It’s something I like a lot: stories or movies that show historical events pretty much as they are known to have happened, but which give a different explanation, for comic or dramatic effect.
For instance, the film Dick gives a funny alternative explanation for some of the events of the Watergate scandal – who was Deep Throat, why there was an 18-minute gap on the tapes, etc.
For a joke, Back to the Future gives an explanation as to how Chuck Berry came up with the idea for Johnny B. Goode.
Tim Powers uses a type of vampire as an explanation of the lives of the romantic poets (Shelley, Byron, and Keats) in The Stress of Her Regard – like the orign of Keats’s epitapth (“Here lies One Whose Name was writ in Water”) and how Shelley died.
What else has this sort of thing? I’d like to find more.
Have you read Declare, also by Tim Powers? He provides an alternate explanation for the events leading up to double-agent Kim Philby’s defection to the Russians in 1963. It involves genies.
If the Young Indiana Jones Chronicles are to be believed, then Henry “Indiana” Jones Jnr appears to have been intimately involved in pretty much every major historical even from 1910-1932 or so.
I’ll second Declare. Powers’ story supposedly exactly coincides with the historic accounts of Kim Philby’s actions during the time set in the story. It’s a very sharp, realistic spy story in one respect (it helps to have read some John Le Carre before reading Declare so you can appreciate the Cold War spy tradecraft) and in another respect, it’s a total fantasy novel. And neither one inhibits the other. One of the most brilliant books I ever read, one of the few I’ve read more than once.
Forrest Gump has quite a few of these moments; for example, Richard Nixon books Gump into the Watergate Hotel, and Forrest subsequently tips off investigators to the people rooting through the office across the way.
Hopefully without risking a serious thread derail, the movie JFK is a version of the events and motives surrounding the eponymous assassination.
Sillier examples: in The Rocketeer, the hero at one point grabs onto a model of the Hercules (“Spruce Goose”) airplane in Howard Hughes’ workshop, and glides it out the door. Hughes remarks, “the damn thing WILL fly!” That movie also has an explanation of how the famous Hollywood sign lost its original “-land”.
Quantum Leap used to have occasional “kiss with history” where Sam made contact with a historical event. For instance, he stopped Dr. Heimlich from choking with a Heimlich Manuver, taught Chubby Checker the Twist, inspired Stephen King and Woody Allen, and taught Michael Jackson how to moonwalk.
In Einstein’s Bridge George Bush picks Dan Quayle as his Vice President due to biochemical manipulation by time travellers, as part of a plan to derail the Superconducting Supercollider, which if built would have led to the destruction of humanity by a nasty parallel-universe species attracted by it’s high energy experiments.
In the Callahan’s Place stories by Spider Robinson, it’s revealed that the Tunguska Explosion was actually the result of a failed attempt by Nikolai Tesla to send a long distance transmission. When he realized what he’d invented instead of transmitter, he carefully discredited himself and his research, gaining the reputation of a lunatic so no one would take his work seriously enough to discover what he’d done and replicate it.
In a Voyager episode, it’s revealed that the sudden advances in computers in the 20th century are due to the analysis of a stranded time travelling ship.
The old CBS series “Voyagers!” to add to the list of shows with meddling time travellers.
Stretching the point a bit, Roger Zelazney’s Amber books allow for travel to alternate realities through the manipulation of “Shadow” so it’s possible to find pretty much every possible divergence of any possible event.
Doctor Who: The Doctor & various companions are responsible for, among other things -
Teaching the first cavemen how to make fire.
Instigating the great fire of London.
Insitgating the burning of Rome.
Inspiring the idea for the Trojan Horse.
Were present at the shoot-out at the OK Corral.
Weren’t responsible for, but saw Queen Victoria attacked by a werewolf, an incident that would be responsible for her inexplicable anemic condition in later life, and (supposedly) resulting in the current generation of English Royals becoming werewolves themselves (who says Prince Charles doesn’t have a wild side?).
It’s also implied that the Professor/Doctor/whatever whose house is the time machine also takes a detour to pose as J.S. Bach to transcribe parts of the music they heard while traveling through time.