This is discussion archived from a time before the current discussion method was installed.
"New York Museum of Modern Art"
Looney Toons: Do you perhaps mean the Guggenheim museum? MOMA is a big white box; the Guggenheim is the wacky cylinder thingie.
RedBeardSean: It's the box; they used it as a theme for a cake just last night on Food Network Challenge. <insert eye roll here> I'm actually going to move this to the examples, I think.
Looney Toons: <blink> Can we talk dull? That's an awfully bland choice for a cake design. But that's irrelevant to the topic.
Ununnilium: A page quote for after the episode shows here:
"New York City. If aliens had to come to Earth... oh, no wonder they came here."
The Defenestrator: Don't aliens usually go to London in the Whoverse?
Scifantasy: Yeah, but every time they come to the US, wham! New York City.
Seth: Episode titles in quotes, series titles italicised (Or some times for quotes bolded).
Sockatume: I removed the following because, although there are subtle nods to the writer-directors' home city, they've stated that it's not explicitly set in any real-world location.
"* Film exception: The main action of The Matrix is set in Chicago."
LordSeth: It says that more than half of the television writers live in New York. Is that really true? I was under the impression the majority of television writers, actors, and production itself is in Los Angeles and/or its surrounding area.
Agent Price: TV writers are most definitely not centered in New York. They were fifty years ago, but no longer.
I'm not sure where to enter this, but it's definitely related. The focus city definitely depends on the country making it. For America, it's almost always New York. Britain, London. For Japan, Tokyo Is the Center of the Universe. Australia tends to juggle between Melbourne and Sydney. Otherwise, the only appearances of this city, aside from special occasions like the Doctor Who episode "Daleks in Manhattan", the city is only ever shown in a montage of notable cities in the world; for this montage Paris is also often included.
Scifantasy: I am very reluctant to bring this up, but it has to be said: the 9/11 attacks. There's a reason that the World Trade Center was targeted. The attacks on the Pentagon and whatever United Flight 93's target was (the Capitol or the White House, it's believed) were equal parts functional and terror, designed to scare as well as cripple the government's ability to fight back; the attacks on the Towers were pure scare factor. Everybody knew what the New York skyline looked like; seeing parts of it going up in smoke hit America where we could feel it.
(Not trying to be insensitive. I'm a New Yorker, and I was in the Bronx in high school when the Towers fell. I remember it very well. But it really is part of this same trope.)
Wheezy: What do you think about the new image? Is it too small?
Lynceus: On a totally random note—New Hampshire appears a lot in literature? I know we had Robert Frost and some famous people's vacation homes and John Irving stereotyped us quite a bit in A Prayer for Owen Meany (though it is true that there is poor signage in NH, because "if you don't already know where you're going, you clearly do not belong there"), but aside from that I totally wasn't aware that New Hampshire was at all a popular setting. Granted reading a lot of sci-fi/fantasy may have blinded me to this, but still. I can think of Owen Meany and possibly other stuff by Irving, and then A Separate Peace, and that's about it. Seriously, considering how freakin' proud the state is of Robert Frost I would have thought my school would have had us read more stuff set where we live, if there was that much of it (though perhaps it is to their credit that they did not... but this is the school where only one book in the mandatory "world literature" unit actually had to be translated into English, and that one book was the one almost everyone hated and fewer teachers actually taught).
Uh, I mean... New Hampshire! We're just that awesome! Or something... Seriously, anyone have like, a whole truckload of examples that proves this, though?
