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Scenes set in a city, including the Establishing Shot can be enormously fun for people who actually live there if they can nitpick details.in partibus infidelium
If the shot was actually filmed somewhere else entirely, it may quickly stop being fun and become headache-inducing, especially if it involves something like The Mountains Of Illinois.
Not to be confused with Hollywood Atlas.
Examples:
Advertising
- In Citroen's "Unmistakeably German- Made in France" ad, the final insult on its Prussia take on Germany is getting Berlin's geography wrong. The car pulls up outside the Brandenburg Gate. The guy gets out, the camera switches to show the other side- which clearly shows the Olympic Stadium, which is quite a way away from the Gate.
Anime
- Exception: Gunsmith Cats took great pains to get Chicago just right, down to minute details. Of course, it's an animated series for which the cost of location shoots is a non-issue... (They did, however, take the unprecedented step of sending the entire animation team there before even beginning production, to get a sense of the city and take reference photos themselves.)
- Beyblade had a tournament in Sydney, Australia. Some characters decide that they want to have private conversation, so they meet five minutes later on top of Ayres Rock. To those outside Australia, to get from Sydney to Ayres Rock they would have to cross half the (continent-sized) country.
- And it's both illegal and impossible to be up there anyway.
- According to one battle scene in Code Geass, Serbia is apparently in the Middle East and is populated by keffiyeh- and thawb-sporting Palestinians (in fact, it is neither, being in Eastern Europe and peopled mostly by East Orthodox Slavs).
- To be fair, this is set in an alternate universe where the most notably different thing is the history of international borders, so maybe Serbia just happened in a different place over there.
- It still makes no sense for a country to shift to a different continent and change ethnicity well still keeping the same name. Did Not Do Research indeed.
- Excel Saga has the Tokyo Big Sight located in
Fukuoka F City.
Film
- The Chase Scene is especially prone to Television Geography. San Franciscans can go on for hours about Bullitt and The Graduate.
- In Bullitts chase scene, it seems like every time they take a right turn onto a downhill street, there's a beige Volkswagen Beetle parked on the right with its back to the camera, in the same spot every time...
- An interview about the first Bourne movie had someone noting that the famous car Chase Scene took a very unconventional route through Paris.
- Mission Impossible II: Ethan Hunt gets a car and chases the girl, leaving the Spanish city of Seville and suddenly reaching some cliffs that might be anywhere but near Seville. Not the movie's only example of Did Not Do The Research about Spain.
- Much of the the film 21, taking place at MIT in Cambridge, MA, was shot directly across the Charles River on Boston University's campus. In an interesting twist on the Television Geography trope, BU students enjoyed the movie more because of the familiar locales, despite its use as another university's campus.
- MIT's administration actually banned the filming of movies on campus after the crew of Good Will Hunting displayed an annoying tendency to randomly close important parts of the school. Given that most of the school didn't have a particularly good opinion of the quality of 21, it's probably best for the moviemakers that they didn't try it.
- Ten Things I Hate About You is nominally set in Seattle, but the high school that all of the main characters go to is easily recognizable as Stadium High School (incredibly distinctive)... in Tacoma, about an hour's drive away. Several other distinctive locations are also in Tacoma.
- Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem is set in Gunnison, Colorado, a small mountain town of about 5,500 people. The establishing shot of the town is much, much larger than that, as they shot it in Canada at a town with 15x its population.
- Furthermore, Gunnison, Colorado is a semi-arid climate with sagebrush as the predominate vegetation, but Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem shows massive temperate rainforest trees with moss hanging from the branches. And the storm sewer system is vastly oversized. Humans, aliens, and even a dog use the sewer system like an underground tunnel. Unless it's a CDOT box culvert bridging a creek, the largest possible sewer pipe is maybe 12 or 18 inches in Gunnison.
- In a rare example of a film actually being shot in the location it's set in, Almost Famous was filmed in San Diego, CA, and several recognizable local landmarks and businesses are visible throughout the movie — although, as the film was shot in 2000 and set in 1971, some of the businesses shown had not yet been established, and others operating at the time that had closed since 1971 were not present.
- Annapolis, set at the US Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland, was rather obviously not filmed there.
- Wherever the remake of Assault on Precinct 13 was filmed, it sure wasn't Detroit! Can somebody show me which ghetto was grown over by that forest? Wall Banger.
- It was filmed in Toronto. Details here.
- Averted in Ballistic: Ecks vs. Sever, which was both filmed and set in Vancouver. It seems odd that the authorities in Canada would allow Americans to run around blowing crap up and treating the city as a shooting gallery, but those who saw Ballistic: Ecks vs Sever and were unimpressed would likely argue the authorities were pretending that none of this was happening and ignored it.
- Before Sunrise: Julie Delpy and Ethan Hawke manage to get everywhere in Vienna, despite only spending only one night there. Pretty amazing, if you consider that the location are spread out over the city and are visited in random order. It's even more amazing if you consider that all of this time they never get on a bus or take a taxi (except once - during the day).
- Bill And Teds Excellent Adventure was nominally set in San Dimas, CA, but the school identified as San Dimas High School was actually Coronado High School in Scottsdale, AZ.
- Brokeback Mountain caused residents of Riverton, Wyoming to look out on the dry, arid scorched land (residents of that area beam with pride that the desolate alien planet in Starship Troopers was filmed there) and ponder where these lush mountain vistas were that kept popping up.
