1943 (Cultural)

Major Cultural Events, 1943

January 1st: Der Fuehrer’s Face is released by the Hyperion Animation Collective, starring the popular character Donald Duck as a citizen of Nazi Germany, increasingly disillusioned by the machine he is but a cog in.

January 15th: Education for Death , produced by the Hyperion Animation Collective, is released, a stark look into how the Nazis indoctrinate their soldiers at a young age. Notable for utilizing a more limited, stylized animation approach increasingly embraced by new Chairman Art Babbitt and Animation head John Hubley, as opposed to realist approach under Disney.

January 18th: After the 1942-43 Winter Meetings were temporarily postponed in December, on this day the MLB resumes their Winter Meetings in Chicagoland. At this time, negotiations between the Musical Collective of America’s pro-am union baseball club and the MLB are completed, and it is announced that effective the 1943 baseball season, the MCA Los Angeles Sound will take the field as members of the American League.

January 30th : The 1943 meeting of the International Congress of American Football is held in Akron, Ohio, alongside the 1943 meeting of the American Gridiron Football League Players’ Association. To the surprise of nobody, the AGFL season is formally canceled for the current year, marking the third consecutive cancellation since the outbreak of the Great Revolutionary War. AGFL Commissioner Jim Thorpe, however, once again reiterates that exhibition matches between AGFL teams, and any AGFL team that wishes to compete against non-AGFL teams, is more than welcome.

February 4th : Le Rayon U(The U Ray) is published in the Belgian comics magazine Bravo , written and drawn by EP Jacobs. Le Rayon U is a direct (distinctly less political) knock-off of the popular American Flash Gordon comic strips.

February 18th: Donald in Japan, a sequel of sorts to Der Fuehrer’s Face is released by Hyperion, featuring Donald Duck now in Imperial Japan. Likely in response to criticism by Japanese Americans, the cartoon is notably lighter on stereotypes and focuses its ire towards the Emperor and the Concordists, as opposed to any Japanese civilians. Though, some stereotypes remain.

March 4th: At the 15th Academy Awards, William Wyler’s Mrs. Miniver wins Outstanding Production and Mervyn LeRoy’s Random Harvest Outstanding Artistic Achievement. Orson Welles’ The War in the South wins Best Documentary.

March 13th:Culture in War and Home , a research paper written by Jane Keller for the People’s Secretariat for Culture, describes the effects of the war on the culture at home and abroad. The paper’s citation and documentation of the Kilroy was Here phenomenon within the VOSCOM rank-and-file would later be seen as an early examination of a meme, and would be cited in the coining of the term.

March 26th:Jungle Drums , a Superman short produced by Famous Animation (formerly North Avenue Animation, formerly Fleischer Studios[1]) is released, featuring the Man of Steel fighting in the Amazon jungle against a secret Nazi-Integralist project to resurrect an Incan mummy army.

March 31st:Okhlahoma! , the first musical produced by the team of songwriter Richard Rodgers and composer Oscar Hammerstein, opens at the Brecht Theater in New York. Based on the novel of the same name by William Cunningham, in turn based on the real events of the Green Corn Rebellion, the musical breaks from musical convention for combining traditional Broadway numbers with a socially conscious dramatic story. The success of the play would allow them to adapt Oil! by Upton Sinclair as their next musical.

April 2nd: Le Petit Prince (The Little Prince) , a book by exiled French pilot Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, is released in Britain, becoming a worldwide classic.

April 8th: The Detroit Red Guard (formerly the Detroit Red Wings) beat out the Montreal Canadiens for the Stanley Cup.

April 13th: Commander Columbia: Light in The Night Is released, featuring intensified Kabbalistic mythological references and direct references to German plans to annihilate Jewry, culminating in the emergence of Moloch, a lord of Thaumiel and a devourer of lives. The film is also noteworthy for large sections of its script being directly written by the Reed government’s propagandists.

April 19th: Swiss chemist Albert Hofmann has an….interesting bicycle ride home from his work, having ingested a miniscule amount of a drug he had synthesized 5 years earlier.

April 30th : Sherlock Holmes in Debs , with Basil Rothbone and Nigel Bruce reprising their iconic roles as Holmes and Watsons, is released by Lankershim. With its contemporary setting, the film indulges in a notably pro-British plot, with Holmes and Watson attempting to stop a Nazi spy ring from breaking up the United Nations.

May 1st: Major League Baseball team Chicagoland White Sox are formally renamed to the Chicagoland Spartacists in a unanimous vote to commemorate the tenth anniversary of the Red May Revolution and the martyrs who died to keep Chicagoland from falling into the hands of the National Salvationists in 1933.

