Line #11 Main/StockDesertInterstate


1	[[quoteright:180:https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/pic_desert_route_diner.png]]
2	[[caption-width-right:180:A common sight along the Southwest.]]
3
4	->''"If you ever plan to motor west\
5	Travel my way, take the highway that is best\
6	Get your kicks on Route sixty-six!"''
7	-->-- '''Music/NatKingCole''', "Route 66"
8
9	Oftentimes characters will be [[RoadTripPlot traveling by car down a road or interstate]] through the desert, usually in the southwestern US, and the location feels like it's stuck in TheFifties. It'll feature [[GreasySpoon stereotypical diners]], gas stations with old-fashioned red pumps, and dramatic desert landscapes with buttes, most often with reddish hues and beautiful sunsets, providing some nice SceneryPorn.
10
11	If the show is lighter in tone, the small towns may be quaint EverytownAmerica places, with an old-fashioned main street and middle-class culture. In horror and thriller shows, the town may be a grimy AbandonedArea, a DyingTown or even a GhostTown with boarded up buildings and a scary GasStationOfDoom.
12
13	A common occurrence in this trope is the [[CityMouse well-off main characters]] from TheCity will have a car break down and they'll have to walk to a dusty, grungy gas station with an octogenarian mechanic and try to get him to fix their [[CoolCar ultramodern sportscar]]. He won't know how to repair anything that newfangled, and parts won't arrive for a week. Now the couple have a FishOutOfWater experience, as they have to live in a dingy NoTellMotel in FlyoverCountry for a week, with no urban comforts.
14
15	The famous Route 66, one of the first American highways, was established in 1926 and ran from Illinois to California, and notably passed through the deserts of New Mexico and Arizona. The highway was decommissioned in the 1980s but it remains present in popular imagination. Much of the route features little towns that led to the rise of the old-fashioned gas stations and diners that are typical for this trope.
16
17	May involve a DesertSkull, AllDesertsHaveCacti, and DecadeThemedFilter. Compare TheWildWest (an earlier depiction of the American West prior to industrialization), Area51 (another stock American desert location), and the MotorcycleOnTheCoastRoad (similar stock romantic depiction of a solitary driver, more common to Japanese works than in the west).
18
19	To some degree, this trope is considered TruthInTelevision. If you get far enough away from the major cities in the American west, the little {{Dying Town}}s you come across ''do'' start to look like this.
20	----
21	!!Examples:
22
23	[[foldercontrol]]
24
25	[[folder:Anime & Manga]]
26	* ''Anime/CowboyBebop'' ("[[Recap/CowboyBebopSession19WildHorses Wild Horses]]"): Spike's fighter, the Swordfish, is in need of overhaul, so he flies it to a shop owned by its original designer. He spends most of the episode there, talking with Doohan, who operates the shop, and it fits the aesthetic of this trope. It also has a Space Shuttle hangar and a huge runway.
27	* ''Manga/OnePiece'': In the Alabasta arc, one of the Baroque Works agents, Zala a.k.a. Paula a.k.a. Ms. Doublefinger, owns a diner out called Spider Cafe in the middle of the desert nation. It's mostly used as a meeting spot for the other agents. Later, a cover story mini-arc showed that, after Baroque Works were defeated, she and most of her fellow agents find a dilapidated one called Cactus Saloon, this time somewhere within a rocky terrain and running it legitimately.
28	[[/folder]]
29
30	[[folder:Comic Strips]]
31	* ''ComicStrip/BloomCounty'': Opus the Penguin finds himself on one after losing his script, wandering along the highway and across the desert before eventually reaching a 7-11, an outpost of American civilization.[[note]]The clerk didn't speak English.[[/note]]
32	[[/folder]]
33
34	[[folder:Films -- Animation]]
35	* ''Franchise/{{Cars}}'': Radiator Springs, the main setting of the ''Cars'' movies, is a desert town along Route 66, surrounded by picturesque rock formations. It was once a thriving community servicing cars driving across the country, but is a DyingTown by the events of the first movie due to Interstate 40 cutting off its main source of income. It becomes a hot tourist attraction after racer Lighting [=McQueen=] makes it his base of operations.
36	[[/folder]]
37
38	[[folder:Films -- Live-Action]]
39	* ''Film/BagdadCafe'' take place in a setting like this in the Mojave Desert. The creator of ''One Piece'' said Spider Cafe was inspired off this movie.
