Literature / Kentucky Fried Politics

“I’m telling you, anybody could serve as governor, Colonel Sanders. Anybody.” - Gov. Lawrence Wetherby (D-KY), 1955

In 1951, a certain businessman named Harland Sanders ran for state senator in Kentucky but failed. This compelled him to concentrate on his chicken restaurant business which grew to be an iconic global brand.

But suppose that, inspired by his son Harley, the Colonel gives politics another chance, and runs for governor of Kentucky? And wait, there is more...he later runs for the Presidency, and serves two terms. Would he be still be known as the affectionate Colonel? Or he would end up something else?

Kentucky Fried Politics: A Colonel Sanders Timeline is a timeline from AlternateHistory.com, penned by gap80. It can be read here (or here if you want the story without reader comments). The timeline concluded with the publication of its last chapter on the Fourth of July, 2021.

Finger-licking tropes include:

Tropes A to M

• Aborted Arc: All related to politicians who were planned to become president by the creator:
  • Martha Layne Collins (who was going to be the 42nd president) was first mentioned in a 1950s chapter, heavily discussed in a 1987 chapter, and included in the 1988 chapter.
  • Jim Edgar (who was going to be the 43rd president) had cameos in chapters set in the 1950s and 1970s.
  • Wellington Webb (who was the 44th president in another draft), received many scenes in the 1990s and 2000s chapters; according to the creator, these scenes were edited leftovers from said draft.
• Accidental Murder: While it's speculated that it might have been a coincidence, J. Edgar Hoover dies of an aneurysm shortly after the Colonel impulsively strikes him in the head with his cane during an argument.
• Adaptation Name Change:
  • The Washington Redskins/Football Team/Commanders of the NFL are renamed ITTL to the Washington Warriors in the 2000s.
  • Because Ted Kennedy became the business partner of Ted Turner, Turner Broadcasting System is called Turner-Kennedy Broadcasting.
  • 20th Century Studios was named that ITTL rather than 20th Century Fox, and is currently known as "Current Century Studios".
  • CNN is known as KNN (Kennedy News Network).
  • Netflix is instead named Netfilms.
  • YouTube is called OurVids instead.
  • Wikipedia is known as Clickopedia.
  • Jennifer Sandra Carroll is known as Jennifer Sandra Johnson, her maiden name.
  • Sarah Palin also uses her maiden name, Heath.
  • Tara Strong still uses her maiden name, Charendoff.
  • Melissa Joan Hart is instead named Marissa Joan Hart.
  • Vermin Supreme retains the name Bagel Pizzazz.
  • In Futurama, Philip J. Fry is instead called Markey Marvin "Key" Martin, Professor Hubert J. Farnsworth is known as Professor Cramble Xenoba Farnsworth, John A. Zoidberg has the middle name "Bleep", and Amy Wong is referred to as Lisa Wong. In terms of The Simpsons characters from OTL, Bart's full name is Bartokovski Dennis Farnsworth (rather than Bartholomew Jojo Simpson), Groundskeeper Willie is known as Willie the Janitor, Milhouse Van Houten is renamed to Houseley Penfield Grubbs, Principal Seymour Skinner becomes Mayor Homer Simpson, Chief Clancy Wiggum becomes Chief Clancy Corvallis, and Sideshow Bob becomes Dr. Schwarzchild.
  • Likewise, the SpongeBob SquarePants character Sandy Cheeks is known as Rosie the Squirrel.
  • Miles Morales is instead named Denzel Delaney.
  • The Game Boy is called the Game Kid.
  • In Spaceballs, Colonel Sandurz is instead named Lieutenant Ronald McDonald. Mel Brooks wanted the character to be named the former, but was vetoed by the studio. This is alluded to in the film when, in one scene McDonald remarks he'd be a better leader than President Skroob and Dark Helmet scoffs, "you'll never be a President, you'll never even be a Colonel!".
  • Due to TON still airing The Late Show, CBS' Late Show is instead called The Night-Time Show.
  • Downplayed examples:
    • Barack Obama is referred to as Barack "Rocky" McCain, having taken the surname of his stepfather John McCain.
    • Cartoon Network is still known by that name in Kentucky Fried Politics but here it is called The Cartoon Network (TCN)^note this is actually the full legal name of OTL's Cartoon Network, as used in copyright notices; voiceovers and other materials in the early years of the network also would refer to it as "The Cartoon Network".
    • Mr. Lawrence goes by Dougie Osowski ITTL.
    • Bernie Sanders is instead known as Bern Sanders.
    • John F. Kennedy is addressed as Jack Kennedy.
    • KFC itself is called "Colonel's Chicken" in Kentucky during its early years.
    • Wendy's is referred to as Wendyburger until 1987, when OTL's name is adopted due to confusion with Whataburger; the Wendyburger name is still used in some locations until 2010, and by older customers.
    • In-universe, the Life in Hell TV adaptation is renamed to Life in Heck and Other Fun Places.
• Adapted Out:
  • Ted Cruz is never born ITTL due to his birth father being killed in the Cuban War.
  • Because the Overmyer Network is far more successful than in OTL and became the fourth-largest television channel, Fox Broadcasting Company and Fox News never exist in this universe.
  • Manos: The Hands of Fate, Escape from New York (due to no Watergate), and Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends do not exist.
  • According to the creator of this timeline, Best Buy was never founded: "When the high fidelity stereo-selling electronics store Sound of Music expanded in the 1970s, the location they chose for their Roseville, Minnesota outlet was in a different part of the town, and as a result, was not hit by that tornado in 1981 that led to them holding an overwhelmingly successful “Tornado Sale” at which they promised “best buys” on everything (hence the chain never reinvented itself as “Best Buy” soon after like IOTL). The tornado still happened (I don't think the POD would impact weather patterns so significantly by this point to butterfly away such a thing) and hit the same spot it did in OTL, but the store was located elsewhere ITTL."
  • Due to Space Jam not existing, neither does Lola Bunny; instead, the "tough but lovable" Bonnie Bunny was created in 1972 in response to the Ark Wave of 1970.
• Allohistorical Allusion:
  • There is a crisis between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. with nuclear war on the line, not in Cuba, but instead in Turkey.
  • John F. Kennedy works closely with Lyndon B. Johnson in the White House, but with Kennedy as Johnson's Secretary of State instead of Johnson's president.
  • Both Kennedy and LBJ still launch an invasion against Castro's Cuba only this time it's actually successful.
  • An assassination attempt on the US President still takes place in November 1963, except instead of a successful attempt on Kennedy it becomes an unsuccessful attempt on LBJ.
  • Hillary Rodham doesn't marry Bill, but she still ends up a Clinton when she marries musician George S. Clinton instead. She still likes the name "Bill" though, and ends up naming her son that.
  • When accused of baseball collusion, Donald Trump of the Philadelphia Phillies loudly insists that there's "no collusion".
  • Trump also insists the Academy Awards are "rigged" when Americana Overdrive fails to get nominated.
  • There's still a President JFK in this timeline, but instead of John F. Kennedy, it's Jack French Kemp.
  • Yoko Ono marries Tommy Chong in this timeline, but she still makes herself known to Prime Minister John Lennon, when she criticizes him for staying out of the North Korean conflict despite the obvious human rights violations.
    • Speaking of Cheech & Chong, the musician Tommy Chong does meet New Mexico Governor Cheech Marin in a Tumbleweed interview in 2018, although their paths had crossed several times before.
  • Walter Mondale wins the 1976 presidential election in a landslide over Ronald Reagan which is a role reversal of sorts of how the race went in 1984.
  • After the Supreme Court legitimizes same-sex marriage, the BLUTAG-friendly Cactus Jack bar in Zanesville, Ohio is hit by arson, similar to the attack on the LGBTQ-friendly Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Florida IOTL.
  • This timeline still has presidential supporters chanting "Feel the Bern", but not for Bernie Sanders; they're for Bernie Goetz.
  • Then-Prince Charles still marries a member of the Spencer family, only instead of Diana he marries her older sister, Sarah; this marriage goes much more smoothly than his marriage to Diana IOTL.
  • The United States elects its first African-American president in the 2000s, but it's not Barack Obama; instead, it is Jesse Jackson.
  • Both this timeline and the original have attempts by the media to create scandals over the clothing choice of the first African-American president, which end up derided as feckless gossip. For Obama, it was a tan suit; for Jackson, it was a basketball hoodie.
  • The SARS pandemic becomes so widespread that much like OTL's coronavirus, the United States and other countries implement "safezoning" measures to protect citizens from catching the disease.
  • Just like OTL's 2016, this timeline's 2008 presidential elections has a male candidate be elected over a female candidate by the electoral college, even though the female won the popular vote; in this case, it's the Democrat Paul Wellstone being elected over the Republican Olympia Snowe.
  • When talking about his experiences with making Quantum Leap, Donald P. Bellisario admits he wishes they could've done an episode which would've debunked the conspiracy theories surrounding the Iacocca assassination.
  • A murder investigation occurs in 1994 concerning O. J. Simpson, with Nicole Brown being brought in for questioning after his corpse is discovered outside her home.
  • The Red Wave of 1996 is analogous to the Republican Revolution of 1994, only this time it occurs after Lee Iaccoca is assassinated in his second year in office.
  • The Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc still collapse in this timeline but it happens in the early to mid-1980s instead of 1989-1991.
  • Deng Xiaoping still becomes the Premier of China but only after coup conspirator Lin Bao is killed during a brief civil war caused by Mao Zedong re-opening the country to the West.
  • Yigal Amir is convicted for his plot to assassinate a prominent politician but it's not Yitzhak Rabin of Israel; instead his target is Anatolijis Gorbunovs of Latvia.
  • Both Natalie Portman and Hugh Jackman star in a superhero film. But in this case, it is not a Marvel movie but rather DC's The Flash as Iris West and Captain Boomerang respectively rather than Jane Foster and Wolverine.
  • The Chicago Cubs end up winning the World Series after a decades-long losing streak, only it happens in 1984 instead of 2016.
  • There is a cinematic universe focusing on DC superheroes.
  • Jussie Smollett becomes an actual victim of a hate crime instead of faking one.
  • Tommy Wiseau makes a So Bad, It's Good movie trilogy known as Americana Overdrive, while The Room (2003) is implied to be much more successful in TTL.
  • Jim Gaffigan still plays the Colonel, only instead of being one of many celebrities to play the part in a KFC ad campaign, he plays the middle-aged Colonel in the TV movie The Life of The Colonel.
  • Robert S. Herring Sr. creates a right-wing news broadcast channel as an alternative to mainstream news outlets. The channel in question is named after him (The Herring Network) instead of the One America News Network (OANN).
  • Barack Obama still becomes a prominent congressman with ties to the Presidency but he's a Republican state senator turned governor of Montana who served as Chief Of Staff to Vice President James Meredith of the Dinger administration as opposed to a Democrat from Illinois who would be elected President. He's also known as Barack "Rocky" McCain, the stepson of John McCain.
  • A third-party candidate in a high-stakes election receives a sizable share of the popular vote. Though this time, it's not Ross Perot of the Reform Party rather it is former 2004 GOP presidential nominee Bernie Goetz of the newly-formed Boulder Party who wins at least 7 electoral votes (17.2 million) from the states of Idaho and Montana which amounts to a total of 11.23% of the national vote.
  • TTL has an instant of a 29-year-old Democratic female Mestizo Hispanic political newcomer beating a much older opponent for a seat in the House of Representatives; but instead of it being Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez for New York in 2019, it's instead Alexandra Lúgaro for Puerto Rico in 2010.
  • In 2010, Monica Lewinsky is elected as a California congresswoman after successfully beating Bill Clinton in a Democratic primary.
  • Georgia elects its first African-American senator but it's not the Democrat Raphael Warnock instead it is Republican Herman Cain.
  • Genndy Tartakovsky still works on the Popeye franchise, except he co-creates a reboot series with Craig McCracken instead of directing a scrapped feature film.
  • Charles Whitman still becomes a well-known sniper. However, instead of being an infamous spree killer, he is a respected Marine sniper during the Cuban War, though one of his fellow soldiers notes that he always seemed as if he was struggling with some internal demon. He is killed by an enemy sniper, believed to have been Lee Harvey Oswald, but conspiracies surrounding his death abound.
