Television Geography

Scenes set in a city, including the Establishing Shot can be enormously fun for people who actually live there if they can nitpick details.

If the shot was actually filmed somewhere else entirely, it may quickly stop being fun and become headache-inducing, especially if it involves something like The Mountains of Illinois.

Not to be confused with Hollywood Atlas.

General

 * Brazilians speaking Spanish
 * Referring to Iranians as "Arabs" when they are in fact Persian
 * Tipis and Totem Poles

Advertising

 * In Citroën's "Unmistakably German - Made in France" ad, the final insult on its Prussia take on Germany is getting Berlin's geography wrong. The car pulls up outside the Brandenburg Gate. The guy gets out, the camera switches to show the other side - which clearly shows the Olympic Stadium, which is quite a way away from the Gate.

Anime

 * Exception: Gunsmith Cats took great pains to get Chicago just right, down to minute details. Of course, it's an animated series for which the cost of location shoots is a non-issue... (They did, however, take the unprecedented step of sending the entire animation team there before even beginning production, to get a sense of the city and take reference photos themselves.)
 * They even visited a real gunshop and fired actual guns, which must have been near orgasmic for Japanese gun otaku unaccustomed to the real thing.
 * Beyblade had a tournament in Sydney, Australia. Some characters decide that they want to have private conversation, so they meet five minutes later on top of Ayers Rock. To those outside Australia, to get from Sydney to Ayers Rock they would have to cross half the country.
 * Pretty much any anime where the cast visits San Francisco will place it in the middle of a desert. Yu-Gi-Oh! at least makes it a cab ride away, while Lupin III, despite remembering to include San Francisco Bay and the Golden Gate Bridge, puts it within walking distance.
 * Anime seems to have a lot of exceptions: Eden of the East has a very accurate landscape and Durarara is very accurate in its portrayal of Ikebukuro, down to the vending machines.
 * Eden of the East is largely accurate but includes one baffling exception. In the first episode, Akira visits an apartment of his in Northwest D.C. Problem is the address they give is actually the location of the National Gallery of Art's Sculpture Garden.
 * In the same episode the opening montage features Saki's photo montage of her visit to New York City, one of those photos features the building One World Trade Center (nickname Freedom Tower). The story takes place in January of 2011 and the tower is not set for completion until 2013.
 * Naturally used and lampshaded (by Beauty) in Bobobobo Bobobo.

Comic Books

 * In The Ultimates 2, one panel showing a nice city landscape with an attractive domed building by a large river had a caption claiming its location to be part of EU headquarters in Brussels. Not only is the architecture of the city distinctly out of place (looking significantly more Mediterranean than the city itself) but more glaringly there is no visible river in Brussels! While a river does run through the city, it was built over in the 19th and early 20th century and runs underground for the length of the city.
 * Possibly justified by the fact that The Ultimates takes place in an Alternate Universe.
 * Averted by Scott Pilgrim, in which most of the locale is recognizably Toronto.
 * X, a vigilanted super hero from Dark Horse Comics. A scene taking place at the Vietnam Memorial shows office-building skyscrapers in the background. Naturally, no such buildings are anywhere near the place, much less all the more important locales in D.C.
 * Parodied and lampshaded in Sam and Max Freelance Police, with locations (and time periods) looking only vaguely correct and with Max sarcastically pointing out the level of research taken in the drawings.

