Every planet they ever visited in Stargate SG-1 looked the same.
Being from New Jersey, I’ve always like the blatantly false portrayal of it in Buckaroo Banzai. the Yoyodyne plant all by itself looks bigger tha Grover’s Mill (where the Martians supposedly and the Lectroids in the movie actually) landed in 1938 (Pepper Mill is really from Grovers Mill, so we know) – Grovers Mill is tiny, and is a small part of West Windsorr Township.
And the palm trees outside Yoyodyne are a nice, Southern Califormia touch.
The New Brunswick Courthouse that Jeff Goldblum is supposedly standing on the steps of, dressed in cowboy garb, doesn’t look like that. And the charscteristic New Jersey faetures – large stretches of farmland, dotted with new huge warehouses, the New Jersey Turnpike and its signs – are absent.
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To be fair, shooting on location would have been cost-prohibitive and taken thousands of years to get there.
The thing that amazes me is that this is true even in animated movies, where there’s no reason for it to look like California. As I’ve noted before, Disney’s Pocahontas has anomalous cliffs and mountains near the seaside, whereas that area of Virginia is conspicuously flast (and marsh as heck), with mountainous regions a hundred miles or so inland. John Smith and Pocahontas would’ve had quite a hike to get where they were singing “Colors of the Wind”.
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Supposedly you can see bits of the Pacific Ocean (in Stafford Indiana), in the amusement park scenes in part 2 of the last episode.
In fairness, I’ve never really gotten that feeling from The Office until the episode where Michael and Jim are on thier way to New York, but turn around when they find out they’ve only been invited to the online party.
That is so obviously SoCal because of the parched landscape. However, in the other scenes, for example, Michael driving into the Lake, it seemed kosher. I can remember scenes with Michael and Jan driving around (on the outtakes) and that was ok too.
I have really been impressed with their ability to recreate snow and cold weather in general. It doesn’t look perfect, but it’s pretty good. Remember the episode where Michael couldn’t raise the roof to his convertible and it got snow all on the inside? I thought that was very good.
Reno: 911 is shot at the Carson (LA suburb) Sheriff’s station and at various LA locales.
The one that was so weird to my wife and me, though, was the opening of the X-Files movie. You know, that scene where Scully and Mulder are on the roof of some skyscraper in “Dallas”? I don’t know why that one bothered me so much, but I figure you’ve got yourself a decent budget for a film and you can’t be bothered to actually GO to Dallas for that shot? And if I recall correctly, the location had almost nothing to do with the film, so if they were actually go to be in LA, they could have changed the script to say so.
Ah, well. Forgot to take my anti-bitter pills this morning.