[QUOTE=RunSilent]
And look at all of the mistakes in the Wizard of Oz…
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That’s true! I’ve been to Kansas; it’s NOT all black and white.
Isn’t 24 one of the worst offenders in this category? Like not only does Jack Bauer have some amazing traffic-clearing powers of persuasion (which I can believe) but he can also drive an hour’s distance in about ten minutes.
As I recall from season 5, there was a standoff at the Ontario airport but the actual airport that was subbed in was definitely not Ontario. I’ve never been there so I don’t know for sure but I’ve heard the substitution was fairly obvious.
They also did a reversed screw up in season six. Jack and Bill Buchanan get in a helicopter to fly to an offshore oil platform. Dialog establishes it as being six miles off the coast. It takes them ten minutes to get there. So their helicopter is going 36 mph!
This isn’t a movie but a TV show, but earlier this season in Criminal Minds they had an episode take place in Potomac Mills mall, which is about 10 minutes from where I live. And in the first shot of the episode, they show a man running down an escalator.
But see…the thing is, Potomac Mills is a one-story mall.
:dubious:
I saw The Lost World: Jurassic Park a little while after I moved to San Diego for school. In the latter part of the movie a female T-rex rampages through parts of San Diego. Except that it’s quite obviously not San Diego.
First, the waterfront doesn’t even remotely resemble the docks where the T-rex roars, silhouetted against an obviously projected background of SD downtown at night. Second, we didn’t have buses that look like the one that gets rammed in what appears to be a downtown area, right in front of a prominently visible street sign that reads “Redwood St.” There is no Redwood street in San Diego. Well, there is one in the area, somewhere around Lemon Grove, or north county, but that’s clear up past the 805, at least 6–10 miles from the docks. There’s a whole lot of rampaging to be done before an angry dinosaur would get that far. And the street signs don’t look like that. And most of the streets don’t look like that either.
The mockup of Dinosaur Land or whatever they were planning on setting up was obviously supposed to be Qualcomm Stadium. That was kind of neat, if cheesy looking.
C’mon Spielburg, it’s like a 2.5–3 hour drive from Hollywood to go to SD and do some on-location shoots to establish better credibility. How lazy can you get?
In National Lampoon’s Vacation, the Griswolds drive across the Poplar Street Bridge into a St. Louis slum, where they are relieved of their hubcaps.
Thing is…PSB goes directly into the downtown business district. You can’t get to such slums that way, even if you try (though there are some impressive slums-truthinadvertising). Even if you tried THEN.
Don’t recall any particulars right now, but I KNOW I’ve seen movie folk move rather quickly from Denver into the mountains. Actually, that requires a decent drive, over steep grades at best, in neverending heavy traffic, if the weather’s nice. The movies and TV possess MAGICAL cars…
[QUOTE=Morbo]
Too many for San Francisco. Bullitt, they’re basically driving all over the place with no regard whatsoever for continuity.
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If you haven’t already seen this, check it out. Pretty cool. 
[QUOTE=NDP]
[Nitpick]It was Vulgaria.[/Nitpick]
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Yep, and not just a pronunciation thing; the stairs the Baron is coming down from his dirigible bears the words: Vulg Air. 
[QUOTE=ArchiveGuy]
If you haven’t already seen this, check it out. Pretty cool.
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LOVE IT!!!
[QUOTE=pravnik]
Also true for the chase scenes in Prague in “Mission: Impossible.” Tom Cruise runs around a corner and suddenly he’s at another location on the other side of the river, ten miles away. He runs around another corner and he’s ten miles away again. If you have any knowledge of the city at all it looks jarringly like he’s teleporting.
.
[/QUOTE]
Very common in American films depicting Paris. Most of the time, it’s obviously done in order to show well-known landmarks or “typically Parisian” looking locations. But in other instances, I wondered why they shot what end up to be the same scene (say, a guy running behind his disgruntled girlfriend) in four different unremarkable spots, a couple miles apart from each other.
(OTH, almost all films where the action is supposed to take place in Paris seem to have actually been shot in Paris.)
In Planes, Trains and Automobiles John Candy and Steve Martin somehow manage to get to St. Louis from the west by driving across the Mississippi River and entering from Illinois.
But maybe I shouldn’t complain because the scene did manage to show the giant fucking Arch St. Louis is known to have, so I guess it was better than Matrix.