40	* ''Film/{{Next\|2007}}'': Nicholas Cage travels through Flagstaff which feels and looks a lot like a stereotypical Southwest Desert.
41	* ''Film/EasyRider'': A film about a road trip from Los Angeles to New Orleans, so it features many red-tinted, wide shots of the road in the desert. As the film was made in 1968, the 50's feel is a lot more excusable.
42	* ''Film/GasFoodLodging'' is set in Laramie, NM, a dusty little town by the highway with a truck stop and a trailer park. Trudi suffers from SmallTownBoredom and longs to get out (although the real reason is that she was raped).
43	* In parts of ''Film/NaturalBornKillers'', Mickey and Mallory commit some of their crimes in desert gas stations and drive along Route 66.
44	* The first act of ''Film/{{Psycho}}'' focuses on Marion Crane driving from Phoenix, Arizona, to Fairvale, California, and a large stretch of that time is spent on desert highways. Her problems really start once she gets out of the desert, getting lost in a rainstorm and accidentally getting off the main highway, where she finds a [[HellHotel quaint little motel]].
45	* Used as a central motif in the aptly-named ''Film/LostHighway''. The movie's title sequence is focuses on the flickering yellow lines of the highway, and it climaxes at a roadside motel out in the California desert.
46	* In ''Film/SevenPsychopaths'', the main characters drive through one of these as they flee LA. Much of the second half of the movie focuses on them camping in the desert, off the side of the road.
47	* Most of the victims of ''Film/TheBeastOfYuccaFlats'' are people driving through the desert, the narrator explaining that they are on vacation.
48	* Both versions of ''Film/TheHillsHaveEyes'' are likewise about a family on a DeadlyRoadTrip through the American Southwest.
49	[[/folder]]
50
51	[[folder:Literature]]
52	* ''Literature/FearAndLoathingInLasVegas'' opens on one of these, "somewhere outside Barstow, on the edge of the desert", as the two protagonists drive from Los Angeles to Las Vegas.
53	[[/folder]]
54
55	[[folder:Live-Action TV]]
56	* ''Series/BlackMirror'': "[[Recap/BlackMirrorBlackMuseum Black Museum]]" opens with protagonist Nish driving her [[CoolCar 1961 Ford Thunderbird coupe]] across a desolate highway, stopping at what looks to be the typical GasStationOfDoom. As this is TwentyMinutesIntoTheFuture, the station is defunct, the car is electric and Nish only needs to leave it out in the sun for a while to charge on a solar panel. And the attendant who greets her, wearing a WaistCoatOfStyle, is the proprietor of the titular museum, itself a shuttered tourist trap that he wouldn't mind showing her around while she waits on her car.
57	* ''Series/StarTrekVoyager'', in the episode [[Recap/StarTrekVoyagerS2E18DeathWish "Death Wish"]] the crew gets to visit the Q Continuum, a higher plane of existence where YouCannotGraspTheTrueForm applies to both the place and its inhabitants. It appears to the crew as a road through the desert with a waystation and Q in human form just hanging around.
58	* ''Series/TwinPeaks'': ''The Return'' involves road-tripping through the American West, and as such there are plenty of shots of the empty road in the desert. The last episode especially has this, and much of it takes place in old-fashioned diners and motels or in a car traveling through the desert. A frequent visual motif is an old-fashioned gas-station, which is a portal to AnotherDimension that hops around, appearing both in the remote desert and along the roadsides.
59	[[/folder]]
60
61	[[folder:Music]]
62	* Presumably the "dark desert highway" where the [[Music/TheEagles Hotel California]] is located.
63	* Music/TheJonasBrothers' music video for their song "Paranoid" involves Nick Jonas driving a sportscar through the desert, and getting into a race with a lady driver.
64	[[/folder]]
65
66	[[folder:Video Games]]
67	* ''VideoGame/AzurLane'' has a dorm furniture set themed around this aesthetic, titled "On the Road." It even comes with a Route 66 road sign. It's also a skin theme for individual shipgirls, with Enterprise, Essex (whose skin is even called "A Trip Down Route 66"), Cleveland, Jamaica, and Akatsuki all getting in on the action.
68	* ''VideoGame/CrashBandicoot3Warped'': The motorcycle levels have this aesthetic, complete with '50s-style diners and gas stations. In addition, the soundtrack has a '50s sound, and Crash wears a [[Series/HappyDays Fonzie]]-style leather jacket. The level "Area 51?" also features RaygunGothic-style flying saucers.
