Originally Posted by
Tzigone
I so strongly prefer pre-COIE there. I mean, he was a rich playboy, but not a bad person, pre-COIE (at least originally) and in his island origin story (which only came in the late 1970s, after other origin stories), he ended up stranded because he tried to stop thieves. And his time on the island was measured in months, not years. I mean, presuming we're talking about DC Super-Stars #17, and not another earlier version of the island origin story that I'm unfamiliar with. Though, of course, you may well be discussing the later versions where his then-assholeness was projected back into the past and his origin was rewritten to make him crappier.
Yeah, that's something I dealt with when building my own time-slide timeline. The number of years of a pilot is required to stay in the military after training has lengthened over time. I managed to track it back to the 1970s, but not beyond. And when did college become a prerequisite for pilots? I don't know if it was back when the character was created and dealing with the changes in the real world between a character's debut and the present can make things wonky. This is especially seen in characters like Billy and Freddy, who supported themselves from a young age, and with regards to how much society would accept that. I liked old-school Hal, and I liked that we sometimes saw the STEM skills (like he built the trainer in the first story, I think?) that pilots would have.