Useful Notes / The Other Rainforest

Hail, Cascadia!

The Pacific Northwest of the United States and Canada. When people talk about the Rainforest, they invariably mean the tropical one in Brazil, but the Pacific temperate rainforest is actually the largest in the world by area, and it stretches from northern California upwards to Alaska. There are also American tropical rainforests in Hawaiʻi and Puerto Rico (and the Philippines, when they used to be under U.S. colonial rule).

This portion of the Hollywood Atlas is home to magnificent forest scenery, Vancouver, mountain lions, Bigfoot, log cabins, lumberjacks, and Magical Native Americans delivering Green Aesops. Oh, and Crazy Survivalists who hole up in shacks, write manifestos, and send letter bombs. Also expect to see a New-Age Retro Hippie or two. Alternatively, we may get a beautifully-forested small town, which often turns out to be a City of Adventure for the local Kid Heroes when they're not being subjected to a Horrible Camping Trip. (Note the "rain" part of "rainforest".) This area may also be a Wild Wilderness with very little contact with the outside world, because the only city in this region Hollywood seems to know about is Seattle, home of the Space Needle and Starbucks.

As home to Microsoft and its founder Bill Gates, and Amazon (the non-tropical one) and its founder Jeff Bezos, and with Nintendo of America down the block and to the left, the Seattle area is the "cool" alternative location for tech people. Occasional recognition is given to Boeing. If Oregon ever gets a city, it will be Portland, which is often stereotyped as being populated by hipsters, Granola Girls, or Bomb-Throwing Anarchists. Funny thing is, despite Seattle being known as a tech city, Portland is a major center for computer manufacturing, with many Silicon Valley companies such as Intel having moved their manufacturing north due to cheaper utilities, wages, and land prices. Another notable company in the area is Nike, whose world campus is in Beaverton, a suburb just west of Portland.

Whenever something is supposedly set in Washington, you can almost guarantee it is Vancouver Doubling. However, due to good union contracts, it's becoming more common for it to be doubled in Oregon. This may change in the next few years, however, as Washington has recently passed tax breaks and other incentives for filmmakers, as well as the Canadian and American exchange rates and labor laws making the States an equally valid choice.

Also, beyond the Cascade Mountains, vast stretches of central and eastern Oregon, Washington, and British Columbia are not in any way a rainforest (and the residents tend to be far more conservative politically.) Much of eastern Oregon is desert or semi-arid, described by some as "the closest you can get to the Wild West and still have cable", while eastern Washington is largely rolling plains similar to those in Idaho and the Midwest. The latter area is home to the majority of America's apple production, as well as the Grand Coulee Dam on the Columbia River, the largest dam in the United States (and at one point the largest dam in the world). Eastern Washington is home to the state's second-largest city, Spokane, whose suburb of Mead is home to Cyan, the developers behind Myst. Plutonium for the U.S. nuclear arsenal is produced on the Hanford Reservation (rather than Oak Ridge, Tennessee or Los Alamos, New Mexico). Eastern BC includes the Okanagan Valley, a major orchard and winery region, as well as a few different mountain ranges.

---

This region in fiction:

Comic Books

• The Marvel Comics version of The Transformers was set in and around Portland. To be precise, the spaceship that brought the Transformers to Earth crashed near "Mount Saint Hilary".
• Greg Rucka's Stumptown is also.
• And Brian Michael Bendis' Scarlet.
• Green Arrow, during the Mike Grell era.
• Charles Burns's graphic novel Black Hole takes place in Seattle during the 1970s.
• Witch Doctor is set in the city of Arkham, Oregon.
• iZombie is set in Eugene, Oregon, although the television series takes place in Seattle.

Films — Animated

• Coraline is set in Ashland, Oregon, due to Laika, the animation company that made it being based near Portland, and them wanting to have it set in Oregon while still making Miss Spink and Miss Forcible's backstory of being former actresses semi-plausible (Ashland is the host for the Oregon Shakespeare Festival).