69	** Dingo Canyon in ''VideoGame/CrashTeamRacing'' has been given this treatment in its remake, ''[[VideoGame/CrashTeamRacingNitroFueled Nitro-Fueled]]'', taking everything that was in the motorcycle stages and plonking them down there.
70	* ''VideoGame/FalloutNewVegas'' has a few post-apocalyptic versions of the trope. Unsurprising given the {{Zeerust}} fifties aesthetic of the franchise and New Vegas's American South West setting.
71	* In ''VideoGame/FinalFantasyXV,'' the first area of the game is a fantastical version of this. It was explicitly inspired by the American Southwest and features several diners and out-of-the-way gas stations.
72	* The entirety of ''VideoGame/FullThrottle'' essentially takes place along a single unnamed Southwestern interstate, starting at the Kickstand bar, then passing through the town of Mellonweed (where Maureen lives), the diner where [[spoiler:Ripburger kills Corley]], the Mink Ranch, the offramp to the Old Mine Road, the bridge over the Poyahoga Gorge, and the Vultures' hideout, and finally terminating at the Corley Motors factory and stadium. The protagonist Ben generally rides it from one end to the other, occasionally getting stuck or backtracking a few stations, with the climax actually taking place [[spoiler:over the Poyahoga Gorge]].
73	* ''VideoGame/{{Overwatch}}'': One of the playable maps in the game is called ''Route 66'', which features a lot from this trope like the stunning Southwestern landscapes and a Main/GreasySpoon type of diner that players spawn into, along with an old-fashioned gas station called ''Big Earl's''.
74	[[/folder]]
75
76	[[folder:Visual Novels]]
77	* In ''VisualNovel/DaughterForDessert'', the trips across the desert to and from Whiskeyville have this as the visual.
78	[[/folder]]
79
80	[[folder:Western Animation]]
81	* ''WesternAnimation/LoveDeathAndRobots'': The episode "[[Recap/LoveDeathAndRobotsFishNight Fish Night]]" begins with the traveling salesmen's car breaking down somewhere in the Arizona desert. Since it's too hot to walk back to a gas station in the day, they plan to wait the night out there and start walking in the early morning.
82	* ''WesternAnimation/WileECoyoteAndTheRoadrunner'': The cartoons take place entirely along highways on the American Southwest.
83	* ''WesternAnimation/JusticeLeagueTheFlashpointParadox'' opens with a young [[ComicBook/TheFlash Wally West]] with his mother on the side of a lonely highway in the desert with their broken down car. Fortunately, there's a (decidedly 50's looking) gas station and diner about half the mile down the road!
84	* ''WesternAnimation/PhineasAndFerb'' played with this concept during the aptly titled "Road Trip" ep where they built this kind of diner ''on top of their RV while it was still in transit'' allowing trucks to drive up a ramp, get some grub and leave just as fast. As per the norm of the show, their parents are oblivious to this and the diner is quickly gone by episode's end.
85	* On ''WesternAnimation/{{Rugrats}}'', Stu and Didi stop at one of these with Tommy and Angelica on the way to the Grand Canyon, when they have some car trouble.
86	[[/folder]]
87
88	[[folder:Real Life]]
89	* [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._Route_66 The famous Route 66]], one of the first American highways. It was established in 1926, ran over 2,000 miles from Chicago to Los Angeles, and notably passed through the deserts of New Mexico and Arizona. Thus, this setting features in many mid-20th century stories where the characters travel west. Although the highway was slowly decommissioned over the 1970s and 1980s due to the construction of Interstate replacements (I-55 from Chicago to St. Louis, I-44 from St. Louis to Oklahoma City, I-40 from Oklahoma City to Barstow, I-15 from Barstow to San Bernardino, and I-10 from San Bernardino to Los Angeles), much of the original route is still traversable through newer roads, and it remains in popular imagination. Much of the route features little towns that led to the rise of the old-fashioned gas stations and diners you see in this trope.
90	** The towns of Ludlow and Baker, California have exits off Interstates 40 (leading east to Needles and eventually Phoenix) and 15(leading to Las Vegas) respectively and thus still have active travel services. In the case of Baker, where I-15 meets CA-127 leading into the heart of Death Valley there are six gas and five EV charging stations as well as three repair shops in a town of 600 people.
91	* [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vega,_Texas Vega, Texas,]] is the embodiment of a Route 66 town. It even features a restored magnolia gas station that dates back to the 1920's.
92	[[/folder]]

Context Main / StockDesertInterstate