- Casino Royale, at one point, had Bond driving along a lovely Bahamian ocean road past some sort of charming open-air market. This troper lives on that island and happens to know there's absolutely nothing out there but houses. He also thought Miami International Airport looked odd, until finding out the interiors was shot in an airport in the Czech Republic and his own local NAS, with the exteriors shot in the UK. Hilariously, the hotel construction site in the opening chase sequence was actually shot at a construction site.
- Considering Bond's globetrotter nature, there are many more examples from the movies. In The Living Daylights, he seems to teleport randomly around Vienna.
- In about half of these scenes he's supposed to be in Bratislava at the time, making this especially funny to Austrians; also, there are no high mountains between Bratislava and Vienna.
- The 1970s version of Charlie And The Chocolate Factory presented the enigma of what was very obviously an American kid living in what was very obviously Germany, but both of his parents were very obviously not in the military and everyone in town was a native speaker of English.
- The Dabney Coleman/Henry Thomas film Cloak & Dagger was filmed in San Antonio, Texas. In a climactic scene, Thomas's character, Davy, has to get from San Antonio's Riverwalk (downtown) to the airport (on the outskirts of the city) in less than fifteen minutes. If he'd left for the airport immediately, he still probably wouldn't have made it in time. Yet, Davy has time for a shootout with the mooks, followed by a car chase with the mooks, before showing up at the airport to confront the Big Bad with a few minutes to spare.
- Averted in The Collector, which is set and filmed entirely within the confines of the city of Vancouver. And "'only'" Vancouver, none of the adjacent municipalities.
- Coronation Street featured a Chase Scene showing a car turning a corner in Salford and crashing into a canal in Ashton (about 8 miles or so apart).
- Gotham City in The Dark Knight doesn't even try to pretend it's not Chicago. Locals noted that they missed several plot details while trying to figure out where everything was filmed.
- The monorail in the first film ran straight down La Salle street toward the Chicago Board of Trade, a very distinctive Chicago building that played Wayne Tower.
- This troper immediately noticed that as Batman rode his batpod to rescue Dent he went right through Millenium Park Station (a highly memorable spot, considering its floor is sort of like a rolling hill with several dips and mounds, which also makes it a cool place to ride around on a batpod).
- In The Departed, The Mole texts the police to go to Sheffield, and they're shown choosing an exit off an elevated highway accordingly. Sheffield is a hundred and forty miles from Boston, in New England, where that still counts for a lot; to get there you go through two other metropolitan areas and then a good thirty miles out into the country.
- In Die Hard 2, the action is set at Dulles Airport in the Washington, DC area, but the pay phones bear Pacific Bell logos. And the police are consistently identified as Washington, DC, police even though Dulles is in Virginia. And the bad guys plan and execute an escape by snowmobile, and a long icicle is used effectively as a weapon. Washington area winter weather almost never supports snowmobile use in the suburbs, and is almost always mild until after the Christmas season.
- Additionally, the airport used in the movie looks nothing like the real Dulles Airport which has a very unusual architecture. That's because many of the exterior airport scenes were shot at Alpena Regional Airport, in Alpena, Michigan, on Lake Huron. Alpena was chosen in part because the producers needed a location with consistent, heavy snow, winter weather cold enough to use snow makers if necessary, and it's small enough that they could close several runways for shooting. The scenes in the baggage-claim drive-through were shot at Denver-Stapleton.
- Dirty Harry: going from Forest Hills Station to Aquatic Park to Mount Davidson in under an hour would be a neat trick in a car (without sirens), let alone on foot.
- In Elizabeth: The Golden Age, Elizabeth gives her inspiring Speech to the Troops at Tilbury (an infuriatingly bastardized version of the original, one of the better works of English oratory), and then retires to watch the Battle of Gravelines. Of course, this requires her to be able to see not only across the English Channel but in fact all of Kent.
- Enemy of the State was set in Washington DC, but filmed in both DC and Baltimore. Multiple scenes have characters walking from a location in one city to a location in the other city, even though they are about an hour's drive apart.
- In Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer, when the Human Torch chases the Silver Surfer through the Lincoln Tunnel, they both enter and exit on the New Jersey side.
- Four Brothers, about a quartet of young men who avenge their adoptive mother's murder, was mostly filmed in Hamilton, ON despite being set in Detroit, MI. Made worse by the fact that the two cities are only about three hours' driving time apart.
- The 2008 Get Smart movie features a climactic Chase Scene in which the characters travel via freeway between core downtown Los Angeles, the Port of Los Angeles (in Long Beach), and Van Nuys Airport (in the San Fernando Valley) within the space of a few minutes.
- The terrible Godsend is repeatedly said to take place in a "small American town." Not only does it not remotely look like a "small town," the father drives past the rather unique-looking Roy Thompson Hall of Toronto.
- This troper's father was very excited to see shots of his college at Oxford, which was not Jordan, used in the film of The Golden Compass. Skirts the trope in that Jordan College never existed to begin with.
- The filmed Jordan College is an amalgam of at least three real colleges. And in the introduction, the shot of a modern-looking Radcliffe Square that's supposed to be in our world ... isn't. The equivalent shot described as in Lyra's world is what Radcliffe Square really looks like.
- Hellboy II: The Golden Army ends at the Giant's Causeway, County Antrim. It's worth noting that the causeway, a formation of hexagonal pillars formed from volcanic rock (according to myth the foundations of a bridge to Scotland so that two giants may fight) does not appear. not even a dodgy mock-up. Instead there is a large fallen statue of a giant. It's also worth noting that there is an island off the coast of County Kerry actually called "The Sleeping Giant" because it looks like one. One wonders why they didn't just set the climax there if they really wanted that kind of a landmark.