Films — Live-Action

• 10 Things I Hate About You: Certain shots show that it is set in Seattle, with the skyline (complete with Space Needle) and several iconic locations. Tacoma seems to double for Seattle in a lot of the more generic places.
• Animal House was shot in Eugene, Oregon on the U of O campus, although it seems to take place somewhere in Pennsylvania.
• Antitrust takes place largely in Portland. Fitting, since the inspiration for the film's villain is also located in the Pacific Northwest.
• Benny & Joon is set and shot in Spokane.
• Dante's Peak, set in a fictional small town in Washington's North Cascades (but shot in Idaho).
• Dead Man: set somewhere in Washington (the Makah village at the end of the film indicates the Olympic Peninsula)
• First Blood, in contrast to the jungle and desert settings of its sequels, is set in the fictional Hope, Washington and was filmed in the real life Hope, British Columbia as well as Golden Ears Provincial Park.
• First Cow takes place in Oregon Country during the 1820s when settlement by non-Natives was just beginning and the U.S. and Britain vied for control of the region.
• Five Easy Pieces: much of the film takes place in Oregon and the Puget Sound area of Washington.
• Foxfire with Angelina Jolie was filmed in SW Portland, and SET in Portland because it was purportedly full of lesbians and wangsty teenagers in The '90s.
• The Free Willy movies (at least the parts set on land)
• The Goonies, set in Astoria, Oregon. Short Circuit was also set and shot on Astoria. "Stephanie's" house is only a few miles from the "Goonies house," with the Columbia River bridge shown prominently.
• Harry and the Hendersons manages to include Bigfoot, Seattle, and the end of a Horrible Camping Trip.
• The second and third acts of Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom are set in the Lockwood Manor in northern California (it was shot in England, though), which eventually becomes a Gothic Horror mansion.
• Just Before Dawn has five youths camping in the woods of Oregon and meeting death in the guise of psycho redneck twins.
• Most of Kindergarten Cop takes place in Astoria where Kimble goes undercover as a kindergarten teacher.
• Lean on Pete takes place in this region. The main characters eventually go on a road trip to Portland, Oregon.
• The Lost World: Jurassic Park was shot in the redwoods of northern California and thus Isla Sorna resembles a temperate rainforest, despite ostensibly being located in tropical Costa Rica.
• McCabe & Mrs. Miller, a revisionist Western set in a small mining town in the Cascades.
• Meek's Cutoff, a Western set in the desert region of SE Oregon, has no forest. In fact, the single tree shown is near the end as the party of pioneers search for water.
• Night Moves (2013) is set in rural Oregon, like Kelly Reichardt's other films also listed on this page.
• No Retreat, No Surrender takes place in Seattle and also the location of Bruce Lee's grave.
• One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest was shot at the Oregon State Hospital in Salem.
• Outbreak was filmed in Humboldt County, set in the fictional city of Cedar Creek (actually Ferndale, CA). The infected monkey is released in the same forest that Luke and Leia rode speeders in.
• Pig: Nicolas Cage plays a man living alone in the Oregon rainforest wilderness, who must travel to Portland, his former home, after his beloved pig is stolen.
• The exteriors for Practical Magic were filmed on Whidbey Island in northern Puget Sound- though this is in a much less rainforest-y area than areas further south and west. The same area was used for a justifiably forgotten TV movie called Cry For the Children.
• The Ring (the Americana remake and its sequel) is set in the Northwest and was shot around Seattle, the Puget Sound, and Astoria, Oregon. The creepy blue quality to the light, unsettling fog and broken down barns are all part of the local color.
• Singles is a movie set Seattle right as the native grunge trend had just started to spread out to the rest of the country.
• The setting of Twilight. Forks, Washington is getting fantastic tourist revenue thanks to the movies—never mind that not a single scene in the saga was actually shot there.
• While no location is given in the film, What the #$*! Do We Know!? was filmed in and around Portland, and makes fairly extensive use of the MAX (the local light rail) and the Baghdad movie theatre.
• The remake of The Wicker Man (2006), set in a fictional part of the San Juan Islands.
• My Own Private Idaho and Drugstore Cowboy feature Portland, Oregon prominently, most notably The City Narrows. Parts of downtown Portland were considered rather gruff before it became so closely associated with The '90s Hipster culture.

