There’s this set with a brick wall with arches in it that seems to show up whenever a TV show needs a basement or warehouse type setting. I first noticed it in Perfect Strangers when I was a kid, where it was their apartment building’s basement (the episode where they get trapped in the slowly flooding basement). Then it showed up again a few years later as the basement of the Winslow house in Family Matters. Then years later I noticed it again in The King of Queens, a show I didn’t even watch that much but just happened to see this particular episode. Now it was the warehouse / distribution center for the fictional delivery company Kevin James’s character worked for.
This is true, but LA, like Casablanca, is still not in the middle of the desert.
You know, I assume, about Star Trek’s use of the Mayberry set. The streets from Mayberry turn up in four different episodes. Most notably, in “City on the Edge of Forever,” Kirk and Edith Keeler walk right past Floyd’s Barber Shop.
Oh, yeah. I think it was used in the original The Untouchables too. In the '60s, Desilu was renting space to a lot of different series, and they often swapped sets. IIRC, Gomer Pyle’s barracks turned up in I Spy (or maybe The Man from UNCLE; I don’t remember exactly), and the ones in Hogan’s Heroes were used in an episode of Mission: Impossible.
In John Wick 2, he’s fighting through The Oculus in Lower Manhattan and the fight ends up on a NJ PATH train. That’s fine, until the train starts moving and the loudspeaker starts announcing “Canal Street” and other stops not on the NJ Path network.
I don’t know the real name, but I call them The Paramount Back-lot Mountain Range. Star Trek: TOS fans will instantly know what I mean.
You mean Vasquez Rocks?
That’s them. Much obliged.
I just mentioned Red Dawn in another thread…fun thing about the show is the lack of insta-kill. And when it does happen its certainly warranted given the armament.
And the final shootout between Swayze and William Smith should happen a lot more in movies. “IM shot!! You’re shot!! We’re still shooting the shit out of each other!!”
A LOT of the combat (especially early on) seems realistic with all the chaos of a firefight.
Someone puts a record on a turntable… but it’s the wrong type (an LP on an old Victrola)… or playing at the wrong speed (a 78 turning at 33 1/3)… or turning counterclockwise… or the music skips so that one bit of a song plays over and over, but with a frequency that no actual record would do.
Ooooooh! That makes me mad! (Yosemite Sam voice)
The “backlot” I get tired of seeing is the hills where they filmed outdoor scenes for MASH*, which I presume to be the Fox backlot.
There are an astonishing number of places in the universe that look like South Korea.
It was Malibu State Park. I don’t think there are any fixed structures surviving, but it’s instantly recognizable if you’re at the right place in the park.
***Combat! ***was filmed on the MGM lot. I never noticed it back in 1962–67, but every damned town in France looked exactly the same because they used the same set every week. Another thing I never noticed between second and sixth grade was that on occasion, you could see traffic going by in the background on the road that ran along one side of the lot.
I grew up in Culver City, and when I was a kid you could hear gunfire from the Combat set (backlot) from my house.
The Southern California Renaissance Pleasure Faire used to take place right over the hill from the MASH set. Makes watching reruns a little more amusing, knowing what was going on down the road and to the right.
I haven’t seen them in a long time, but those 20th Century Fox/Irwin Allen “computers” (Lost in Space/Time Tunnel/Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea) used to drive me bugfuck.
Mrs R and I watched a bunch of Maverick episodes a while back, and darned if every little hick town he rode into didn’t look exactly the same. I told her it was the director’s subtle comment on the jaded attitude a professional gambler got after prolonged travel. 
^ Now, Jim Garner could actually pull that off, IMHO. 
When I saw Primer, I almost gave up at the 1-minute mark when I saw that they hadn’t bothered to ask anyone how to actually solder…
‘Back to the Future II’.
I imagine the film makers guessing that the multiple plot arcs were confusing, and so there was a scene where Dr Brown had to explain the concept of a parallel universe to the audience, masked as dialogue to Marty.
Just my take on it.