- Highlander 3 features a scene that takes place in Newark Airport. They don't have any giant signs that say "Bienvenue à Montréal".
- Possible aversion: the Chicago-area McAllister house in the Home Alone movies is an actual suburban house in Winnetka (a Chicago suburb).
- The VH-1 Made For TV Movie Hysteria: The Def Leppard Story tried to double Sheffield with Canada. So drummer Rick Allen's famous car crash, which happened on the A57 in the Derbyshire Peak District, looks like it happened on the Icefields parkway. The very North-American yellow centre lines on the road are also a bit of a giveaway.
- Not a big, famous town such as L.A. or Vancouver, but when the criminals who are the subject of In Cold Blood (the original 1960's movie) are seen approaching the Clutter's home, they are crossing the railroad tracks in Holcomb, Kansas. The Clutters did live across the tracks, but the car in the scene is going north. The Clutters lived south of the tracks.
- Independence Day: Jeff Goldblum drives south to Washington DC from New York City. There's an establishing shot of his car approaching DC from its most recognizable angle — over the Potomac going north.
- This is less crazy than it sounds, since no major highways enter downtown DC from the north. Assuming Goldblum was trying to get to Capitol Hill, he probably would have come down the Baltimore-Washington Parkway, which passes within about 2 miles of the White House — from the south.
- The Norwegian film Insomnia (later remade in Hollywood) was filmed in this troper's hometown. When the main characters drive from the airport to their hotel, they make an inexplicable detour past a building several kilometers out of their way. And the exterior of their "hotel" is recognisable as an office building that ironically is very close to several real hotels.
- The Inspector Gadget movie with Matthew Broderick was filmed in Pittsburgh. Lots of people are surprised to find out that "Dr. Claw's Headquarters" and the city's four gold-painted bridges are real.
- This Troper lives in Pittsburgh and actually was traveling through the city via bus for the first time with her mother and brother, only to find that the bridge was closed off because of filming. While waiting for the next bus, we all got a glimpse of the helicopter scene though this troper was too young to understand what the "stunt doubles" her mother kept mentioning were.
- Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back has the animal testing facility/diamond heist scene set in Boulder, Colorado. The scene gets nearly everything wrong. Boulder is home to a Strawman U with an extremely active Anti-Animal Testing protest group and so the lab would never have been there in the first place. The setting appears to be the plains, but Boulder is at the feet of the Flatirons mountains. Finally, Jay and Silent Bob steal a monkey and leave with it on foot. The next scene shows them in Utah, which is 300+ miles away over the Rockies.
- Nicolas Cage's Knowing, set in Boston and New York, was filmed in Melbourne, Australia. One of the scenes was filmed on the steps of the state Parliament House. Imagine, Americans, a film set halfway around the world with a scene taking place outside your State Congress.
- Knowing is theoretically set in the Lexington, Massachusetts area. Being from this area, this troper feels he can safely say that the film's director has never even seen pictures of Lexington. This is most evident on any scene set on a highway, where there are huge desolate areas with no trees, where Massachusetts has an overabundance of them near it's highways.
- Lake View Terrace is very clearly not Lake View Terrace. It was actually filmed in Walnut, about 40 miles away. Especially jarring for the fact that any production company based in Southern California would know that Walnut cannot pass for Lake View Terrace.
- The Left Behind movie was filmed in Toronto, setting the city hall as UN headquarters, but that's not the bad part. You want to hear what's just ridiculous? The flags out front were from all the Canadian provinces and territories.
- This Orlando-born troper always gets quite a kick out of the building destroyed at the beginning of Lethal Weapon 3, a movie series set in Los Angeles. The building in question is obviously the old Orlando City Hall, with the new City Hall, the Suntrust Tower (the tallest building in the city) and other notable Orlando landmarks featured in the background. Made even better by the fact that the cop who says, "Bravo" is Bill Frederick... Orlando's mayor at the time.
- Parts of the Sci-Fi Channel Original Movie 'Locust' take place in Southern Indiana/Kentucky, and one scene features the main characters driving from Kentucky to Indiana. They pass a "Welcome to Indiana!" sign by the side of the road with trees and dirt and such. Go check out a map of the Indiana/Kentucky border to see why that wouldn't work. (Hint: the Ohio River defines the entire Indiana/Kentucky border). That's not even mentioning the scenes taking place in southern Indiana showing perfectly flat, level ground despite the huge number of thousand-foot hills in that area.
- Looking at a map of Indiana, there is one location in the southwest part of the state near Evansville where the Indiana/Kentucky border is north of the Ohio River on solid ground. 200 years ago it followed the river, but the river changed paths and the border stuck, so a land crossing between the two states does exist. Still, that does not account for the issue with the hills in Southern Indiana.
- The 1961 film The Long Ships takes place in Scandinavia and North Africa, but was entirely filmed in Yugoslavia, which, needless to say, looks very little like either location.
- The ballpark used for the Cleveland Indians' home stadium in Major League was actually County Stadium in Milwaukee, WI. The filmmakers possibly nodded to this by casting Milwaukee Brewers announcer Bob Uecker as the Indians' main broadcaster, and recasting the Milwaukee television station which had their logo on the outfield scoreboard in real life as a Cleveland station.
- In The Matrix, "Mr. Anderson" and his coworkers all speak with American accents, the street names all seem to be taken from Chicago, yet the cars outside are driving on the left side of the road (the movie was actually filmed in Sydney). Of course, the movie is set in a computer program made several hundred years in the future, so the details arguably don't have to match up with 21st century reality.
