Where the Hell Is Springfield?

""It's kind of a mystery, yes. But if you look at the clues, you should be able to figure it out.""

- Lisa Simpson, The Simpsons

The city and/or state (and in extreme cases the country) the series takes place in is never revealed, or is intentionally hidden.

This trope can be used as a running joke in comedies. In drama, it can be effective in creating an atmosphere of mystery and uncertainty. Leaving a location unspecified can help it serve as a geographic Audience Surrogate. Other times, the writers simply never see a reason to bring it up.

It can make it easier to build a City of Adventure, since nobody can point out that the city doesn't have an airport, casino, opera house, Gothic cathedral, etc, but can lead to blatant contradictions in geography if the writers aren't careful. Many examples inspire extensive fan effort to piece together clues and pin down the location. Unsurprisingly, many of these turn out to just be where the show was filmed. For extra fun, this trope can be combined with Retro Universe.

While "Springfield" as a generic Anytown dates at least to the 1950s and the Guiding Light (1952-2009) daytime TV serial, the name is most closely associated with the hometown of The Simpsons. "Springfield", as one of the most common town names in the United States, has its very own page at the eloquently-named Separate Simpsons Geography Thing.

Contrast with No Communities Were Harmed and Canada Does Not Exist, where the setting is based on a real-life location but never outright identified.

The Simpsons
"Alec Baldwin: Most people don't even know where Springfield is. Homer: Heh, yeah. To tell you the truth, I'm not even sure!"
 * This entry is so long that it deserves its own folder!
 * Springfield, of course. We don't know where it is, but we have a pretty good sense of where it isn't.
 * In Mr. Lisa Goes to Washington, Homer examines an envelope with his address. It gives the state as "T.A." and an invalid six digit zip code of 192005.
 * When the creator of the cartoon Danger Dog visits Springfield Elementary, the children are given the chance to ask questions. Hundreds of hands go up. The first question is "What state is Danger Dog set in?" "Michigan." All but one hand immediately goes down again.
 * Truth in Television; children treat all their favorite cartoons that way.
 * As part of the publicity for The Simpsons Movie, a video contest was created to determine which was the "real" Springfield. The winner: Springfield, Vermont.
 * The Movie also Lampshaded the fact that there are too many inconsistencies for Springfield to have a real location "Look at that, you can see the four states that border Springfield: Ohio, Nevada, Maine, and Kentucky!" Of these states, only Ohio and Kentucky border each other (and both of them have a Springfield); the others are separated by several thousand miles.
 * One Treehouse of Horror episode has multiplying Homers in a Grey Goo scenario. A map of the outbreak shows that the Homers started spreading from various Springfields.
 * In "Bart vs. Lisa vs. the Third Grade," a state representative (the Capital City Goofball) says: "The time has come to change our state flag. This Confederate symbol is an embarrassment, particularly as we are a northern state."
 * "Behind the Laughter" mentions them as a "Northern Kentucky family." It also mentions them, on different broadcasts, as a "Southern Missouri" family. Regardless, that's not the Simpsons as characters, but the Simpsons as animated actors who play caricatured versions of themselves on the show.
 * The most probable truth most will have to come to terms with however, is that when creating the show Springfield was intentionally designed to be a sort of Everytown USA. An amalgamation of sorts combining common qualities of many cities in the United States in order to make the satire within the show broader... as well as give the writers more to work with. So in a sense, it's where ever you want it to be. This harsh truth will most likely do nothing to quell the wild speculations, however.
 * Really?
 * One episode continues the joke, claiming that Springfield is "The entertainment capital of this state."
 * Homer is talking with Alec Baldwin about why he moved there and this happens:

"Congressman #1: Then it is unanimous. We are going to approve the bill to evacuate the town of Springfield in the great state of.... Congressman #2: Wait a second, I want to tack on a rider to that bill."
 * In Season 21 episode 21, Moe says that Springfield's zip code is 80085, which, in calculator spelling, spells boobs. However, 80085 is not an actual zip code. We checked. But other zip codes beginning 800* are in Colorado.
 * Holding the calculator upside down, 58008 is North Dakota.
 * And as mentioned below, they mention that North Dakota is one of the only two states the family isn't banned from. Are they not banned, or have they not been there?
 * In the next episode, Sideshow Bob shows up and kidnaps Bart, taking him to Five Corners (similar to the real Four Corners) in a scheme to avoid being arrested by having the crime committed in all 5 states.
 * Well, not exactly. He meant to split a murder into its constituents parts: standing in one state, shooting a gun in another state, so that the bullets flies through the third state, hitting Bart in the fourth state and finally killing him in the fifth state. When you consider the geometry of the situation, it seems Beyond the Impossible. It's also a Fallacy of Composition since Sideshow Bob believes that because none of the acts by themselves are illegal, the murder will be impossible to prosecute.
 * From 'Bart's Comet', when the titular comet is heading towards Springfield:

"Marge: "742 Evergreen Terrace, Springfield, Ohio oh, hiya, Maude! Come on in!""
 * From "Sunday, Cruddy Sunday," Marge gives her street address to get replacement parts for an egg arts-and-crafts set.

"Larry: (to the conductor) Hey, Casey Jones, where's this train headed? Conductor: Springfield. Larry: Yeah, yeah. What state? Conductor: (muffled by the train whistle)-aska"
 * So that's what the joke was!
 * In "Burns, Baby, Burns," a man named Larry realizes that Mr. Burns is his father when he sees Burns on a moving train:

"Reporter 1: We're going to Springfield! Reporter 2: Which one? Reporter 1: The one the Simpsons live in!"
 * Yet another episode contains this memorable exchange:


 * To really confound the matter, one episode had the Simpsons visit Florida, which they were banned from ever visiting again. It was then revealed they were banned from visiting every state except Arizona and North Dakota.
 * And neither one has a Springfield...
 * Get me two plane tickets to the state that Springfield is in!
 * In 'Much Apu About Nothing' Homer tries to locate Springfield on a map, and points near Chicago (note that the state capital of Illinois is named Springfield). Lisa says that that's nowhere near Springfield, and indicates the right location, which we're prevented from seeing when Bart blocks the view.
 * In another episode, Homer goes to "West Springfield", which is described as "Twice the size of Texas"
 * According to David Silverman (who directed many episodes and The Movie), the show takes place in the fictional state of North Takoma. Which probably makes this the best possible answer to the question.
 * The latest Word of God is that Springfield is based on Springfield, Oregon, near to Matt Groening's home town.
 * Or not.
 * That week's episode had the opening's chalkboard read "The true location of Springfield is in any state but yours."
 * There's also Bronson, Missouri where everyone bears a resemblance to Charles Bronson. The only clue to where in Missouri it is, is that a #10 bus goes from there to Branson.

Anime & Manga

 * Futari wa Pretty Cure is set in Wakabadai, an amalgam of various suburbs surrounding Tokyo on different sides. (There is a real town by that name, but it's in the wrong area).
 * Yes! Pretty Cure 5 is set in a city that is supposedly somewhere in Japan. It's full of French signs, and some fans have noted that it looks like The Theme Park Version of London.
 * Uminari City, the setting of Triangle Heart 3 ～sweet songs forever～ and Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha.
 * The town in Princess Tutu has a vague location, made only worse in that the town changes names depending on what language you're watching it in. It's Kinkan in the Japanese, and Gold Crown (the translation of "Kinkan" in the English dub. However, the last episode has a map of the town clearly labeled "Goldkrone," German for Gold Crown—so it's likely that the town is located in Germany, or a fantasy-world equivalent. Nearly all of the text in the series is in German, too, which helps to back up this idea. The town is based on the real-life German town Nördlingen, so it may be an alternate version of that town.
 * The town that D.N.Angel is set in is a strange case - all the characters have Japanese names and they seem to follow Japanese customs, but the town's architecture looks like a seaside European villa. The anime added a character that claimed to be an exchange student from America, but otherwise countries aren't really mentioned. In fact, the audio commentary for the English dub has two actors from it asking "Where is this set, anyway? France?"
 * It's never revealed what country the jungle in Haré+Guu is in. It does have Indonesian flowers, bears, and orangutans, but the rest of the wildlife is totally bizarre.
 * Prétear is set in the fictional Awayuki Town, somewhere in Japan. We're shown that the town appears to be on a small island connected to the main part of Japan by a bridge, but it's hard to tell much else.
 * Mahou Sensei Negima features Mahora Academy. All that can be determined of its location is that it's likely somewhere in the Kantou region of Japan (the same area that Tokyo resides in).
 * Excel Saga is set in "F City, F Prefecture"; various clues in the series point to Fukuoka City. The manga is explicitly set in Fukuoka.
 * Daten City and neighboring Oten City are equally vague. Implied at points to be located in an Eagle Land, Daten City at least features a Tokyo Suburb.
 * Most of Kiki's Delivery Service takes place in a city that explicitly borrows architectural elements from such locations as Stockholm, Visby, Lisboa, Napoli and Paris. It is implied to be located in Northern Europe, and the inhabitants seem to be a mix of European and East Asian phenotypes with no hint of racial segregation or discrimination. (The policemen's uniforms, however, look distinctly French, and combined with the city's hilly terrain and its seaside location, this might imply the southern coast of France.)
 * Most of the race locations in Initial D are actual mountains, with one very notable exception...Akina. Except for the fact that it's somewhere in Gunma and looks kinda-sorta like the real-life Haruna, details are sketchy at best. (The fact that the closest settlement is "S City" doesn't help.) For that matter, there's some question as to exactly what the course looks like, as, unlike what's shown in the video games, it's not Haruna (nb. Haruna does not have five consecutive hairpins anywhere).
 * Umi no Misaki is set on what is for all intents and purposes, a fictional small island in the vicinity of Okinawa.
 * "Cape Mery" in Kaleido Star is allegedly in California, but it can't seem to make up its mind whether it's Los Angeles or San Francisco—it's got LA's shoreline and palm trees but also San Francisco's hills, vintage streetcars, and a dead-on markup toward the Ferry Building and nearby Amtrak terminal in the second season's opening.  At the same time, it also has the concrete canyons of New York City.  And just to confuse the issue even further, the rising sun over the ocean horizon when Sora performs the Angel Maneuver in the final episode makes it clear that the open sea is to the east of the city—pretty hard to do anywhere in California. Some viewers suspect that it's actually in Hawaii, not California, which would solve most of these problems (and explain some otherwise extremely fast travel times from Japan).

