It’s sort of like how a cartoon character can reach outside the frame and grab a giant hammer whenever he needs one. When Spielberg needs a Grand Canyon for someone to fall into, he makes it happen.
In The Graduate, Benjamin drives the wrong way on the Bay Bridge (he’s supposed to be going to Berkeley, but is shown driving east-to-west, away from the East Bay and towards SF). And half the Berkeley scenes are shot on the USC campus.
But: these don’t count. The demands of location filming, and the need for good backgrounds & stuff are things that would only be noticed by local residents, and don’t fulfill the requirements of the OP.
Just remembered the one scene where the NCIS computer network is being hacked. The scientist chick starts typing frantically to ward off the attack (S.O.P. for any show I’ve seen).
In comes a teammate. He sees her and asks her what’s happening. She tells him. He offers to help. She accepts. AND HE STARTS TYPING ON THE SAME KEYBOARD!
WTF?!? :smack:
I always thought that the "Southern England looking like California "was a deliberate joke on Holywood.
So many glaring errors in Courage Under Fire. Almost saved by the acting of Denzel Washington. The most glaring is that the central conflict in the flashbacks is between Meg Ryan and her tough infantry door gunner Lou Diamond Phillips. He’s a door gunner. On a MEDEVAC helicopter. The entire story hinges on an armed ambulance. See there is this pesky thing called the Geneva Convention…
This is my favorite scene like that one. It sounds like something my mother would say in an effort to impress me.
Of course it is. That’s my point.
Yeah, I liked that one too. However, it’s not necessarily something that every computer user would spot.
To a programmer, though, it’s stupid as stupid can be.
In The Other Guys, when they get a call about a possible jumper at 3 World Financial Center. It seemed like an oddly specific address, given that the building shown was clearly not 3 World Financial Center.
In season four of Sons of Anarchy, Tig has just driven a car up on the sidewalk and caused Pope’s daughter, who was sitting at an outdoor cafe, to go flying to her death through a plate glass window. The rival gang is now chasing Tig, who has dumped the car and gotten on his Harley. The Sons are racing to his rescue. Within moments, everyone is driving down a two-lane country road where they come up one lane completely blocked by cars – it’s a traffic jam, with no visible cause, in the middle of nowhere! (How incredibly convenient.) The Sons escape by driving in the emergency lane, shooting back at their pursuers, causing them to lose control and crash into the stopped cars. Problem 1: Only one side of the road is blocked; why doesn’t everyone just pull over in the left lane and keep going? Problem 2: There are NO DRIVERS in the stopped cars. Not one. Nada. Every car is empty. So, how’d they get there?
I love me some Sons but this one really bugged me.
In episode 2F09 when Itchy plays Scratchy’s skeleton like a xylophone, he strikes the same rib twice in succession, yet he produces two clearly different tones. I mean, what are we to believe, that this is some sort of a magic xylophone or something? Boy, I really hope somebody got fired for that blunder.
In the same vein, the 101 Dalmations of the 1996 remake are assisted by skunks and raccoons despite it being set in England. I’m sure they were all CGI too, so it wasn’t even accidental.
On the other hand, to Psych fans, Southern California looks a lot like southern Canada.
There are some raccoons in England, although they aren’t common…yet.
What really bothered me about this scene was that all the children were looking towards the bomb. That’s not an error, I can believe they’d want to watch the bomb being carried away, but it would have been a lot smarter to protect their eyes and faces. I felt like someone should have told them to duck and cover.
The one that always comes to mind for me is The Deer Hunter, where the main cast, who are supposed to be steel workers somewhere around Pittsburgh, drive out of town to do the hunting promised in the title and suddenly find themselves in the Washington Cascades, i.e. on the opposite side of the continent.
Pretty much every film I’ve ever seen that involves railroading gets the technical aspects hilariously wrong. My current favorite is Unstoppable, which I actually quite liked overall. Suffice to say that it is pretty much impossible that a set of locomotives would ever balance on one set of wheels, going around a curve. On a high trestle. That just happens to cross over an oil tank farm.
Right on!
And what about this: everyone knows that back in '64, Honolulu boat tours were either 2 hours or 4 hours. The whole Gilligan’s Island concept is based on a LIE! 
I like how in the first X Files movie, Dallas looks like a desert, the residents speak with a strong southern accent and you can see mountains off in the distance.
Also, in the TV show Dallas a hurricane hits South Fork ranch. If a hurricane could make it to Dallas, I’d hate to see what Galveston & Houston would look like.
Northern Exposure. I lived in Alaska at the time and loved the show but their writers really, REALLY should have done a bit more research. They were constantly making statements about Cicely being “x” close to Anchorage and “x” close to Juneau, etc. Alaska is very big state and it used to make me insane just how off they were. The location they were giving with their directions just doesn’t exist. The actual cities are about 3-4 times as far apart as the writers had them.
I understand that no one would probably know that (or care) except people who either lived in the state or were a bit detail obsessive, like me. Seriously though, the writers couldn’t look at a map for the distances?
Another example of “that’s not how sprinklers work” was in the first Daniel Craig Bond movie, Casino Royale. When chasing the bad guy to the airport where he going to commit some kind of terrorist act, Bond gets every one to evacuate the airport. He does this by getting into a back room somewhere that has a switch on the wall that’s the “sprinkler override control” - and activating it causes every sprinkler in the airport to go off.
It’s ridiculous because, as mentioned by Morbo, individual sprinkler heads only go off when in close proximity to heat. Also, I’m 99.99% sure that even if there was a sudden fire throughout the entire airport that actually caused all the sprinklers to activate simultaneously, the demand on the system would overwhelm the water supply, since the water pipes aren’t built for that, and very little water would come out of each head.