- This was, however, intentionally done by the Wachowski brothers. Who added California highway signage to the sequels just to further mess with us.
- Which they didn't even have to do — the sequence was filmed in California, but on a purpose-built highway set.
- Also, you can recognise several Australian corporate logos, including the Commonwealth Bank, on various buildings, and the locations (especially in the first film) are easily-recognisable parts of downtown Sydney.
- To make matters more confusing, or possibly just to screw with people who nitpick at these kind of details, the skylines of Nashville and San Francisco are plainly visible in Trinity's opening chase scene.
- The first Men In Black film shows K spying on his pre-Masquerade wife in Truro. The map starts with all of Massachusetts, zooms in on Cape Cod...and zooms in on Sandwich, about as far as you can get from Truro. Ironically, the lush forest in the background of "Truro" looks much more like Sandwich.
- When the Griswolds set out from Chicago in National Lampoons Vacation, oil rigs can be seen in the background. L.A. has plenty of these (and even southern Illinois has some oil deposits), but not Chicago. It's a bit of a Wall Banger in that much of the rest of the movie was filmed on location.
- Some tall palm trees, and maybe even mountains, can be seen in the background of the early scenes at the car dealership as well. Oops.
- Another Nicholas Cage example, from National Treasure 2: Book of Secrets. In the car chase in London Town, the cars cross Westminster Bridge north to south, engage in a chase in what is clearly the City of London, which is north of the Thames- you can see the street signs, then cross Southwark Bridge again north to south.
- The Nightmare On Elm Street films are said to take place in the suburbs of a fictional town in Ohio. For the most part, the filmmakers did a pretty good job covering up California Doubling. However, the first movie has a scene that CLEARLY shows palm trees in the background (Note, unless they're fake, it's highly unlikely that palm trees would survive in cooler areas like Ohio), and the fifth movie shows California license plates.
- In No Way Out, there's the (nonexistent) Georgetown Metro stop, with the DC Metro being portrayed by the Toronto Metro.
- Exactly whose mega-mansion was depicted in Out of Sight? Allegedly it was filmed in the same suburb in which it was set, but this troper has yet to discover a home quite that large anywhere in north-central Oakland County.
- As with the TV show Inspector Morse, films set in Oxford, England tend to frequently play fast and loose with geography — characters in The Oxford Murders, for instance, step out of a pub onto the sidewalk in front of a lingerie store on the other side of the road.
- Consider an early scene in The Prestige when Hugh Jackman's character arrives in Colorado Springs. The town he arrives in is high in the mountains (the Springs, like Denver, is situated on the Front Range, just east of the Rockies), and Pikes Peak is nowhere to be seen. Later, he approaches Tesla's lab on a path lined with deciduous trees, not the pine and aspen forests common in that part of the world.
- Not to mention the fact that Tesla's Lab was in a very flat, comparably treeless portion of town as compared to the steep sloped, heavy woodlands depicted.
- The indie movie A Problem with Fear is supposedly set in the Calgary subway. Calgary doesn't have a subway, and if it did the ads in the subway would likely not be in French, as they were in the movie. One wonders why they didn't just set the damn thing in Montreal.
- It's terribly obvious they filmed Resident Evil 2 in Toronto. An opening shot in the theatrical version shows the CN Tower, and the climax of the movie occurs at another famous landmark — Toronto's uniquely designed City Hall. Granted, a city so much like Raccoon City doesn't exist.
- In one scene, Resident Evil 2 seems to place Raccoon City in somewhat central New Jersey. Oddly enough, they realistically portrayed an evil pharmaceutical company having a research office, in the middle of nowhere NJ, yet relatively near a larger city. Johnson and Johnson, Sanofi-Aventis, Novartis, Pfizer, Merck, Wyeth, Hoffman-La Roche, Bristol-Myers Squibb, and Schering-Plough all have locations in NJ that somewhat parallel this. No zombies yet though...
- This troper remembers seeing the Bloor Viaduct Bridge in one scene when Umbrella's caravan of black vans are going to pick up VIP's before the zombies attack. It was surreal seeing a zombie flick supposedly taking place in the US, while also seeing the bridge I cross every day to get to school, which literally would have been visible in the shot had they panned out more. Even more surreal was the fact there was no traffic on it, probably for the first time since it was built.
- The 1976 Robin Hood film Robin and Marian was filmed in Pamplona, Spain which, needless to say, looks nothing at all like Nottinghamshire.
- The Jackie Chan movie Rumble in the Bronx, filmed in Vancouver, makes little attempt to hide that fact. The snow-capped coast mountains are visible in many scenes, as are various Vancouver landmarks.
- In Short Circuit 2, the Unnamed American City which hosts the action also hosts the CN Tower, the Toronto Transit Commission subway, World's Biggest Bookstore and Roy Thompson Hall (lesser known than the CN Tower, but still landmarks).
- Part of Spider Man 3 was filmed in Cleveland, Ohio, but you mostly can't tell because the empty, dilapidated buildings along Euclid Avenue were covered with shiny fake storefronts for the movie. The one exception is the brief shot where Spidey leaps in front of the Trust Company Building. The rotunda, and the concrete tower behind it are clearly recognizable to those in the know.
- Star Trek IV generally wreaks havoc with the geography of the San Francisco Bay Area. A particularly notable moment comes when Kirk and Spock have just left the Cetacean Institute in Sausalito (for which the Monterey Bay Aquarium, well to the south of the Bay Area, is obviously being used). Gillian Taylor pulls over to offer them a lift back into San Francisco. In the background is the Golden Gate Bridge in all its glory, and they are already unmistakably on the San Francisco side of the bridge.