  • George Lincoln Rockwell, the leader of the American Nazi Party is a person of interest in a high-profile assassination but this time it's Rockwell that tries to kill the Colonel for his stance on civil rights only for the bomb to not explode properly and afterwards federal authorities would promptly arrest him.
  • The United States declares war on a dictator-ruled Muslim country for its apparent involvement in state-sanctioned terrorism but it's not Iraq rather it is Libya. Additionally, Muammar Gaddafi is captured by US forces in a similar vein to Saddam Hussein in OTL's 2006.
  • After Bob Packwood's diaries are subpoenaed, Nixon comments to a friend that things like this are why he records his thoughts using tapes, as they are much easier to dispose of.
  • In Russia, a political activist is arrested for protesting against the Russian government, prompting protests and immense public pressure for his release. The name of the activist? Vladimir Putin.
  • Trey Parker's animated series Tim Warped features characters named after characters from OTL's South Park: Tim Vulner (a reference to OTL's Timmy Burch and Jimmy Valmer), Kyle Borowitz (after Kyle Broflovski), and Cartman Ericson.
• All There in the Manual: Some of the other aspects of the timeline are only mentioned by the creator in response posts or special posts about the leadership of specific nations.
• Ambiguous Situation: Per Word of God, many people born in the 1980s and on may or may not have survived the historical butterflies.
• Assassination Attempt:
  • Two on LBJ: in 1962, Ku Klux Klan-affiliated salesman Byron De La Beckwith tries to kill LBJ during a Chicago trip, but is arrested. The following year, Thomas Arthur Vallee attempts to murder LBJ during a trip to New York City, but only manages to wound him. He is killed by Secret Service agents as he tries to flee.
  • George Lincoln Rockwell tries to kill the Colonel with a bomb because of his stance on civil rights but it eventually failed.
  • Members of the Manson family try to assassinate the Beatles, but luckily fail. They do manage to kill their manager, Brian Epstein.
  • Osama bin Laden attempts to assassinate the Colonel ITTL, blaming him and his chicken dinners for the 1978 Atlanta Peace Treaty, which bin Laden opposes. Much like Rockwell, bin Laden fails to even kill the Colonel.
  • James Oliver Huberty attempts to kill Jeremiah Denton but fails since he was inside bulletproof limos.
  • A more successful one happens to President Lee Iacocca.
• Asshole Victim:
  • Jeffrey Epstein flees the country before he is arrested for pedophilia, but his plane crashes into the ocean. He survives the crash, but eventually chooses slitting his neck over slowly dying of exposure.
  • One of John Wayne Gacy's victims ITTL is a 17-year-old Jeffrey Dahmer.
  • Jimmy Savile is murdered in prison in December 1980.
• Award Snub: In-Universe example; a few people think that the Colonel got snubbed when US Secretary of State Jimmy Carter, Anwar el-Sadat of Egypt, and Menachem Begin of Israel jointly receive the Nobel Peace Prize for the revolutionary Atlanta Peace Treaty, despite it being the Colonel's peace dinners that made it at all possible. The Colonel would later receive a Nobel Peace Prize of his own when he repeats the feat with India and Pakistan.
• Blackmail Backfire: Sanders's campaign opponents try it against him, both during his runs for governor and president. Both attempts fail due to him frankly admitting that he was wrong at that time.
• Black Republican: Barack "Rocky" McCain, James Meredith and Herman Cain are the prominent examples of this trope in the Kentucky Fried Politics universe.
• Bread and Circuses:
  • Averted. You’d think given that the Colonel is a fried chicken mogul, he would do this. You are wrong.
  • Invoked by Australian prime minister Shirley de la Hunty in her response to the 2001 Australian flag referendum, as she had supported the then-current flag.
• Breaking the Glass Ceiling: Happens a lot throughout this timeline.
  • Tom Bradley becomes Los Angeles' first black mayor.
  • Jerrie Cobb becomes the first woman on the moon.
  • Five African-American Democratic politicians become governors after winning gubernatorial elections from the 80s to the 2010s which include Harrison Wilson (Virginia), Joe Louis Clark (New Jersey), Jackson W. Andrews (Kentucky), Unita Zelma Blackwell (Mississippi), and Shirley Franklin (Georgia).
  • Roberto Clemente becomes the first Afro-Hispanic Governor of Puerto Rico in 1984.
  • The 1989 presidential elections come down to Maureen Reagan (R-CA) and Carol Bellamy (D-NY); Bellamy eventually wins and becomes the first female president.
    • Also for Bellamy; she becomes the first female Secretary-General of the United Nations.
  • James Meredith becomes the first black US Vice President after President Larry Dinger selects him.
  • Later, Jesse Jackson Sr. is elected as the first black President.
  • Alan Page becomes the first black Chief Supreme Court Justice.
  • Francis Arinze becomes the first ever black Pope.
  • Paul Wellstone, as Jesse Jackson's VP, becomes the first Jewish Vice President, and later is elected as the first Jewish President.
  • Herman Cain is not only the first black CEO of the National Restaurant Association but he's also a chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City, the leader of Burger Chef and KFC and even the GOP's first African-American senator from Georgia.
• Broken Win/Loss Streak: In 2008, vice-president Paul Wellstone does what no incumbent vice-president since Martin Van Buren has managed to do: succeed their president into the US presidency via the electoral process.
• Call a Smeerp a "Rabbit":
  • During the 1964 election, "hippie" becomes the name for supporters of Dixiecrat conservative third-party candidate Farris Bryant, the name comes from the name of his party on the ballot "Heritage Independence Party", or "H.I.P." for short.
  • Across the pond, UKIP becomes the acronym for "United Kingdom Intrepid Progressive" a far-left offshoot of the Labour Party.
• Call a Rabbit a "Smeerp":
  • Anti-war protesters, in comparison to the above "hippies", are called "shoutniks" due to them starting in the early 60s, when "beatnik" was still a thing.
  • The X-Men are what the more outspoken followers of Malcolm X call themselves. As a result, Stan Lee publishes his new comic book team under their initial name, "the Mutants".
  • Sexual harassment becomes ITTL "sexual pestering".
  • BLUTAG (acronym for Bi-Lesbian-Undefined-Trans-Assexual-Gay) becomes the TL's equivalent of "LGBT", while "coming out of the cocoon" substitutes "coming out of the closet".
  • ITTL, HIV is named the ISF (Immunity System Failure) Virus.
  • AIDS also becomes SASIF (Sexually-Acquired System Immunity Failure Virus).
  • RINO (Republican In Name Only) becomes LID (Liberal In Disguise) to describe the more left-leaning members of the Republican Party.
  • "Direct-to-video" is called "Direct-to-MLD" or "Strait-to-home".
  • Online streaming is called "vide-streaming".
  • The Internet is referred to as the "technet", and Wikipedia is referred to as Clickopedia. Likewise, the .com domain is called .co.usa, and online is referred to as ontech.
  • Memes are known as "laffpics".
  • Thanks to the SARS pandemic, the US coin the term "safezoning", as OTL's equivalent of "social distancing".
  • Instead of DVDs, TTL has “Micro Laserdiscs”, or “Micro-LDs”.
  • Thanks to the Colonel investing in Bill Gates' career, Computer Generated Imagery (CGI) is known as Computer Rendered Imaging (CRI).
  • Spoilers for fictional works are called "Ruiners", and "leaks" are called "spills".
  • A slight variation: Drugs are simply called "Recreadrugs" (a shortening of recreational drugs). Additionally, the War on Drugs is known as "The War on Recreadrugs".
  • The Jonestown massacre was averted, but later on, a numerology cult does successfully commit a mass suicide involving poisoned Pepsi drinks. As a result, the OTL term "don't drink the Kool-aid" about falling into suspicious behavior is replaced TTL with "don't pop the Pepsi".
• Cavalry Refusal: One factor contributing to the U.S. declaring war against North Korea is that President Dinger had back-channel talks with China's Premier Zhu, where they settled on agreements where China would not come to North Korea's aid.
• Civil War:
  • One breaks out in China in 1975 when Lin Biao and other hardliners angry over Mao Zedong slowly opening the country up to the West stage a coup, which quickly fails as he gets away and rallies his own loyalists to counterattack. Then things get more complicated when Deng Xiaoping starts gathering supporters by offering a "third path" midway between Mao's and Lin's. Ultimately, Mao dies from poor health and stress and Lin is killed by Deng's forces, allowing him to take over the country.
  • Happens in Syria in the late 90s upon the death of Hafez al-Assad. Since he died before he could formally install his son Bassel as his official successor, it creates enough of a loophole for his Vice-President Abdul Khaddam to declare himself the legal heir, with the two and their respective loyalists quickly coming to blows; things are then made even more complicated when Hafez's brother Jamil steps in and presents himself as a compromise candidate, which just creates another faction fighting for control. In the end, Jamil submits to Khaddam and helps him defeat Bassel, who flees into exile.
• Composite Character:
  • Lee Iacocca is more or less TTL's equivalent John F. Kennedy as he is not only the first American Catholic President but is the unfortunate victim of an assassination during a presidential tour in a big city with the incident becoming the subject of many conspiracy theories. His death by Lynwood Drake is also frequently compared to John Wilkes Booth's killing of Abraham Lincoln at Ford Theatre in 1865 much like JFK.
  • Since Lee Harvey Oswald never killed JFK due to him losing to the Colonel in the 1968 elections, Lynwood Drake also takes on the "presidential assassin" aspect of the man when he shoots Lee Iacocca in 1995 during a tour of Los Angeles.
  • Jesse Jackson becomes the Kentucky Fried Politics analogue to Barack Obama as he's not only the first black President of the United States but serves two terms in office by successfully defeating white Republican candidates in the general elections, has a media scandal over his choice of clothing during a leisurely activity, oversees many liberal policies during his administration and his Vice President would become his successor in office by winning the race for the White House.
  • Like Jackson, Paul Wellstone has a similar political career to Joe Biden in this universe since he was a Senator from a blue state that scored a significant upset against a Republican incumbent and later became the VP to an African-American president. Just like Biden, Wellstone would win the Presidency and follow similar policies as his predecessor.
  • Jeremiah Denton is much closer to OTL's John McCain than his counterpart in this universe since he is a famous Vietnam War veteran that became a senator in a deep red state and eventually ran for President. Only this time, Denton would actually win the presidency unlike McCain. Additionally, he also oversees the successful invasion of an Arabic dictatorship much like George W. Bush. The rampant scandals throughout his administration and his Vice President Lamar Alexander resigning from his post in favor of a Congressional House Whip are also taken from Richard Nixon.
  • Bernie Goetz is essentially the Donald Trump of this timeline since he was born in New York City after World War II and became a well-respected businessman that later entered politics. He's also a real estate developer and a hardware store tycoon from a solidly blue state who became the Republican nominee for President much like Trump as well as a presidential campaign that has been accused by some to be racist. The only real difference is that Goetz was already a senator from Colorado whereas Trump never held any political office prior to winning the GOP nomination for the presidency. Likewise, he later became an independent that ran for the presidency again as part of a new party and won over 10% of the vote which is also taken from Ross Perot and its logo is the American bald eagle much like the Constitution Party in OTL.
  • Kelsey Grammer is a well-known and respected actor in Hollywood much like his OTL counterpart but he is a California Republican that served as Governor of the Golden State and became President of the United States similar to Arnold Schwarzenegger and Ronald Reagan respectively.
  • Composite Virus in the case of the 2002-2003 SARS epidemic which becomes the alternate equivalent of COVID-19 in this universe as a disease that originated from China but eventually became so widespread that it led to many countries adopting safety measures that require citizens to stay at their homes and wear a mask when they go outside in public as well as prohibiting large crowds from wide open areas.
  • The Hedgehog wing of the Republican Party is basically the GOP Libertarians and the Libertarian Party lumped together as part of the same organization. Heck, Gary Johnson is the leader of the faction and their symbol is the OTL Libertarian porcupine.
  • Seymour Skinner in TTL's Futurama is instead named Homer Simpson.
• Canon Welding: What happens to Tin Toy and Toy Story ITTL; Tinny becomes part of the latter movie.
• Cincinnatus:
  • The Colonel, at first, intends to be this as governor of Kentucky and return to his business, but the call of politics comes too strong for him.
  • Fred Tuttle, Republican Senator of Vermont, is elected in 2001, but makes clear from the start that as soon as he gets his dairy farmer relief bill passed, he'll resign. The moment President Jackson signs it into law, he gives his notice.