Comics
""If I remember my atlas, we live in a big, purple country." "And our house is by the giant letter 'E' in the word 'States'.""
 * Riverdale in Archie Comics.
 * In very early Archie stories, Riverdale is explicitly situated somewhere in Massachusetts, the home state of creator Bob Montana. For example, Mr. Lodge first appears as a Massachusetts senator. (Indeed, at the time the character was introduced, Massachusetts had a real-life senator named Lodge). This location has long since ceased to be canon.
 * Bob Montana named it Riverdale in the first place because his hometown is Haverhill, MA, a city whose sole salient geographic feature is the Merrimack River winding its way through town.
 * Nowadays, Riverdale is stated to be close enough to New York to make driving there not unbelievably long, pretty solidly putting it on the East Coast. (Riverdale, NJ, a pleasant suburb northwest of Paterson and 45 minutes' drive from central Manhattan, is a good candidate.  Riverdale, NY, in the Bronx, is not.)
 * Although a few stories have implied it to be in California.
 * After a "Where is Riverdale?" contest, it was revealed that Riverdale is "All of America, including Canada and Mexico."
 * In Gold Digger by Fred Perry, the Diggers family lives in Atlanta, Georgia. However, since the whole point of the comic is that Gina is an Adventurer Archaeologist and explorer, most of the stories are set in various "lost lands" like El Dorado or Atlantis whose locations are, of course, never specified.
 * Duckburg and Mouseton from the Disney comics and cartoons.
 * Duckburg is in Calisota, United States. Which is itself a Springfield, being a combination of California and Minnesota.
 * Calisota does have a definite location nowadays: it is the Northern 1/3rd of California. The location was established by Don Rosa. In Carl Barks's time, Calisota was indeed a Springfield.
 * This puts it in the proposed State of Jefferson (at least the modern idea).
 * According to that map, Duckburg is in about the real-life location of Eureka, CA.
 * As early as Romano Scarpa's "Emperor of Calisota" (1959), Calisota is identified on a map and resembles the California coast, with Duckburg and Mouseton seen next to each other.
 * Carl Barks reportedly said Duckburg can't be found on the map because it is under the letter A with the large font of U.S.A.
 * However, one episode of DuckTales (1987) was about Scrooge McDuck, Gyro Gearloose, and Doofus finding Atlantis (clearly located in the Atlantic Ocean) where they are all forced by the Atlanteans to clean up the lost city as punishment for polluting it.
 * In the G.I. Joe comics, one of Cobra's bases is "a nice little town called Springfield," a Stepford Suburbia Town with a Dark Secret somewhere in the United States. Even when a Joe is brought to Springfield and escapes in one storyline, Cobra manages to evacuate by the time GI Joe can stage a counterattack, suggesting that Cobra has set up more than one "Springfield."
 * This was used in the "There's No Place Like Springfield" episode of the TV series. After Shipwreck is attacked by Cobra, he wakes up several years later with no memory of anything that happened since the accident. Cobra was destroyed and the Joes disbanded, and Shipwreck himself got married and had a kid. And they live in a town called Springfield.
 * Dykes to Watch Out For: The city is never named, but depicted as a medium-sized American Midwest town with snowy winters, a university, and a large and diverse LGBT community. Maps included as title pages in some of the collections show a surprising number of streets named after famous lesbians. Author Alison Bechdel has said that the look and character of the city is very loosely based on Minneapolis.
 * Calvin and Hobbes never makes any direct mention of where it's set, though there are a few hints that it's probably in Ohio or thereabouts.