- Taking Lives is set in Montreal, which you can tell from the establishing shot of... the Château Frontenac. *rolleyes*
- The Tom Hanks vehicle, Turner And Hooch was set in inland Sacramento — and filmed in the very, very coastal Monterey Bay area.
- The movie includes a conversation scene that repeatedly switches back and forth between two camera angles — one angle looking out at Moss Landing Harbor, and the other, looking inland at Pacific Grove, twenty or thirty miles south.
- You've Got Mail takes place in New York but the Golden Gate Bridge is visible when Tom Hanks is walking his dog, Brinkly.
- There is an Alfred Hitchcock thriller in which the American protagonist comes to Stockholm to receive a Nobel Prize. In one scene he falls off the Symphonic Hall into Lake Malaren, which in fact is about a kilometre away from that building. Also, the seasons are wrong: the Nobel Prizes are awarded in early December when Lake Malaren is about +4 degrees Celsius. If you fall into it, the cold will paralyze you in seconds.
- The dramatic US Robotics tower in the I Robot film is placed in downtown Chicago...however, its location based on clues from the movie is impossible, appearing in both the Loop and North Michigan Avenue, opposite sides of the city. One shot shows it apparently standing on a large fictional plaza built over the Chicago River, so this may have been intentional. This movie is also an example of Vancouver Doubling, but at least the filmmakers were bothered to do some location shooting in Chicago.
- This troper was amused watching the horse/motorcycle chase in True Lies for the first time, as Ahnuld and his horse teleported from Georgetown to the distinctive atrium lobby of the Crystal City Hilton, which is across the Potomac in Virginia near the Pentagon, and doesn't have a condo with a pool across from it. The establishing shot outside the building matched the exterior at least, except that they matted in at least twenty extra stories.
- The Rock: towards the climax of the movie, a nerve gas missile is fired from the titular island, programmed to hit the Oakland Coliseum Stadium. Seconds later, when the missile is shown approaching its target, the stadium shown is actually Candlestick Park in San Francisco; it's most obvious when you consider the stadium's red seats, and that Candlestick is neighbored by the water and hills shown in the movie while the now-named McAfee Stadium is surrounded by flat dry land next to a basketball arena and a freeway.
- Run Lola Run has the heroine run all over Berlin in the space of twenty (real time) minutes. For example her house is just north of the Spree and she starts running north, then moments later ends up south of the river, considerably further east, running north across the river. that section of the U-bahn does NOT come out of the ground as is shown. Definitely covered by Rule Of Cool.
- Trainspotting is the Scottish city of Edinburgh, right? Then what can explain the scene where Renton and Diane come out of the nightclub and it is revealed to be the very distinctive exterior of the Volcano... which is Glasgow, a good fifty miles from Edinburgh?
- We from Bayonne, New Jersey had a lot of fun in the remake of War Of The Worlds starring Tom Cruise. The house in the beginning of the movie is in downtown Bayonne, right underneath the Bayonne Bridge. However, during the alien landing, Tom Cruise walks over to a church that is actually in Newark in under a minute. Beyond the miles of distance required to walk there, Cruise would also have to either swim across Newark Bay or dodge highway traffic across the NJ Turnpike bridge. Though this Troper will admit it was very cool seeing his hometown blown up by aliens like it was New York City or something.
- Indiana Jones And The Kingdom Of The Crystal Skull was filmed, in part, at Yale University, including a chase scene. Indy and Mutt travel at about the speed of sound, judging from how fast they get from some points to others.
Comic Books
- In The Ultimates 2, one panel showing a nice city landscape with an attractive domed building by a large river had a caption claiming its location to be part of EU headquarters in Brussels. Not only is the architecture of the city distinctly out of place (looking significantly more Mediterranean than the city itself) but more glaringly there is no visible river in Brussels! While a river does run through the city, it was built over in the 19th and early 20th century and runs underground for the length of the city.
Literature
Live Action TV
- Everybody Loves Raymond, set in Lynbrook, NY has an episode where Deborah wants to sell Girl Scout cookies in front of the busiest place in Lynbrook, a pizzeria, but is banned from doing so. However, the closest Pizzeria to Fowler Ave (which looks nothing like its TV counterpart) has a Coldstone and a movie theater within 500 feet of it, both of which are far busier than the pizzeria.
- Occurs to excess in 24, often as a consequence of the show's real-time format. In one particularly jarring example, Jack Bauer infiltrates a warehouse in North Hollywood and, upon climbing to the roof, is in downtown LA (with Union Station clearly visible nearby).
- The most blatant They Just Didnt Care moment came in Season 4, where the Terrorminions hijack a nuclear missile transport and manage to lose the satellite tracking in the mountains... of IOWA.
- In the first episode of Season 2, President Palmer and his son are shown fishing in a large, empty lake in the middle of a pristine tranquil meadow at the foot of a snowcapped mountain. A subtitle reveals that they are in 'Lake Oswego, Oregon'. Lake Oswego is an affluent suburb just outside of Portland, the lake itself is surrounded by dozens of multi-million dollar houses, and there isn't a snowcapped mountain for a good 85 miles.
- Another jarring one, from Season 3, has Jack travelling c. 70 miles in about 15 minutes. In a helicopter, which isn't capable of that speed.
- In the episode of Angel where Angel and the gang visit Lorne in Las Vegas, several of the characters step out of the Tropicana casino (on the south side of the Las Vegas Strip)...and wind up on Fremont Street (with its distinctive lighted canopy) several miles to the northeast.