• Conspiracy Theorist:
  • A man aptly nicknamed "Conspiracy Joe" is frequently depicted as a guest on a political radio talk show, citing long lists of ridiculous conspiracy theories regarding just about any subject. For example, after Pol Pot dies, Joe claims that he and the Colonel were actually the same person in some bizarre False Flag Operation, and after the assassination of President Lee Iacocca, he lists dozens of suspects, each more nonsensical than the last.
  • Later entries feature chat conversations taken from a conspiracy website discussing everything from government conspiracies to subliminal communist messages in The SpongeBob Zone.
• Continuity Snarl: All of these were fixed in 2024.
  • ITTL, Congresswoman Coya Knutson is elected governor of Minnesota in 1966. By her 1968 marriage to Ken Hechler, she was stated to be in Congress again with no explanation why.
  • IRA leader Ian Paisley is stated to have been killed in both December 1967 and February 1970. This was revised so Paisley is stated to have been severely wounded in 1967 and then killed in 1970.
  • One snippet for The SpongeBob Zone says that Tom Kenny voiced Squidward, while Patrick Pinney voiced Mr. Krabs. That show's cast list, however, said that Squidward was voiced by Don Cornelius, and Mr. Krabs was voiced by Charlie Adler.
• Cool Old Guy: The Colonel himself.
• Cruel and Unusual Death: Kim Jong-Il, who was starving his citizens while he feasted in luxury, is confronted by a pack of his starving subjects and literally torn apart, with the implication that he was Devoured by the Horde not out of the question. The US and Korean soldiers present are so stunned by the sight that they do nothing to save him or take him in alive.
• A Day in the Limelight: This happens to quite a few people in this timeline.
  • The main example of this trope in Kentucky Fried Politics is Harley Sanders, the son of the Colonel who succumbed to tonsillitis when he was 20 years old. Because of his survival in this timeline, Harley is a prominent businessman and CEO of Kentucky Fried Chicken until his death.
  • There's also Estus Pirkle, the Governor of Mississippi and Republican candidate for President in the 1992 election. In OTL, he was an obscure preacher whose church sermons served as the inspiration for the 1972 film If Footmen Tire You, What Will Horses Do?.
  • The timeline has Harley Brown become the Vice President to Kelsey Grammer and the 45th President of the United States. IOTL, he was an obscure Republican from Iowa who ran failed campaigns for Governor in 2014 and 2018 respectively.
  • Charlotte Pritt was only well-known in her home state of West Virginia for being the first woman to win the Democratic gubernatorial nomination and lost to Cecil Underwood in the 1996 elections as well as subsequent unsuccessful campaigns for Secretary of State and Governor respectively. TTL, Pritt was not only successfully elected as governor but she also became the forty-seventh president and the second American female politician to hold this position.
• Death Is Dramatic: Ho Chi Minh's death in TTL is suitably dramatic. After being chased out of Vietnam due to the US under President Sanders winning the Vietnam War, he travels to Banteay Srei, laments the crumbling of empires, then picks up a discarded KFC bucket and rages that that man was his downfall. Soon after, he begins suffering chest pains and is dead by the time his supporters get him back to their hideout.
• Deadpan Snarker: Paul McCartney's icebreaking quip to John Lennon after the latter ends his 12-year Prime Minister term:
  "You didn’t burn that parliament place down to the ground, John, I’m disappointed in you."
• Death by Adaptation:
  • Elton John and Robert Downey Jr. both succumb to drug overdoses in this timeline.
  • Farahnaz Pahlavi, daughter of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, is killed by terrorists linked to Ayatollah Khomeini.
  • Dan Aykroyd dies in a plane crash.
  • Bill Cosby passes away in 2001 after complications from diabetes, having long fallen from grace thanks to his allegations happening much earlier IOTL.
  • John Hinckley Jr. is one of the first American soldiers killed during the intervention in Uganda.
  • Prince Andrew is killed in a helicopter accident.
  • Kevin Sorbo suffers a fatal brain aneurysm.
  • Nobuhiro Watsuki is murdered in an arson attack by Shinji Aoba.
  • George R. R. Martin dies from SARS disease complications in 2005.
  • Jussie Smollett gets killed by homophobic white supremacists in 2019.
  • Non-person examples: Long John Silver's, Taco Bell, Chuck E. Cheese, and TGI Fridays all go defunct ITTL.
• December–December Romance: Marilyn Monroe marries Harry Belafonte when both are 68, and for Marilyn, tenth time's the charm.
• Decomposite Character: Decomposite Network in the case of Since Fox and Fox News. Since neither network exists, in this timeline, Overmyer and Herring take upon specific aspects of Fox and Fox News respectively with the former being the fourth-largest television channel in the United States which even has The X-Files as one of its top-rated programs while the latter serves as the premier American right-wing news outlet.
• Dies Differently in Adaptation:
  • Martin Luther King Jr. doesn't get assassinated, but he does die at 56 from heart failure.
  • Fidel Castro is killed in an air raid in 1962 during the Cuban War.
  • Michael Jackson perishes when his Neverland ranch mansion burns down.
  • Brian Epstein is killed during the Manson Family's failed attempt to kill the Beatles.
  • The Colonel himself gets 10 extra years of life, but eventually his diabetes takes him in his sleep, instead of leukemia/pneumonia.
  • Harley Sanders Jr. passes away peacefully while he is in his 90s, instead of succumbing to tonsillitis fever at just 20.
  • Jimmy Savile is murdered in prison in December 1980 while serving a 15-year prison sentence.
  • John F. Kennedy is never assassinated by Lee Harvey Oswald and dies from Addison's disease at the age of 74. His brother Robert doesn't get assassinated by Sirhan Sirhan; he dies at 95.
  • Andy Warhol is shot to death in 1968.
  • Elizabeth Taylor dies in a car accident at the relatively young age of 33.
  • Jeffrey Dahmer is killed by John Wayne Gacy when he's just 17 years old instead of being murdered by an inmate while serving his life sentence in prison.
  • Jeffrey Epstein dies in a plane crash after he flees the United States to avoid getting convicted for sexual pestering.
  • George Lincoln Rockwell is killed by a fellow inmate at the Petersburg Federal Correctional Institution when he's 75 years old.
  • Lee Iacocca is assassinated by Lynwood Drake during a presidential tour in Los Angeles.
  • Actor Joe Flynn survives his heart attack in 1974 before dying in 1991.
  • Otis Redding dies from heart disease at age 69.
  • Malcolm X dies at the ripe old age of 86 from natural causes.
  • Robert Maxwell, the father of Ghislaine Maxwell lives much longer and dies at the age of 88.
  • Jimi Hendrix dies in 2013 at the age of 70.
  • Judy Garland dies in 1972, at 50.
  • Sharon Tate dies of emphysema in 2020, at 77.
  • Instead of being killed by police during a killing spree, Charles Whitman is killed by a Cuban sniper during the Cuban War, believed to have been Lee Harvey Oswald.
  • Instead of her dramatic overdose, Marilyn Monroe dies peacefully from congestive heart failure at the age of 87.
  • Medgar Evers passes away from natural causes.
  • Gene Siskel still dies of cancer, though he dies in 2002 instead of 1999.
  • Roger Ebert still has his cancer a bit earlier, but doesn't lose his voice until 2011 due to different circumstances. He passes away in 2015.
  • Jim Henson passes away in 2018 at 81 from an unspecified ailment.
  • Mel Blanc quit smoking in 1981 and died in 1997.
  • O. J. Simpson is found dead at his fiancée Nicole Brown's house.
  • Joe Alaskey died in 2019 of cancer.
  • Due to UHC, Wayne Allwine lived to coach Bret Iwan and Chris Diamantopoulos on the Mickey Mouse voice. He retired from the role in 2016 due to his declining health, and died of diabetes two years later.
  • Russi Taylor died in September 2019.
  • John McCain dies peacefully from natural causes four years later in 2021 than in OTL.
  • Word of God says that Bruce Lee died at the age of 45 from a head injury instead of cerebral edema. His son Brandon would also die at around the same age in a freak car collision.
  • Wilma Rudolph passed away from brain and throat cancer at age 60 in 2000.
  • Greg Burson sobered up in 1999, but relapsed three years later due to the effects of the SARS pandemic. After going into rehab, he returned to voice acting in 2004. He died in 2018 of diabetes complications.
  • With UHC being established in 1990, Fred Rogers' stomach cancer is detected early and treated, going into remission by the end of 2004; he suffers a relapse in 2013 and dies two years later.
  • Non-person example: The World Hockey Association (WHA) lasts up until 2004 as opposed to an immediate merger with the National Hockey League (NHL) in 1979.
• Different World, Different Movies:
  • As a result of an extensive amount of rewrites in order to balance the tone of the film, Used Cars comes out in 1984 instead of 1980. A direct effect of this is that Back to the Future is put on the back-burner until its completion, ultimately getting released in 1988. And while Christopher Lloyd and Michael J. Fox are still the leads ITTL, the film focuses on 1958 instead of 1955.
    Bob Gale considered 1958 to be “an excellent year for a time travel story – it’s at the rise of the beatniks, it’s at the apex of the idealistic teen era of malt shops, Rock-and-Roll, civil rights, and suburban expansion – it’s a time right before all hell broke loose in the early ’60s.”
  • While Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is still adapted into a film in 1971, the 2005 adaptation is directed by Chris Columbus instead of Tim Burton.
  • The Walt Disney Company still produces and distributes Mulan but it is released in the early 1980s not as an animated film but as a live-action action adventure movie with an all-Asian cast and the Hong Kong-based Shaw Brothers Company as joint producers. It also becomes quite controversial for being "too pro-China" amongst American conservatives and its villainous depiction of the Huns but nevertheless Mulan becomes a box office success in contrast to its straight-to-video sequel which was an outright bomb.
  • Quantum Leap winds up lasting seven seasons instead of five, and ends with Sam returning home following a leap into the (ITTL) Libya War of the early 1980s.
  • While SpongeBob SquarePants is more the basis of a restaurant chain ITTL, Stephen Hillenburg does co-produce a cartoon based off it with Klasky-Csupo, called The SpongeBob Zone, lasting from 1997 to 2001. In fact, Hillenburg even goes out of his way to make sure it isn't just a blatant advertisement for the restaurant, "with the restaurant being an almost incidental part of it".
  • Matt Groening decides to make animated shorts based off of Life in Hell in 1985 (after making sure he retained the rights) for the Overmyer Network, which eventually results in the animated series Life In Heck And Other Fun Places premiering in 1987^note It's in effect a hybrid of Life in Hell and The Simpsons, concerning a family of yellow-colored rabbits and the local nuclear power plant. and lasting until 1994 with the (purposefully done) No Ending Series Finale "Who Shot Binky?".
    • As Life in Heck was reaching the end, Groening was asked to make another show for the network. The result? 1994's Futurama, which borrows elements from OTL's Simpsons, such as Bart^note now Farnsworth's clone replacing Cubert and Milhouse^note known as Houseley Penfield Grubbs ITTL, named after character actor Houseley Stevenson, US Senator Penfield Tate (R-CO), and US Senator James Grubbs Martin (R-NC), Groundskeeper Willie^note who replaces Scruffy as the Janitor, Mayor Homer Simpson^note in actuality ITTL's version of Principal Skinner, Chief Clancy Corvallis^note a black version of Chief Clancy Wiggum, and Herbert Powell^note who is still voiced by Danny DeVito and is still Homer's half-brother. As with The Simpsons, Futurama is a long-running cartoon criticized for its perceived decline in quality from 2008 on, though unlike The Simpsons, Futurama ends in 2022.
  • Toy Story is quite different in this universe. For starters, the film is a big-budget Canon Welding sequel to Tin Toy with Tinny becoming one of the main characters while Buzz Lightyear is replaced by a female space ranger named Jerrie Parsec (named after Jerrie Cobb, the first woman on the moon), though Woody is still a prominent character in the movie.
  • Breaking Bad still exists, but with several differences: it's set in the 1980s before universal health care was established (hence why Walt's cancer is still a plot point), Walt is played by Matthew Broderick instead of Bryan Cranston, Jesse is played by Penn Badgley instead of Aaron Paul, Kim Wexler from OTL's Better Call Saul is Walt's lawyer, Hallie Todd is also a key cast member, and the series runs for four seasons on TON from 2008 to 2011. Instead of Better Call Saul, the series receives a Kim-focused prequel titled Slippin' Kimmy that ran from 2014 to 2019. Walt also drives a 1986 Yugo instead of a 2004 Pontiac Aztek due to the different time period, swapping it out for a Pontiac Firebird later on.