 * Residents of the east side of Cleveland recognize it as Chagrin Falls, Bill Watterson's hometown.
 * Peanuts never explicitly stated its setting, but the few clues given suggest either Minnesota (where Charles Schulz grew up), Northern California (where he spent the last four decades of his life), or a combination of the two.
 * Likewise, Garfield's location is never specified in the comics. However, this was averted in the Garfield Goes Hollywood animated special, when it's announced as Muncie, Indiana (Jim Davis' hometown).
 * Two British comics The Beano and The Dandy (made by the same company) are contained within their own fictional towns that are meant to be somewhere in the UK, called Beanotown and Dandytown respectively (it's assumed that the two towns are close to each other, as they are rivals). Not only that, but the geography within the towns changes according to where a character is and where they are trying to get to. So that wherever you are now is always relatively close to where you want to be.
 * Where is Astro City? Kurt Busiek has been asked numerous times by fans on the Internet, but refuses to tell, only confiding that its real-life location contains a small town rather than a city. Context (e.g., KBAC as the local station's call letters, which isn't just an In-Joke) puts it in the Western United States, in a location consistent with having at least one large mountain (Mount Kirby).
 * From the comics we know that it is west of the Mississipi, and that the town founder was on his way to California when his wagon broke an axle (with the implication that he never actually made it there). Various characters talk about going to California in a manner that implies that they do not already live there. So Oregon or western Nevada seem like strong contenders.
 * Zits made a reference once that indicated the nearest interstate highway was I-70. This means the strip most likely takes place in Maryland, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Missouri, Kansas, Colorado, or eastern Utah (and the terrain doesn't look that much like Colorado or Utah). Jeremy once said that he was born in Nebraska.
 * Jeremy's dad once mentioned a business meeting in which he had to drive to Dayton. The strip is drawn by Jim Borgman, a chief cartoonist for the Cincinnati Enquirer, which might imply that it takes place in the Cincinnati area. I-70 passes through Dayton and just north of Cincinnati.
 * There was another strip where Jeremy tries to drive somewhere and gets lost, ending up near Bucyrus, so it seems that they somewhere in Ohio.
 * In a recent strip, Walt responds to one of Jeremy's complaints by commenting that "Surf's down in central Ohio" which seems to confirm the Ohio location.
 * FoxTrot has hinted that the town in which the Fox family lives is called Hillsdale (e.g., a Hillsdale Mall in an early strip, H's on the school team's uniforms, etc.), but besides an address in the first strip, no specifics are given.
 * It's possibly somewhere in the Northeast, given that Peter is a Boston Red Sox fan and Roger of the Washington Redskins. (Some fans have also suggested Chicago, as Roger claims to have been born there in a couple early strips and Andy has tickets to a Bulls game where she gets an autographed Michael Jordan basketball - but it's likely the Bulls were the visiting team in that game)
 * At least one early strip in Pearls Before Swine said the strip took place in Stephan Pastis' hometown of Albany, California, which is near San Francisco. However, this is never mentioned again, and a later series shows the characters needing to take a cross-country bus trip to San Francisco.
 * Dick Tracy's adventures take place in an unnamed analogue of Chicago (based on the presence of Capone counterpart Big Boy).
 * The geography of The DC Universe and its fictional cities is vague and inconsistent at best, but some facts have been "officially" or quasi-officially established from time to time. DC's "house fanzine" from the '70s, Amazing World of DC Comics, established some city locations, which were mostly followed in The Atlas of the DC Universe, a supplement for the DC Heroes Roleplaying Game. As an aside, the JLA/Avengers miniseries established a reason why DC's Earth seems to have so many large cities with no analogues on Marvel's Earth (which generally speaking conforms much more closely to Real Life Earth). The reason? DC's Earth is physically larger. Not by a lot, but by enough to have a bit more room for extra cities.
 * Metropolis (Superman's city, of course) has rarely if ever been nailed down to a precise location in the comic books... but it was in the comic strips - specifically The World's Greatest Superheroes, which ran from 1979-1982. Metropolis was unequivocally located in Delaware, The Delaware location was used in The Atlas as well, and in the JSA vs. Kobra miniseries, "Metropolis, DE" had its first official comic book sighting (as the address of a criminal suspect seen in a database). But there are a lot of other candidates for Metropolis' location, or real-life cities that "inspired" Metropolis:
 * Superman creators Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster grew up in Cleveland. Shuster lived in Toronto, Canada until age 10. Both cities have been suggested as inspirations for Superman's Metropolis.
 * New York is another obvious inspiration (made explicit in the 1978 movie and its sequels). It should be noted that the city of New York also has an independent existence in The DCU.
 * Chicago is sometimes mentioned as an analogue for Metropolis. This notion tends to be more plausible in Superboy-related series, which sometimes portray Metropolis as "the nearest big city" to Clark Kent's hometown of Smallville (but see below for more about Smallville).
 * Occasionally, Metropolis has been referred to as being in the fictional state of "New Troy." New Troy has also sometimes been referred to as part of Metropolis - it's the "Manhattan Island" analogue within Greater Metropolis in The Atlas, for example.
 * Gotham City, home of Batman, is located in New Jersey, across the Delaware Bay from Metropolis, according to the World's Greatest Superheroes comic strip (see above). But it too has had several alternate candidates:
 * New York. Many have said "Metropolis is New York by day; Gotham City is New York at night."
 * Chicago. The Dark Knight was filmed there.
 * The fictional state of "New Gotham."
 * The relative location of Gotham City to Metropolis can vary greatly. Sometimes, the two cities are practically "Twin Cities," while in other depictions, they're hundreds of miles apart.
 * The 1966 Batman TV series mostly follows the "New York under a different name" principle, but the show has enough ambiguities to rate its own entry in the Live Action TV section (see below.)
 * The Young Justice animated series puts it in Connecticut, around where Bridgeport is in real life.
 * Most maps of Gotham City depict the City as having a huge body of water, probably an ocean, to its east, which in the U.S. would imply a location on the east coast, or conceivably on a large non-oceanic body such as one of the Great Lakes, San Francisco Bay, or Puget Sound.
 * Another plausible location is in New Jersey's Great Bay.
 * Less about the geography and more on its cartography, Gotham (or at least the main downtown make up) is clearly modeled as a "Manhattan Island" analogue; maps shown during the "No Man's Land" event clearly show it as a large inland island, as the federal military was able to blow the bridges to keep all (okay, most) in/out movement at bay.
 * Central City, home of The Flash (Barry Allen), is in Missouri, across the Mississippi River from Keystone City (which places it in the neighboring Kansas), home of The Original and the third Flash, Jay Garrick and Wally West, according to The Atlas. However:
 * Pre Crisis, Central City may have been in Ohio, and Keystone City may have been in the Keystone State, Pennsylvania.
 * Sometimes Central City is suggested as having been named for being "in the center of" the United States. However, this might mean very different things depending on when the city was founded.
 * Silver Age and Bronze Age stories quite often depict Central City with prominent mountain ranges (and mountain caves used as supervillain hideouts) nearby, which would be inconsistent with a Midwestern location.
 * In The New Frontier, a character refers to Barry as "the Illinois Flash."
 * One Bronze Age story depicted Central City being near sizable salt flats, of all things.
 * The DCU's 2011 relaunch actually recalls that "salt flats" story. Central City and Keystone City (collectively known as "the Gem Cities") are shown to have "badlands," drawn with a Monument Valley look, "just outside Central and Keystone City."
 * Opal City, home to multiple generations of Starman, is in Maryland, according to its creator, James Robinson. It's a rather bizarre location, since Opal City seems to have been at least somewhat on the edge of "the Wild West" in the late 19th Century.
 * Coast City, home of Green Lantern Hal Jordan, has somewhat surprisingly always had an unambiguous state in the comic books. It's in California. Its location within California is pretty vague, though. (The Atlas puts it in the north, about halfway between San Francisco and Eureka).
 * Smallville, hometown of Clark Kent, was given an unambiguous location in Kansas in the 1978 movie. This location carried over into the comic books. Its location was previously unspecified, however:
 * As noted above, Smallville was sometimes depicted as being relatively close to Metropolis. This could suggest a Midwestern location for Metropolis... or an Eastern location for Smallville. Smallville could have easily been in, say, rural New York or Pennsylvania. And in any case, the northeast was much more rural in the 1930s, which would have been the setting of the first Superboy stories (Superboy stories were first published in the late 1940s).
 * The eponymous TV series suggests that Metropolis is the closest big city to Smallville.
 * In fact, the series admirably resigns itself to implausibility and places both Smallville and Metropolis in central Kansas, regardless of how absurd that is. (Smallville is covered in forests, mountains and lakes, while the real Kansas is famously flat and featureless. And Metropolis dwarfs Kansas's largest city, Wichita, by at least an order of magnitude, probably two.)
 * As with Central City, a number of Superboy stories depict nearby geography (e.g., mountains) that would be inconsistent with a Midwestern location.
 * Hub City, home of The Question, has an undefined location, but was specifically inspired by East St. Louis, Illinois, (according to creator Denny O'Neil).
 * Happy Harbor, Rhode Island was home to the original Justice League of America's "Secret Sanctuary," right? Well, later stories established this as a fact, but as one blogger notes, this isn't really supported by the original stories. The Secret Sanctuary is also in a mountain cave, a feature Rhode Island is not known for.
 * Behold! A website which catalogs some of the information found in the Atlas of the DC Universe!
 * Basin City, aka Sin City. It is seemingly in the West somewhere, considering it's located near a desert and was started as a boomtown. There are also Western-style bars and strip clubs (Nancy dresses as a cowgirl, often) as well as the term cowboy thrown around sometimes. Country music is also popular there, apparently. The city seems based mostly on Las Vegas with elements of New York, Chicago, and LA thrown in for good measure.
 * Tintin, though a Belgian creation originally intended to be a reporter for a Brussels newspaper, essentially became of undetermined nationality and hometown once the comic went international. Though the drawings incorporate features of Brussels, he is never stated to be from anywhere more specific than Europe in the comics, nor does he ever acknowledge being in Brussels when he is in the city. The English translation at one point puts Captain Haddock's estate of Marlinspike in England (based on the address on a letter), but this is never acknowledged elsewhere in the series and the French original does not specify Belgium.
 * The last album even makes all the press write that Marlinspike is in Western Europe.
 * Even though some of the international editions change this, the names of streets as well as the people who live in Tintin's hometown are clearly French. So even though Brussels is not named, the location is more specific than just "Western Europe": it has to be either France or Belgium.
 * More evidence: In The Black Island, Tintin narrowly catches the ferry to England, making it very clear that that's not his home. Seeing that the entire journey from his hometown to the port takes place in one day, this makes his Belgian/Northern French roots all the more evident.
 * In-Universe example in Miracleman: The City of Spies in Spy Story is just called 'the City', and when the main character starts asking questions like what country it's in, people look at her as if she's mad. It turns out that the City was built to house all the spies in the world, who couldn't deal with the utopia the world had become and were instead given a fictional war of intrigue to carry out among themselves.
 * W.I.T.C.H. has Heatherfield. Here's all the data we have: the location is easily recognizable as a generic big European city on the sea with a Los Angeles-style bridge; the names of the vast majority of the residents are of British origin (Hay Lin's family doesn't count because they're Chinese, with her mother being explicitly a native of Hong Kong); football (soccer for the Americans) is apparently the most popular sport; Halloween is a popular celebration; language in signs and insignias switches between English (most used) and Italian (rarer); the Sheffield Institute was build on a former pumpkin patch due an Italian-language pun (pumpkin being sometimes used as synonym for 'head' and 'brain' in Italian); France and Italy are explicitly shown as foreign countries (and French is often treated as a foreign language that Will and Irma have problems with); the school sometimes flies the Stars and Stripes; currency has been alternatively shown being the American dollar (early on) and the euro; the police has called the Interpol for an apparent case of illegal aliens. Many people tried to narrow that location down to at least a country, everyone failed.
 * Beetle Bailey and Camp Swampy. When first seen, it had palm trees and was definitely not in Alaska. That's about all we have, except the palm trees aren't there any more.

Films -- Animation

 * Wallace and Gromit takes place in a generic Northern England town, though when Wallace gets post, the address can be briefly seen as "62 West Wallaby Street, Wigan."
 * The Toy Story movies are set in "the Tri-County area," as seen on newspaper vending machines, TV ads for Al's Toy Barn, the local airport, and WebTuraMaps.
 * In another Pixar film, The Incredibles, it's never explained where the city of Metroville is located.
 * However, Violet's middle school is based on Brad Bird's high school, Corvallis High School in Corvallis, Oregon.
 * And in a third Pixar film, Cars, Radiator Springs is clearly located in the southwestern US, but is located near I-40 and US Route 66, yet it is never explained which state it's in.
 * Nor is Carburetor County.

Films -- Live Action

 * Se7en takes place in an unnamed American city. Some take it to be Seattle (due to much of the film taking place on rainy days), but there's also a nearby desert.
 * American Beauty takes place in a generic Stepford Suburbia, location unspecified.
 * Miller's Crossing takes place in an unnamed American city during The Roaring Twenties.
 * Saw takes place in an unnamed city, with no hints as to where it is located.
 * The state represented by Senator Jefferson Smith in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington is not named, even though (or more likely because) its two senators, the governor, and the boss of its political machine are all central characters.
 * The opening voiceover of Danny Boyle's Shallow Grave states that "this could be any city."
 * The city of Springwood in A Nightmare on Elm Street wanders all over the country as the series goes on. The first movie is set in an unnamed Los Angeles suburb, but as Continuity Creep sets in with each sequel, the setting picks up the name Springwood and enough backstory to turn into a Town with a Dark Secret. The fifth sequel's opening finally puts Springwood squarely on a U.S. map... in Ohio.
 * Although Alternate Continuity might be coming into play now, Freddy vs. Jason moves the city all the way to the east coast: Springwood is shown to be a short walk/drive from Camp Crystal Lake which, according to some of the Friday the 13 th sequels, is in upstate New York. If we go by the Freddy vs Jason vs Ash comic book, Crystal Lake (and, by extension, Springwood) is also near Ash's hometown of Dearborn, Michigan. This town really gets around!
 * Actually Crystal Lake is in northern New Jersey, and Freddy vs. Jason just failed to show the amount of time it would take to get there from Ohio. The problem is addressed in the Friday the 13th documentary His Name Was Jason, and by the screenwriters, no less.
 * The Dark Knight Trilogy never hides the fact that the films were shot in Chicago, with prominent landmarks like the Wrigley Building visible, but there the location of its Gotham City is apparently fantasy, given that its license plates state that it's located in Gotham State.
 * Conversely, Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice hides almost everything about the location of its Gotham—except that it is on the opposite short of a large bay or lake from Metropolis, and that the lights of one can be seen from the other at night.
 * A number of movies shown on Mystery Science Theater 3000 are like this; Danger: Diabolik! is ambiguously Europe-y, Hobgoblins is in a town big enough to have its own movie studio but the main character's house, the strip club, and the make-out spot are all very clearly suburban if not exurban.
 * Payback is set in some city during some decade. The architecture, clothing, furniture, and phones all make both its city difficult to place both in location and time.
 * Office Space had cars with generic "USA" license plates.
 * Incendies is set in an unnamed Middle Eastern state in a state of unrest and rebellion.

