"Well we spread the word through the underground That we were the hottest new thing in town A record guy came out to see us one day And just like always, we didn't play And it knocked him out - he said he loved our work He said he loved our work but he wasn't sure if he could sell a record with nothing on it I said, 'Tell him we're from Seattle'
He advanced us two and a half million dollars"
— Todd Snider, "Talking Seattle Grunge Rock Blues"
A city situated on the eastern bank of Puget Sound in the
state of Washington, and its surrounding metro area. Named for a 19th century Duwamish tribal chief from the region, who
did not give an environmental speech often attributed to him. Home base of (or at least origin-point for) Microsoft,
Nintendo of America,
Valve, Starbucks, Boeing, Amazon and several other companies of note, and the birthplace of
Grunge music (
Nirvana in particular, despite not being from here). Its landmarks include Pike Place Market
note widely considered the real main tourist attraction, the Space Needle being little more than a giant tourist trap, Pioneer Square (which pre-gentrification was the
original Skid Row),
The Experience Music Project, a half-mile Monorail constructed for the 1962 World's Fair which exemplifies
Zeerust to a tee, the
Seattle Underground which was a partial inspiration for
Ankh-Morpork, and the Space Needle, also constructed for the World's Fair
note :It looks a lot bigger in pictures than in Real Life, due to the fact that it's usually photographed from Queen Anne Hill, from an angle that makes it look taller than anything else in the skyline, despite being relatively short and at least a mile north of downtown..
Seen as trendy and bohemian by many, thanks to grunge and
Frasier. Often used in fiction as a destination for a character being sent on a very long
bus ride.
In media, thanks to the cheaper filming costs,
Vancouver, British Columbia, is often used as a stand-in for Seattle or for unidentified parts of the USA resembling Seattle, leading to the term "Seacouver" for such settings.
Contrary to its treatment of other media Seattle remains one of the major hubs of videogame development in America behind LA/San Francisco region. Possessing the aforementioned Nintendo and Valve software along with numerous other developers.
Trails only
Cleveland as the
Butt Monkey of the U.S. sports world due to their spotty track record in regards to major league sports. (Three, count 'em, three, championships in the entire city's history.
note Two by the women's basketball team, the Seattle Storm, and one by the NBA team that moved. The University of Washington Football team won between two and four national titles depending on how one recons such things. And waaay back in the day, the Rainiers baseball team won a few Pacific Coast League pennants. Even further back, the long-defunct Seattle Millionaires won the Stanley Cup in 1917. Many local football fans, however, will tell you that the Seahawks were the rightful winners of Superbowl XL, but were cheated out of it by the officials' bias in favor of
Pittsburgh. This is a subject you should broach carefully, if at all.) In recent years, the situation has been particularly grim, with even the once-powerful University of Washington Huskies NCAA football team
having the worst single season record in history, and the Seattle Supersonics NBA team being spirited away to
Oklahoma City. Not helping matters is the fact that the city is famous for coffee, computers, grunge music, liberal politics, and rain,
note Frankly, though, the rain isn't much worse in the city itself than it is on most the Eastern seaboard on average; the Olympic Peninsula on the other hand, right next door to the west of Seattle, is probably the wettest place in the continental United States. which are decidedly at odds with the interests of the typical sports fan. The sports fans who
do call the area home responded to the aforementioned pirating of their NBA franchise by latching onto Seattle Sounders FC, the newest
MLS expansion team, and making it one of the few teams in the league to regularly sell out the stadium. Qwest (now
Century Link) Field, the home stadium to the Sounders and Seahawks, was from 2007 to 2010 true to the city's rebellious spirit by being the only stadium in the NFL to serve neither Pepsi
nor Coca-Cola beverages on its grounds,
having instead awarded its concession to the locally-based Jones Soda company. The rights have since been granted to Coca-Cola, which definitely makes going to Sounders games a lot less fun.
Home to the authors of the webcomic
Penny Arcade, who, as the above paragraph illustrates,
have difficulty understanding
the
Team Spirit of sports.
Bruce Lee grew up in Seattle, and graduated with a degree in psychology from the University of Washington.
Is also the hometown of
Sir Mix-a-Lotnote Actually, Tacoma is, whose song "Posse on Broadway" was based on Seattle's Capitol Hill neighborhood.
About half an hour to the south is the city of Tacoma (the "Tac" in SeaTac International Airport). It used to be a fairly industrial town, infamous for the horrible "Tacoma Aroma" produced by the city's paper mills, but has undergone revitalization in recent years due to increased port traffic, various downtown renewal projects, and an influx of consumer dollars from troops stationed at the burgeoning Joint Base Lewis-McChord, an Army/Air Force facility just to its south. Even the former site of the ASARCO smelting plant is being turned into luxury housing (why anyone would want to live over a former toxic waste site is another question). Its most famous son is arguably the one-eyed glass artist Dale Chihuly, whose works are all over the city (even in one of the McDonald's). Unlike Seattle, Tacoma hosts no major league teams of its own, though the Mariners' triple-A affiliate (the Tacoma Rainiers) is regionally popular, and the Tacoma Dome (in addition to being a frequent
WWE venue) has occasionally hosted Seattle's teams while their home venues were being renovated.