  • The Sopranos runs from 1999 to 2010, with the series finale, "Made in New Jersey", ending more conclusively with Tony suddenly getting killed by the man in the "Members Only" jacket instead of OTL's infamous Smash to Black, as a Shout-Out to The Godfather.
  • Tim Burton directs a Spider-Man movie in the early 1990s with River Phoenix as Peter Parker and a race-lifted version of Mary Jane Watson played by famous singer Selena Quintanilla-Perez.
  • The West Wing has Jolene Davenport Jr. as the main protagonist instead of Jed Bartlett.
  • The Star Wars prequel trilogy comes out much sooner than OTL with the movies released in the mid to late 90s and early 2000s respectively. Additionally, there are some noticeable differences between the original and alternate versions which are derived from scrapped concepts such as Han Solo growing up in Kashyyyk and Palpatine as Anakin's "father" through impregnating his mother by manipulating the midichlorians. The titles of the episodes are also known as The Knights Arise, The Resistance Endures, and Guardians of the Force rather than The Phantom Menace, Attack of the Clones, and Revenge of the Sith.
    • The franchise also enters live-action TV in 2006 with several shows covering what happens after Episode III; in OTL, it didn't enter live-action TV until 2019 with The Mandalorian.
  • James Cameron never makes the Terminator movies since he doesn't suffer a nightmare while working on Piranha Part Two: The Spawning. However, he does still write and direct Titanic (1997) albeit with a different cast and Kevin Smith of all people co-writing the ending, which unlike OTL has Jack surviving alongside Rose.
  • Bob Ross takes over for Bill Alexander on The Magic of Oil Painting in 1975, which is renamed to The Joy of Painting in 1979. Ross leaves the show in 1988 for a foray into politics, before stepping back into hosting duties from 1995 until sometime before the late 2000s.
  • Power Rangers is known by its original working title of Galaxy Rangers when the Overmyer Network picks up the show.
  • The Critic runs on ABC in 1994 and UPN for several more years.
  • Mike Judge creates High High, an animated series on MTV that is basically OTL's Daria with Beavis and Butt-Head as major characters. It runs from 1996 to 2003. The video essay mentioning the series notes that there have been calls for a spin-off starring Beavis and Butt-Head, and opines that "such comic relief characters are best for shorts, not twenty whole minutes".
  • Trey Parker creates Tim Warped, an animated historical satire series that combines live-action, stop-motion, and animation, and runs from 1996 to 2008 on TumbleweedTV. Elements from OTL's South Park are present, such as the protagonist's best friend being named Kyle, an antagonistic character named Cartman Ericson, and leaning towards commentating on current events as the series goes on.
  • Return to the Planet of the Apes, the scrapped sequel/reboot to Planet of the Apes (1968) successfully comes to fruition and it's released by 20th Century Fox.
  • Treasure Planet is released in 1998 by Disney and quickly became a huge success that led to a brand new franchise with two sequels and merchandise.
  • Judge Judy begins airing a year earlier than IOTL, and doesn't end in 2021.
  • Instead of Family Guy, Seth MacFarlane makes The Life of Larry and Steve into an animated series for the Overmyer Network.
  • The Powerpuff Girls is known as The Whoop-ass Girls in the US (a reference to the original pilot) and The Power Punch Girls overseas. It's also part of a new breed of cartoons that push the envelope despite being made for younger audiences such as Dexter's Laboratory, Futurama and Clone High. Additionally, all of these shows air on the Overmyer Network's TON (Tons-o'-Toons) as part of the "What-A-Cartoon" program instead of Cartoon Network and MTV respectively.
  • Mina and The Count is picked up by the Overmyer Network and greenlit into a fully-fledged animated series. The show lasts for five seasons.
  • Series with Jim Henson's involvement include Sam and Friends (1955-1961), The Wizard of Id (1969-1970), Sesame Street (1969-present), The Muppet Show (1976-1982), Fraggle Rock (1983-1989), Muppet Babies (1984-1993), The Dark Crystal Chronicles (1987-1992), The Storytellers (1994-1995), The New Muppet Show (1997-2001), The Jim Henson Show (2005-2006), and The Muppets (2011-2017).
  • King of the Hill ran from 1998-2015, and Ed, Edd n Eddy also ended in 2015 rather than 2009.
  • CatDog would last for six seasons from 2002-2010 on Nickelodeon and Overmyer respectively. Additionally, a TV movie would be made after the show's conclusion.
  • Harvey Beaks airs on TCN from 2013 to 2020 as Bad Seeds.
  • Welcome to the Wayne is another TCN show ITTL, airing from 2016 to 2020; while Ansi and Olly are still voiced by Alanna Ubach and creator Billy Lopez, respectively, Saraline is voiced by Judith Barsi.
  • Likewise, Glitch Techs begins airing in 2021 and continues to the present day.
  • Harvey Street Kids runs on Netfilms from 2015 to 2020, using the artstyle from OTL's concept art.
  • Alex Hirsch does still make Gravity Falls but ITTL it's called Mystery Shack with Graunty Lois and Grandpa Stan as major characters.
  • Amphibia is called Amphibiland and runs from 2018 to 2021.
  • The Owl House is instead named The Boiling Isles, running from 2019 to 2024.
  • No Neck Joe (Craig McCracken's first student film) was made into a series, The Misadventures of No-Neck Joe And Robot Rick.
  • The People's Court is a reenactment series, with a spin-off, The People's Real Court, featuring real cases.
  • The Bugs Bunny Show runs from 1948 to 1978, with episodes from 1965 to 1972 toning down the violence due to requirements from the Sanders administration.
  • The renewed spike in science fiction thanks to the success of the NASA mission to Mars. The events also lead to a movie adaptation of John Carter getting made much earlier in the 2000s as opposed to the early to mid-2010s.
  • A Song of Ice and Fire is still made into a television series but airs on the Overmyer Network instead of HBO. The show is also known by the books' original name or Ice and Fire for short as opposed to Game of Thrones and came out a decade early. The series lasts from 2007 to 2011.
  • The SARS epidemic affects specific works of pop culture. The Grim Adventures of Billy & Mandy (here known as Billy and Mandy) is canceled due to complaints about the show having the Grim Reaper as one of the main characters. The Walking Dead never exists in TTL with Robert Kirkman focusing on writing Tech Jacket which gets adapted as a short-lived TV series that ran from 2005 to 2007.
  • A version of Space Jam titled Toon Slam exists in this timeline. The film was a parody of late 90s superhero flicks and starred Kareem Abdul-Jabbar instead of Michael Jordan, as well as Brendan Fraser and Catherine Zeta-Jones.
  • In terms of Looney Tunes series, in addition to Tiny Toon Adventures, Animaniacs, Baby Looney Tunes, and Duck Dodgers, there's a series called Coyote Falls that focuses on Wile E. Coyote and the Road Runner, and Speedy, a mature Speedy Gonzales-focused series.
  • While Predator and its first sequel appear to be mostly the same, they're followed by a third movie which inexplicably crosses over with the Rocky franchise^note a Historical In-Joke, since by some accounts Predator was inspired by an oft-shared joke that Rocky V would have an alien as his main opponent, two James Cameron-directed movies that are critically panned, a sixth movie set on the Predators' home world that's considered the nadir of the series, and a seventh movie that returns to the series' roots by being about soldiers hunting a Predator in Cameroon.
  • Likewise, Alien seems to be the same as OTL, but its sequels diverge into a Myth Arc about Ripley being blamed for murdering the crew of her ship and going rogue to both clear her name and fight the Xenomorphs, eventually leading to her being pardoned and made a General. There's also a spinoff TV show about her daughter and a web series set in-between movies.
  • The first movies in both the Friday the 13th and Halloween series are the same as OTL, but then both franchises go vastly different, with various more sequels and reboots. There's also mention of Freddy vs Michael, indicating that A Nightmare on Elm Street is also quite different.
  • A later update confirms that the Elm Street franchise is completely different beyond the original film (which is apparently mostly the same as OTL). This includes a film where Freddy is sent into the future to attack people on a spaceship, the aforementioned Freddy vs Michael, similar crossovers with The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Leprechaun, a Tim Burton-directed reboot, and a prequel.
  • According to Word of God, the Leprechaun series is mostly the same except for having a prequel detailing the leprechaun's origins; Texas Chainsaw Massacre has four sequels released through the 80s and 90s (but all at different years than the OTL sequels), then doesn't get a reboot until 2019; and the Child's Play series never happens, with the concept of a Serial Killer's spirit possessing a toy being used in a Twilight Zone reboot episode instead.
  • Chinatown has a different ending as a result of the Ark Wave of 1970 with Noah Cross killed by his daughter Evelyn Mulawray and the water supply scheme being foiled similar to the original version of the ending IOTL. Additionally, the film has Jane Fonda as Evelyn instead of Faye Dunaway.
  • With Escape from New York butterflied, John Carpenter makes a cop movie titled Undercover L.A. starring Kurt Russell.
  • Home Alone eventually gets a prequel serving as an origin story for Harry and Marv, as well as a reunion movie.
  • The Jaws franchise ends up with ten movies, which (aside from all four of the OTL ones) also includes a prequel covering Quint's experience in the Indianapolis sinking, several comedic self-parodies, and a reboot.
• Disabled in the Adaptation:
  • Vladimir Putin, while working as a KGB officer, was accidentally shot in the back during a protest by a fellow KGB officer, rendering him paraplegic. As a result, he resigned and became a community organizer protesting any injustice perpetrated by the Russian government.
  • Alex Jones became paraplegic in a 1991 bus crash when he was 17, and became a staunch activist and advocate of disability rights.
• The Dog Bites Back: While trying to flee South Korean troops in the closing days of the Second Korean War, Kim Jong-Il is confronted by the troops and some peasants in a secret room in his home, full of lavish foodstuffs even while the citizenry starved outside. When he can't explain the food in the face of the peasants' starving demands, his subjects descend upon their "Supreme Leader" and practically rip him limb from limb.
• Doorstopper: With over 100+ chapters, more than a million words, and a complex plot to boot.
• Double-Meaning Title: The timeline of course refers to not just the Colonel and Kentucky Fried Chicken but their legacy shaping world politics and history.
• Emerging from the Shadows:
  • When RNC chairman William Miller enters a room full of political operatives to understand the situation between choosing between the equally controversial Barry Goldwater and Nelson Rockefeller, Senator Hugh Scott says they've come up with a third person who could be a compromise candidate. Miller turns around to see Colonel Sanders emerging from a shadowed corner of the room.
  • When John Y. Brown Jr. is called into Sanders' office for his underhanded deal in buying out McDonald's for KFC, the Colonel spells out just how displeased he is by turning on the side lights and revealing who else is in the room - McDonald's owner Ray Kroc turning around in his chair.
• Epic Fail:
  • During the Colonel's gubernatorial election in 1955, his opponent Happy Chandler accuses him of being ineligible for the governorship on account of participating in a duel in 1931. After reading the case, it doesn't take long for the court to rule that the incident was self-defence, not a duel, leading to not only Chandler's vote share tanking, but the current governor Wetherby (who is also a Democrat) to endorse Sanders instead.
  • Hafez al-Assad of Syria, wanting things in the Middle-East to return to pre-'78 Atlanta Treaty unrest, seizes the opportunity when an Israeli agent assassinates a radical in Lebanon's parliament (but the two countries wanted to settle the matter peacefully instead). He declares war on Israel and rolls a Syrian tank battalion into the country to agitate things, only for all the other members of the treaty (even Palestine, at least tacitly!) to publicly side with Israel against Syria for the sake of their continued prosperity. Three days later, with only a handful of casualties, Assad recalls his troops, completely humiliated.
• End of an Age: 2010 is this to KFC, after Mildred Sanders, the youngest of the Colonel's children and the last living "Great Elder" of the company, passes away at 91.
• Enemy Civil War:
  • As MI6 raids the Oasis where Jim Jones and Charles Manson are hiding out, both men try to reassure the other by proclaiming himself to be the savior of humanity, the second coming, etc. Obviously, both disagree with each other and get into a brawl that eventually kills both of them.