Literature

 * Older Than Steam: Explicitly invoked in Don Quixote in its very first line: "In a village of La Mancha the name of which I have no desire to recall."
 * That has not stopped scholars from reconstructing Don Quixote's escapades and concluding that the village is Argamasilla de Alba, where Cervantes was imprisoned for a time (and, according to Word of God, he began to write the novel). No surprise the man didn't have any desire to recall that place.
 * It's even lampshaded that the name of that village is intentionally hidden in the very last chapter: Part II, chapter 74: Such was the end of the Ingenious Gentleman of La Mancha, whose village Cide Hamete would not indicate precisely,. in order to leave all the towns and villages of La Mancha to contend among themselves for the right to adopt him and claim him as a son, as the seven cities of Greece contended for Homer.
 * Justified by the "can't let you know who we are, or where we live" in Animorphs.
 * There were actually enough hints given as to the surrounding area's geography, as well as the convenient nearby zoo/theme park "the Gardens" to guess it was somewhere in that general area.
 * Yep, forests, beaches, valleys (and mountains since you can't really have one without the other) that pretty much narrowed it down to somewhere on the West Coast, near the Sierra Nevada mountain range, and in America, that meant California. Although the part about being near the Sierra Nevada eliminated parts of California. The size of the Mall also gave clues about the size of the city, as did the size of the Yeerk pool as indicated by the number of other entrances and their geological distribution given that in was located under a large part of the city, but not all of it either.
 * The Saga of Darren Shan, as well as the Demonata never reveal the name of their town, city or country.
 * Judging by how Darren says "I won't tell you were I live; I wouldn't dare," the author is just adding some mystery into the series.
 * It's implied that it's set in Britain but Darren's family are Irish, just like the author.
 * Some of the books refer to soccer as football, something generally only done by the British anyway.
 * Actually, though Grubbs never reveals the town he lives in at the beginning of Lord Loss, the rest of the book—and a few of the sequels—take place in Carcery Vale.
 * Darren's school in the first book is based on one near the author's home in Limerick, Ireland. It feels very Irish in general, too.
 * Done in A Series of Unfortunate Events. Not only is not clear where the orphans are during any book, it isn't even clear which country or time period the books are set in (there are vague "hints" at the USA, but this is largely because the author is American).
 * The movie places the Baudelaire Mansion at "28 Prospero Place, Boston, Massachusetts."
 * Lampshaded or subverted (take your pick) in Garrison Keillor's Lake Wobegon Days where, early in the book, he explains how surveyor error caused Mist County, the town's location, not to appear on maps of Minnesota.
 * John Dies at the End is set in the town of 'Undisclosed', with the only information ever given about it being that it's 'Somewhere in the American Midwest'
 * Before it was published, the town was Rockville. Unfortunately, there was such a place in Illinois so he changed it for legal reasons.
 * Players of the current ARG on the website have figured out that the town is most probably Cairo, IL. There's been photos of this town and multiple references to the Egyptian city of the same name, for example.
 * It has never been stated where the city of Newford, where most of Charles de Lint's stories are set, is located, whether or not it's in either Canada or the United States. It's probably in Ontario (where the author lives) but there's been no confirmation.
 * Nothing is known about the city, or even the country, of José Saramago's novels Blindness and Seeing. This was, of course, completely intentional.
 * Saramago does this frequently; the same thing happens in Death With Interruptions and All The Names. However, things seem quite Portuguese, despite the unnamed country in Death With Interruptions being supplied with a monarchy.
 * Without Blood by Alessandro Baricco includes a note at the beginning stating that this trope was used intentionally so as to universalize the story. Spanish character names are used "due to their music" and do not indicate a Spanish setting.
 * Huge by James W. Fuerst would seem, according to careful examination of Huge's descriptions in the story, to be set in Eatontown, New Jersey. However, while some aspects of the book's geography match up with Eatontown (the location of the mall and the Circle, the town's proximity to the Garden State Parkway), the author has obviously taken care to scramble other aspects and make the setting more generic. The proof is in the location of the reservoir relative to the mall...it just doesn't work in real life.
 * Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is set somewhere in Britain (probably London), but thanks to Willy Wonka being played by Americans in both movie versions (and Charlie being played by one in the first), it's very ambiguous.
 * This is intentional for at least the first movie. In the DVD extras, the director states that they left the location of the factory ambiguous so that kids could think it was anywhere and then it could be mysterious and exciting.
 * The actual filming location was Munich, Bavaria, West Germany, for budget reasons and the location of the actual factory chimneys seen. Also, they liked how "storybook" the town looked, giving it a fantasy/timeless feel.
 * In the book, Charlie finds a dollar in the gutter in the American edition, but a 50p in the UK edition.
 * The second movie deliberately invoked this too, with a setting designed to look like America to English audiences, and England to American audiences.
 * The first series of Warrior Cats was set in a forest based off of New Forest in southern England, but in the second series, the Clans moved to an entirely fictional new forest and have encountered some wildlife that can't be found in the UK, making it pretty hard to determine where the series is set. Even the authors aren't sure.
 * Of course, the fans don't really care. In their minds, it's still set somewhere in the English countryside.
 * M. T. Anderson's Feed is somewhere in America, but apart from the only clues are that it is not too far from the ocean. The problem with pinning down location is that the book is set in the future, so all modern indications don't quite fit.
 * Encyclopedia Brown lives in Idaville, USA, with a fair amount of Geographic Flexibility. (There's some hint that it's in the US Southeast, and an Onion story spoofing the books put it in Florida.)
 * After Sinclair Lewis released Main Street some people were mad at him over using the real town of Sauk Center, Minnesota, that he created for every other book he wrote, the fictional state of Winnemac, (uses pieces of Michigan and Ohio), with its largest city of Zenith, and a town named Springfield, Winnemac.
 * Although it is often presumed to be in Pennsylvania, it is never actually stated where Huntsdale is, although it's clearly American. Melissa Marr stated that this was intentional in an interview, wanting it to be a kind of everytown.
 * Leslie hopping on a train to Pittsburgh in Ink Exchange does give it a bit of a radius.
 * All the King's Men is set in a state that is never named and about which little is said except that it's in the Deep South. However, given that it is very loosely based on the career of Huey Long, a governor of Louisiana in the 1930s, to say nothing of other clues, it's not too much of a long shot to just say that it's set there.
 * The Movie is explicitly set in Louisiana.
 * The "Conni" series of books, written by Julia Boehme, is set in a town called Neustadt. Neustadt (New Town) does exist, but there are 26 Neustadts in Germany itself, not to mention the other 9 in other European countries and one in Ontario, Canada.
 * Moose County, from the Cat Who... books, is described as being "four hundred miles north of everywhere." It's definitely in the United States and is somewhat in the vicinity of the Great Lakes. That's all that has ever been explained about where it is.
 * The Keys to The Kingdom takes this to such ridiculous extremes that all we know about the protagonist, Arthur, is that he lives on Earth. The author put in the effort to make sure his country, town, and even school remain nameless.
 * In The Hunger Games, the exact locations of the Districts and the Capitol is never made clear. There are some geographical clues, as well as the industries each area is known for, but nothing specific.
 * In the endless Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys stories, they've always had trouble pinning down their hometowns:
 * Nancy's hometown of River Heights was originally placed in Iowa, but in the following years, it drifted as far east as New Jersey. In the most recent series, it's implied to be in Illinois, within driving distance of Chicago.
 * The Hardy Boy's home of Bayport was a little better. It was always implied to be a coastal town, but that didn't stop it from drifting up and down the East coast. Similar to River Heights, though, in more recent years, they keep it in the New York/New Jersey area to keep it within driving distance of New York City.