Fiction set in or near Seattle:
Comedy
- One of Bill Cosby's early comedy routines is about the city, and its supposed lack of sun.
Film
Literature
- Boneshaker is set in a version of Seattle in which the Klondike Rush occurred before the Civil War ended, when Alaska still belonged the Russia... and the accidental release of volcanic gases from Mount Rainier turn most of the population into zombies.
- Twilight takes place in Forks, over on our Olympic Peninsula, but Bella does seek visits Seattle.
- Elizabeth Anne Scarborough's "The Godmother". The author makes a point of stating in the forward that the novel takes place in an alternate universe version of Seattle, possibly to avoid being sued for libel; in the novel, the entire City Council is corrupt and many members are pedophiles who have hamstrung the department of Social Services in order to create an environment where abused pre-teens have no choice but to run away, making them easy prey.
- Whered You Go Bernadette parodies life in the Seattle neighborhood of Queen Anne, and not very affectionately.
Live-Action TV
- Wikipedia has a category for television shows set in Seattle. Some of these include:
- Dark Angel: Filmed in Vancouver.
- Dead Like Me: Filmed in Vancouver.
- Star Trek: Deep Space Nine actor Armin Shimerman remarked that his character's home planet, a soggy mudball called Ferenginar, "Looks a little like Seattle on a bad day." It even has a Space Needle (the "Tower of Commerce").
- Frasier: Filmed in Los Angeles, except for the 100th episode, which was actually filmed in Seattle. And the episode gets as much mileage out of Seattle landmarks as it can, including Niles getting a fish thrown at him in Pike Place Market and Frasier getting trapped on the Monorail on the way to the Space Needle.
- Grey's Anatomy
- Highlander: The Series: at one point it's outright called Seacouver.
- iCarly
- The Killing
- Kyle XY: Filmed in Vancouver.
- Millennium: Filmed in Vancouver.
- Reaper: Filmed in Vancouver.
- Smallville: Vancouver doubles for Kansas, but one episode was set in the Seattle docks.
- The 4400: Filmed in Vancouver.
- Twin Peaks
- John Doe, filmed in Vancouver, to the point that the Television Without Pity recapper just kept calling the city "Seacouver."
- Almost Live: Actually filmed in Seattle.
- The second of the Kolchak TV movies was set in Seattle, and several scenes were actually filmed there.
- The 1968-70 Western Here Come The Brides. Its theme song was "Seattle", a tribute to the city, and Perry Como's version became a Top 40 hit.
Music
Tabletop Games
- Genius The Transgression includes a premade setting, the Seattle of Tomorrow.
- Shadowrun: Features Seattle and most of south Puget Sound as a walled-off metroplex. Considering its central location between several nations and status as a transportation hub between North America and Asia, it is treated as the setting's "home base".
- Word Of God has it that Seattle was singled out by all the (Chicago-based) game designers because, at the time (1980s), it wasn't sufficiently prominent in pop culture to constitute a trope of its own; thus, they could freely make stuff up about the area without most of their game's audience catching on. They were aiming for Aliens in Cardiff, not realizing how Grunge and various movies and TV series would elevate the city's prominence in the near future. Ironically, Jordan Weisman (the lead designer on the original Shadowrun) would later move to Seattle, in part because of Microsoft acquiring FASA, and later to engage in game studio serial entrepreneurship.
Video Games
- Deus Ex Invisible War
- World in Conflict: The first and last missions take place in Seattle.
- Phantasmagoria 2 happens in Seattle.
- In Mass Effect 3, the opening levels take place in a Seattle/Vancouver hybrid megacity, where the two grew so large they sprawled into each other.
- An expansion pack for Railroad Tycoon 2 features a rather unique scenario where the player must build a metro transit system in Seattle. The city also shows up on North American maps in general.
Western Animation
- Hey Arnold: The city is never named, but per Word Of God it's an amalgam of Seattle, Portland, and New York City]]. Arnold's house is underneath I-5.
- Appears briefly in The Simpsons Movie.
- And in an Itchy & Scratchy short. Itchy saws the top off the Space Needle, and it gets stuck in Scratchy's eye.
- Springfield itself is an amalgam of several urban areas throughout the northwest, including Seattle as well Portland, Oregon (where Matt Groening grew up), Olympia, Washington (where he went to school). On one instance, a letter addressed to the Simpsons had the state abbreviation "NT", which Word Of God claimed stood for "North Tacoma".
- In "Homer the Clown", Krusty gives a list of inherently funny place names, including Walla Walla, Cucamonga, and Seattle.
- Krusty himself is (vaguely) based on longtime television host and Seattle icon JP Patches.
- A setting for one episode of Scooby-Doo. Features a sequence set at a "Space Needle" that was evidently animated by someone who had the structure described to them third hand over a bad telephone connection.
- Aqua Unit Patrol Squad 1 is nominally set in Seattle, although the backdrops are competely unchanged from the earlier seasons when the show was set on the Jersey Shore. One promo refers to the setting as "Seattle and/or New Jersey".
- Phineas And Ferb though not set in Seattle, the city is mentioned more than any other U.S. city, and at the end of "The Chronicles of Meap" the credits were played beneath a "promo" for Meapless in Seattle which was originally not going to be made, but it was and was released.
Web Comics
Web Original