  • After Kim Jong-il is killed, North Korea's military and government quickly fracture and dissolve, with dozens of officers and politicians each claiming to be the legitimate new leader.
• Everyone Has Standards: In 1967 in the middle of Sanders' presidency, John Y. Brown Jr. approaches the Sanders family with the news that he had distracted Ray Kroc with the idea of a political run and secretly purchased shares in McDonald's under the Finger Lickin' Good Inc. name, effectively buying out their biggest competitor, a move technically approved by Sanders-appointed judges. Despite the potential windfall, and even if Kroc had done the same thing to the McDonald brothers, Sanders and his children conclude that the effective hostile takeover is far too underhanded, so they give the shares back to Kroc, declare a temporary truce with him, and fire Brown.
• Expanded States of America: In the mid-2000s, America has 52 states after Puerto Rico and Washington, D.C. are granted full statehood.
• The Faceless: Harley Sanders, the Colonel's son whose survival serves as the Point of Divergence ITTL, has his face covered by various objects on all photographs taken of him; even his infobox on his Clickopedia page has his face covered by glitched pixels and two "Gateway Timeout" boxes. The one instance where his face isn't covered, he's only seen as a silhouette from behind in a photo of him and three of the Colonel's great-grandchildren attending his funeral.
• Fake Shemp: Just like IOTL, KFC begins an advertising campaign starring an animated Colonel voiced by Randy Quaid in 1998. Despite getting approval from the real Colonel's family and Pete Harman, the campaign becomes controversial; while it is liked by younger customers, older customers disapprove of it due to the Colonel's death still being very recent, as well as Quaid's voice in early commercials sounding higher than the real Colonel's (he would switch to a more accurate voice later on). This campaign ends sometime in the 2000s.
• False Flag Operation: Bulgaria attempts this in 1971 by having agents commit arson against Orthodox churches in Turkey in order to fan tensions with Greece, in the hopes of destabilizing NATO and forcing America to pick sides between them in any resulting conflict (and therefore draw whichever one loses into the Warsaw Pact's orbit). Fortunately, the agents are caught in the act and the plot exposed, bringing the two countries closer together instead.
• Fictional Counterpart:
  • The aforementioned Herring Network is basically the One America News Network in all but name. Even the logo of THN is the same as OANN.
  • The Boulder Party is basically the Reform Party in the 21st century with purple as their electoral color.
  • The timeline has its fair share of political parties that serve as fictional equivalents to their real life counterparts such as the Heritage and Independence Party for the American Independent Party or the Liberty Union Party for the Libertarian Party.
  • The Socialist Alliance are based on the Democratic Socialists of America.
• Fictionalized Death Account: IOTL, Brian Epstein died from an overdose that may or may not have been a suicide. Here, he gets murdered by the Manson family.
• Fictional Political Party:
  • During the 1964 election, Farris Bryant's third party Dixiecrat campaign coalesces as the Heritage Independence Party. This results in his right-wing supporters being the ones who become known as hippies (or rather, "H.I.P.ies") in this timeline. In the 1972 election, this party suffers ideological schisms, with social conservatives staying under the HIP banner, fiscal conservatives and isolationists forming the Defense Party, and populists and segregationists forming the Country Party.
  • In 1966, Timothy Leary founds the Natural Mind Party as a political extension of his philosophical beliefs.
  • Post-Communist Cuba has the Stability Party (left-leaning centrist), Conservative Party (pro-American hard-right), Nationalist Party (anti-American and anti-Communist right-leaning centrist, which collapses within a decade), and the New Authority Party (officially listed as "third position", which also eventually collapses). By the turn of the 21st century, a Progressive Party emerges as a new left-wing group.
  • When Vietnam finally transitions to democracy after the period of military dictatorship following the defeat of the communists, the country's politics are dominated by the Peaceful Today and Tomorrow Party and the Heal and Rebuild Together Party.
  • During the 1980 election, liberal Democrats and Republicans disgruntled by their parties picking conservative or right-leaning moderate candidates band together as a new Progressive Party (which appears to dissolve by the midpoint of the decade).
  • During the late 60s/early 70s in Canada, the New Democratic and Social Credit parties merge to form the Progressive Tomorrow Party. And during the 90s, several small populist parties (Action, Alberta, and Frontier) merge into the Action Alliance.
  • The post-Gaddafi parties of Libya are Libyan Movement (sympathetic but skeptical of the West), Independent Pathway (pro-West but anti-US), and National Identity (conservative "third way").
  • The Liberty Union is a Vermont-only far-left party that appears in the 90s and gains nationwide significance when it manages to elect a federal Senator.
  • In disgust at the Republicans going with a moderate candidate in the 2008 election, Bernie Goetz runs a right-wing populist campaign under the banner of the Boulder Party, which is used by like-minded individuals in later elections.
  • A Boulder Party splinter group called the Strong Party forms for the 2012 election, collapses afterwards, and reforms by the 2016 election as the Bigfoot Party (Truth Party in some states), running on a platform demanding full government transparency in regards to various conspiracy theories and fringe beliefs.
• Fix Fic: A lot of real life tragedies are avoided in this timeline:
  • The Manson Family murders and Jonestown massacre never happen as Manson instead tries to kill the Beatles, retreats to Jones' compound in Brazil when this fails, and then both die when law enforcement raids the place.
  • Numerous serial killers and mass murderers (Zodiac, Bundy, Dahmer, etc.) die before any of them can go on their sprees. As an example, Brenton Tarrant, the perpetrator of the Christchurch mosque shootings IOTL, is run over by a self-driving car.
  • The terrorist attack on the 1972 Munich Olympics are foiled by Olympic security.
  • The deaths of some famous celebrities such as Elvis Presley, Marilyn Monroe and River Phoenix are outright averted.
  • Hurricane Katrina is less devastating than real life due to better preparations and reactions by both local and federal authorities.
• Flag Bikini: One woman in the Americana Overdrive: Volume One poster wears a bikini with an American flag pattern on it.
• Foreshadowing:
  • In early 1984, the Denton administration is discussing going to a Girl Scout event, and Secretary of State Buz Lukens volunteers, saying he likes their cookies. The next year, he is accused of sexually pestering an underage girl, which is only the start of the Denton administration's very sharp decline.
  • In 2005, in the middle of his father's presidency, Jesse Jackson Jr. loses his temper at a client and is fired from his law firm, and later, his family notes that he seems to bounce between joy and anger. The next chapter/year, he loses his temper and punches out a reporter, is arrested, and is discovered to have bipolar disorder.
• Gender Flip: Some instances of Breaking the Glass Ceiling when it comes to women leads to certain characters in popular media changing to match.
  • This timeline's version of Toy Story has Buzz Lightyear replaced with a female space ranger named Jerrie Parsec, named after the first female astronaut Jerrie Cobb.
  • In TTL's Star Wars movies, Darth Maul is a female Sith Lord played by Maggie Cheung.
  • TTL's version of The West Wing, instead of President Jed Bartlet, has President Jolene Davenport, who is based on the first female president Carol Bellamy.
• Glad I Thought of It: Donald Trump says this almost word-for-word when Tommy Wiseau suggests adding a scene set in a riverboat casino for Americana Overdrive.
• The Good King: How the Colonel is mainly remembered in Kentucky after his governorship, as well as in the US after his presidency.
• Heel–Faith Turn: While serving his prison sentence at Virginia's Petersburg Federal Correctional Institution in Prince George County, George Lincoln Rockwell abandons his Nazi ways by becoming a full-time born-again Christian minister.
• Historical In-Joke:
  • Tim Burton's Batman (1989) picks an unconventional up-and-coming actor for the role of Bruce Wayne. That star? None other than Nicolas Cage.
  • A violent video game developed by Midway leads to the creation of a video game ratings system in the United States.
  • There is a film adaptation of The Flintstones made in the mid-1990s which is a huge success with critics and audiences. It also sparks the trend of movies based on old cartoons.
  • Marvel adapts one of its best-selling comics The Mutants (TTL's X-Men) into a successful Saturday morning cartoon. In turn, it would lead to a movie to capitalize on the cartoon's popularity.
  • George Lucas makes not one but two Star Wars Christmas specials which are generally panned by critics and fans of the franchise.
  • Natalie Portman plays the love interest of the main protagonist in a superhero movie.
  • Jerry Jones unsuccessfully launches a bid to buy the Dallas Cowboys.
• History Repeats: John Y. Brown Jr. was fired from KFC after trying to pull a hostile takeover of McDonald's without the Sanders family's permission. Later on, Brown runs for a Kentucky Senate seat in 1983, but is beaten by Harland "Harley" Sanders Jr., the Colonel's son.
• How the Mighty Have Fallen: Post-reelection in a landslide, the Denton administration is riding high on both the capture of Gaddafi and managing the US through the dissolution of the Soviet Union, with an approval rating of 91%. Then, an avalanche of scandals involving members of his Cabinet come to light along with his part in covering them up, and after a mid-term "donkey tidal wave" turning both chambers of Congress Democratic, Denton decides to resign before he can be impeached, with an approval rating of just 25%.
• I Just Shot Marvin in the Face: Lee Harvey Oswald is part of Che Guevara's troops, but trips over a tree root and his unsafetied gun shoots Che in the face.
• I Resemble That Remark!: The raspy-voiced Anthony Fauci talks about the symptoms of the new SARS virus to the Jesse Jackson administration, mentioning that one of the symptoms is a sore throat. When he gets an odd look from someone, he clarifies that he doesn't have it; he just naturally sounds like that.
• In Spite of a Nail:
  • Despite the historical butterflies, most of the teams in the National Football League (NFL) are largely the same as OTL. The only real difference is the absence of the Jacksonville Jaguars and the Louisville Stallions taking their place as the NFL's newest expansion team who would go on to win two Super Bowl championships in 2005 and 2008 respectively. Similarly, the MLB remains largely unchanged from its OTL counterpart aside from the presence of a Louisville team (the Colonels).
  • Many actors, actresses and directors in film and television have similar careers aside from Kevin Spacey. In the case of Warren Beatty, he was a volunteer for Mike Gravel's 1984 presidential campaign but would eventually go into acting. Wesley Snipes while not an actor still becomes a renowned name in Hollywood as a director. Kelsey Grammer meanwhile would go to pursue a successful political career as the first Republican governor of California in decades and eventually the 44th President of the United States.
  • James Rolfe is still a prominent video critic but he's not The Angry Video Game Nerd instead he is the creator of "Paper-To-Screen Adaptations", a popular webseries on OurVids (TTL's equivalent of YouTube) that analyzes movie and television adaptations of popular comics and books.
  • Joe Biden still becomes Delaware's Democratic senator but in 1985 since he lost the previous election in 1972.
  • Jurassic Park still becomes the highest-grossing movie of 1993.
  • Not only do Hurricane Katrina and Hurricane Irene occur in the exact same circumstances but they are just as devastating as their OTL counterparts.
  • Marc Benioff is still a businessman, but instead of technology, he founds a burger chain called Burger Czar, borrowing its name from an episode of Welcome Back, Kotter.
  • John Schnatter is still the owner of a restaurant chain, except that instead of pizza, he serves chicken.
  • Ross Perot is still a prominent billionaire but unlike his OTL counterpart, he has a fairly successful political career as Governor of Texas in the mid to late 1980s.
  • Rick Perry also becomes Governor of Texas but was elected two decades early.
  • Ben Garrison still becomes a prominent cartoonist but he eventually became a political analyst later in his life.
  • Frasier still gets made and still lasts from 1993 to 2004.
  • The Rock-afire Explosion creator Aaron Fechter still manufactures animatronics, though they're for SpongeBob's Undersea Cuisine, as well as providing special effects for several movies.
  • COPS is still canceled, but in 2001 (due to complaints of bias against minorities) rather than 2020 (due to the George Floyd protests).
  • Other movies, TV shows and video games that are still made in this timeline include The Star Wars Holiday Special, Ewoks, Scooby-Doo, Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Prizzi's Honor, Mortal Kombat, Doom, The X-Files, Natural Born Killers, The Lion King (1994), Pocahontas, Die Hard, Home Alone, Tomb Raider, Sonic the Hedgehog, Pokémon, Dexter's Laboratory, Samurai Jack, My Life as a Teenage Robot, Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius, The Boondocks, and Code Monkeys (which runs from 2007-10 and again from 2015-16).