• The forests of Endor are in Humboldt County, California.
• The scenes that were supposedly set in Japan for Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles III were filmed on the Oregon coast.
• My Name is Bruce is set in the fictional southern Oregon town of Goldlick, as well as actually being filmed in southern Oregon (Bruce Campbell lives in the southern Oregon town of Jacksonville).
• The Parallax View, which starts in Seattle (with an assassination at the Space Needle) and continues around the Washington State area.
• The Lost Coast Tapes takes place in the Pacific Northwest. California's Lost Coast, to be exact.
• That Cold Day in the Park is set in bleak, rainy Vancouver. Robert Altman told reporters that the gloomy weather was one of the reasons he chose the location.
• Leave No Trace is set in the chilly forests of Oregon and Washington.
• Quite a few of Lars von Trier's films are set in Washington state, such as Dancer in the Dark, Antichrist, and The House That Jack Built, the latter even mentioning Mt Saint Helens. Despite taking place in Washington State, Von Trier has never visited the state and doesn't intend to due to his fear of flying.
• Even Lambs Have Teeth is set in northern Washington. Two girls planning to spend a month working on an eco-farm never make it, but are instead kidnapped by a gang of redneck sex traffickers. The film plays up the isolation of the region, and how easy it is for someone to just 'disappear'.
• Turkey Hollow takes place in the Pacific Northwest, but nobody says which state.
• Without a Paddle, set in Oregon but filmed in New Zealand, follows a group of friends searching for D.B. Cooper's treasure. Along the way they encounter everything from grizzly bears to vengeful pot farmers.
• Fire with Fire (1986) is set in the mountainous regions of Oregon.
• WarGames: The first portion was set and even at least partially filmed in Seattle.

Literature

• The Twilight Saga is set in the town of Forks, Washington. Although Forks is a real place, the first movie filmed the Forks scenes in Oregon, and the subsequent movies filmed the Forks scenes in Vancouver, both of which are at least in the right region.
• The Postman
• Barbara Kingsolver's novel Pigs in Heaven has the main character move from Tucson to Seattle. She finds the local climate impossibly rainy. "This isn't a city, it's a carwash!"
• Laird Barron have a tendency to set his Cosmic Horror Stories in the rural area and forests around Olympia, Washington.
• Most of the Mercy Thompson series takes place in the Tri-Cities in Eastern Washington. The second Alpha & Omega novel is set in Seattle and does a good job.
  • Patricia Briggs was living in the Tri-Cities when she started writing the series.
• Beverly Cleary's Henry Huggins and Ramona Quimby books are all set in Portland.
• Some of Michael Slade's RCMP thrillers take place in Vancouver. Many of its characters have spent time hunting or backpacking in British Columbia.
• The Emberverse book series by S.M. Stirling features the PNW and Willamette Valley as central setting locations. The green and verdant landscape is mentioned as being a boon to the residents.
• The Northwest Front series of books takes place (mainly) in the Pacific Northwest as white nationalists try to separate and establish their Northwest American Republic....by terrorism.
• The Wildwood series by Colin Meloy (yes That Colin Meloy) is a young adult fantasy that sets an entire fantasy land in the wild woods near Portland.
• The prime setting of Imagine Someday a fictional city in Oregon that's somewhat like Portland. The characters also visit the Cascades at one point.
• In Metatropolis the eco-anarchist city of Cascadiopolis is hidden among the trees and basalt flats.
• A Study in Moonlight is all set in Western Washington. Most of "Tamanous of the Brackenwoods" takes place in a fictional small town in the Olympic Peninsula rainforest country, not far from Forks.
• The Nemesis Series is set in New Port City, a fictional city on Puget Sound which includes two peninsulas, part of the mainland, and three islands including Anderson and Mc Neil Islands. The text's description places it just west of Tacoma, Washington.
• Ken Kesey uses the Pacific Northwest extensively. Notably One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and Sometimes a Great Notion.
• The Lathe of Heaven takes place in Portland. Haber begins to believe Orr when he dreams that it hasn't rained there for two years.
• The Eagle Tree is about an autistic boy from Olympia and his fascination with the trees in this region.
• InCryptid: The Price family compound is outside of Portland, Oregon, though the books take place all over America (and in some cases in other countries).
• Patrick McManus lived in and typically set his stories in this region, most frequently the town of Blight, Idaho (a fictionalized version of his own hometown of Sandpoint).

Live Action TV

• Eureka
• Twin Peaks is set in the eponymous small town in the northeast corner of Washington State. In the first episode, City Mouse Dale Cooper — utterly enchanted with the place — has one very important question upon his arrival:

  Cooper: Sheriff, what kind of fantastic trees have you got growing around here? Big, majestic?
  Sheriff Truman: Douglas firs.
  Cooper: (dreamily) Douglas firs...

