The City of Everywhere is a setting that only exists in comedic works. It usually claims to be one or more famous cities from Real Life, but contains an inexplicable and highly suspicious selection of features from all over the Hollywood Atlas. The City of Everywhere often has an assortment of landmarks and local color which in Real Life obviously couldn't be found on the same continent.
See also Where the Hell Is Springfield?. Compare Informed Location.
Examples:
open/close all folders
Advertising
- Cartoon Network's 2004-06 identity revolved around what's informally known as "CN City", where the settings of multiple CN shows have been fused into a single setting. For instance, the Sector V treehouse, the City of Townsville, and the Peach Creek cul-de-sac are essentially right next to each other, with road signs indicating Metropolis and Gotham City are somewhat nearby. Due to this it's also a City with No Name, though some bumpers called it the "City of Downtown".
Anime & Manga
- Digimon Adventure had this as the place where they face Machinedramon. Justified because said city is in the digital world.
- Judoh, in Heat Guy J. Word of God says the creator took elements from all over the place to create the city.
Comic Books
- A wartime issue of The Beano had Lord Snooty concoct a plan to confuse the Luftwaffe pilots bombing his hometown by surrounding it with landmarks "borrowed" by the RAF from all around the world. These included the Leaning Tower of Pisa, the Taj Mahal, and Table Mountain.
Films — Animated
- Big Hero 6 is set in San Fransokyo. It combines elements of San Francisco and Tokyo, so you get trams with Oriental-style roofs, Japanese signages everywhere, and the Golden Gate has torii gates as its towers. Word of God reveals that the amalgamation is in-universe; San Francisco was completely devastated by the 1906 earthquake, and its rebuild was influenced heavily by a large Japanese immigrant community, and the name was changed to honor this.
Films — Live-Action
- The view from Babe's window at the animal hotel in Babe: Pig in the City includes the Hollywood sign, the Golden Gate Bridge, the Sydney Opera House, the Statue of Liberty, the Eiffel Tower, Big Ben, the Rio de Janiero statue of Christ, the World Trade Center, the Empire State Building, the Chrysler Building, what appears to be a Moscow cathedral, and possibly other famous landmarks. Signage in the film indicates the city Babe visits is called "Metropolis", which has a Metropolis Gun Club and Metropolis Institute of Medicine.
Literature
- Dave Barry's Only Travel Guide You'll Ever Need has diagrams labeled "Map of Downtown Vienna," "Map of Downtown London," "Map of Downtown Paris," "Map of Downtown Berlin or Munich," "Map of Downtown Ireland," and "Map of Downtown Cairo," which are obviously the same silly drawing. The channel which runs down the middle of the drawing is triply labeled: "Seine River," "Thames River," "Nile River."
- The city of Ankh-Morpork in Terry Pratchett's Discworld series is one such city, in a Culture Chop Suey sort of way. Clearly identifiable inspirations that stay prominent in multiple books include 18th to 19th century London and New York City for the economy and culture, Renaissance-era Venice for the system of government, Seattle of all places for the geography and occasionally Paris for a bit of variety. But basically, any time Pratchett felt like doing a Whole-Plot Reference to a work of fiction set in a particular city, he found some way to squeeze the necessary architecture and cultural traditions into Ankh-Morpork somewhere. There's also a lot of Anachronism Stew mixing up eras of the same city; for instance, a Globe style permanent theater was a new and iffy idea that had never been tried before when the city opera house across the street was already centuries old.
Live-Action TV
- Gotham City in the 60s Batman (1966) TV show. It has landmarks from everywhere with the name "Gotham" slapped on the front. Including a clock tower named Big Benjamin.
- Last Week Tonight with John Oliver: The city in the background is a composite, containing landmarks from New York, D.C., London, and many other cities, with what may be the tip of a pyramid looming in the background.
Music
- Invoked in the music video for Michael Jackson's "Black or White", when the camera zooms out from Michael singing at the Statue of Liberty's torch and showing landmarks from many other places from all over the world in the background, the idea being to show that everyone lives in the same world.
Theater
- In Bells Are Ringing, Sandor's song "Salzburg" describes a wonderful seaside city that has not only strudel and goulash but gondolas, Toros y Flamenco, Geisha girls and the Nile, and also resembles Gay Paree and Oklahoma!.
Video Games
- In Strong Bad's Cool Game for Attractive People: Dangeresque 3, Venice, Cairo, Ireland, Tokyo, and Paris are all the same set (which, of course, resembles none of the aforementioned places) with a really badly made prop in the background. They even have the same character (sort of) standing around in the same place in each.
- Given proper time and wise financial management, you can build such a place in SimCity.
- The Simpsons: Tapped Out has run multiple promotions where you can build buildings and landmarks that were never in Springfield.
- In the Civilization series, you can essentially achieve this by building several World Wonders in the same city (or general vicinity in the case of Civilization VI).
- Some fictional cities in Need for Speed games are this. One example would be Bayview from Underground 2: While its general setting is a south Californian city similar to Los Angeles (complete with its own equivalents of Beverly Hills and the Hollywood sign), it also has an elevated train system similar to Chicago's L-train, a casino area that resembles Las Vegas' Fremont Street, and an airport terminal that looks like DC's Dulles International terminal, not to mention one of the skyscrapers downtown is styled after the Central Plaza from Hong Kong.
- Similarly, while Burnout's many circuits are set in parallels of real-world cities, Paradise City from Burnout Paradise is a city of everywhere, you can find the UN headquarters and Brooklyn Bridge from New York, another copy of Chicago's L-train, its own Hollywood sign and the Kölnarena (now Lanxess Arena) from Cologne as you drive through the streets of Paradise.
Western Animation
- This is how The Simpsons Movie solves the Separate Simpsons Geography Thing. It's hinted in one episode where Sideshow Bob takes Bart to a location just outside of Springfield where five states meet, including Minnesota, New Jersey, and Hawaii, which does not border any other US state.
- Capital City gets this treatment. If Springfield is Everytown, America, then Capital City is every city. One episode claims its nickname is "the Windy Apple", and another points out famous landmarks that are completely made up.
- In Futurama, a beach in the state of New New York has famous landmarks from across the world located on it—after Fry questions the others on it, Leela explains that the state of New New York had elected a supervillain governor at one point, who stole them all, then put his face on Mount Rushmore (which he also stole).
- Codename: Kids Next Door: The second episode had a Mini Golf Course of Everywhere. Numbuh 2 wakes up to a vista that features pretty much every famous landmark there is; he suddenly catches onto something being off by the time he gets to the Sphinx. Turns out to be a miniature golf course in a basement with all the landmarks having been properly shrunken down, along with Numbuh 2 himself.
Real Life
- Some of the hotels in Las Vegas appear to invoke this trope, with the hotels in question having themes based off of Ancient Egypt (Luxor), Ancient Rome (Caesar's Palace), Medieval Europe (Excalibur), Venice, Italy (The Venetian), Paris, France (The Parisian), New York City (New York, New York), etc.