- Similarly, in the film Next the main character enters a building on Freemont Street and then exits the building onto the main strip.
- The Bill is set in East London (albeit a fictional part of it), but filmed in South London, with the frequent result that you see the trains of certain train companies go past that have no business being anywhere near East London (plus the fact that most National Rail lines in East London operate on overhead wires, not third rail). In "Killer on the Run", a character boards a north-bound Northern Line train at Charing Cross, gets off at the next stop and arrives in a mainline rail terminus. You'd have to go a few stops further along to reach one (Euston).
- The show has frequent cases when it is clear that the characters are on the wrong side of the Thames.
- An episode of the new Bionic Woman had a meeting arranged to take place at a sulphur plant on the waterfront...which would be instantly recognizable to anyone who has ever been in downtown Vancouver and looked across the harbour at North Vancouver.
- The frequent presence of lush greenery and vegetation, and moderately frequent rain, in desert Las Vegas on CSI (filming in LA, also a desert but heavily watered) is often a source of amused derision by show fans. Also, Geoff Duncan has written two articles on the geographical inaccuracy of two outside jobs, one in "Jackpot" and another in the 2004 season premiere.
- Iconic soap opera Dallas has an absolutely ludicrous commute from South Fork Ranch (3700 Hogge Road - Parker TX 75002) to downtown Dallas. They go down US-75, past the two gold buildings (never adding the brown-brick hotel that was built in between), and somehow enter downtown by going east on the I-30 Causeway. A two-hour commute each way. Always inspires laughs from Texans.
- Dead Like Me is nominally set in Seattle, but they never made any effort to disguise the fact that it was actually Vancouver. They often would do beautiful pans across the city and its landmarks.
- Often fairly obvious in the new Doctor Who, which is shot in Wales. Wales is substantially geographically diverse to work for this, however.
- The spin-off series Torchwood averts this by actually being set in Cardiff. Which doesn't stop them from playing fast and loose with Roald Dahl Plas and surrounding landmarks.
- Lampshaded in Due South, which is set in Chicago but filmed in Toronto. When they did an episode set in Toronto... they filmed it in Chicago.
- In an episode of The Facts Of Life, set in Peekskill, New York, Mrs. Garrett brings in the newspaper — the Los Angeles Times, which is not usually found on the porch in New York.
- Averted in Forever Knight. The Pilot Movie took place in the usual Unnamed American City, but the series, filmed in Toronto, was explicitly set in Toronto.
- The substitution of Vancouver for an unnamed city in the US Northwest (presumably Seattle) is so common that the term "Seacouver" is the setting's unofficial name. The Sentinel and the Highlander TV series are examples.
- This name is actually official in the case of Highlander.
- In the case of The Movie upon which Highlander: The Series was based, London doubled for New York.
- Frasier - No building in Seattle has the view seen from Frasier's window. The shot was taken from the top of a cliff and was chosen so the Space Needle could be prominently seen from the window.
- In the pre-air pilot of Fringe, two characters visit a sprawling, isolated storage facility in "Back Bay, Massachusetts." Back Bay is actually a high-end neighborhood in Boston, mainly full of rich people and expensive shops, with a significant lack of storage facilities of any kind. The version of the pilot that eventually aired changed the title card to Chelsea, which is more believable, but the previous scene still has a character claiming that the "Back Bay police" reported suspicious activity in the area.
- Happy Days frequently displayed palm trees in what was supposed to be Milwaukee, WI.
- I think you're thinking of Laverne And Shirley, which moved to California in its later seasons. And of course the iconic episode where Fonzie did something that changed everything. (He did end up moving to a
retirement "singles community" in the final episode with a vaguely Polynesian theme and fake palm trees— a sad end for what was once the coolest man in America.)
- Hawaii Five-O averted this by being entirely filmed in Hawaii (or, at least, advertised as such).
- Pretty much everything on Heroes is filmed in or near Los Angeles, including the fictional town of Costa Verde.
- Inspector Morse, set in Oxford, England, is infamous for this — Morse has, for instance, stepped from a cobbled street in the town centre to a park two miles away.
- Little House on the Prairie: Note the title, taken directly from the series of autobiographical children's novels, with its reference to the lush, rolling grasslands characteristic of much of central North America. The TV series is specifically set about midway through the trek, in Minnesota. Anybody surprised that the onscreen scenery routinely featured Southern California-style mountains, trees, scrub-brush, chaparral, etc? Didn't think so.
- Lost, naturally enough, uses Hawaii as a stand-in for such diverse cities as Seoul and LA. One scene with Jin and Sun set in Korea takes place along the distinctive (and famously dirty) Ala Wai Canal. In another scene with Kate set somewhere in the southern US, palm trees are visible (which might be plausible for Florida, granted) and several buses drive by with the distinctive livery of Hawaii's transit service.
- An episode of Mantracker "Jim and Nichola" is filmed in Carcross, Yukon Canada, but while the highly detailed zero-in GPS map is clean and linear, the actual scenery and locale are decidedly not so. The episode jumps back and forth between Montana Mountain and the south-east side of Carcross, to the dunes and desert and beach on the other side with absolutely no linear travel whatsoever, and there is no sign of the town itself, though they would've been absolutely forced to cross one of the bridges there or likely drown in the powerful currents of either Windy Arm or Bennett Lake. Additionally, the GPS map itself is nearly 100% inaccurate, and none of the focus spots matches any of the locations actually filmed.