• The Bones episode "The Man in the Bear", which for some reason included a Stock Footage shot of Yosemite (they must have been walking really far).
• Nowhere Man - filmed entirely in/around Portland, though the various episodes were actually set in cities all over the country.
• Dead Like Me - Set in Seattle, but quite obviously filmed in Vancouver.
• The Sentinel is set in the fictional city of Cascade, a stand-in for Seattle.
• Almost Live!, a sketch comedy show that ran from 1984-1999 in the timeslot before Saturday Night Live, was produced and shot in Seattle, and featured skits which, in addition to lampooning (and helping codify) all the area stereotypes, regularly involved local current events and celebrities. Often the trivia of choice to determine if someone's a 'true' Washingtonian is to quiz them about their knowledge of this show.
  • Likewise Bill Nye the Science Guy was shot in and around Seattle, and is practically a child-friendly Spin-Off.
• Power Rangers Mystic Force - Though the fictional city of Briarwood suggests that it is either in Northern California or Oregon, it was filmed in New Zealand
• Frasier is set in Seattle, but filmed entirely in LA, except for one special on-location episode.
• iCarly
• John Doe
• Lost had a scene showing Ben being born in the forests just outside of Portland.... only problem being that the trees and foliage in the scene are obviously(and hilariously) tropical.
• Dark Angel is set in cyberpunk-esque Seattle 20 Minutes into the Future after an EMP burst destroys the US economy.
• Highlander: The Series is set in "Seacouver".
• The X-Files filmed its first five seasons in Vancouver, though it played host to a variety of different places, including Oregon, Idaho, Iowa, New Jersey, and Washington just in the first season. The pilot is set in the fictional town of Bellefleur, Oregon. They switched filming to L.A. after season five, and this becomes almost glaringly obvious in season seven, when Mulder and Scully return to Bellefleur to follow up on their first case. The pilot is drizzly, rainy, and ominous. The entirety of "Requiem" is sunny and more inviting.
• NBC's Perfect Couples is set in Portland, Oregon, although this is not mentioned on-screen often.
• One episode of Stargate SG-1 ("Seth") was set north of Seattle. Also, the episode "Nightwalkers" was set in a small, coastal Oregon town. Most of the series was filmed in the Vancouver area, leading to more than one joke about how all these alien planets sure look a lot like the Rocky Mountains.
• Portlandia is, obviously, set in Portland.
• Grimm is set and filmed in and around Portland, Oregon. There are a lot of little in jokes that are funnier if you're a Portlander or an Oregonian (two eisbibers being really big OSU fans, for instance).
• Leverage filmed its second, third and fourth seasons in Portland but set them in Boston. Starting in season five, the show will take place in Portland.
• Kyle XY is filmed in Vancouver, BC and while their exact town remains unnamed it seems to be close enough for frequent and casual trips to the University of Washington in Seattle, which is established as many alumni of the Government Conspiracy having started as students there.
• MacGyver (1985) had the episode "Log Jam", featuring Mac investigating the Northwest logging industry to discover... the Yakuza.
• Here Come the Brides: "The bluest skies you'll ever see are in Seattle..."
• Everything Sucks! is set in Boring, Oregon, a small town in the exurban part of the Willamette Valley.

Radio Dramas

• ''BellinghamTerror is set and produced in Bellingham, Washington and features loads of local history and references.
• Pacific Northwest Stories and the Public Radio Alliance:
  • PWNS and the PRA produce series in which the groups are fictionalized versions of themselves as a journalistic company based in this region. Naturally their shows largely take place in the area. They're also in a Shared Universe on paper; the two plotlines don't overlap much other than that the reporters Nic Silver and Alex Regan make the occasional appearance in one another's shows.
  • The Black Tapes follows their reporter Alex Regan as she investigates Dr. Richard Strand, a reclusive scientist and paranormal investigator of the highly-skeptical variety, and his yet debunked cases (the "Black Tapes"). Although Strand legitimately works to debunk cases, it's partly a cover to investigate the real mysteries of the Black Tapes, which link together to paint a picture of an incoming demon apocalypse.
  • TANIS follows Nic Silver as he takes to the field to investigate a thing called Tanis. It's not entirely clear if Tanis is a place, a phenomenon, a "doorway", or even an entity, and there's evidence to suggest that it fits into more than one of those definitions. As he digs deeper, he stumbles into the conspiratorial conflict centered around containing it. Much of Nic's research focuses on a specific point in the pacific northwest's forests that is home to strange phenomena and frequently affects the minds and sanity of those who draw too close to it.

Sports

• Mixed martial artist, commentator and All-American U of O wrestler Chael Sonnen would sometimes call himself the "Gangster of West Linn," (Oregon), with a flawlessly straight face.

Tabletop Games

• Shadowrun's default campaign setting is Seattle and surrounding areas.

