City of Everywhere

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.

The City of Everywhere is a setting which 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 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?.

Examples of City of Everywhere include:


Anime and Manga

Comic Books

  • A wartime issue of The Beano had Lord Snooty concoct a plan to confuse the Luftwaffe pilots bombing his home town 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.

Film

  • 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. In this vista, the Christ statue overlooks the Hollywood sign, and a helicopter and airplane can be seen eerily close to the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center (though flying away from them). Signage in the film indicates the city Babe visits is called "Metropolis", which has a Metropolis Gun Club and Metropolis Institute of Medicine.
    • IIRC the landmarks in Babe: PiTC are all subtly different from the originals - for instance, the WTC has cut-off corners, giving the twin towers irregular octagonal cross-sections.

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.

Theater

Video Games

  • In Strong Bads 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.

Western Animation

  • This is how The Simpsons movie solves the Separate Simpsons Geography Thing.
  • In Futurama the city of New New York has famous landmarks from across the world, on a single beach. This is explained by the city having a supervillain mayor at one point, who stole them all, then put his face on Mount Rushmore, which he also stole.
  • Parodied in an episode of Kids Next Door. Numbah 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 Numbah 2 himself.