Television Geography: Difference between revisions

* In ''[[The Departed]]'', [[The Mole]] texts the police to go to Sheffield, and they're shown choosing an exit off an elevated highway accordingly. Sheffield is ''a hundred and forty miles'' from Boston, in New England, where that still counts for a lot; to get there you go through ''two other metropolitan areas'' and then a good thirty miles out into the country.

* In ''[[Die Hard 2]]'', the action is set at Dulles Airport, near Washington DC, but the pay phones bear [[California Doubling|Pacific Bell logos]]. And the police are consistently identified as DC police even though Dulles is in Virginia. And the bad guys plan and execute an escape by snowmobile, and a long icicle is used effectively as a weapon. Washington area winter weather almost never supports snowmobile use in the suburbs, and is almost always mild until after the Christmas season.

** Isn't the weather at least justified, as it was supposed to be one of the worst winter storms on record that particular terrorist-laden Christmas?

** In ''Live Free or Die Hard'', the main characters realize they have to run to DC. When they realize this, they are clearly on Light Street in Baltimore, MD. They manage this.

** Morse has, for instance, stepped from a cobbled street in the town centre to a park two miles away.

** The Isis (the Oxford stretch of the River Thames) gets similar treatment in the rowing film ''True Blue'', when the climactic race scene jumps randomly back and forward on the river, changing directions occasionally and at one point teleporting to Marlow, 25 miles away in a straight line and much further if you follow the river. Given they seem to have filmed (most of) the race on the fairly short stretch of river that it was supposed to be set on, it must be down to odd dramatic editing choices rather than any lack of care on the director's part.

** Not to mention the fact that Tesla's Lab was in a very flat, comparably treeless portion of town as compared to the steep sloped, heavy woodlands depicted.

* The indie movie ''A Problem with Fear'' is supposedly set in the Calgary subway. Calgary doesn't have a subway, and if it did the ads in the subway would likely not be in French, as they were in the movie. One wonders why they didn't just set the damn thing in Montreal.

** In one scene, ''Resident Evil 2'' seems to place Raccoon City in somewhat central New Jersey. Oddly enough, they realistically portrayed an evil pharmaceutical company having a research office, in the middle of nowhere NJ, yet relatively near a larger city. Johnson and Johnson, Sanofi-Aventis, Novartis, Pfizer, Merck, Wyeth, Hoffman-LaRoche, Bristol-Myers Squibb, and Schering-Plough all have locations in NJ that somewhat parallel this. No zombies yet though...

* The 1976 [[Robin Hood]] film ''Robin and Marian'' was filmed in Pamplona, Spain, which, needless to say, looks nothing at all like Nottinghamshire.

* The [[Jackie Chan]] movie ''Rumble in the Bronx'', filmed in Vancouver, makes little attempt to hide that fact. [[The Mountains of Illinois|The snow-capped coast mountains]] are visible in many scenes, as are various Vancouver landmarks.

* In ''[[Short Circuit (Film)|Short Circuit]] 2'', the Unnamed American City which hosts the action also hosts the CN Tower, the Toronto Transit Commission subway, World's Biggest Bookstore and Roy Thompson Hall (lesser known than the CN Tower, but still landmarks).

* In the climax of Guy Richie's ''[[Sherlock Holmes (Film)|Sherlock Holmes]]'', characters somehow manage to run from the sewers of the Houses of Parliament to the top of the newly constructed tower bridge within minutes. The two land marks are miles apart.

* In ''~Planes, Trains and Automobiles~'', [[Steve Martin]] and John Candy are taking a bus from Kansas to St. Louis... cue iconic shot of The Gateway Arch as the bus they are traveling on crosses the Mississippi River. Problem is, the bus is now traveling west from Illinois instead of east from Kansas.

* ''[[Rocky II]]'': During the opening credits, an ambulance takes Rocky from the (now-demolished) Spectrum over a Delaware River bridge (which would take you to New Jersey), into downtown Philadelphia, around City Hall ''twice'', and to Pennsylvania Hospital. The actual route would be a straight shot 20 blocks up Broad Street, six blocks down Locust, and one block over. Even then, you'd pass several closer hospitals.