Most movies about Alaska are way off base (wrong vegetation, wrong types of mountains, etc.), but in the series Northern Exposure, someone finds a snake in the well house. There are no snakes in Alaska.
[QUOTE=Omniscient]
Yeah, I think Chicago is probably one of the most visually iconic cities out there since so much of what makes it popular are the huge landmarks. Moreso than LA. NYC, Chicago and San Francisco are easily the most visually recognizable if not the best known.
[/QUOTE]
I agree. LA has one instantly recognizable skyscraper and the Hollywood Sign. Everything else looks pretty generic in a three second establishing shot. The Sears Tower & Hancock, on the other hand just scratch the surface of Chicago. And I have to admit, without the bridges, Transamerica would probably be the only thing recognizable in our skyline (though that may be a different story twenty years from now).
[QUOTE=DWMarch]
They also did a reversed screw up in season six. Jack and Bill Buchanan get in a helicopter to fly to an offshore oil platform. Dialog establishes it as being six miles off the coast. It takes them ten minutes to get there. So their helicopter is going 36 mph!
[/QUOTE]
Strong headwinds?
[QUOTE=Siam Sam]
That’s true! I’ve been to Kansas; it’s NOT all black and white.
[/QUOTE]
Of course not, it’s more sepia toned.
Actually Kansas is pretty poorly represented as well. How many Gunsmoke episodes had mountains and gulches? I tell you there are no gulches anywhere near Dodge City. And people think we grow lots of corn here, its wheat people! Wheat!
In Big Fish the Auburn scenes are clearly not Auburn University either.
[QUOTE=Chingon]
Actually Kansas is pretty poorly represented as well. How many Gunsmoke episodes had mountains and gulches? I tell you there are no gulches anywhere near Dodge City. And people think we grow lots of corn here, its wheat people! Wheat!
[/QUOTE]
Not just Gunsmoke, either. I was watching Critters 1 & 2 a couple of weeks ago with some friends and we all marveled at how many mountains there were near this boring Kansas town. Mountains that could disappear and reappear, too.
[QUOTE=Ellen Cherry]
This is pretty minor. Stripes with Bill Murray was shot partially in Louisville, Ky. Early in the film they’re in a taxi headed for the airport, crossing a bridge. The only bridges in Louisville take you to Indiana, not the airport, which is south of downtown.
[/QUOTE]
I don’t find it at all difficult to imagine Murray’s character from Stripes taking somebody from downtown Lousville to the airport via Indiana. Or via Shreveport, or Bangkok, for that matter …
The real Skull Island bears very little resemblace to the depiction in King Kong.
[QUOTE=Chefguy]
There are no snakes in Alaska.
[/QUOTE]
Did Samuel Jackson pass through recently , your clues are snakes and treadmills.
Declan
I have lost count of movies and TV series that supposedly portray places in Spain and end up showing a total mish-mash of 100% imaginary locales…
A particularly egregious one was from an espionage TV series from many years ago, Masquerade, which had an episode that was supposed to take place in Madrid.
I hope I am wrong in my recollection, but I seem to remember that, in the universe where that episode took place, Madrid had a beach…
Just my 2 eurocent!
[QUOTE=Zeldar]
This is too old for most Dopers even to care about, but the old Walt Disney productions (TV shows and feature movies) about Davy Crockett, especially when he was supposedly living in West Tennessee were filmed somewhere else because the mountains shown are closer in size to East Tennessee, but look much more like California or somewhere west of Tennessee. West Tennessee has some hills but there are no mountains in that part of the state.
Our family went camping at the Reelfoot Lake State Park (Northwest Tennessee near the Mississippi River and the Kentucky state line) when the kids were young and we took a boat tour of the lake to see all the flora and fauna of that earthquake-made natural wonder. The surrounding terrain was almost as flat as the lake and the tour guide pointed at a little rise on one shore and said in what sounded like a joking manner, “That rise there is the high point in this county.” It was less than 30’ higher than the lake.
Tennessee slopes downward from East to West and all the really high ground is East of Nashville. The western half (surely the western third which starts at the Tennessee River and goes to the Mississippi) is mostly the sort of terrain you find in Mississippi and Western Alabama.
Bottom line: Davy Crockett, as depicted by Walt Disney, is geographically in error.
[/QUOTE]
I’m sure you enjoyed Grindhouse: Death Proof as they perform a car chase on highways that wound through the world famous scrub brushes of arid east Nashville (technically, Lebanon).