June 1st: My Brazilian Brazil , featuring Donald Duck in the last of his Fascist trilogy, sees Donald become a member of the Green Guard and having to survive a harsh regiment in the Amazon (including a fight with a Jaguar). Jose Carioca from Saludos Camaradas makes a cameo at the end to tell the audience to continue to work to support the war effort with war bonds.

June 16th: Painter Jackson Pollock has his first exhibition at the Public Museum of Modern Art in New York City. However, controversy emerges due to Pollock’s style of splashing paint on his canvas to express fuller emotion (termed “Abstract Expressionism”) and whether institutions funded by public grants should prioritize artists like Pollock or Markus Rothkowitz [2] or more “representational” artists.

July 1st:A Tree Grows In Brooklyn, a semi-fictionalized memoir by Betty Smith, is released. It would become a major hit with overseas troops, with Smith later saying that she receives more fan mail from soldiers than from civilians.

July 15th : Mexico! , a documentary written by Dalton Trumbo, is released. Believed to have been produced in response to the misbehavior of American troops stationed in Mexico, the film is a comprehensive look into the country and its culture, and urges respect for “such a beautiful location.”

August 9th: Sexual Snafu , the third in the popular “Private Snafu” shorts, directed by Chuck Jones and written by Theodor Geisel, is released by the First Motion Picture Unit. The film focuses on how to avoid venereal diseases and sexual hangups while under deployment.

August 15th: The Klansman , an adaptation of Thomas Dixon Jr.’s book of the same name, is released by German film conglomerate UFA-Film GmBH in collaboration with “Patriot Films”, the local film studio for the Free American State. Directed by Herbert Selpin and written by Ingmar Bergman, the film depicts the American Civil War and Reconstruction through a distinctly pro-Southern, anti-semitic, white supremacist lens. With its deeply racist narrative and pro-slavery leanings, the film would would instantly be decried by the countries of the United Nations with the exception of American Havana, who maintain a notable and telling silence on the issue

August 30th: The emerging fad of Phonebooth Stuffing gains notoriety in the UASR, thanks to a challenge organized by the local PBS affiliate in Charlotte, NC

September 10th : April Blossoms is released by Melrose and Lincoln Films. Directed by Esther Eng, the film focuses on a Japanese family, as they witness events from 1900 to the present. The film, made in response to calls for better Japanese representation in film, receives positive reviews.

September 15th: “Zeras the Hammer: Shadows over Africa” releases featuring the battle between Zeras the Hammer and the forces of Italy’s colonial Empire.

October 5th : Game 1 of the World Series takes place in Cincinnati, Ohio. The Cincinnati Reds, champions of the National League, are set to take on the Chicagoland Spartacists, champions of the American League. Cincinnati wins the first game of the series in an eleven inning walk off, 4-3. This game is also notable as it is the first time that a woman has played in the World Series. Jackie Mitchell, pitcher for the Spartacists, threw 7.1IP and gave up only 1 earned run.

October 7th: Tintin story The Shooting Star begins serialization in Le Soir. In time the story would become controversial for its use of an antisemitic, anti-communist caricature as the villain.

October 11th : The Cincinnati Reds throw a combined complete game shutout to win Game 6 of the World Series with a score of 2-0, and win their first title of the modern era.

November 1st:Your Place At Work, a film commissioned by the Secretariat of Labor, explores how an average worker, despite not being bigoted, can exhibit certain biases and assumptions that can negatively impact their co-workers. It then pleads for workers to understand and work through these assumptions.

November 4th: Lewis Milestone’s The North Star is released. Focused on Ukrainian partisans bravely resisting the Nazi invasion, the film notably stars many Ukrainian actors (such as Dmitri Milyutenko) as leads and background actors, many of whom were displaced by Teutonic.

December 17th : Calling Dr. Death , starring Creighton Chaney in the titular role, starts a popular series of films based on the popular Inner Sanctum radio series.

December 20th: A minor landslide occurs just outside of the town of Olympia, Washington, blocking the road temporarily. The story on it by the Washington Times, however, becomes notorious when it runs with the headline Large Boulder the size of Small Boulder Blocks Road

[1] Minor retcon, but the Fleischers flee to Americuba following the revolution, with their animators forming “North Avenue Animation” on the mainland
[2] Aka Mark Rothko *[WPA]: Works Progress Administration *[NBI]: National Bureau of Investigation