Video Games

• Alan Wake. The developers wanted to create a convincing Washington landscape, so they took literally THOUSANDS of photographs of the land, not to mention architecture styles. As a result, the game had very little concept art.
• Deadly Premonition is set in the fictional city of Greenvale, Washington. (Based on the landscape, it's up somewhere in the Cascades.) Many characters mention visiting Seattle as well.
• World in Conflict Much of the story and game play, while sometimes set in Europe with the EU, and in New York, is set in Washington. In 1989, The Soviet Union invades Seattle using a lot of cargo vessels as a front. Their invasion is halted around the fictional city of Pine Valley (in place of Ilwaco, Washington), and finally turned around at the fictional town of Cascade Falls (in the Cascades in northern Washington). A final counterattack on Seattle (with an appearance by the Space Needle) forces the Soviets and Chinese reinforcements to retreat from the US mainland.
• The first mission in Mass Effect 3 takes place in a futuristic version of Vancouver as it is being attacked by the Reapers.
• The starting village of Arroyo in Fallout 2 is located roughly in the vicinity of Medford, Oregon and most of the game takes place in northern California, once a part of the Northwestern Commonwealth (Nor-cal, Oregon, Washington, Idaho, and Alaska). That being said, a lot of the area (especially south in Northern California) is still a dead and irradiated desert after the Great War, with the one large rainforests being hard to find.
• Gone Home is set in Oregon during, naturally, The '90s.
• Life Is Strange features a prestigious art school in Oregon, populated by every variation of the Hipster archetype one would expect.
• Oakwood is set in an abandoned campground (presumably) somewhere in North America. It's abandoned because it's experiencing a case of dinosaur infestation.
• The Sims:
  • The Supernatural expansion for The Sims 3 adds the town of Moonlight Falls, based on Forks, Washington from the Twilight books, all the better to go with its Urban Fantasy theme.
  • The Eco Lifestyle expansion for The Sims 4 adds Evergreen Harbor, which the flavor text indicates is located on the "Willupette Sound" (a reference to both the Willamette Valley in Oregon and Puget Sound in Washington). Uniquely, it's less a rustic Arcadia and more a run-down and polluted industrial city based on cities like Tacoma, Renton, Kent, Everett, and pre-tech-boom Seattle, with the gameplay in the pack revolving around cleaning it up, though once the smog is gone from the skies, the snow-capped mountains and pine forests surrounding the town become far more visible.
• While State of Decay never specifies where its setting of Trumbull Valley its located, the Seattle-based developers stated that they based it on the rural prairies and forests of central and eastern Washington state, a rare example of the parts east of the Cascades showing up in fiction (and being accurately depicted).
• Tower Unite's Zombie Massacre level Compound takes place in Washington, which is also where the Development team is.
• Ninja Baseball Batman has its first level set in Seattle, while the game itself was actually conceptualized by Irem's American Division in Redmond.
• Project Wingman takes place 432 years after a tectonic cataclysm that reshaped much of the Earth, and follows an alternate version of Cascadia as it stages a revolution against The Federation, a superpower that controls the Pacific Ocean.

Webcomics

• Ozy and Millie live in the Seattle area, and spend a lot of time in the forest.
• In Homestuck, John lives in Maple Valley, Washington (near Pipe Lake).
• This strip from The Oatmeal.
• Rhapsodies takes place in Homestead, Columbia (a large city on the shores of Puget Sound, in a United States with a slightly different history).
• A Running Gag in Monster of the Week is to caption every "wilderness" location (until Season 4) as "The rainy pine forests of [place that does not have rainy pine forests]", lampshading the heavy use of Vancouver Doubling in early The X-Files.

Western Animation

• The Angry Beavers is set in the fictional Wayouttatown, Oregon.
• Aqua Unit Patrol Squad 1 has the guys move to Seattle. Their neighborhood looks exactly the same, but the Space Needle is shown in The Creditor.
• Darkwing Duck, in the episode dealing with Native Americans with big feet.
• Gravity Falls is set in a weird part of Oregon. (Or ya know, the weirder part anyway.)
• The Simpsons - Matt Groening once said that Springfield was actually set in Oregon, his home state. Then again, Matt Groening said this, and there have been many deliberate contradictions throughout the series, including an episode where Bart and Homer had to plan a long road trip to get to Oregon (where they accidentally destroyed Groening's birth home).
• Phineas and Ferb: Humorously referenced in "Meapless in Seattle":
  Isabella: But how can we tell when we're [in Seattle]?
  (it suddenly begins pouring and Grunge music plays)
  Ferb: We're there.
• Rick and Morty is set right outside of Seattle, according to Word of God .
• Ready Jet Go! takes place in Washington. According to Word of God, they live north of Seattle and south of Vancouver, just off Interstate 5.

---