I can’t think of any examples off the top of my head, but I’m always amused when a movie supposedly takes place in San Francisco, and vast suburban neighborhoods are shown with big houses on large lots, with big backyards. And of course the entire neighborhood is as flat as the Midwest. This is entirely possible in other parts of the Bay Area, but within the city limits of San Francisco? No way.
There’s at least one- Rockaway Freeway in Queens. But it’s an ordinary street, not an expressway/highway/parkway.
Were those meant to be the locations or were they substituting for someplace else? Because both Mystic Seaport and Williamsburg are historic recreations so I could see them being used for that purpose.
The Modesto, Ca in Aliens Vs. Monsters is nothing like the real Modesto, Ca.
There is a cheesy series (Hallmark?) called Chesapeake Shores. It’s set in fictional waterfront town near Baltimore. I grew up in that area and spent a lot of time on Chesapeake Bay. The series, unfortunately, was filed in the Pacific Northwest. Canada I believe. It is filled with all kinds of beautiful water views that are so obviously not the Chesapeake Bay it drives me nuts. Both areas have plenty of natural beauty, but the topography of the two regions is completely different. It would be like filming something in Amsterdam and saying it was San Fransisco.
See the first photo in this article for one example:
Jules Verne’s The Master of the World had an extinct volcano (with a crater) in the Blue Ridge Mountains and a deep lake (deep enough to lost a submarine in it) in the middle of Nebraska.
McConnell AFB in Topeka had two squadrons of LGM-25C Titan II ICBMs until 1984. That’s closer to Lawrence than Whiteman AFB’s Minuteman II launch complexes.
In Office Christmas Party, set in Chicago, there was a one-liner about going next door or across the street to the Rite-Aid parking lot. There are no Rite-Aid pharmacies in Chicago.
In Thor: The Dark World they put in a Tube station at Greenwich. There isn’t one.
Or not so subtle as the case may be:
In X-men: First Class they depict Villa Gessel, Argentina as a mountain town, when Villa Gessel is a coastal town, the nearest mountain being more than 600 kilometers away…
Monk had a particularly egregious example of this sort of thing. Monk and Natalie wanted to figure out if it was in any way possible for their suspect to ride a motorcycle from her home in Richmond (where she had an alibi) to the crime scene in Novato by the time the murder took place. Cut to a montage of the two of them riding through Downtown San Fransisco, riding past cable cars and other famous landmarks. If you were trying to get from Richmond to Novato as fast as possible you would never go anywhere near San Francisco. You’d take 580 across the Richmond Bridge, and then head north on 101.
Exactly! The accent was exaggerated in the original Fargo, but I know people that talk like that. And they afe in Wisconsin. (it’s insidious!)
There’s no right way to take a left toin at Albicoickey that will get you from Hollywood (or Brooklyn, either) to the Coachella Valley and the carrot-eating festival, therein.
And while this isn’t the exact thing, I still remember a scene in a movie where the characters got on an elevator in a NYC high rise and got off in the second class pool of the Queen Mary, in Long Beach.
But that’s not an inaccurate depiction of a city or region; it’s just using two places as film sets.
There abundance of trees and mountains in Gunsmoke amused people from western Kansas.
Of course there is a TV Tropes page devoted to the remarkable resemblance of various regions and cities around the world to places in California (though they don’t define it as a Trope).
Just off the top of my pointed little head:
Lethal Weapon - Lots of weird geography but the one that really stood out was a foot chase that started in the San Fernando Valley, turned a corner and was suddenly in downtown Hollywood.
Last Vegas - The guys decided to leave their cab on the way to Aria from Binion’s. Cue sequence of shots of them walking and talking past iconic hotels - totally out of sequence, on the wrong side of the street or substantially past Aria when coming from Downtown. To be fair, this is a problem with just about every show set in Vegas. They want to show the resorts, but they don’t bother with reality.
I thought having Frasier and Niles hang out that fancy coffee place was something of an attempt to depict Seattle culture, at least when the show first started. I think we tend to forget that, since the fancy coffee trend spread to the rest of the country a few years later, but I think in the early 1990s it was still considered a “Seattle thing”. But I guess you would know better than I would.
But anyway, Psych is probably a good entry for this thread. Sure, maybe Vancouver makes a good stand-in for most American cities, but not for Santa Barbara. It’s not “my” city, but I’ve visited often to know what it’s like, and they have a distinctive Spanish style architecture that you see all over the city, that is never seen in Psych. And I can tell you there are no towering evergreen trees anywhere there like you see in the show.
Reminds me of the Austin Powers line “It’s remarkable how England looks in no way like Southern California”.
McConnell AFB is in Wichita, not Topeka. That’s about two and a half hours away. There’s Forbes Field in Topeka, home of the 190th Air Refueling Wing, but AFAIK they did not have any ICBMs.