History Main / TheMountainsOfIllinois

Not to be confused with the [[IncrediblyLamePun Iowa Caucasus]]. HereThereBeLions is a subtrope pertaining to a particular highly distinctive bit of mountain in the Vancouver area.

A subtrope of TelevisionGeography. See also MisplacedVegetation. [[RealityIsUnrealistic Note that in some parts of Illinois, the mountains of Missouri are indeed visible.]] But this obviously doesn't include Chicago to the north, the default location for shows based in Illinois.

* ''HaroldAndKumar Go to White Castle'': In the climatic scene, the heroes [[spoiler:hang glide off a massive cliff to reach the White Castle in Cherry Hill, NJ. Sadly, there are no such cliffs.]] Though artistic license should be granted for such a serious, moving piece.

** It's also in a savannah and has only scattered low buildings. It's hard to imagine how all of this could be any more wrong. Did the level designers even look at Joburg's article on Wikipedia?

* MiamiGuns parodies Japanese cop show cliches, and is set in ostensibly-Miami. Various episodes have villains illegally drift racing through the mountains of Florida (max. elevation 346 feet), or having a shootout in a wild west style desert (Miami is more of a swamp).
* Major season 4 features the main character Goro Shigeno playing for a minor league team in Memphis, TN where the stadium is surrounded by a cityscape featuring palm trees planted LA style along the streets. Memphis is a very forested city, but palm trees don't grow well there.

* Not a visual so much as a factual error. In ''TheWestWing'' episode "Isaac and Ishmael," reference is made to a terrorist secretly crossing over the border between Ontario and Vermont. Vermont does not border Ontario.
** Hence the secrecy.

* ''Film/StarTrek'' (2009) has Kirk driving a car into a deep canyon...in Iowa. This has been HandWaved as being some sort of mine or quarry.
** It is very clearly a quarry, due to the visibly cut walls, and the fact that they filmed the scene using an actual quarry.

* The Dean Martin MattHelm movie ''The Wrecking Crew'' may have been the direct inspiration for the Austin Powers gag that leads off this section. The movie takes place in Denmark. ''Some'' portions of the film, though perhaps only second-unit stuff, appear to have been shot in Denmark. The finale, however, with its exciting car chase along twisty mountain roads that ends with a confrontation on a cable car connecting two of the Danish Alps... wasn't. In reality, the highest point in Denmark, Møllehøj, is 170.86m high. The caption for Wikipedia's picture of [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mollehoj Møllehøj]], notes that the actual high point is "obscured by the farm buildings" in the picture's foreground. California locations doubled for the "Danish Alps".

[[AC:Comics]]
* During the [[XMen Magneto War]] crossover, Magneto met up with the Acolytes in an alpine-looking location, which the caption box says is "the Netherlands". Given that the word "Netherlands" means "lowlands", this is a ''[[TvTropesWikiDrinkingGame particularly]]'' {{egregious}} example.
* An early issue of ''AlphaFlight'' showed mountains in the distance in Winnipeg, Manitoba, which is located in the Red River Valley, one of the flattest areas on Earth. The nearest mountains are nearly 900 miles (1400 km) west, in Alberta.
* At one point, the headquarters of the JusticeLeagueOfAmerica was indentified as inside a mountain in Rhode Island, which doesn't have any.

Movies and TV shows, wherever they're supposed to be set, tend to be filmed in [[CaliforniaDoubling Southern California]] or [[StargateCity British Columbia]]. This leads to a common error, where mountains show up in the background of settings which have no visible peaks in RealLife, such as in the US state of Illinois, which, if you haven't already realized it, is as flat as this joke.

* An episode of ''TheXFiles'' featured the SAME fjord surrounded by mountains and pine trees that played a lake in Kansas in the {{Smallville}} example above as a lake in Iowa. They even spelled Okoboji wrong.

** This is doubly heinous when you factor in that all of this hiding in hills takes place ''offscreen''. They could've easily just had the theft take place somewhere where there are mountains (or at least steep foothills) to hide in. Either someone acutally thought [[YouFailGeographyForever there are mountains in Iowa]] [[TheyJustDidntCare or...]]
** While parts of the seventh season were filmed on-location in Washington DC, ''CaliforniaDoubling'' was used in a large portion of the episode. Thus, you get palm trees and brown hills ... in DC.

** And none of these in Illinois are actually "mountains" - the highest is 1,235 feet, so it's really more of a "hill," and to put it into perspective Illinois has two buildings that are taller than that.

* The DisneyChannel Original Movie ''PrincessProtectionProgram" takes place on the Louisiana bayou. Since the movie was filmed in Puerto Rico, it's a good deal more mountainous than Louisiana, where any hills in proximity to a Bayou rise no higher than about 10 feet (3 meters).

Not to be confused with the [[IncrediblyLamePun Iowa Caucasus]].