I liked Penelope, but wow, was it obviously out of place.
It is set in the U.S., but it is clearly London where the movie was shot. There is a scene in a phone booth that looks nothing like an American phone booth, the characters dive a van that has the steering wheel on the opposite side, there is a merry-go-round that says “BRITAIN” on it, a large chunk of the cast is British and some of them failed terribly at faking the accent and a large number of others didn’t even try so people with English accents appear everywhere in the film, bartenders, school children, businessmen, you name it. Plus the whole thing just looks exactly like London.
Oh wow, I watched that movie this weekend, and forgot until you mentioned it that they claimed at the beginning that it was in the US. I assumed that it was the Americans who were lax in their accent attempts. I don’t think I’ve ever seen that model of van in the US, with the steering on either side. Even the culture wasn’t American, with its focus on aristocracy, but maybe that was “fairy tale”, not British.
We enjoyed Penelope too, but the mix of British and American everything was so weird and in your face that we wondered if it was done on purpose for some reason.
and they made parts of Burbank stand in for Ireland in Darby O’Gill and the Little People, it’s so fun to spot the dry Southern California weeds and foxtails spray-painted to look like lush Irish greenery.
What episode is this? I have the entire series on DVD and I don’t recall this happening. There is an episode in which Joel and Ed speculate that there may be a snake in Joel’s shower pipes, but no snake is actually found.
Not sure how much this counts as I’m sure it would have been terrible regardless of where it was made, but Deathwish 3, which was supposed to take place back in NYC, was filmed in the UK (London?). The buildings, streets, everything looks all wrong! Though as I said, the movie itself is so bad you don’t really notice it.
I grew up in the southern end of southeast Alaska (Wrangell Island, if you’re curious), and in fact spent two years working as a wildlife biologist there for the Forest Service in the Tongass (one year of that doing an amphibian survey deliberately looking for rare cold-blooded animals - we were trying to determine whether or not a specific variety of frog was actually an endangered species or not, and since we were being required to do so, it was decided that we might as well conduct a thorough survey of the populations, since it had never been done*) and never saw nor even heard of a snake sighting, nor ran across anything that even hinted at a wild snake population.
When last I checked, snake sightings were reported about twice a year in the Tongass National Forest (which is huge and encompasses most of Southeast Alaska) and substantianted about every third year (on average). To date, every single substantiated sighting was fairly conclusively determined to be an escaped/released pet situation. This has included several garter snakes (although boas are more common). Nobody has ever produced credible evidence of a native population - no eggs, no egg shells, no skeletal remains (including in predatory bird droppings, which are generally a fairly rich source of such evidence - particularly owl pellets), reported sightings do not follow a geographic pattern (randomly scattered, not bunched in one region - if there’s a small population, one would expect to see sightings localized, rather than spread randomly across several islands), etc. I suppose it’s remotely possible that there are some snakes living on the mainland of extreme southeastern Alaska, as that region is essentially entirely uninhabited (the population of the southernmost of SE Alaska basically lives exclusively on a string of islands). If so, they didn’t appear in the wildlife surveys the Forest Service ran in those areas at all. As in, no trace of any snake appeared.
/end hijack
*Fairly large portions of southeastern Alaska are some combination of “nigh-inaccessible” and “really quite difficult to navigate”. This makes doing comprehensive wildlife-population surveys a stone cold bitch. Southeast Alaska is essentially composed of a long string of mostly-uninhabited islands. Not islands with beaches, mind you - islands carved by fairly-recent glacial activity. Those islands are basically trees growing on a thin layer of dirt which covers a big, huge chunk of glacially-carved granite. And it rains 300 days a year, so most of the dips in that granite collect moisture. That moisture generally turns itself into a peat bog. Some of those bogs are upwards of 100 feet deep - and you can get sucked into one just like movie-quicksand. Anything that’s not bog is generally either alpine (some of the tops of those islands are a long ways up) or old-growth temperate rain forest. You need a machete to get through it. Unless you’re on an island, and then you have the fun and romance of a half-overgrown clearcut to deal with. I cannot tell you how much time during that bedamned study I spent standing armpit-deep in a freezing-ass cold swamp or hacking my way through a drippy, cold jungle to find a test site or trap location looking for evidence of wildlife . Wildlife other than the vast hordes of blood-sucking insects vigorously going about their evolutionary imperative on my face and arms, that is.
I think most of the confusion comes from what my boss when I worked for the USFS termed “Small Boy Infestations”. It’s not uncommon for kids to trap wild garter snakes as a pet - and to keep their “pet” a secret from parents who’d be less than amused by it. There’s also a fair amount of back-and-forth traffic from SE AK and the lower 48 in the summertime. As a result, you get a few snakes transported up as clandestine pets and turfed out by annoyed mothers upon discovery (or released by the kid to escape punishment).
What’ll happen is wildlife guides will look for “reports” of X animal and they’ll find reports of garter snakes in SE AK and quit there. They often don’t have the inclination or resources to run it to ground. The USFS has both.
My understanding (which might be flawed) of why garter snakes didn’t spread to southern SE AK is primarly because of the climate. It’s too wet too often and (unlike western WA, for example) there’s not much way for snakes to get out of the wet. The soil is either fairly thin or a peat bog (sometimes, excitingly, it’s fairly thin and layered over a peat bog). Amphibians can deal with that level of constant moisture, but reptiles are less adapted to those conditions. Plus, there are lots and lots of predators around who are fairly indiscriminate about what they eat (raptors, weasel-family ground predators, etc.).
I can neither confirm, nor deny*, having had an aquarium with several garter snakes in it when I was a small boy.
*Actually I can confirm it. I never had to hide it. When one’s father has a Ph.D. in herpetology, it’s surprisingly easy to get parental support for having a few pet snakes. Wasn’t enough to let me keep the snakes in the house, but I didn’t have to hide them. Live birth of garter snakes is really, really neat.
Speaking of snakes and I am referring to the movie “Snakes on a Plane”, there are no snakes in Hawai`i. Legally, that is. Any found here are exported, posthaste.
Are you agreeing with me or disagreeing? As written I’m not sure. Since I have been to Salzburg a few times I can assure you that it is not near the Swiss border. I will grant you that due to the fact that the border goes north south at that point of the generally east west border you would be going to the west to get to Germany. That does not negate my point. In the movie the family is shown escaping the Nazis by walking from Salzburg over the Alps into Switzerland. To get to Switzerland from Salzburg you would have to walk across the width of Austria, giving the Nazis plenty of time to catch up. Even if the nuns disable their vehicles. The only border that is close to Salzburg is the German border.
Of course the real story isn’t as dramatic. The Von Trapp family lost their money, moved to Italy after the Nazis came into power and then moved to the US.
APB’s point was that if you went north to Germany from Salzburg, you wouldn’t encounter the Alps. To get to Switzerland, you will indeed encounter the Alps. Lots and lots of Alps.