- Midnight Man- not only is Westminster tube station not served by the Northern line, the Jubilee line platforms there have glass barriers for safety. It's clearly the closed Charing Cross Jubilee platforms being used.
- Though set in San Francisco, Monk is mostly filmed in Los Angeles. This was painfully evident when Monk goes to a train station and both the external and internal shots clearly identify it as Union Station in Downtown LA.
- Another episode referenced the San Bruno train station, which on screen was next to a hilly wooded area where they found a body. You probably couldn't really hide a body near the San Bruno train station, since there's a densely neighborhood about 50 feet away from the train tracks... on flat ground... with no palm trees.
- One episode of the US version of The Office had the cast visit Lake Scranton for a beach party. There is no beach or sandy shore at Lake Scranton, which is on a hillside and surrounded by trees◊, a result of California Doubling.
- Spoofed in Police Squad!, where the Roman Colosseum and Leaning Tower of Pisa are back-projected during a trip to "Little Italy."
- Power Rangers has been filmed for the last several years in New Zealand, with geography that is obviously not North American. And the seasons reversed. Some Lampshade Hanging has been employed with minor characters being "sent to New Zealand" to get rid of them. Of course, through the show's entire history, Stock Footage obviously shot in Japan has been commonplace, leading to the overwhelming prevalence of Japanese cars (not Everybody Owns A Ford in this universe), Japanese signage, an usually large number of HOV and bicycle lanes, and extras who spontaneously become Asian.
- The 15th season went even further in their mistakes as the Rangers were constantly visiting other countries in their quest. They visit the Florida Everglades which, unlike the real place, has a very noticeable mountain range in the background.
- On another occasion they visit Stonehenge in Britain. The field in which its set is supposed to be flat, with a fence surrounding the structure itself and two roads very close by. Neither the roads nor the fence can be seen in the episode and the field is fairly hilly.
- When launching one particular jet zord from their base in California, Mt. Fuji can be seen in the background.
- Everything in Primeval happens in or around London, according to their website. Including Episode One, which was set and filmed in the Forest of Dean (in Gloucestershire!).
- Robin Hood is filmed in Hungary, so the foliage is wrong for Nottinghamshire. In the season three opener Robin is almost thrown off a high cliff. Even allowing for river course changes, coastal erosion and deforestation, Nottinghamshire is not renowned for its cliffs.
- And yet, just five miles or so to the east of Nottingham lies the village of Radcliffe on Trent, so named because of the red cliffs nearby.
- Much of the county has cliffs, probably because a lot of it is made of sandstone. You don't even need to look beyond the city itself to see proof; look at Castle Rock, right under the most famous landmark in the city, Nottingham Castle. Possibly some research was not done here.
- An old Seven Days episode had Parker chasing the Villain Of The Week through Washington, DC. Specifically, from the White House (across the street from the Capitol!), past the Washington Monument, down the steps of the Jefferson Memorial, and back to the White House, where he collapses out of breath. You would be, too, if you'd just run 5 miles in 12 seconds.
- In the first episode of Shoebox Zoo (little-known BBC kids' programme), the protagonist and her father leave a small independant cinema (The Dominion, a real cinema in Edinburgh, Scotland) and in the very next shot are walking down Cockburn Street two and a half miles away.
- Sliders — nominally set in San Francisco, yet clearly actually filmed in Vancouver — is notorious for this. One memorable example features the nonexistent Van Ness "BART" station.
- In Stargate SG-1 (filmed in Vancouver) episode "Memento Mori", Cameron Mitchell is on a highway presumably in Colorado(as that's where Cheyenne Mountain is). The roadsign says "Surrey", and there's no Surrey in Colorado.
- In fact, every time SG-1 does scenes outside the base and not in generic wilderness invokes this trope. To a Colorado Springs (the city at the foot of Cheyenne Mountain) native, the gas station shots from season 6 episode "Sight Unseen," and to a lesser extent, the whole of season 8 episode "Affinity," shatter the suspension of disbeleif. The shots of the Cheyenne Mountain Complex entrance, however, as spot on, (being actual footage of the location).
- The "oceanside" amusement park in the Title Sequence of Step By Step was actually 6 miles inland.
- Just so that you'd understand - an amusement park (and especially its wooden roller coaster) built that close to an ocean or body of water like that would have a very hard time staying in existence against Mother Nature and plain old Laws of Physics - sandy beaches aren't exactly the most stable type of land to build roller coasters on, and said roller coaster and quite likely large portions of the park itself would be in danger of being washed away, regardless of whether the area is hurricane-prone or not. That said, there are amusement parks that are built close to bodies of water such as Lakeside Amusement Park in Denver, Colorado or the famous Coney Island Amusement Park in New York New York; the former is built near a mundane man-made lake (as its name implies) and both are built on solid, paved ground.
- And Coney Island features a wooden roller coaster that's been around since 1927.
- Not to mention the famous Pleasure Beaches at Blackpool and Southport in the UK. They aren't actually on the beach, but they're very close to it.
- The Giant Dipper wooden roller coaster has been on the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk in California since 1924, and an identically named wooden coaster has been on Mission Beach in San Diego, California since 1925.
- Supernatural often has the brothers Winchester driving from place to place in a ridiculously short space of time - including, in a recent episode, Dean getting from Kansas to Colorado and back in a couple of hours.
- Well, the two states do border each other, so it's more a question of where in Colorado and Kansas they're traveling between.
- Also spoofed in one episode where the brothers Winchester visit a Hollywood studio and Sam comments that the place looks like Canada. Supernatural is, of course, filmed in Vancouver.