Live Action TV

 * Most US soap opera primary setting locations (e.g. Port Charles in General Hospital)
 * "Salem" in Days of Our Lives is pretty explicitly set in or near a heavily Catholic part of Chicagoland (albeit some distance outside the city itself), though with extreme Geographic Flexibility.
 * It's implied that the The Brady Bunch is set in California, but where exactly is unknown.
 * The Deconstruction The Brady Bunch Movie explicitly sets the characters in Los Angeles.
 * It's more than implied that the original series is set in metro Los Angeles, given numerous references to L.A. sports teams.
 * The city and state that Malcolm in the Middle takes place in is never revealed though likely to be in California considering the fairly short car journey to the Irwindale Speed Rally and Disneyland and the license plates.
 * The city and state where Hill Street Blues took place were never mentioned, though it clearly resembled Chicago.
 * So much so that shots of Chicago were used in the series as background and transition shots, and the police uniforms and police cruiser livery strongly resembled that used by the Chicago Police Department at the time.
 * They also had a rotund African-American mayor, "Ozzie Cleveland", an Expy for then-Chicago mayor Harold Washington
 * Oz takes place in an unnamed state, likely in the Northeast.
 * The creators specifically state its in New Jersey in the commentaries. They even point out in the pilot that Alvarez is wearing the wrong gang colors for a NE hispanic gangster (IE wearing LA colors).
 * The Bill is set within the fictional district of Canley in London. Where exactly in London however is unclear despite it being seemingly large enough to reach the northern residential areas, and the central city itself all the way down to the Thames river.
 * Mission: Impossible: in the series the team was often sent to the vaguely named People's Republic of Tyranny. Other locations included the nation of "San X" in South America or the Caribbean. Whenever the mission was in the United States, the city or state was rarely named beyond "Western" or "Central". Any named nation, used for a mission in Africa, was never a real nation. Finally, Western Europe was referred to as a friendly or neutral nation.
 * La Femme Nikita: the location of Section One's command center is only revealed to be in  when the center is destroyed to prevent the enemy from gaining control. The other command centers and Section One sub-centers are never revealed unless they are destroyed or are temporary installations.
 * The locations of the missions are constantly shown with on-screen text such as "Berlin, Germany, 20:00 hours". Other times the agents say "terrorist Smith was located in London" or "agent Greg is in Venice and will return by dawn".
 * There are several episodes where the location is given as "Building X, Eastern Europe" or "this information came from Northern Europe", but generally the viewer knows where the operation is taking place.
 * The Prisoner: we never learn the location of The Village.
 * The titular town of Eureka is never explicitly pinned-down, although usefully the whole town is supposed to be a national secret. Various episodes have narrowed it down to somewhere in Oregon, though.
 * The Adventures of Pete and Pete was described as taking place "in the mythical city of Wellsville." Their home state is nicknamed "The Sideburn State."
 * Though New Jersey license plates and NJ Transit Buses are everywhere.
 * Somewhat vague hints are given throughout the series, mostly contradictory. However, those that aren't seem to confirm that it's somewhere in the Eastern Time Zone—Little Pete goes west into the Central Time Zone in "Time Tunnel," and his radio station's call letters start with a W (possibly placing it east of the Mississippi).
 * A few episodes specifically state "Wellsville, Michigan". Which would be on the "W" call letter side of the Mississippi. Regarding New Jersey license plates and such: They Just Didn't Care.
 * Angel Grove, the setting of the original Power Rangers, has every single sort of climate imaginable: mountains on one side, forest on another, desert on another, ocean on another. It's never outright stated where it is, but between Kirk's Rock, a "bank of California" sign, the similarity of the name to "Los Angeles," and all of those climates being available in Southern California, it's generally accepted as being smack dab on top of Los Angeles, which has the minor consequence of implying differences in history there, given that Angel Grove has been shown to have been a British colony in the 1700s. Of course Rita's telescope made it clear that it was actually located in Japan, in what is likely Tokyo.
 * This is true of most Power Rangers hometowns—only Silver Hills, Washington and Turtle Cove, Colorado have been confirmed by Word of God. Most of the other seasons seem to be in California (even though post-Wild Force seasons were shot in New Zealand).
 * Power Rangers RPM has contradictory hints as to the location of Corinth; latitude and longitude coordinates given place it either in the center of Greenland or the middle of the Indian Ocean, whereas overhead shots, maps, and other minor clues place it smack dab on top of Boston, Massachusetts. The climate is desert, but its heavily implied that there was nuclear bombardment, which handwaves quite a bit there.
 * Power Rangers Samurai is set in a city that has English signs and a rather diverse group of citizens, but at the same time has ancient temples and other distinctly Japanese locations. When we eventually see someone's driver's license, it says "Panorama City, PR 649815" - an invalid zip code (the US uses five digits, not six), and it's probably safe to say that PR does not in fact mean Puerto Rico as it would in real life.
 * The fictional Fairview from Desperate Housewives is located in the equally fictitious Eagle State, although the state is rarely mentioned.
 * To make it even weirder, this check shown in one episode shows the town to have a six-digit zip code.
 * The setting of Scrubs is an amalgam of most of California. The writers call it "San Difrangeles."
 * The eponymous town in Jericho is in Kansas, but its real world location has been deduced to be non-existent. You see, a number of major highways were supposed to cross paths there; they do cross paths in Kansas but not in the way shown on the map.
 * Jericho was supposed to be close enough to Colorado that you could see when the bomb hit Denver. At one point, it was thought Oakley, Kansas, was Jericho's stand-in. If this was indeed the case, the town was still 90 miles from the Colorado state line. You have no chance of seeing mountains from there.
 * A map of Jericho that was once posted on the CBS web site showed I-70 and "state routes" 40 and 83 meeting inside Jericho's city limits. In real-life Oakley, I-70 meets U.S. 40 3 1/2 miles east of Oakley, then goes northwest to meet U.S. 83 about three miles north of town. U.S. 40 and U.S. 83 meet just inside Oakley's south city limits, then run together for about 2 miles before U.S. 83 turns north again.
 * The location of CTU is the best-kept secret about 24. One writer at Television Without Pity attempted to triangulate it by using the driving times mentioned in the show, but they couldn't possibly correlate with each other. And when it is shown in a long shot including the backdrop of Los Angeles, it shot even those calculations all to hell.
 * The building itself is pretty easy to find, having been shown from many different angles. It's in the district of Westlake, just across the 110 from Downtown. This would put it just a block or so from Viridian Dynamics. And everybody knows the driving times in 24 are meaningless.
 * "Camden County" on My Name Is Earl, which seems like it's supposed to be Southern despite the California doubling. Even odder, the county seems to be a town. Is "county" in the town's name officially or what?
 * The show has a lot of references to real locations that are, by and large, in Northern Maryland. Whether it's actually supposed to be there is debatable.
 * Camden County, North Carolina, is actually a consolidated city-county, though most of the show's clues point elsewhere.
 * The exact location of Dog River, Saskatchewan in Corner Gas is never revealed, though it's said to be "40 kilometers from nowhere" and when characters refer to or drive to "the city" both Saskatoon and Regina are close enough to qualify.
 * Word of God says that "the city" is Regina.
 * Some of the locations in the show are actual businesses in Rouleau, Saskatchewan (The gas station isn't, but the bar is), with is about 40 km southwest of Regina and about 200 km south of Saskatoon.
 * Pushing Daisies is set in a large-ish city in Papen County; small town Coeur d'Coeurs is (pick one) a short drive away or 120 miles away. All the names are fictitious, and information on locating them within the United States is internally inconsistent. The pilot episode hinted that Papen County might be in Michigan; in a later episode, a letter addressed to Coeur d'Coeurs has a Massachusetts ZIP code.
 * None of Jonathan M. Schiff's productions explicitly state a location, although they're all set somewhere in Queensland. This works for Ocean Girl, which is set Twenty Minutes Into the Future on the Great Barrier Reef, but H₂O: Just Add Water and Cybergirl both feature locations easily recognisable to locals (The River City Museum is actually the Brisbane Powerhouse, H2O's water park is Sea World), even though they go to great pains to avoid referencing specific areas.
 * The Dukes of Hazzard never said which state Hazzard County was in. As a Mad Magazine satire of the show observed, "If we suggested that any state in the nation allowed these kinds of goings-on, they'd sue our britches off!"
 * Early episodes were shot in various cities in northwest Georgia, so that is usually taken as the home state. The General Lee has Georgia plates, and Daisy is once said to have "the best legs in all of Georgia." This has not stopped Hazzard, Kentucky from taking credit though.
 * Occasional mentions of day trips to Macon and day-long drives to Atlanta would suggest southeast Georgia, but many other hints suggest northwest Georgia. There are mountains, the town is said to be in a place where several states come together, and there was a reference to "the tornado of '74" possibly referencing the Super Outbreak of 1974 that hit that area.
 * Highlander the Series took place in an unnamed city. It was filmed in Vancouver, but all the cars had Washington State (US) license plates, giving rise to the Fanon name for the city: "Seacouver" (a Portmanteau of Vancouver and Seattle).
 * Nick at Nite's almost entirely forgettable Hi Honey, I'm Home! was the story of two families: The Duffs, a normal suburban family with modern concerns, and the Nielsens, a '50s-era sitcom family, sort of a Donna Reed Show/Leave It to Beaver/Make Room For Daddy Expy, who move into the real-world house next door as part of the Sitcom Relocation Program. When greeting the new neighbors, the "real" family politely asks where the Nielsens came from. "Springfield." "Which one?" "... Springfield." The issue is immediately dropped.
 * The Sentinel takes place in the fictional city of Cascade, WA, the exact location of which is never disclosed. Jim Ellison also has the non-existent ZIP code 98765. If you follow the clues, Cascade is easy to locate... it's actually Vancouver.
 * Vancouver, WA or Vancouver, BC?
 * A major recurring theme in Lost is nobody knows where the island is, to the point that even those who have been there before can't get back easily. The island also gets bonus points for being a unique example, considering that.
 * Where the hell is LazyTown?
 * Bizarrely, at least one episode implied that the town is alone in the middle of a wasteland full of nothing but dirt and periodic telephone poles.
 * Where is Gotham City in Batman, the 1966 series? It was rather obviously filmed in Southern California, but:
 * For the most part, Gotham City is treated as New York under a different name, with different names for famous New York landmarks and personalities. For instance, there's "Chime Square," a Times Square analogue, "Mayor Linseed," an analogue for then-mayor John Lindsay, and "Governor Stonefellow," an analogue for then-governor Nelson Rockefeller.
 * Other evidence is more ambiguous, such as the call letters for Gotham City TV stations KGC and KGOM, which imply that Gotham is located somewhere west of the Mississippi.
 * On the other hand, cowboy villain Shame states that they need not follow a Showdown At High Noon rule requiring that both participants be armed, because the rule doesn't count east of the Mississippi.
 * Occasionally, the series seemed to embrace its actual California filming location. For example, "Gotham Point" is a beach and surfing haven that seems far more like California than anything on the east coast.
 * Batman keeps a (helpfully labeled, of course) "Giant Lighted Lucite Map of Gotham City" in the Batcave. Eagle-eyed viewers have noticed that this map is actually the reverse-image of a map of the greater St. Louis, Missouri area, as it was in 1966.
 * In one episode, a fortuitous blackout leads the Joker to remark "Gotham City is having a power failure -- just like New York!" It's both a topical reference to the blackout of 1965, and evidence that New York has a separate existence in the show's continuity.
 * In the same episode, we learn that (according to clocks in the Batcave showing the time in Gotham, Los Angeles, Chicago, and other cities) Gotham City is in the Eastern time zone.
 * True Blood makes no secret that it is set in Louisiana, but the exact location of Bon Temps is a bit of a mystery.
 * Roughly speaking, there are 5 cities of note in the state: New Orleans, Baton Rouge, the smaller cities of Lafayette and Alexandria, and larger city Shreveport. One can travel I-10 from New Orleans to Baton Rouge to Lafayette, then travel I-49 to Alexandria to Shreveport.
 * It is generally accepted that Bon Temps is somewhere near Monroe or West Monroe, as the characters go to the Monroe Medical Center when injured.
 * However, later seasons show them being much closer to Shreveport, although the medical centers there, being slightly more metropolitan, are larger and better staffed. The closer proximity to Shreveport is validated by travel time to Dallas being about 3.5 hours (5 hours from Monroe).
 * Scenes actually shot in Louisiana are filmed in Baton Rouge and its nearby wetlands, showcasing bayous and cypress trees, which are virtually non-existent in the northern part of the state.
 * The small town of Bunkie (a real place) to which Sookie travels in the first season in an attempt to gather information about the serial killer is described as being "not far," and can be traveled to in less than an hour, when in actuality, it lies between Lafayette and Alexandria, and would be at least a three hour drive from Monroe or Shreveport.
 * While The Wonder Years certainly looks to be set somewhere in Southern California (and a couple of episodes feature clues hinting that this is indeed the case), the exact setting is never specified.
 * Community's Greendale is placed rather ambiguously. It seems to be in Southern California from various small details in episodes, but it's never stated clearly, and All There in the Manual information says it's in Colorado. This may be for legal reasons, to make it more difficult to link the show to Dan Harmon's experience in community college in California, should one of his classmates accuse him of basing a character on them.
 * We also learn that Greendale was apparently discovered by a Portuguese sailor named English Memorial while he was searching for a fountain that would cure syphilis.
 * Green Acres never indicates its location, though a mention of the state capital, Springfield, being four hours away by car suggests that it might be in Illinois (or any of the dozen or more other states that have a Springfield.) One episode revealed that the state animal is the kangaroo. Ummm, right.
 * Sanctuary is set in the fictional Old City and takes places in Canada (they don't advertise the country, either, but the color of the money gives it away, if nothing else.) The Powers That Be have said they don't give a specific location on purpose, though.
 * Some more attentive viewers have figured out that the flagship Sanctuary is in the Vancouver, BC/Seattle, WA area, however.
 * Sunnydale in Buffy the Vampire Slayer. We do know it's in California, and it's explicitly described in one episode as being about 2 hours' drive north of L.A.  It's also on the coast (sometimes).  Most evidence points to it being an Expy of Santa Barbara, but there are a few bits of contradictory information which belie that identification.

