neutrality or even anti-Nazi intervention, they do not tell their filmmakers “to support any political positions or anything that is needlessly disparaging of foreign nations.”

September 2nd: Jack Warner requests NBI protection following death threats made by Legionaires. MacArthur and William Randolph Hearst privately tell him to begin work on “test films” to possibly change public opinion in the event of a war. Warner proceeds to ask that Great War scripts dating from 1921 be dug up for “material”.

September 8th: Don Quixote , an animated feature by Hyperion, is released, featuring the characters Morty Mouse and Goofy in the roles of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza. The film (mostly the result of wartime restrictions limiting other potential choices) is regarded as a lesser feature following the artistic achievement of Fantasia.

September 28th: Superman , a short animated film produced by North Avenue Animation, is released, based on the Syndicated Features character of the same name. It features the character battling a Nazi sleeper cell and their giant robot.

October 1st : On Wednesday night, Game 1 of the World Series is played at Grant Field in Cleveland, Ohio. The Cleveland Combrigs (formerly the Cleveland Indians) defeat the Cincinnati Reds in which starting pitcher Mateusz Iverson pitches a shutout in front of a crowd of 41,990 people.

_October 3rd:_The Maltese Falcon , an adaptation of Dashiell Hammett’s famed novel of the same name, is released, starring Barbara Stanwyck as a gender swapped Sam Spade.

October 6th : In a contentious Game 5, the Cleveland Combrigs secure a World Series pennant by walking the Reds off in the bottom of the 9th, securing a 5-4 victory at home.

October 9th: Wallis, Princess Consort releases a book, The Princess Diaries, detailing her romance with King Edward…. interspersed with her racist condemnation of communism and the American Revolution and her open admiration of Adolf Hitler.

October 21st: Suprema, the creation of William Moulton Marston, Elizabeth Holloway, Olive Byrne, and artist Harry Peters, makes her debut in Solidarity Comics All-Star Comics.

October 25th : The crossover half-film: “Libertas Invicta ”, featuring Captain America and Commander Columbia is released to wide syndication with the two embodiments of the American Way meeting for the first time to battle fascism.

November 8th: Jessica Mitford, British IVA volunteer with the WFRA, publishes One Year of Teutonic , to try to inform the audiences in neutral countries on the conditions of the war on the front. Her sister Unity Mitford (a Nazi associate) denounces her sister as a “blood traitor”, while other sister Diana, an MP for Oswald Mosely’s New Party (and Mosley’s rumored lover) neutrally states that the matter of intervention is “complicated”.

November 11th: Leonid Spartak, husband and co-worker of Samantha Waver, agrees to a joint interview with Walt Disney to discuss the role of animation as both a creative art and a means of expression proletarian culture; defending the usage of fantastical elements by creators such as himself, his wife, Samawal, and Disney and making his now famous (and often misattributed to his wife) quotation that “the point of fiction is not to tell of the world as it is, but to speak of it in a way that provides some fulfillment beyond what merely being told about something can give; even if that fulfillment is simply in fun.”

December 13th: Bob Montana’s teenage schmuck Archie Andrews makes his inconspicuous debut in Pep Comics #22.

December 25th: Christmas Day: While on the homefront, Americans celebrate their second Christmas in wartime trying to conserve resources, soldiers attempt to make due with artificial Christmas trees and canned rations instead of Christmas turkey. *[WPA]: Works Progress Administration *[NBI]: National Bureau of Investigation