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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.
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:
Live Action TV
- 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.
- 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.)
- 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 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.
- 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 occassion 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.
- 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.
- 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!).
- Hawaii Five-O averted this by being entirely filmed in Hawaii (or, at least, advertised as such).
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- Spoofed in Police Squad!, where the Roman Colosseum and Leaning Tower of Pisa are back-projected during a trip to "Little Italy."
- The first 5 seasons of TheX-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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
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 freaking country.
- And it is a continent-sized country, a concept people from smaller nations seem to have trouble wrapping their head around. This troper (who comes from a town 8 hours west of Sydney) was told of a few German students in the town deciding to visit Ayers rock, and packing themselves a picnic for the trip.
- California gets this too. People don't realize that it takes 14 hours to go from top to bottom. Without stops. If you drive fast and don't hit traffic. This troper had a friend who got a hotel in Sacramento in order to visit San Francisco.
- I've got you both beat; I live in Canada. Geographically, second-largest country in the world; touching three separate oceans; climates ranging from temperate British Columbia, to frozen northern territories, to going back and forth between hellishly hot to bone-numbingly cold in Alberta; and yet everyone thinks Canadians live in igloos and hunt polar bears.
Western Animation
- Exception: The Simpsons takes great care to get geography down accurately for when they visit a major city and 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.
- 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).
Film
- The Chase Scene is especially prone to Television Geography. San Franciscans can go on for hours about Bullitt and The Graduate.
- 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).
- In Bullitts chase scene, it seems like every time they take a right turn onto a downhill street, there's a beige VW Beetle parked on the right with its' back to the camera. In the same spot every time...
- It's terribly obvious they filmed the movie 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.
- You mean Toronto isn't somewhere near Trenton? In one scene, RE 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...
- In the film 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).
- Actually, the "Unnamed American City" is clearly stated in-movie to be New York City, which makes this even more egregious.
- In a rare example of a film actually being shot in the location it's set in, Almost Famous is 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.
- The VH1 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.
- Although "Mr. Anderson" and his coworkers all speak with American accents in The Matrix, and the street names all seem to be taken from Chicago, 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.
- Also, at one point (as Morpheus is pointing at his head & saying "The very minds of the people we are trying to save") you see a Commonwealth Bank logo on a building.
- Enemy of the State was set in 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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. In fact, most Washington winter weather forcasts are "40 degrees and raining".
- more like 30 degrees and dry. but still...
- Additionally, the airport used in the movie looks nothing like the real Dulles Airport which has a very unusual architecture.
- You've Got Mail takes place in New York but the Golden Gate Bridge is visible when Tom Hanks is walking his dog, Brinkly.
- Possible aversion: The Chicago-area McAllister house in the Home Alone movies is an actual suburban house in Winnetka (a Chicago suburb). This non-Chicagoan will leave it up to the natives to see if there are any nitpicks.
- 10 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 distintive)... in Tacoma, about an hour's drive away. The same is true of several other locations, which also are all in Tacoma.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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, if this editor recalls correctly, looking inland at Pacific Grove, twenty or thirty miles south. Since this editor was stationed at Coast Guard Group Monterey at the time, the flip-flopping was sufficiently disorienting that, to this day, he has yet to see the entire film.
- The 1976 Robin Hood film Robin and Marian was filmed in Pamplona, Spain which, needless to say, looks nothing at all like Nottinghamshire.
- 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.
- This troper and her husband, being residents of Colorado, nearly burst out laughing during 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 this part of the world.
- {{Bill and Ted's 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- I don't know where they filmed the remake of Assault on Precinct 13, but it sure as hell wasn't Detroit! Can somebody show me which ghetto was grown over by that forest? "Wall Banger"
- This troper is now very glad that she hasn't seen that movie, as she's still trying to figure out 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.
- A number of people have commented on how Gotham City in The Dark Knight doesn't even try to pretend it's not Chicago. This Troper has heard stories of locals getting so distracted trying to figure out where everything was filmed that they missed plot details.
- 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.
- Hellboy II: The Golden Army ends at the Giant's Causway, Co. Antrim. It's worth noting the 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 Co. 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.
- The Nightmare On Elm Street film series is said to take place in a fictional town in the midwestern suburbs of the USA (Specifically, Ohio). For the most part, the filmmakers did a pretty good job covering up the fact that the movie was filmed in California. 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 liscense plates.
- 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.
- There is a Hitchcock thriller, whose title this troper cannot recall, 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 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 Left Behind movie got this especially bad; it 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.
- "Annapolis", set at the US Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland, was rather obviously not filmed there.
- "Four Brothers," about a quartet of young men who avenge their 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. Hey, who can tell the difference between one rusted-out post-industrial northern city and another, right? *grumble*
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.
Comic Books
- This troper was highly amused when reading The Ultimates 2 to see one panel showing a nice city landscape with an attractive domed building by a large river and the 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! A river does run through the city, but it was built over in the 19th and early 20th century and runs underground for the length of the city.
Literature
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