Theater
""What he means is that he's moving to some little hick town that nobody's ever heard of." "Hey! People have heard of it!" "Oh, yeah? What's the name of it?" "You can find it on any map." "What's the name of it?" "Folks are flocking there from all over." "WHAT'S THE NAME OF IT?" "BOMONT!" "Bomont? Where the hell is Bomont?""
 * The location of the nameless city in which Urinetown is set is a complete mystery. All that can be inferred (though the presence of Senator Fipp) is that it is in the U.S.
 * The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny is implied to be set in the U.S., but it's anything but clear which part of the country Mahagonny is located.
 * The consensus seems to be that is located in Alabama, including mentions of being near the coast but not close enough, mentions of Pensacola and driving to Georgia and of course the famous Alabama Song. At the same time it can be on California since it mentions Alaska gold miners coming down the coast (which is never stated which coast it is, it's simply called "The Golden Coast."
 * Word of God places Avenue Q "in an outer-outer borough of New York City."
 * Footloose:

Video Games

 * Raccoon City of Resident Evil is allegedly set in "the American Midwest," but the presence of mountains, lakes, rivers, forests, very warm autumns, and a sign with a 212 area code (Manhattan, NYC) greatly limit where it could be. Fan speculation puts it in either Colorado or Pennsylvania, the latter being where the novelizations placed it.
 * Despite what Fanon would tell you, the Spanish-speaking European country where Resident Evil 4 is set is never explicitly named and was intentionally done that way according to the Word of God. Luis Sera tells you upon meeting him he "used to be a cop in Madrid" though, and the fact that there is only one country in Europe with Spanish as the official language kind of destroys the entire point of not naming the country.
 * Resident Evil 5 has Kijuju, which is apparently supposed to be in Northwest Africa. The problem is that the official language is Swahili, which would put it on Africa's East coast (somewhere around Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, etc.). Another problem is use of the Naira, which is Nigeria's national currency. The flag on Irving's boat could've been a hint, but is useless, since it's the Pan-African flag with stars added to it.
 * Ditto the titular Silent Hill, which only has a lake, forests, and vaguely New England-ish architecture for clues.
 * The original manual describes the town as being in New England (the lake and forests fit), but the first two games exclusively feature what appear to be Michigan license-plates on cars (again, the lakes and forests fit). The town happens to be by a body of water named Toluca lake; there's a real Toluca Lake in California.
 * The movie version is very strongly inspired by Centralia, Pennsylvania, where a decades-old coal fire has turned the place into a Ghost Town.
 * For that matter, you don't get any clues as to where the hell South Ashfield or Shepherd's Glen are, either.
 * It gets a little more confusing in that the movie version states that Silent Hill is in West Virginia, but other games largely place Silent Hill as being in Maine.
 * The movie makes it even more confusing when you realize that there's no Toluca County in West Virginia.
 * While not technically an issue of where a city is, Sonic the Hedgehog managed to change its setting from an alien planet Mobius to Earth (albeit not one like the Earth we're on now). Of course even that wasn't enough, with the translation for the Sonic OVA calling Sonic's home world, "Planet Freedom," and Sonic X stating that, while the series is set on Earth, Sonic is not a native of Earth, and his actual home world's name is never mentioned. Archie Comics Sonic the Hedgehog actually then goes on to say that Mobius is Earth, but several hundred years in the future.
 * Okay, now that's somewhat confusing. On the nature of the games, Mobius, ever since Sonic Adventure, was rendered non-canon to align with the Japanese canon, where it was always Earth. However, the trope still applies in a sense, since some locations such as Station Square, obviously a city in the USA, are never said as to where they are. Places like South Island don't count, as they're... Somewhere in the Pacific, presumably. Then Sonic Unleashed proceeds to muck everything up by making Earth almost unrecognizable except for similar cultures and the looks of locations.
 * Call Alternate Continuity on the Sonic X, Sonic OVA, and Archie's Sonic examples.
 * The location of Fairport in F.E.A.R. is never explicitly stated, although the American flag outside of Wade Elementary in the second game suggests that Fairport is located in the United States.
 * City 17 from Half-Life 2 has nothing more than a few subtle hints as to a general location provided in-game. The Word of God only goes so far as to confirm that it is, indeed, somewhere in Eastern Europe, as those hints indicated.
 * Subverted by the fact that, when you're riding up the tower towards Breen's office, the background texture representing City 17 is actually a picture of New York City.
 * According to the Half-Life wiki, the city that City 17 is based on the most is Sofia, Bulgaria (due to both the art director for Half-Life 2 being from Sofia and the various Cyrillic signs around the area spelling words in Bulgarian).
 * Although it's interesting to note that the Overwatch Nexus is modeled after the Parliament of Serbia.
 * Following the clues, we can learn that City 17 has an extensive canal system, is in a former Soviet country, uses the Russian and English Alphabets, is located in a mineral-rich area (it's close to several large underground mines), is along the coast, and is near a rich Alpine-style forest.
 * In the second Destroy All Humans! game, there's a throwaway joke that the game's own Eastern European city, Tunguska, eventually becomes City 17.
 * Condemned Takes place in Metro City, which is a highly decayed industrial city (most likely) somewhere in the rust belt.
 * Splinter Cell: Pandora Tomorrow has a rather clever use of this; the good guys know the baddie is going to deploy some sort of weapon in "the Springfield demonstration," so the US has to start immunizing people in all of the Springfields. A portion of the game is spent finding out exactly which one and what weapon.
 * Even better: it's theorized by Third Echelon that the antagonist specifically chose "Springfield" because there are so many. An additional layer of security in case anyone found out the name of the operation.
 * Touhou: Gensokyo is somewhere in Japan. All we know beyond that is that it's landlocked and has at least two mountains and a lake. Of course, it's entirely possible that it wouldn't fit on a map.
 * The geography of the Outside may have also changed.
 * Gensokyo's Youkai Mountain has been stated to be Mount Yatsugatake, which... more or less exists. The complication is that the Youkai Mountain is the "original" version of Yatsugatake, which, according to legend, was once as tall as Mount Fuji before being torn down into the Yatsugatake mountain range it is today, which also exists outside of Gensokyo in Touhou's continuity. In addition, at least one real-world lake has been wholesale moved into Gensokyo. The word "where" doesn't mean much at this point.
 * Gensokyo has been described as existing halfway into an alternate dimension, facilitated by the Hakurei border. Some fan theories think that there is a point or small area where the border overlaps into our world, but outside that Gensokyo does not reside inside earthen geography.
 * Simply put, it may be thought of as a herniated section of space-time, except it is also apparently not sealed off in the upward direction; a rocket leaving Gensokyo will still get to the Moon
 * It should be mentioned that there have been no official maps of Gensokyo; we don't even know where things are except in relation to each other.
 * Urban Dead: Where is the zombie-infested city of Malton? It features US style malls, UK style pubs, a great deal of African art and many further contradictions. Advanced possibilities include England, the USA, South Africa, Canada, Australia and Belize according to the wiki. As with everything else, the entire Backstory is left up in the air for each player to decide; fandom has mainly decided on England or some mysterious area of South Africa that receives snow every December.
 * Didn't Kevan specifically say it was in England? If nothing else, the quarantine forces are British Army, so it has to be somewhere in the UK.
 * Mirror's Edge takes place in an undisclosed location, many things contradict each other as well. Everyone speaks English with an American accent (excluding CPF Officer Lt. Miller), written Languages include English, Cyrillic, and East Asian, everyone drives on the left side of the road, all the buildings are 21st century style architecture (suggesting that the entire city is fairly new).
 * Eh, not really. The languages just imply its a rather cosmopolitan city and the 'all buildings were 21-st century' thing; it was explain in the trailer that the glass skyscrpers were build over the old buildings. Though american accents with the whole driving on the left thing IS a mystery...
 * One group Let's Play for Psychonauts had the players trying to figure out where Whispering Rock was located.
 * Valve based the maps of Team Fortress 2 on the environs of the American Southwest without giving any actual clues as to where 2Fort, Hydro, Badwater, etc. are located. The fandom has a lot of fun finding real life analogues all over the place. (And, of course, once you played enough hours, you start expecting to hear sounds of battle every time you come across an abandoned train yard, or dried out rain canal, or old industrial building...).
 * In the War! Update, the Demoman's comic opens in Badwater, New Mexico.
 * Where does Nanashi no Game take place? Well, the fictional university is called "Nanto," as is the subway line on which the second chapter is set, and Nanto is another name for Nara, so maybe it's there. But wait, the name of the protagonist's friend's apartment building is shared by a real building in Fukuoka—so is this supposed to be Fukuoka, or is that a coincidence? And then the protagonist goes to Nakano Broadway, which is the name of a real shopping mall in Tokyo...
 * Final Fight's Metro City (as seen in the intro of the first game) is somewhere on the East Coast of the United States. Seeing as its port leads directly to the Atlantic Ocean, fan speculation either places it as New York City or close to it (NYC explicitly exists in the SF verse, as seen with Street Fighter III and the Brooklyn-born Alex and Marvel vs. Capcom 3 shows Haggar running for mayor of New York).
 * Valkyria Chronicles saga takes place in Gallia; a fictional country that would be located near Poland. The game creators didn't just made a whole country, with its own traditions, geography, political matters, and history, but a whole continent inspired in Europe, Europa with just as much detail as Gallia.
 * Most of the action in the F.E.A.R. games takes place in an American city called Fairport, but the precise location of the city is unclear. It is implied in FEAR 3 that the city is somewhere in the southern parts of the United States, as the Point Man is able to fly a high-tech and apparently very long-ranged Armacham helicopter there from an unspecified South/Central American city.
 * Played straight in Metal Gear game, where the only specifics of Outer Heaven's location was 200 miles north of the Galzburg region of South Africa (which likewise also doesn't have its location specified). It's averted in most future installments, where the game/cinematics at least shows a map showing the specific location of the main location of the game (or in the case of Metal Gear Solid 2 and Metal Gear Solid Peace Walker, take place in actual real life locations (New York City and Costa Rica/Nicaragua, respectively) rendering the trope pointless anyway.).
 * Paragon City from the now-defunct City of Heroes was allegedly a coastal city in Rhode Island, but it had a seaport opening to the ocean in the north—impossible in Rhode Island, whose only seashore makes up the entirety of its southern border.