Film
"Despite the economic turmoil, Scotiabank's Racoon City expansion plans were unaffected."
 * Hollywood movies in general tend to have palm trees popping up in the background of states where there quite obviously are no palm trees. Watch for it.
 * Watching a Chase Scene filmed in a city you are familiar with? Be ready for Fridge Logic:
 * "You can't get to X boulevard from Y street!"
 * "How did they get from X boulevard to Z street without passing through B drive?"
 * "They just backtracked several miles..."
 * "Wow, Route X is surprisingly gridlock free for rush hour..."
 * Reviews of the low-budget Atlas Shrugged movie reveled in poking fun at the movie's depiction of Wisconsin. The land of cheese has a surprising number of cacti.
 * In Field of Dreams, Ray Kinsella's voice beckons him to travel to Boston and Chisholm, Minnesota, but aside from Huntington Avenue and Fenway Park, the entire movie was shot within a 50 mile radius of the Iowa farm that served as his home, conveniently within the rugged Driftless Area of the midwest, which filled in for the Appalachian Mountains.
 * In the beginning of The Wild Stallion, Miranda Cosgrove's character narrates that she grew up in Cleveland, with an aerial view of a city that is obviously Boston, with shots of the Back Bay, the New England Aquarium, and the Tobin Bridge.
 * By contrast, Cedar Rapids was filmed in Ann Arbor, Michigan instead of the titular city.
 * Leap Year, apart from its appalling Oireland setting, uses atrocious geography. Anna's flight from Boston to Dublin is diverted to Wales due to weather, although London is a major international hub and a much more obvious place in which to divert the plane. Then, she gets a ferry from Wales to Dingle -- Dingle being on the southwest coast of Ireland, ignoring the regular Holyhead-to-Dublin ferry. Dingle is shown as a tiny village when it's actually a moderately-sized town. Then, her journey from Dingle to Dublin passes the Cliffs of Moher and the Burren, neither of which would be anywhere near her route.
 * The Chase Scene is especially prone to Television Geography. San Franciscans can go on for hours about Bullitt.
 * In Bullitts chase scene, it seems like every time they take a right turn onto a downhill street, there's a beige Volkswagen Beetle parked on the right with its back to the camera, in the same spot every time...
 * An interview about the first Bourne movie had someone noting that the famous car Chase Scene took a very unconventional route through Paris.
 *  Mission Impossible II: Ethan Hunt gets a car and chases the girl, leaving the Spanish city of Seville and suddenly reaching some cliffs that might be anywhere but near Seville. Not the movie's only example of Did Not Do the Research about Spain.
 * Much of the film 21, taking place at MIT in Cambridge, MA, was shot directly across the Charles River on Boston University's campus. In an interesting twist on the Television Geography trope, BU students enjoyed the movie more because of the familiar locales, despite its use as another university's campus.
 * MIT's administration actually banned the filming of movies on campus after the crew of Good Will Hunting displayed an annoying tendency to randomly close important parts of the school. Given that most of the school didn't have a particularly good opinion of the quality of 21, it's probably best for the moviemakers that they didn't try it.
 * The Perfect Storm is based on a true story of fisherman from Gloucester, MA. The bar they frequent, The Crow's Nest, is shown right next to the pier on Harbor Loop. The actual Crow's Nest is about a half mile away, across the street from a wharf for a whale watch business.
 * The movie ends with a scene at the real St. Ann's church. The priest and deacon on the alter were current to the movie's filming (1999), but weren't at the church when the film takes place (1991). Neither was the choir.
 * Ten Things I Hate About You is nominally set in Seattle, but the high school that all of the main characters go to is easily recognizable as Stadium High School (incredibly distinctive)... in Tacoma, about a half-hour's drive away. Several other distinctive locations are also in Tacoma.
 * Alien vs. Predator: Requiem is set in Gunnison, Colorado, a small mountain town of about 5,500 people. The establishing shot of the town is much, much larger than that, as they shot it in Canada at a town with 15x its population.
 * Furthermore, Gunnison, Colorado is a semi-arid climate with sagebrush as the predominate vegetation, but Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem shows massive temperate rainforest trees with moss hanging from the branches. And the storm sewer system is vastly oversized. Humans, aliens, and even a dog use the sewer system like an underground tunnel. Unless it's a CDOT box culvert bridging a creek, the largest possible sewer pipe is maybe 12 or 18 inches in Gunnison.
 * In a rare example of a film actually being shot in the location it's set in, Almost Famous was filmed in San Diego, California, and several recognizable local landmarks and businesses are visible throughout the movie -- although, as the film was shot in 2000 and set in 1971, some of the businesses shown had not yet been established, and others operating at the time that had closed since 1971 were not present.
 * Annapolis, set at the US Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland, was rather obviously not filmed there.
 * Wherever the remake of Assault on Precinct 13 was filmed, it sure wasn't Detroit! Can somebody show me which ghetto was grown over by that forest?