• Joke Ending: "Chapter Fin", the chapter uploaded on April Fool's Day 2021, is deliberately unrealistic in the most comical way. Examples include the resurrection of the Colonel and other dead people, a completely new calendar, and Vermin Supreme being elected as the 46th president, partnering with the Colonel.
• Karmic Death: Kim Jong-Il is heavily implied to have been Devoured by the Horde for starving his subjects while he feasted in luxury.
• Kid Has a Point: After John Lennon retires as PM, one of his grandsons finds his old guitar, and asks why he doesn't play music with his old friends any more, if they're still his friends. Unable to refute the point, Lennon calls up Paul McCartney later that day.
• Kill Steal: James von Brunn makes plans to shoot President Lee Iacocca, but on his attempt, Lynwood Drake beats him to it.
• Landslide Election:
  • The Colonel (R-KY) easily wins re-election with 364 electoral votes and 39.6 million ballots cast over Jack Kennedy (D-MA).
  • The 1976 presidential race has Walter Mondale (D-MN) win not just the Electoral College but the popular vote with 39 states (including Washington DC) and 48.3 million voters with 58.1% of the electorate while Ronald Reagan (R-CA) only won 11 states that amounted to just 33 million and 39.7% of eligible voters.
  • The 1984 US presidential election has incumbent president Jeremiah Denton (R-AL) grab 518 electoral college votes compared to Mike Gravel (D-MA)'s 19, with 1 faithless elector.
  • Thanks to the after-effects of Lee Iaccoca's assassination and the successful Korean War, Larry Dinger (R-IA) overwhelmingly wins the White House and sweeps John Glenn (D-OH) with almost all states voting Republican.
  • Jesse Jackson (D-SC) wins the 2004 election against Bernie Goetz (R-CO) by a wider margin than in 2000 thanks to a successful campaign that flipped six traditional Republican states which include Virginia, West Virginia, North Carolina, Georgia, Mississippi, Missouri, Iowa and Kansas.
  • The Donkey Tidal Wave of 1986 and the Red Wave of 1996 both result in the Democrats and the Republicans respectively taking control of Congress and the White House due to important events that dramatically affect American politics (the Great Potomac Scandals and the Assassination of Lee Iacocca).
  • Incumbent President Kelsey Grammer (R-CA) wins renomination in the 2016 primaries nearly unanimously, not losing a single primary and only losing 27 non-bound delegates. And in the election proper, he wins twice as many states as his opponent Gary Locke (D-WA) and earns more than 100 more electoral votes.
  • Both of the main 2020 primary contestants turn into cases of this. On the Republican side, Rand Paul (R-KY) only takes Indiana and Maryland while splitting North Carolina with Harley Brown (R-ID), who takes every other state. On the Democratic side, Charlotte Pritt (D-WV) takes 43 states, with the others divided among the other candidates.
• Lifesaving Misfortune: While recovering from his Assassination Attempt, former President Sanders' physical reveals the symptoms of Type 2 diabetes, allowing him to adjust his lifestyle and alleviate the disease.
• LOL, 69: The thread discussing Vice-President Harley Brown becoming the President for the last months of President Grammer's term devolves into calls of "Nice" after it's calculated that the number of full days he'll be in office until the inauguration of Charlotte Pritt is 69.
• Magnum Opus Dissonance: invoked Inverted: In his 2001 interview concerning Quantum Leap, Donald P. Bellisario expressed displeasure with how the Series Finale played out, in part due feeling it ending with Sam returning home and reuniting with Donna and Al was too "sappy", while at the same time admitting that the audience loved it.
  I thought it was too sappy and not dramatic or, you know, big enough, for a series finale, especially given how the episode begins with Sam leaping into an Air Force soldier during the Libya War of the early 1980s. It starts off with bombs going off, end with a hug. I thought it needed to be more profound, or maybe have some extra tension, like some kind of uncertainty that his leap home wasn’t a complete success. Like maybe his leg didn’t leap back so now he’s got someone else’s leg. Or something, I dunno. But, to my surprise, the audience really liked it, so, hey, what do I know?
• Mars: The Marstronaut Mission by the United States is a resounding success with humanity landing on the red planet by 2003.
• Moment of Weakness: Burdened with the news of his son's arrest, President Jackson decides to increase military intervention in the Congo crisis, having lost faith in peace talks. However, VP Wellstone steps up his efforts and manages to establish an agreement.
• Moral Guardians: Because of the Colonel's moralistic views, he established many laws that censored what media could display to the public like alcohol, violence or sex, in an attempt to protect the minds of children.
• Morton's Fork: After former President Jesse Jackson is heard making more antisemitic remarks right before the 2010 midterms, the DNC encourages him to step back from publicly campaigning for them so as to not lose them white and Jewish voters. This, however, causes the Black vote to tank, leading to significant Democrat losses in Senate, House and gubernatorial elections.
  Jackson: (allegedly) Heh, I told them that Black voter turnout would not stay up without me.

Tropes N to Z

• Never My Fault: After Happy Chandler loses the 1955 Kentucky gubernational election, he asks whose idea it was to challenge the Colonel's eligibility. When an aide is about to remind Chandler that it was his idea, Chandler angrily blames him and fires him.
• No Kill like Overkill: Averted. The Colonel disagrees with the idea of a strategic bombing campaign in Vietnam, preferring to fight the Viet Cong using stealth and special forces units, then use conventional units when invading North Vietnam and fighting the NVA. These methods end up defeating not just North Vietnam, but also the Pathet Lao and Khmer Rouge.
• Not Helping Your Case: President Kelsey Grammer's speech to his cabinet about how they need to show the world that America needs to improve its international image and is not just a country of overweight loudmouthed slobs is immediately followed by Vice-President Harley Brown letting out a belch after finishing a burrito.
• "Not Making This Up" Disclaimer: The headline saying that the Sanwi Kingdom had chosen Jimi Hendrix as their semi-ceremonial crown prince has the suffix “We’re Serious.”.
• Obstructive Bureaucrat: Republican House Speakers Robert Smith Walker and H. Dargan McMaster are this to Democratic Presidents Carol Bellamy and Jesse Jackson respectively, both doing their best to kill the most progressive proposals.
• Oh, No... Not Again!: Having managed the hantavirus epidemic during her term as US President, this is Carol Bellamy's reaction when the SARS pandemic rears its ugly head.
• One-Steve Limit: Averted in terms of last names. In addition to the Colonel and his relatives, there is also Carl Sanders, the Democratic candidate who runs against the Colonel during his second presidential campaign, and Colonel Peter Sanders, a retired Indian Army officer he meets while visiting India after his presidency.
  • Special mention goes to the Colonel and his descendants, where "Harland David Sanders" becomes an Ancestral Name that's passed down through the generations. ^note "The Colonel" Harland David Sanders Sr., Harland David "Harley" Sanders Jr., Harland David "Lando" Sanders III, Harland David "Lando Jr./Davey" Sanders IV, Harland David "Vinnie" Sanders V, Harland David "Lando III" Sanders VI
• Our Presidents Are Different:
  • LBJ (D-TX, 1961-65) becomes Eisenhower's successor, and is mainly President Scheming and President Iron for his war on Cuba.
  • The Colonel (R-KY, 1965-73) becomes a mixture of President Personable and President Iron for his stance on the Cold War, particularly for the wars in South-East Asia, mixing strength with humanity. A lot of future Republicans that adopt his moderate conservative views are called "Colonel Conservatives".
  • Walter Mondale (D-MN, 1973-81) is mostly President Iron due to his interventions in Uganda and Ethiopia to keep the peace, but also due to his disagreements with his VP Mike Gravel.
  • Jeremiah Denton (R-AL, 1981-86) is initially President Iron for his hardline stance against Gaddafi in Libya, but drops into President Corrupt when he starts covering up sexual pestering scandals within his administration, which force him to resign from the presidency.
  • Jack French Kemp (R-NY, 1986-89) is President Personable for his improvement of US foreign relations, but is pretty mild otherwise. He doesn't even manage to win re-nomination for election. One could say that it actually helped his short tenure, as the lack of pressure for campaigning means he can focus on the job.
  • Carol Bellamy (D-NY, 1989-93) is definitely President Minority as the first woman president, but also President Iron for her unwavering focus on the job (and possibly a dig at her unmarried status).
  • Lee Iacocca (R-CA, 1993-95) is a mix of Presidents Iron and Jerkass due to his belligerence, and although he did a lot for the economy and healthcare, he hated the gridlock in Congress and often resorted to executive orders. Then he becomes President Target when he is assassinated.
  • Larry Dinger (R-IA, 1995-2001) is a mix of Presidents Iron and Personable like the Colonel, but more on the Iron side from his overseeing of the Second Korean War and the zero-tolerance war on drugs.
  • Jesse Jackson Sr. (D-SC, 2001-09), as TTL's first black President, is President Minority, as well as President Personable, overseeing many progressive reforms under his tenure.
  • Paul Wellstone (D-MN, 2009-13), is also President Minority as the first Jewish-American president much like his predecessor Jackson, but was a VP Personable when he diplomatically handled the unrest in the Congo when the latter was unable to intervene.
  • Kelsey Grammer (R-CA, 2013-20) is mainly President Iron for his tougher stances on issues than Wellstone.
  • Harley Brown (R-ID, 2020-21) is mainly President Iron like Grammer, but also President Jerkass for his "Harleyisms" that zigzag the line between rustically honest and boorishly insulting, as well as pushing through a lot of executive orders in the three months he was in office.
  • Charlotte Pritt (D-WV, 2021-present) is a mixture of President Personable and Minority, as the second female President of the United States and oversees many liberal policies passed in Congress.
• Pacifism Backfire: Prime Minister Lennon refuses to involve the UK in the Second Korean War, seeing it as more loss of human life, but when the extent of the human rights violations and starvation in North Korea is revealed, he receives a fair bit of backlash for not doing anything to help.
• Passing the Torch: In 2020, after Vice-President Harley Brown loses the presidential election to Charlotte Pritt, rather than endure the three stressful lame-duck months until inauguration day, President Grammer decides to resign the presidency, hand the reins to Harley, and let him serve the remainder of the term.
• Perspective Reversal: At the start of the Civil Rights movement in the 50s and 60s, Martin Luther King Jr. was seen as the peace-advocating leader while Malcolm X was derided as the more violent rabble rouser, but in the 70s, King became more accepting of violence while X started embracing pacifism. In addition, King got caught up in the "Ark Wave" feminist movement and his improprieties have tarnished his reputation, while X published his autobiography and became known as a caring family man.
• Please Select New City Name / Meaningful Rename: Because of the existence of Washington State, the District of Columbia (Washington) changes its name to Potomac after the river that flows through the city when it becomes the fifty-second state.
• Point of Divergence:
  • Due to the survival of Harley Sanders, the Colonel is inspired to become Kentucky Governor and later President. The after-effects of the Sanders administration include infrastructure being improved, the Civil Rights and women's rights movements gaining traction earlier, Castro's Cuba overthrown by an American invasion, Vietnam's reunification by the South with U.S. help, North Korea also being overthrown and reunified with the South, the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc collapsing in the mid 1980s, the ERA being ratified, and Puerto Rico and Washington, D.C. becoming the 51st and 52nd states in the Union.
  • Additionally, since the Colonel invested in the construction of Landis Stadium and pumped money for the state of Kentucky, Louisville has a much larger population than OTL, leading to the MLB granting the city an expansion team named the Colonels, the ABA's Colonels being absorbed into the NBA and the NFL would create the Louisville Stallions as opposed to the Jacksonville Jaguars.
• Posthumous Character: The Colonel and his son Harley after their deaths in this timeline, at 100 and 95 years respectively.
• Proxy War: The conflict in Iran between the Shah's government and the Ayatollah's rebel forces, which are backed respectfully by the US and Soviets.
• Puerto Rico: The commonwealth island is eventually admitted into the Union as the 51st state and the first to have English and Spanish as official languages.
• Putting the Band Back Together: After John Lennon retired as Prime Minister, he and his fellow Beatles got together for one last charity concert for the SARS epidemic. It also counts as The Last Dance for George Harrison, who dies from cancer 10 months later.
• Race Lift: Chief Corvallis (TTL's Futurama equivalent to Chief Wiggum) is African-American, rather than Caucasian.