Visual Novels

 * It is unclear if Kadath in Shikkoku no Sharnoth is either north of Britain somewhere or in an alternate dimension. Evidence all points to the latter apart from the fact that to get to Kadath you have to go north.

Web Comics

 * Annyseed Is definitely set in Scotland, and it's definitely set on the isle of Skye, but exactly what part of the 639 square miles, with a population of just under 10,000 people, remains a mystery. And how come the kids wear what they like, whist attending The Good Old British Comp ? No clues there... Perhaps it's an alternate reality?
 * The Adventures of Dr. McNinja is set in a town with haunted woods, a pharmaceutical research facility, a warehouse district, a pirate bar and various other locales useful for the plot and/or action scenes. It is eventually revealed, through a series of hints in art and dialogue, to be Cumberland, Maryland (and later lampshaded in the alt-text).
 * Gunnerkrigg Court and Gillitie Wood are located somewhere in the UK (apparently in Campbell Country). So far, only two further clues to their location have been given: the nearby Annan Waters (a real river in Scotland), and a letter from Kat (whose contents imply that the Court is not in Scotland).
 * The Inexplicable Adventures of Bob is set in the aptly-named suburb of Generictown. It has not yet been specified what city Generictown is a suburb of. It is adjacent to Pitcheresk Forest, with a mountain range beyond that, including Mount Generic (which is notable for having a hole in its peak, thanks to events in one storyline).
 * Housepets is set within Babylon Gardens, a suburban neighborhood somewhere in the United States; the exact location is not specified, although the author has stated that the main characters' home was based upon a former residence of his in North Carolina.
 * The exact location of Domain in Kevin and Kell is not mentioned. Even stranger, the town of Domain is explicitly stated to not exist in our world. Since a variety of other places such as "The Wild" exist the world of K&K, this probably isn't surprising.
 * El Goonish Shive's Moperville is in an undisclosed location somewhere in the US. At one point in order to avoid revealing the location when Sarah is trying to search obituary records the State abbreviation is replaced with asterisks.
 * Then again, she might have wanted to do an all-state search. What's the chance that the Grace she's looking for lived in the same state as Moperville?
 * Eli Parker tried to avoid revealing the location of Unwinder's Tall Comics (beyond "somewhere in Minnesota") for as long as possible. Eventually, a conversation came up which would have been too awkward to write without the characters mentioning the town's name. So Unwinder lives in Garen, Minnesota, which is a Ghost Town in Real Life.
 * As above, no one knows where Silent Hill actually takes place. Fan Web Comic Silent Hill: Promise puts it ambiguously in Upstate New York.
 * Bob and George No location given, but if they're Japanese, why do they celebrate the Fourth of July?
 * Averted in Homestuck: All the heroes' homes are given coordinates save for Dave's. John lives in Maple Valley, Washington, Rose near Rainbow Falls, New York, Jade is somewhere off the coast of Australia, and Dave is implied to live around Houston.
 * The main reason Dave's location isn't set in stone is because Andrew Hussie is savvy enough to realize that Houston doesn't look how it is portrayed in the comic (being much closer to New York or Boston) but wanted to have someone living in a big city, so it remains only hinted.

Web Original

 * In Legion of Net.Heroes, Net.ropolis floats from state to state. It has its own senator for this reason.
 * Homestar Runner: WHERE THE FRACK IS FREE COUNTRY, USA??
 * It's in "Place," Duh!
 * This applies to individual locations in Free Country USA, as well. The geography is so flexible that Strong Bads Cool Game for Attractive People lets you create your map of the place any way you want.
 * Trinton Chronicles takes place in a fictionalized version of Virgina, USA where the Chesapeake Bay is actually a mountain range, the land mass is extended out a few miles, and its somewhere plopped between real life towns of Nassawadox and Eastville. The only major changes are that the areas are widened on the map for the city and the Campell Airport doesn't exist nor does the town of Birdsnest, replaced by the city.