 * It was filmed in Toronto. Details here.
 * Averted in Ballistic: Ecks vs. Sever, which was both filmed and set in Vancouver. It seems odd that the authorities in Canada would allow Americans to run around blowing crap up and treating the city as a shooting gallery, but those who saw Ballistic: Ecks vs Sever and were unimpressed would likely argue the authorities were pretending that none of this was happening and ignored it.
 * Before Sunrise: Julie Delpy and Ethan Hawke manage to get everywhere in Vienna, despite only spending only one night there. Pretty amazing, if you consider that the location are spread out over the city and are visited in random order. It's even more amazing if you consider that all of this time they never get on a bus or take a taxi (except once - during the day).
 * ~Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure~ was nominally set in San Dimas, California, but the school identified as San Dimas High School was actually Coronado High School in Scottsdale, Arizona.
 * Brokeback Mountain caused residents of Riverton, Wyoming, to look out on the dry, arid scorched land (residents of that area beam with pride that the desolate alien planet in Starship Troopers was filmed there) and ponder where these lush mountain vistas were that kept popping up.
 * Casino Royale, at one point, had James Bond driving along a lovely Bahamian ocean road past some sort of charming open-air market. There's absolutely nothing out there but houses.
 * Considering Bond's globetrotter nature, there are many more examples from the movies. In The Living Daylights, he seems to teleport randomly around Vienna.
 * In about half of these scenes he's supposed to be in Bratislava at the time, making this especially funny to Austrians; also, there are no high mountains between Bratislava and Vienna.
 * And in Tomorrow Never Dies you get a similar effect with Hamburg. As a bonus, in the scene with the chase in the parking-house next to the Hotel Atlantic, it ends with the car crashing through the wall and falling several stories into Mönckebergstraße - at a spot which is actually about half a kilometer away from the hotel.
 * Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory (1971) presented the enigma of what was very obviously an American kid living in what was very obviously Germany, but both of his parents were very obviously not in the military and everyone in town was a native speaker of English. The 2005 film averted this by being set in the mind of Tim Burton.
 * Of course, the story was deliberately set in an ambiguous setting.
 * The Tim Burton version isn't much better - we get a picture Bavarian Cliché Storm from the south of Germany. But the town mentioned lies in northern Germany which is very much not like Bavaria.
 * The Dabney Coleman/Henry Thomas film ~Cloak & Dagger~ was filmed in San Antonio, Texas. In a climactic scene, Thomas's character, Davy, has to get from San Antonio's Riverwalk (downtown) to the airport (on the outskirts of the city) in less than fifteen minutes. If he'd left for the airport immediately, he still probably wouldn't have made it in time. Yet, Davy has time for a shootout with the Mooks, followed by a car chase with the Mooks, before showing up at the airport to confront the Big Bad with a few minutes to spare.
 * Averted in The Collector, which is set and filmed entirely within the confines of the city of Vancouver. And "'only'" Vancouver, none of the adjacent municipalities.
 * Coronation Street featured a Chase Scene showing a car turning a corner in Salford and crashing into a canal in Ashton (about 8 miles or so apart).
 * In The Departed, The Mole texts the police to go to Sheffield, and they're shown choosing an exit off an elevated highway accordingly. Sheffield is a hundred and forty miles from Boston, in New England, where that still counts for a lot; to get there you go through two other metropolitan areas and then a good thirty miles out into the country.
 * In Die Hard 2, the action is set at Dulles Airport, near Washington DC, but the pay phones bear Pacific Bell logos. And the police are consistently identified as DC police even though Dulles is in Virginia. And the bad guys plan and execute an escape by snowmobile, and a long icicle is used effectively as a weapon. Washington area winter weather almost never supports snowmobile use in the suburbs, and is almost always mild until after the Christmas season.
 * Additionally, the airport used in the movie looks nothing like the real Dulles Airport which has a very unusual architecture. That's because many of the exterior airport scenes were shot at Alpena Regional Airport, in Alpena, Michigan, on Lake Huron. Alpena was chosen in part because the producers needed a location with consistent, heavy snow, winter weather cold enough to use snow makers if necessary, and it's small enough that they could close several runways for shooting. The scenes in the baggage-claim drive-through were shot at Denver-Stapleton.
 * Isn't the weather at least justified, as it was supposed to be one of the worst winter storms on record that particular terrorist-laden Christmas?
 * In Live Free or Die Hard, the main characters realize they have to run to DC. When they realize this, they are clearly on Light Street in Baltimore, MD. They manage this.
 * Dirty Harry: going from Forest Hills Station to Aquatic Park to Mount Davidson in under an hour would be a neat trick in a car (without sirens), let alone on foot.
 * Harry also is able to take the train directly from Forest Hills to Delores Park which is impossible in real life. You have to take a separate line.