• Realpolitik:
  • When the US intervenes in Ethiopia after a Soviet-backed Military Coup, President Mondale gets the Soviets to back off of any more involvement by agreeing to sell them millions of tons of wheat at a discount; facing a starving population due to poor agricultural resources, the Soviets agree.
  • After Syria invades Israel on a very thin pretext (a rogue Israeli national assassinating a Lebanese official with Syrian business ties), the rest of the Arab nations side with Israel in order to preserve the prosperous economic connections that have come from twenty-or-so years of peace in the Middle East.
• "The Reason You Suck" Speech: The Colonel gives a very brutal one to J. Edgar Hoover over his surveilling of war protesters, before whacking him in the temple with his cane out of anger. This inadvertently leads to Hoover’s death via a brain aneurysm.
• Redeeming Replacement: In the eyes of the Iranian populace, while the Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi was despised as a Western panderer, his son Shah Reza Pahlavi is a lot more popular, seen as a fair (if idealistic) leader dedicated to helping his subjects, keeping the peace, and turning Iran into a neutral and prosperous hub a la Switzerland. After his sister was kidnapped and executed by pro-Khomeini radicals, the public rallied behind him and his family and Khomeini's followers were eventually ousted.
• Refuge in Audacity: After Muammar Gaddafi is captured alive, he declares himself an American citizen to spend life in an American jail instead of being sentenced to death in Libya. It works.
• The Remnant: A few months after the official end of the 1975 Chinese civil war, a couple of Lin Biao loyalist Generals gather forces in Manchuria and threaten to use a couple of stolen nukes against Beijing if Deng Xiaoping doesn't step down. The government responds by neutralizing their nukes and then storm their base, killing most of the rebels involved.
• Richard Nixon, the Used Car Salesman: This happens very frequently with famous historical figures and actors since this is an Alternate History story.
  • The Colonel becoming Governor of Kentucky and later President!?
  • Lyndon B. Johnson is elected early, defeating Nixon in 1960. His successor is the Colonel.
  • John F. Kennedy is the Secretary of State for the Johnson administration and launches an unsuccessful campaign for the Presidency in 1968.
  • Similar to Kennedy above, Jimmy Carter becomes a Secretary of State for Walter Mondale.
  • Ray Kroc runs for president in 1976 but fails to win the Republican nomination.
  • Lee Harvey Oswald is remembered as the man who killed Che Guevara during the Cuban War. His actions become the subject of a best-seller titled Call Me By My Real Name: Confessions of a Fallen Hero.
  • John Lennon going from Beatle to Liverpool MP, then Labor Party leader, and finally Prime Minister of the UK.
  • Bob Ross going from soldier, to famous artist, to governor of Alaska, then head of the EPA, and then Paul Wellstone's Vice-President.
  • James Chaney isn't murdered by the Ku Klux Klan and instead lives long enough to become the second black governor of Mississippi after Unita Zelma Blackwell.
  • Likewise, Medgar Evers is never assassinated by Byron de la Beckwith and in his post-civil rights life he became the first black mayor of Decatur, Mississippi in the 1970s as well as running an unsuccessful Senate campaign.
  • Barry Gordon becomes a Congressman for two terms in California, before becoming head of Pizza Hut in 2007.
  • Robert F. Kennedy Jr. heads up Burger King.
  • Ditto for Lee Iacocca, Harry Shearer, Kelsey Grammer, Monica Lewinsky, and even Bernie Goetz.
  • Kevin Spacey becomes an electrician due to his family never moving to the West Coast and his father's death in 1965 from falling a row of stairs during a blackout.
  • Wesley Snipes becomes the director of the critically-acclaimed Relentess a biopic about Bass Reeves, the first black US Deputy Marshal west of the Mississippi.
  • Donnie Dunagan (the voice of the titular character in Bambi and later a Marine) becomes Kemp's Secretary of Defense.
  • John McCain becomes an Admiral instead of going to politics, and while recovering on Hawaii meets and marries Ann Dunham, becoming Barack Obama's stepfather. Barack "Rocky" McCain thus grows up a Military Brat, becomes Chief of Staff to Vice-President James Meredith, and in 2008, is a Republican state senator in Montana as well as eventually getting elected as governor.
  • Fittingly the Trope Namer himself became a Republican senator from California and never won the Presidency.
  • James Oliver Huberty attempts to assassinate outgoing President Jeremiah Denton but failed due to presidential limos being bulletproof since 1964.
  • Ross Perot served as Governor of Texas from 1983 to 1987 as the only Independent politician in the state to hold this office and later served as the US Ambassador to Mexico under the Iacocca administration. Perot would also go on to become the new owner of the Dallas Cowboys and later joined the Microsoft Board of Directors.
  • Donald Trump and George W. Bush are retired baseball players, and they even get into a brawl on the field at one point. Trump decides never to pursue a political career after the assassination of Iacocca, and instead decides to go into independent moviemaking with Tommy Wiseau.
    • In addition, Trump's line of ex-wives includes Sarah Palin and a member of the British royal family.
  • Rudy Giuliani doesn't become mayor of New York. He instead becomes husband to the NY mayor: Mary-Anne Trump.
  • Bernie Sanders is the CEO of the progressive-leaning Tumbleweed Magazine instead of becoming a senator from Vermont.
  • Vladimir Putin, after being crippled by friendly fire from a fellow KGB officer during a riot, turns on the Russian government and becomes an outspoken community organizer, who is frequently interviewed by international news. He is even arrested during the corrupt term of President Nikolayev.
  • Stephen Hillenburg, the creator of SpongeBob SquarePants IOTL, decides to create a seafood restaurant chain called SpongeBob’s Undersea Cuisine, which itself gets a tie-in animated series co-produced with Klasky-Csupo, called The SpongeBob Zone, running from 1997-2001.
  • Timothy McVeigh is a computer programmer and left-wing activist responsible for launching Operation Lockjaw against the United States government. He also works for Commodore International and Microsoft.
  • Al Gore becomes a famous documentary film director, looking at important topics like climate change.
  • Bill Clinton becomes the Governor of Alaska from 1978 to 1986 and pursued an unsuccessful run for the presidential nomination for the Democratic Party. He later moved to California for a career as a lawyer and attempted to run for Congress in 2010 but the sexual pestering scandal puts an end to his political aspirations there.
    • By the way, the person who beats him in the primary of his 2010 Congress run and goes on to become a House Representative? Monica Lewinsky.
  • Joe Biden is elected to the Senate in 1984 after serving as Delaware's Governor from 1977 to 1985. Ever since his decades-long political career had ended in the Red Wave of 1996, Biden became a member of the liberal lobby group Centrist Circle and the Amtrak Board of Directors as well as serving as a part-time lecturer at the University of Delaware.
  • After his MLB career had ended, Roberto Clemente serves as a Goodwill Ambassador under the Mondale administration as well as the chairman of the Council on Physical Fitness and Sports. Later, Clemente would become the first Black Hispanic Governor of Puerto Rico.
  • Geert Wilders moved to the United States and becomes a political strategist for the Republican Party after failing to become a prominent actor in Hollywood.
  • Estus Pirkle entered into politics first by becoming Governor of Mississippi and later running an unsuccessful presidential campaign in 1992.
  • Herman Cain becomes the first black CEO of the National Restaurant Association but also becomes a chief executive for Burger Chef and KFC in addition to being elected to office as a GOP Senator from Georgia.
  • James Rolfe is a prominent critic on OurVids who is the creator of "Paper-To-Screen Adaptations", a webseries that analyzes good and bad adaptations of popular media. He was also a writer that worked on the animated series The Defenders of Dynatron City and later became an actor as well as working with Paramount to develop a "movie about video games movies" with Crispin Glover.
  • Doug Walker (The Nostalgia Critic in OTL) becomes an actor turned scriptwriter much like Rolfe.
  • Derek Savage stays in modelling longer before acting in several low-budget films made by Vince Offer.
  • After Blue's Clues, Steve Burns goes on to become a well-known drama actor.
  • Kelley Earnhardt (daughter of Dale Earnhardt) stays as a NASCAR driver and becomes successful like her brother, Dale Earnhardt Jr. Likewise, Frankie Muniz also becomes a NASCAR driver. Conversely, Jeff Gordon races in IndyCar instead of NASCAR
  • Judy Sheindlin served as assistant US Attorney General under President Carol Bellamy from 1991 to 1993.
  • Eric Bauza not only remains an animator, but creates an animated series through his company, Bauzilla Productions.
  • Likewise, Robyn Byrd (John Kricfalusi's first victim IOTL) becomes a successful animator and cartoon creator, as Kricfalusi's fall from grace happened much earlier ITTL.
  • Newt Gingrich was the Communications Director for the Denton administration from 1981 to 1985.
  • Larry Sanders becomes interim Prime Minister in 2015.
  • Paul Heyman became CEO of the WWE.
  • Cory Booker becomes a professional dietician.
  • Vladimir Nikolayev serves as President of Russia in The New '10s.
  • Instead of becoming the Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski instead becomes the pseudo-leader of an online anarchist/primitivist cult known as the Forest Fellowship. Eric Rudolph is a member of this group and gets arrested in 2014 for bombing a tech business.
  • Jeff Bezos becomes Director of NASA.
  • Justin Trudeau goes into acting instead of politics, though he does do some political activism.
  • Kirk Cameron remained an atheist and became a liberal political activist, stumping for Bob Ross in 2016.
  • Both Rodger Bumpass and Bill Fagerbakke pursue different careers with the former becoming a film actor and director while the latter became a renowned linebacker for the Houston Oilers and the Minnesota Vikings (though he does still become an actor). Likewise, Tom Kenny is also a film actor, as is Maddie Blaustein.
  • Matthew Cox becomes a hugely successful gunrunner under the alias "Tommy Gun Thompson", who after his arrest becomes famous for a tell-all autobiography that eventually gets a movie deal.
  • Andrew Yang becomes Mayor of Columbus, Ohio.
  • George Floyd becomes a judge, and is eventually appointed to the Supreme Court by Charlotte Pritt.
• Roaring Rampage of Revenge: While dealing with the wayward Ayatollah Khomeini, the Shah Reza Pahlavi's sister, Farahnaz, was kidnapped and executed by a group of radicals. Pushed to the limit, the Shah orders the kidnappers bombed out of existence, and several months later, does the same to Khomeini himself.
• Rule of Symbolism: As Hồ Chí Minh walks along North Vietnam after being overthrown, he spots an empty bucket of KFC, symbolizing that what had once been Hồ's empire is now under American influence.
• Southern-Fried Genius: The Colonel is the quintessential Kentuckian, but he is both a successful businessman and successful politician.
• Spared by the Adaptation:
  • The Point of Divergence of this timeline is the survival of the Colonel's son, Harland "Harley" David Sanders Jr. from the tonsillitis fever that took his life IOTL when he was just 20. He serves in World War II, joins his family in running Finger Lickin' Good, Inc. and KFC, and even takes a stint in politics, until he passes at the ripe old age of 95.
  • Neither Martin Luther King Jr. or Malcolm X are assassinated.
  • Elvis Presley has his Wake-Up Call with a heart attack, takes his health more seriously, and even gets a heart transplant from a fan, surviving into the 21st century.
  • Steve Irwin doesn't die from a stingray attack.
  • Marilyn Monroe doesn't die by overdose, living until the age of 87.
  • Ray Combs does not commit suicide.
  • Jayne Mansfield never dies in a car crash.
  • Vladislav Volkov isn't killed in the Soyuz 11 mission.
  • James Chaney is never brutally killed by the Ku Klux Klan in 1964.
  • Jimmy Hoffa does not mysteriously disappear in 1975.
  • John Belushi doesn't succumb to a drug overdose and later undergoes rehabilitation.
  • Freddie Mercury never succumbs to AIDS and HIV (ISF in the Kentucky Fried Politics universe)
  • Robert Clemente doesn't die in a plane crash during a trip to deliver aid relief to earthquake victims in Nicaragua.
  • Nicole Brown is never murdered by O. J. Simpson since there is a Role Reversal between the two.
  • River Phoenix never succumbs to a drug overdose.
  • Per Word of God, Dale Earnhardt is "still alive, still racing".
  • Likewise, Chris Farley also avoids drugs and continues his acting career.
  • John Allen Chau gets caught before he could reach the North Sentinel Islands in time, and after a sentence in jail, becomes an OurVids personality to capitalize on his fame.
