Alternate-Universe Sci-Fi Channel Show Asks What Would Happen If Germany Lost War

[Dave Monroe]

ENTERTAINMENT
Alternate-Universe Sci-Fi Channel Show Asks What Would Happen If
Germany Lost War
November 9, 2009 | Issue 45•46


NEW MUNICH—The new Sci-Fi Channel series Fallen Axis, which eerily
depicts a world in which Germany actually lost the Second World War,
premiered Tuesday evening to high ratings in an alternate universe to
our own.

The much-anticipated television event is said to be the most ambitious
ever produced by the science-fiction-themed network, which is a
subsidiary of the Aryan Broadcasting Company. According to the early
response, audiences in the alternate realm have been riveted by the
show's vision of an inverted existence wherein a defeated Germany has
been completely neutered by the Allied powers.
"Imagine, if you will, a world in which Hitler's glorious master plan
had instead ended in ignominious failure, and the Allies had somehow
emerged the victors," the show's creator, Leonhardt Riefenstahl, said
during an appearance on Entertainment Heute Nacht. "It would be as if
everything we know to be true—the fall of Russia, the invasion and
surrender of the American continents, Heinrich Braun-Hitler's
consolidation of the various conquered states in 1973—had never even
happened."
Added Riefenstahl, "I think viewers all across the great worldwide
National Socialist Empire are going to be terrified by the upside-down
world we've created."

Critics residing in the alternate realm have also responded positively
to the show: Many praised its scarily realistic depiction of a postwar
Russian-American union rising to economic dominance and superpower
status with the help of gloating French and English allies.

"Not only is Fallen Axis a chilling, what-if story of a world gone
mad, it also asks a number of important questions about what Germany's
victory meant, and why its sacred mission was so critical to the
fatherland and all of humankind," said Hans von Winterstein, TV critic
for the Deutsche-American Zeitung. "And Rolf Staal's performance as
former cowboy actor Henry Fonda II, the monstrous American president
who attempts to spread his country's insidious political and economic
liberalism across the globe, will horrify even the most stoic among
us."

Producers said depicting the fictional, non-German-controlled America
cost upwards of 40 million reichsmarks per episode, with much of the
budget going toward recreating the cities of Washington, D.C. and New
York exactly as they would have appeared before the famous
tide-turning Luftwaffe strike of 1951. In addition, test audiences
reported being impressed by the show's painstaking portrayal of a
topsy-turvy 2009 in which American big-band music plays on every
radio, Mickey Mouse spouts pro-Semitic propaganda from every cinema
screen, and dilution of the supreme race runs rampant.

The show is considered by many to be another boon to the Sci-Fi
Channel's fall schedule, which also includes Battlestar
Gleichschaltung, a weekly drama about a starship crew that enforces
the total coordination of intergalactic society and commerce, and the
hit reality series Jew Hunters, in which a team of paranormal
investigators scour banks and former Polish ghettos in search of
Jewish spirits.

No less an authority than the National Socialist Empire's
reichsminister of propaganda Helmut Goebbels expressed his admiration
for Fallen Axis in a formal address yesterday from the Reichstag.

"The Führer and myself are enormously pleased with this provocative
new program," Goebbels said. "It shows you how close Germany might
have been to losing the war had Nazi scientists not perfected the
vortex gun just in time, and it is a reaffirmation of the values of
self-sacrifice and racial purity that Germany's magnificent victory
championed."

Added Goebbels, "However, I must strongly warn the show's creators
that it would be extremely unwise of them not to include a five-minute
tribute to the Führer at the beginning of all future episodes."



http://www.theonion.com/content/news/alternate_universe_sci_fi_channel