- Third Watch is an interesting case. It is set and filmed in New York, but the 55th Precinct seems to cover the whole city. (Filming took place across all 5 boroughs.)
- The street containing the police station and firehouse is in Long Island City, Queens.
- The "5x" Precincts are usually found in The Bronx.
- An episode of the UK crime drama Trial And Retribution features a character landing at London City Airport. However, the place has grass- the real London City is in the middle of East London and pretty near the Canary Wharf skyscrapers.
- Especially egregious because the main reason anyone flies to London City rather than Heathrow, Gatwick or Stansted is because it's handy for the business district.
- An episode of The Unit set in London Town has three errors- using an establishing shot of the MI6 HQ and stating it is that of MI5, having St. Stephen's Tower (aka Big Ben) visible at ground level in the City of London and the wrong licence plate format for the UK.
- On Will And Grace, set in New York, Will's policeman boyfriend Vince receives a page to participate in a "187" investigation. He is pleased to be called in to investigate a murder. But 187 is the California police code for murder.
- The short-lived TV show Wonderfalls was set in Niagara Falls, NY. Every shot of the waterfall depicted in the show, and the American-side gift shop where the main character works, is from the Ontario side. Additionally, in one episode, they are shown traveling to Canada through a border crossing surrounded by land on all sides, which implies that they drove a few hundred miles northeast or southwest to avoid using any of the Buffalo-Niagara area crossings, all of which involve bridges over the Niagara River.
- The DVD commentary points out a scene between Jaye and her sister: an in-person (not phone) conversation where because of location issues, Jaye's part was filmed in the US and her sister is standing in what is recognizably the Canadian side. Maybe they just have excellent hearing?
- The first 5 seasons of The X-Files were filmed in Vancouver. On David Duchovny's insistence, they relocated to Los Angeles. At least a few fans complained that the new, sunny location didn't have the same gloomy atmosphere as its more northern predecessor.
- The McCloud episode "Night of the Shark" was set (and filmed) in Sydney, Australia. One scene shows McCloud dashing across the Sydney Harbour Bridge into the city centre. Except that he is going across the bridge in the wrong direction and would actually be heading away from the city.
- An episode of Psych opens with Shawn telling Chief Vick that's he's going skiing, and she asks where he'd ski in the middle of summer; cut to Whistler, just over a hundred kilometers from Vancouver, with typical summer lows around seven degrees (the resort is used for bikes in the summer). Most of the action takes place in the even warmer seaside Vancouver, because Shawn and Gus went there (again, roughly a hundred kilometers away) upon seeing a criminal instead of going to the Whistler police, for no obvious reason. Even so, everyone acts like it's below freezing for the entire episode, even during the day, when it would likely be around twenty.
- Maybe they didn't realize that those temperatures were in Celsius? Maybe they just looked up the weather there and thought it was in Fahrenheit? 'Cause they acted like it was around 20 F.
- One episode of The X-Files features a train rolling through an area of jagged hills, scrub brush, and very little green vegetation of any sort. In Iowa, of all places, where basically the entire state is green because if there's available land, somebody's planted corn or soybeans on top of it.
- An episode of 30 Rock had Jack and Liz travel to Stone Mountain, Georgia (Kenneth's home town) to scout out salt-of-the-earth 'Real American' talent. The real Stone Mountain is firmly within the orbit of metropolitan Atlanta and has a population that's mainly African-American, but the show depicts it as part of Hee Haw Land.
- The Sopranos is actually quite good about their locations, as any Joisey troper can tell you. They do tend to play fast and loose with driving times, though.
- The opening to Newhart is not filmed in Vermont, but near Squam Lake, New Hampshire.
Tabletop Games
- The Twilight 2000 adventure module "The Black Madonna" is supposedly set in Czestochowa in Poland. This troper can say with 100% certainty that (even accounting for war damage) the city depicted on the included map is clearly not Czestochowa, though whether it's a repurposed map of a city for which maps are more readily available or just entirely made up is unclear.
Video Games
- The opening cutscene for Resident Evil 2 shows a sign for "Grady's Inn" with a 212 area code, which is exclusive to Manhattan.
- In a mild subversion, the Shibuya featured in The World Ends With You is mostly identical to the real Shibuya, but with the names of many stores and buildings changed due to copyright issues (e.g. "Towa Records" instead of Tower Records).
- Parasite Eve takes place in all sorts of New York landmarks, such as Central Park and the Museum of National History. While the general feel of the places are surprisingly accurate, they play merry hell with the layout, obviously in an attempt to RPG-ize it.
- In Prototype, Manhattan is located in the middle of what appears to be a large bay instead of between 3 rivers, so that all other landmasses are too far to reach despite the Player Character's quite significant aerial movement capabilities.
Western Animation
- Lampshaded in Assy McGee. The series supposedly takes place in Exeter, New Hampshire, a small town, but it is depicted as a crime-ridden metropolis.
- Not exactly geography, but in one episode of Gargoyles, King Arthur enters Westminster Abbey...by a door that as far as this Troper knows, does not exist. The Chapel of Henry the VII is reconisable enough, but the rather significant King Edward's Chair is on the wrong side, against a wall that also does not exist (the chair, at least, did still contain the Stone of Scone at the time the episode would've been written, however).
- Averted in The Simpsons, which takes great care to get geography down accurately when they visit a major city and to include proper landmarks; for instance, having been released from prison in Tokyo, they are seen to walk away from the Tokyo Police Headquarters (a very distinctive building).
- Of course, the layout of Springfield itself changes so much the place can't possibly have a definite map at this point.
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