  • Tupac Shakur is never mysteriously murdered in Las Vegas. Similarly, Christopher Wallace (The Notorious B.I.G) doesn't get killed in a gang drive-by shooting.
  • Kurt Cobain never commits suicide.
  • Judith Barsi is not killed by her father, and is still active as an actress and voice actress (though she took a two-year hiatus to focus on her mental health). Likewise, Polly Klaas is not kidnapped and murdered by Richard Allen Davis (who died in a drunk driving accident in 1986), and is also still active.
  • Heather O'Rourke never contracts giardiasis.
  • Paul Wellstone never dies in a plane accident and becomes not just Jesse Jackson's VP but eventually the President of the United States.
  • Bob Ross doesn't suffer a stroke of lymphoma.
  • Gen. Eldon A. Bargewell doesn't die during a lawnmower accident.
  • Cheri Jo Bates is never brutally murdered on the grounds of Riverside City College.
  • Selena Quintanilla-Perez is never shot and killed by Yolanda Saldivar.
  • Medgar Evers isn't assassinated by Byron de la Beckwith.
  • Maddie Blaustein never succumbs to cancer ITTL.
  • Anthony Bourdain does not commit suicide.
  • Owen Hart doesn't fall to his death because an OSHA probe led to the WWE having better safety standards.
  • John Reynolds (who played Torgo in Manos: The Hands of Fate) doesn't commit suicide, and becomes an award-winning actor.
  • Nation example: Yugoslavia still exists ITTL.
  • In this timeline's version of Titanic (1997), Jack survives the Titanic sinking.
  • Corporation examples:
    • The Overmeyer Network becomes a successful major television channel thanks to the Sanders administration.
    • H. Salt Esq. Fish & Chips becomes much more successful than IOTL.
    • NeXT is still a competitor to Apple.
    • Burger Chef is still in operation, becoming a serious competitor to McDonald's.
    • In a reversal of OTL, ShowBiz Pizza Place is still alive, and has adapted to changing times, while Chuck E. Cheese's (which never did) closed its last location in 2017.
    • The Howard Johnson Company still exists in the restaurant business; while it doesn't have over 1,000 locations as it did in its peak, it at least has roughly 100 locations in the US rather than its final store closing in 2022, thanks to John Y. Brown Jr. getting involved in the company and weathering the effects of the 1978 recession.
    • Hanna-Barbera remains active as a Turner-Kennedy subsidiary.
    • 4Kids Entertainment is also still active; they have been involved primarily in anime since the late 1990s.
  • Coin example: because John F. Kennedy never became president ITTL, Franklin half dollars are still minted.
  • George Floyd isn't killed by police.
• Scrapbook Story: Like most timelines on Alternate History Discussion, the plot of Kentucky Fried Politics is primarily made up of in-universe book excerpts as well as websites, forums, news reports, and broadcasts.
• Shown Their Work: The timeline covers decades of American and world history with the author providing footnotes of research in every chapter and how it contrasts OTL.
• Sliding Scale of Alternate History Plausibility: A solid Type I, with elements of Type II sprinkled into the story.
• Springtime for Hitler: Gene Roddenberry, hoping to discourage NBC from ordering more Star Trek installments, pitched a deliberately over-the-top pilot for an animated adaptation. To his horror, NBC greenlit a full season. Roddenberry later declared it non-canon in 1990.
• Start My Own: After Hillenburg's ideas to improve Long John Silver's ended up being rejected repeatedly, he quit to start a competing chain, SpongeBob's Undersea Cuisine, whose success contributed to Long John Silver's collapse.
• Take a Third Option: How the Colonel ended up running for the White House and winning it. He was the compromise candidate for the Republican Primary after the primary season ended without a clear frontrunner and a contested convention. Moreso, he wasn't even in the race for the Presidency in the first place, and didn't get involved until he was asked to run just before the National Republican Convention.
• Tastes Like Friendship: The Colonel believes that he can resolve international tensions between countries through dinner, and his track record speaks for itself. He established relations with Mao's China by opening the first KFC in China, established the "Annual Chicken Dinner Peace Summit" for leaders in the Middle-East that eventually culminated in a lasting peace treaty, and even won a Nobel Peace Prize for getting India and Pakistan to the table to negotiate peace.
• Tempting Fate:
  • In a 1968 log entry, high-ranking Pathet Lao member Phoumi Vongvichit declared "We will launch the attack soon enough – our victory is inevitable!". Almost a month later, the Pathet Lao falls, and Vongvichit is among the casualties.
  • During his second term, President Jeremiah Denton uttered "You know, I really think our problems are almost over." and "I think we're finally getting out of the woods now." on two separate occasions. After the first statement, Bob Packwood's diaries are subpoenaed by the FBI, and after the second statement, the diaries' contents are published, revealing just what Denton knew about the Buz Lukens pedophilia and hush money scandal.
  • Prime Minister Nick Varvaris says that Australia's cybersecurity is good enough to make the country un-hackable. Two days later, their parliament is hacked by foreign agents.
• This Means War!: Kim Jong-Il's paranoia against foreign influence eventually leads to misinterpreted orders to shoot down anything in the air with anything they have, and one jumpy private and rumors of a South Korean fighter jet leads to anti-aircraft missiles being fired over the DMZ into the South Korean city of Paju, resulting in many deaths including several American soldiers and tourists. With American blood now spilled, President Dinger orders military support be given to South Korean forces, and later, enters the war outright.
• Throw the Dog a Bone:
  • Trying to work through his weakened heart, Elvis Presley receives an offer from a deceased fan (who has the same name as his mother) to donate her heart to him. The surgery goes well, and Elvis dedicates his next album to her, "Elaine".
  • After 53 years of failed marriages, Marilyn Monroe finally finds an enduring match at the age of 68 to Harry Belafonte. By 2005, they are celebrating their 10-year anniversary, which has lasted longer than any of Marilyn's previous marriages.
• Trumplica: Bernie Goetz is surprisingly enough rather close to Donald Trump's business and political career as a former business tycoon from the Democrat-controlled state of Colorado who became the Republican nominee for President by running on a mostly conservative platform that draws much of its support from blue-collar, working-class voters, whose campaign would face constant accusations of racism by some critics.
• Undignified Death: J. Edgar Hoover dies of a brain aneurysm not long after the Colonel whacks him in the face with his cane during an argument. Bonus points for the Colonel being oblivious to the idea that he caused it.
• The Vietnam Vet: Former president Jeremiah Denton and US Navy Admiral John McCain fought in Vietnam which subsequently made them famous war heroes to many Americans.
• Wake-Up Call:
  • A heart attack at 38 gets Elvis Presley's head on straight and he does his best to kick the drugs and the fast food.
  • The Iacocca assassination and the gunning down of their fellow rappers make Biggie Smalls and Tupac Shakur re-evaluate the influence that their lyrics and their feud has on their lives, and they do their best to turn down the temperature.
• Wham Line: After VP Harley Brown loses the 2020 presidential election to Charlotte Pritt, President Grammer feels sympathetic for him, but then Grammer has an idea: resign the presidency and let Brown be President for the final 71 days of his term.
  Grammer: Marissa, dear. How’d you like to beat the holiday rush and blow this popsicle stand early?
• What Could Have Been: In-Universe:
  • SpongeBob's Undersea Cuisine had many names proposed back when Mr. Krabs was the primary focus. These included The Crunchy Crab, Krab King Burgers, Undersea Cuisine, Dockside Classics, Offshore Delights (both of which were taken), Undersea King Cuisine, Krab King Cuisine, Sea King Burgers, the Sea King Shack, the Krabby Patty Shack, Crusty Crab Burgers, and Krabby Patty Cuisine. The restaurant was going to be called SpongeBoy Ahoy after Stephen Hillenburg created a sponge mascot, but after learning that the name had been used by a mop company, renamed it to SpongeBob's.
  • There were plans for an animated series based on the Colonel's life in the early 1990s; it was rejected due to Finger Lickin' Good's financial woes.
  • Calls have been made to replace Franklin D. Roosevelt on the US dime with the Colonel or Lee Iacocca, though they have never come to fruition.
• Wide-Eyed Idealist: The Colonel actually thinks that geopolitical tensions can be resolved through chicken dinners. And given his influence in the Annual Chicken Dinners in the Middle East that eventually led to the 1978 Atlanta Treaty, and his winning of the Nobel Peace Prize for settling the dispute between India and Pakistan, there's ample evidence to say he's right.
• You Are a Credit to Your Race: When Jewish Vice President Paul Wellstone says that he wants to give Uganda peace talks another go, the African-American President Jesse Jackson comments that he and his lot are naturally persuasive. This isn't the first Jew-targeted comment that Jackson has made towards Wellstone, but Wellstone doesn't let it bother him. However, Jackson being recorded making another such comment after he leaves office does lead to some uncomfortable news scrutiny for the Democratic Party afterwards.
• Your Approval Fills Me with Shame: After the above mentioned incident, several anti-Semitic politicians praise Jackson for his comments, triggering a horrified reaction from him.

Tropes affected by the timeline include:

• All the Trope Namers originating from The Simpsons, Family Guy and South Park: They still kind of exist, but under different names since their creators did other shows ITTL. Matt Groening successfully adapted Life in Hell for TON as Life in Heck and Other Places, Seth MacFarlane got Larry & Steve into a full series for TON’s sister channel Ton-o-Toons and Trey Parker and Matt Stone made Tim Warped instead of South Park.
• Avoid the Dreaded G Rating: The motion picture ratings system in the United States is different from OTL: there's AAA (All Ages Admitted; TTL’s G rating), PGR (Parental Guidance Recommended; a mix between PG and PG-13), and OEO (Over Eighteen Only; a mix of R and NC-17). As such, the trope is called “Avoid the Dreaded AAA Rating” instead.
• Balkan Bastard: The modern Yugoslav Wars aspect of this trope is non-existent since Yugoslavia survived ITTL.
• Memetic Mutation: Memes here are known as netwits.
• Middle Eastern Terrorists: They’re not as prevalent here as they would be IOTL. The Colonel’s Chicken Dinner Summit in Israel and the lack of a Soviet invasion or 9/11 ensured a much more stable Middle East.
• Qurac: ITTL, the trope is inspired by Gaddafi’s Libya and post-monarchy Egypt since Hussein and the Assad regime either never came to power or were overthrown. Furthermore, the Trope Namer from DC Comics goes under a different name and is based, again, on Gaddafi’s Libya because of Hussein’s earlier death than IOTL.
• Right-Wing Militia Fanatic: The trope is more inspired by events like the Wide-Awakes Movement of the 1990s and less so on contemporary groups or individuals since domestic terrorism and political polarization are not as common ITTL
• Scandalgate: Since Nixon never became President ITTL, the trope is instead known as Scandal Wave, after the Great Potomac Scandals and Ark Waves respectively.
• Southern-Fried Genius: The trope is likely to be based on Indiana-born but Kentucky-raised Colonel Harland Sanders because... well, you've read the title.
• Terminator Impersonator / Terminator Twosome / The Ahnold: As James Cameron never made Terminator ITTL, both are butterflied out of existence. Similarly, expies of Arnold Schwarzenegger are instead based on his performance as Conan the Barbarian.
• Trumplica: The presidential and political aspects of this trope are not present here since Donald Trump never went into politics. Furthermore, Trumplica incorporates the subject’s baseball and filmmaking careers as much as his businessman side.
• The Vietnam Vet: Since America won the Vietnam War here, this trope is called "The Cuba Vet" and is based on the Cuban War, which was as controversial as OTL's Vietnam War.
• YouTube Kids' Channel / YouTuber Apology Parody: YouTube doesn’t exist and was replaced by OurVids as the premier video-sharing website in this world. That said, there are equivalents to both tropes specific to OurVids given the site's popularity.
• Why We Are Bummed Communism Fell: This trope was created earlier with the collapse of the Soviet Union and Eastern Bloc in 1984 rather than 1991.
• Who Shot JFK?: This trope is called "Who Shot Iacocca?" instead since Lee Iacocca basically took the place of Kennedy (who, here, never became President and Lee Harvey Oswald not having a reason to kill him) as a famous American president being murdered and having conspiracy theories about said murder even decades after it took place.

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And I think dedicating this school to (the Colonel) is the kind of legacy that he would smile at and say that it was finger lickin’ good.

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