Western Animation

 * The G.I. Joe cartoon also used a town named Springfield, in the episode "There's No Place Like Springfield"—where Shipwreck was subjected to a Truman Show Plot to try to get him to spill classified information.
 * Fans of the show Daria continue to argue over the location of Lawndale even though the creator has actually stated the city's location largely because the alleged location, Maryland, contradicts three of the show's five seasons, which have shown the characters taking day trips to both deserts and mountains.
 * It doesn't help that Lawndale is always green.
 * Lampshaded in The Tick (animation), in which the city is literally named "The City." This leads to landmarks being named things like "City City Hall."
 * Ditto Frisky Dingo, where the town in which all the main characters reside is consistently referred to as Town.
 * Complete with extensive pauses and shifty eye movements. "... on the street of... the town."
 * They're probably somewhere near Seattle. When driving to Vegas Killface says "16 hours in the car..." A mile marker w/ different cities on it seems to indicate they are driving south to Vegas. Assuming a 70-75 mph speed limit you end up somewhere in the vicinity of Washington state/northern Oregon
 * Atlanta may be more likely, since the freeway map on GPS screens corresponds to the I-285 perimeter highway. Also, the Haggar Pants Arena is a carbon copy of the Georgia Dome, albeit with a giant pair of dress pants attached to the roof. Furthermore, Adult Swim is based in Atlanta as well as the production company behind the show before their shutdown.
 * And The Powerpuff Girls' Townsville and Citysville.
 * Ben 10 takes its sweet time getting around to telling you that the Tennysons are originally from the town of Bellwood. But neither it nor its sequel Alien Force (which actually stays close to home, instead of driving all over the US) ever bothers to mention which of the ten possible Bellwoods it is.
 * According to Word of God, it's in the same state as Springfield.
 * Interestingly, it leaves only Florida, Illinois, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, and Nebraska as possible states of both Springfield and Bellwood.
 * It can't be Illinois, because the state that Springfield is in has a separate capital, Capital City, which isn't Springfield.
 * King of the Hill is set in Arlen, Texas. Where in Texas Arlen is, however, is never made clear. The county is mentioned as Heimlich, which is made up, and geographical details change from one episode to the next.
 * Also, Arlen is based off the town of Garland, Texas.
 * In a Crossover Punchline on The Simpsons, it is suggested that Arlen is 2000 miles from Springfield, but that doesn't really clear things up one way or the other.
 * The water park in the episode Four Wave Intersection is eerily similar to Schlitterbahn Beach Waterpark in South Padre Island, Texas. In the same episode Dale mentions that Boomhauer was a highly renowned surfer in Corpus Christi. In the episode Escape from Party Island, Hank and his mother and her friends to Port Aransas during Spring Break. All three cities are in the southern part of Texas along the Gulf of Mexico, which suggests that Arlen could be as well.
 * There are quite a few real world locations mentioned in King of the Hill, however, and most of them suggest that Arlen is a suburb of Austin, Texas. Travis County, where Austin is located, is mentioned in one episode as being very close to Arlen, and Arlen apparently even shares a zipcode with Austin.
 * Backing this up is the fact that Strickland Propane's Real Life counterpart is in Leander, Texas called Action Propane. Leander is only a short drive from Austin.
 * It's pretty explicitly around the Dallas Fort Worth area. What with the strong Dallas influence, driving distance from Arkansas and Oklahoma, and... the bulk of the series.
 * It could also be based on Bell County with references to the cities of Belton and Kileen. There are also references to them living in central Texas, where Bell County is found (Belton, Kileen, and Temple are all around halfway between Waco and Austin, a 60 mile drive either way).
 * When Kahn is fired from his job and finds another in Houston, he gripes that it is "a three hour commute."
 * Code Lyoko is another case, even without the Geographic Flexibility of the American dubbed version. The satellite shots clearly show the place of action to be in the suburbs south of Paris, but the actual town is never named by the characters even in the French version (nor is the river stated to be the Seine). The actual Renault factory which inspired "The Factory" was in Boulogne-Billancourt (and its emplacement fits exactly with a map shown once) but it was destroyed in 2004. Kadic Academy, on the other hand, was inspired by the Lycée Lakanal based in Sceaux, further to the South. Hence the town of the heroes seems to be an alternate-universe hybrid of these two places.
 * While the Island of Sodor in Thomas the Tank Engine is well defined in the Railway Series Books, the TV series changed it, moving it and making it large enough to contain mountains, lost cities, and every other sort of geographical feature... sometimes contradicting itself from season to season.
 * Several maps of the island show it being located between the Isle of Man and England.
 * The city in which the Ranger Tree resides in Chip 'n Dale Rescue Rangers is said by Tad Stones to be meant to be a mixture of New York and Los Angeles, and many clues bear this out.
 * Phineas and Ferb takes place in Danville, somewhere in the Tri-State Area. Which Tri-State Area? They never say.
 * In The Pilot, Doofenshmirtz shows the Tri-State Area on a map, putting it somewhere around the Denver Area. While this is consistent with some information (the family can drive to Mt. Rushmore and back easily in a day), in "Hail Doofania" he points his micronation out as being near San Francisco. However, its broadcast station in other episodes is WJOP, which would designate it as being east of the Mississippi River.
 * The heavily screwy episode "Hip Hip Parade" implies it was named for a guy called Tristate.
 * And to make it more complicated, what John P. Tristate actually did was unite the "Bi-State Area" with the "Adjacent Area" (founded by Otto H. Adjacent, of course), as if a "tri-state area" was an actual political entity.
 * And you can apparently reach Atlantis from there.
 * Believe it or not, there is a actual city called Danville, which is in the San Ramon Valley in Contra Costa County in California. Unlike the Danville in the series, it is not in a Tri-State Area and is much farther away from Mt. Rushmore.
 * There is also a Danville in Pennsylvania, which is even farther away.
 * There are actually eighteen Danvilles strewn across the U.S. and Canada. If the town is based off one of these, Dan and Jeff aren't telling.
 * For a more minor example, Doofenshmirtz's homeland of Druelselstein. Arguably it could to be some sort of fictional region of Germany, as Doof's dad spoke German, Lawrence described Doof as having "some sort of a German accent", and he's used the German word "dummkopf" ("idiot") a couple times, but later we see that it has its own princess, whom Ferb describes as speaking with "an upper-class Druelselsteinian vocal pattern."
 * The PBS cartoon series Arthur takes place in Elwood City, with no clear location. But it's probably on the Atlantic coast, because it's within an easy drive of the seashore and is not very far from either Washington. D.C. or Crown City, a New York city lookalike. It also appears to be near the real New York.
 * If you follow the clues, it's in Pennsylvania. One episode mentions a school field trip to Erie, and another has a short driving vacation to Washington, D.C. And one of the books has Arthur getting a package, with a partial address confirming that yes, it is Pennsylvania.
 * Interestingly enough, there is an Elwood City in Pennsylvania. It's near Pittsburgh, and less than 90 miles from the above mentioned Erie.
 * They went on a field trip to visit the Amish, so yeah.
 * In an early episode, D.W. asks Arthur, "Where's the nearest island?" He replies, "Staten Island."
 * Middleton in Kim Possible is apparently close enough to the heartland to be able to access Tennessee in less than thirty minutes, but has California weather.
 * It's been shown on maps several times—in a different location each time.
 * Amity Park from Danny Phantom has been hinted at to be anywhere from states like Louisiana to the northwest states like Oregon and Washington. General consensus is that it's located in the central U.S., but that doesn't explain why Casper High has "Northwestern Standardized Testing"...
 * The Grand Finale actually zooms in on Earth, implying Amity Park is indeed, in the central U.S. area. Whether you still wanna take that as canonical is up to you.
 * Lake Eerie puts Amity Park up north! Which would actually make sense, since they drove to Wisconsin... then again, it's also been implied to be in Louisiana, too.
 * Metalocalypse: The location of Mordhaus, Dethklok's home, and the surrounding land is up for grabs. People have tried to get clues based on how Dethklok got to various gigs, but then it starts getting inconsistent. The only thing fans can conclude is that it isn't Los Angeles.
 * Or the Marianas Trench.
 * And it doesn't help that season three reveals that Mordhaus can fly.
 * Rocky and Bullwinkle come from Frostbite Falls, supposedly in Minnesota, which is just about as conveniently populated as Springfield; Boris and Natasha (and their respective cohorts, superiors and employers) come from Pottsylvania, a tiny eastern European republic, which according to The (live-action) Movie Boris And Natasha is nestled between the two other tiny eastern European republics of Wrestlemania and Yursovania.
 * Frostbite Falls is based on the real-world town of International Falls, Minnesota. One episode even lists Frostbite Falls as being located in Koochiching County, the real-world county International Falls is in.
 * Monster Buster Club takes place in Singletown, but the sub-national territory of Singletown and the nationally of Singletown is never explained.
 * Word Girl's Fair City never has its location fully explained, though it has been revealed that it's situated near some type of body of water.
 * Hilariously parodied in Pinky and The Brain: Brain creates his own country named Brainania, and after Pinky accidentally declares war on America, The US is forced to call for a truce because they don't know where Brainania is, and they can't go to war with a country they can't find.
 * The city in which the Teen Titans animated series takes place is never explicitly named in the show, though it's shown to be on the west coast of the United States. In the Teen Titans Go! comic based on the animated series, it's given the (rather unfortunate) moniker of Jump City. The Titans East, however, get to live in and protect "Steel City." In the Teen Titans comic that inspired the series, the team was based first in a secret location near Gotham City. Later incarnations were based in New York City and San Francisco.
 * The animated Christmas Special Twas the Night Before Christmas takes place in "Junctionville, U.S.A." Literally—this is what's written on all of the mail that gets delivered to the place.
 * Similarly, much of the action in The Year Without a Santa Claus takes place in "Southtown, U.S.A.", about whose location we know only that it is in the South. Of the U.S.A.  Far enough so that it never has snow.  (The show has some odd ideas about geography in general... it strongly implies that the Earth is a hemisphere and that nothing exists below the equator, despite at least one Sub-Saharan African child appearing in the "gift" sequence.)
 * The Fairly OddParents has Dimmsdale. There's a Dimsdale... it's in Canada. The Christmas Special, on one hand, places it in Southern California.
 * However, another episode involves time travel to Dimmsdale's founding, wherein the citizens all dress like stereotypical puritans, burn "witches", and speak in Ye Olde Butchered English, implying an east coast location.
 * There are multiple other episodes which place it in southern California; the founding episode is the only exception. For example, the Old West episode, in which Timmy's family reaches the desert in their car in just a few hours, and the another episode states it's in a time zone three hours behind the East coast.
 * Where is Doug's hometown of Bluffington? It's near Bloatsburg.
 * Gardenia, the home town of Bloom, protagonist of Winx Club. At first, everybody supposed that it was in Italy, since it's an Italian show. This was dismissed in Season 4, when they had to travel to Italy in order to find a certain fairy.
 * In Making Fiends, there's the town of Clamburg. With clams, Puritans and a relation to Vermont and Canada, you would assume it's somewhere in New England. However, that wouldn't explain how it manages to be blazing hot in December and February, and the creator lives in Los Angeles and may have been raised there.
 * Transformers Generation 1 has "Central City", from the 2-part episode Megatron's Master Plan, which apparently isn't that far from Autobot Headquarters. While the Autobot's crashed ship isn't given a specific location in the cartoon (it was said to be on the side of "Mt. St. Hilary" in the Marvel Comics and placing it squarely in Washington State), in Cosmic Rust Perceptor is left in Fox Creek Canyon, just 3 miles from Autobot Headquarters.
 * The Blue Falcon and Dog Wonder, a Batman and Robin parody come from "Big City" with their state never stated. They have a port on the ocean and are near a huge lake - an apparent joke on one of the great lakes. This was reiterated when they visited Dexter's Lab on Cartoon Network. Dexter's Dad asked how the Falcons football team were doing To which the hero replied "No, I'm the Blue Falcon, from Big City!" "Yeah, how is life in the big city?". No reference to the state was given there either.
 * League of Super Evil is set in "Metrotown". Its location is hinted at when explosions and such are seen from space suggesting it is near Vancouver, Canada where the show is made. Like Springfield, Metrotown has a statue of its founder, the aptly named Jeremiah Metrotown.
 * There's a real-life neighborhood of Greater Vancouver called Metrotown. However, it's a neighborhood, not a town in its own right; it's part of southern Burnaby.
 * It's hard to tell where Dora the Explorer is set. The spinoff series, Go, Diego, Go!, seems to be somewhere set in Latin America though.

Real Life

 * Not quite the same, but the person on the receiving end of this call was probably asking this in their head.
 * The German running gag, the Bielefeld Conspiracy. The joke of this is, that since the city, despite having a population of 330 000, bears no significance in German culture, tourism, history, politics and economy, there is no reason why anyone would know anything about it. Therefore, Bielefeld doesn't exist and is really just a conspiracy by the Powers That Be.