* ''Blow Out'': John Lithgow drags Nancy Allen onto a subway-surface trolley car at the 15th Street underground station. Cut to them climbing to street level at Penn's Landing, 15 blocks away. The subway-surface lines terminate at 13th Street. There is no underground station of any kind at Penn's Landing.

* In ''Next'' the main character enters a building on Fremont Street, Las Vegas and then exits the building onto the main strip.

* The ''[[King Kong]]'' rip-off A.P.E. was set in South Korea. For some reason, despite being filmed in Korea and being co-financed by a Korean film company, they did few establishing shots of Seoul. Instead, two characters simply sit in the backseat of a car and describe Seoul landmarks as they come (the main train/subway station, city hall, the capitol, etc.) In order to see all of these landmarks, they would spend a couple hours driving in different directions.

* The ''[[Green Lantern (Film)|Green Lantern]]'' film takes place in fictional Coast City, but there are a lot of recognizable New Orleans landmarks in several scenes. Then again, almost every DC Universe city is a disguised version of a "real world" city. (Just ''which'' city, though, is sometimes [[Fan Wank|open to debate]]...)

* The "oceanside" amusement park in the [[Title Sequence]] of ''[[Step By Step]]'' was actually 6 miles inland.

** Just so that you'd understand - an amusement park (and especially its wooden roller coaster) built that close to an ocean or body of water like that would have a very hard time staying in existence against Mother Nature and plain old Laws of Physics - sandy beaches aren't exactly the most stable type of land to build ''roller coasters'' on, and said roller coaster and quite likely large portions of the park itself would be in danger of being washed away, regardless of whether the area is hurricane-prone or not. That said, there ''are'' amusement parks that ''are'' built close to bodies of water such as [http://www.lakesideamusementpark.com/ Lakeside Amusement Park] in Denver, Colorado or the famous Coney Island Amusement Park in New York, New York; the former is built near a mundane man-made lake (as its name implies) and both are built on solid, paved ground.

*** Not to mention the famous Pleasure Beaches at Blackpool and Southport in the UK. They aren't actually on the beach, but they're very close to it.

* ''[[Supernatural (TV)|Supernatural]]'' often has the brothers Winchester driving from place to place in a ridiculously short space of time - including, in one episode, Dean getting from Kansas to Colorado and back in a couple of hours.

** Well, the two states ''do'' border each other, so it's more a question of where ''in'' Colorado and Kansas they're traveling between.

* In NBC's made for TV movie ''Atomic Train'', we see several shots of what is supposedly the Denver skyline, populated by such logos as, Canada Trust or the Bank of Nova Scotia.

** Additionally, the main plot of the movie is that a train is [[Runaway Train|running away]] on a 300 mile downhill grade into Denver. In reality, the first roughly 250 miles of the track into Denver runs mostly uphill.

* Boston-area residents were amused when car chases in ''[[Spenser|Spenser: For Hire]]'' frequently took a corner at high speed and suddenly found themselves on a street on the other side of the city. Averted in certain episodes, when locations were correctly identified as used as most locals would. One example would be what was supposed to be a romantic picnic near an old stone grist mill while staying at a nearby hotel; the mill is in Sudbury and is attached to the Wayside Inn- a popular spot for weddings and other romantic getaways.

* ''[[Criminal Minds]]'' episode "Exit Wounds" supposedly takes place in Franklin, Alaska. The fishing ships in the opening would imply that Franklin is on the ocean. However, Franklin is on a creek, '''hundreds''' of miles away from the ocean, and more importantly, is [[Ghost Town|uninhabited]]. The closest town, Chicken, had a grand total population of 17 in the year 2000. They also mention a Lake Lafayette, and in a state with over three million lakes, there are none named Lafayette. Most TV shows and movies [[Did Not Do the Research|do not to do research]] when it comes to Alaska, much less do they ever film there.

** And Springfield is somehow in a state that borders on Ohio, Nevada, Maine, and Kentucky, all at once.

*** All at one point too with a recent episode {{spoiler|where someone tries to murder Bart while standing in another state and steps to another state each time cops from said state show up.}}

{{quote| '''Lisa''': "Aw, haven't we stood in five different states long enough?"<br />

'''Homer''': ''[[Man Child|(petulantly)]]'' "No." }}

[[Category:Chase Scene]]

[[Category:Television Geography]]