There are a ton of references in the timeline mainly because with the inclusion of dates, I could slip a lot of fun stuff in there. Right off the bat, any time September 17th is mentioned, that’s a reference to the first movie because that’s the date it came out.

First off, we have two fictional character birthdays, August 1st, and December 9th, which are the birthdays of The Joker and Oliver Queen (a.k.a The Green Arrow) respectively. Next is March 15th, 1975 which is the day that Terror of Mechagodzilla came out in Japan.

The next date is another movie release date. Arnold’s birthday, May 25th, 1977, is when Star Wars first opened in theaters. While the year isn’t right on this next one, the date of November 23rd is when the very first episode of Doctor Who premiered. Adam’s birthday, January 25th is the officially designated date of Opposite Day.

This one’s pretty straightforward. August 12th is my birthday and September 12th is my sister’s birthday. 2003 is the year I was born so there is an August 12th, 2003 in there as well. I also had the opening scene of the first movie take place on the exact day it was released, September 17th, 2010.

This is a fun one because it was a complete accident. Kate and Humphrey get married on March 26th, which is the day the first How to Train Your Dragon movie came out. I just picked a random date in early spring for the first movie to start and the amount of time that passes in the movie landed their wedding on March 26th. June 28th is when the first Pirates of the Caribbean movie came out. March 29th, 2020 is a real-life application because in the story, COVID hits the zoo that Humphrey is at and in real life, that’s when quarantine started.

July 16th of the same year is another real-life application because it was around that time that things were starting to settle down with COVID and that’s exactly what happens in the story. While it’s not on the calendar, this next one ended up being true by pure coincidence. In the story, I state that a year after the zoo reopens in the summer of 2020, everything went back to the way it used to be, making it July of 2021 when things go back to normal at the zoo. And now, as of May 13th, 2021 as I’m writing this, we’re expected to be completely done masking and social distancing by July 1st, about a year after things started settling down.

May 4th is of course Star Wars day. June 12th is another fun one because that’s the day when I came up with the idea to write these stories in the first place. Right at the end, there’s November 23rd, 2063 which will be the 100th anniversary of Doctor Who.

And while this reference showed up earlier on, I had to save it for last because it is my absolute favorite thing in the entire collection. The entry reads this:
“November 15th, 2019: Oscar’s sons, Mark and Ethan, are born.”

Now let me break this down. Mark and Ethan refers to Mark Fischbach and Ethan Nestor, two popular YouTubers better known as Markiplier and CrankGamePlays. On November 15th of 2019, they started a collaboration channel called Unus Annus, which is Latin for “one year”. The idea was to upload one video every single day for one year and at the end of that one year, they would (and did) delete the entire channel and every video on it. The point of all this was to teach people about the inevitability of death and to cherish the time that you have while you still have it, because you can never go back, and you can never stop the clock from reaching zero.

But these weren’t just any old videos, no, they were far from it. Because the channel was getting deleted in one year, Mark and Ethan threw all of YouTube’s rules out the window and literally made videos on whatever they wanted. For one entire year, they successfully put up one video every single day and not one of them got taken down. And it was surprisingly sad when the day came for the channel to get deleted. In some way, these characters of Unus and Annus that they had created had become real and now they were dying.

On November 14th, 2020, over 1.6 million people (myself included) stayed up for twelve hours straight and watched the final livestream that Mark and Ethan did. For twelve hours, they sat and reflected about the past year, watching different parts of their favorite videos among other things. And once the clock hit zero, they hit the delete button. So this one date is a reference to one huge year of crazy that happened at the perfect time because of everything that was going on in the world. People had something positive to look forward to every single day during the worst year of our lives. We had no idea what ridiculousness the next day would bring, but we knew it was going to be good.

Looking back at all this, I realize it was a bit of a feat that I managed to make these stories as good as they turned out to be. I had to take this pretty silly kids’ movie and turn it into something dark and aged up with a cohesive story, and yet keep the spirit of the characters that the fans love intact. Doing that really boiled down to the idea of making it darker. Here’s a character we all love. In what way can I cause them to get hurt? And that clearly happens a lot throughout these stories, mainly with Humphrey since he was my favorite character, although Viper may have taken that title now. But either way, I’m very proud and happy with how everything turned out.