 * In Elizabeth: The Golden Age, Elizabeth gives her inspiring Speech to the Troops at Tilbury (an infuriatingly bastardized version of the original, one of the better works of English oratory), and then retires to watch the Battle of Gravelines. Of course, this requires her to be able to see not only across the English Channel but in fact all of Kent. (We also have the little problem that the Speech to the Troops was given after the Battle of Gravelines, when they were still worried about an invasion force.)
 * Enemy of the State was set in Washington DC, but filmed in both DC and Baltimore. Multiple scenes have characters walking from a location in one city to a location in the other city, even though they are about an hour's drive apart.
 * To say nothing of the "Georgetown" Metro stop that found its way into that and several other movies.
 * In Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer, when the Human Torch chases the Silver Surfer through the Lincoln Tunnel, they both enter and exit on the New Jersey side.
 * Four Brothers, about a quartet of young men who avenge their adoptive mother's murder, was mostly filmed in Hamilton, ON despite being set in Detroit, MI. Made worse by the fact that the two cities are only about three hours' driving time apart.
 * The 2008 Get Smart movie features a climactic Chase Scene in which the characters travel via freeway between core downtown Los Angeles, the Port of Los Angeles (in Long Beach), and Van Nuys Airport (in the San Fernando Valley) within the space of a few minutes.
 * The terrible Godsend is repeatedly said to take place in a "small American town." Not only does it not remotely look like a "small town," the father drives past the rather unique-looking Roy Thompson Hall of Toronto.
 * In The Graduate the protagonist is headed to Berkeley from LA over The Bay Bridge. Not only is it unnecessary since both of the major highways (101 & 5) going from LA to the San Francisco area could or would deposit him in the East Bay, but he's going across the bridge into San Francisco.
 * I-5 goes through Sacramento, which is a two and a half hour drive from San Francisco. Definitely nowhere near the East Bay.
 * He would have switched to the 580, thence to the East Bay.
 * Hellboy II: The Golden Army ends at the Giant's Causeway, County Antrim. It's worth noting that the causeway, a formation of hexagonal pillars formed from volcanic rock (according to myth the foundations of a bridge to Scotland so that two giants may fight) does not appear. Not even a dodgy mock-up. Instead there is a large fallen statue of a giant. It's also worth noting that there is an island off the coast of County Kerry actually called "The Sleeping Giant" because it looks like one. One wonders why they didn't just set the climax there if they really wanted that kind of a landmark.
 * High School Musical takes place at East High School in Albuquerque, New Mexico. It was actually filmed at East High School in Salt Lake City, Utah. However, East High School's auditorium isn't that impressive, so to film the stage scenes they had to go to Murray High School, about fifteen or so minutes away.
 * Highlander III the Sorcerer features a scene that takes place in Newark Airport. They don't have any giant signs that say "Bienvenue à Montreal".
 * Possible aversion: the Chicago-area McAllister house in the Home Alone movies is an actual suburban house in Winnetka (a Chicago suburb).
 * As it was written by John Hughes it's half aversion, half this trope. They never mention which Chicago Suburb the McAllisters live in, but you can be certain that it's the same fictional town - Shermer - that Hughes set all his Chicago-based films in.
 * * A possible exception being Ferris Buellers Day Off where the characters visit almost every landmark in Chicago in the span of a few hours and make it home in time for their parents to get back from work. Even if one were to assume they only spent a few minutes at the Cubs' game, a few minutes at the Sears Tower, etc., traffic and distance would stop them from visiting all of those places during a 9-5 workday.
 * The VH1 Made for TV Movie Hysteria: The Def Leppard Story tried to double Sheffield with Canada. So drummer Rick Allen's famous car crash, which happened on the A57 in the Derbyshire Peak District, looks like it happened on the Icefields parkway. The very North-American yellow centre lines on the road are also a bit of a giveaway.
 * Not a big, famous town such as L.A. or Vancouver, but when the criminals who are the subject of In Cold Blood (1967) are seen approaching the Clutter's home, they are crossing the railroad tracks in Holcomb, Kansas. The Clutters did live across the tracks, but the car in the scene is going north. The Clutters lived south of the tracks.
 * The Norwegian film Insomnia (later remade in Hollywood): When the main characters drive from the airport to their hotel, they make an inexplicable detour past a building several kilometers out of their way. And the exterior of their "hotel" is recognisable as an office building that ironically is very close to several real hotels.
 * Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back has the animal testing facility/diamond heist scene set in Boulder, Colorado. The scene gets nearly everything wrong. Boulder is home to a Strawman U with an extremely active Anti-Animal Testing protest group and so the lab would never have been there in the first place. The setting appears to be the plains, but Boulder is at the feet of the Flatirons mountains. Finally, Jay and Silent Bob steal a monkey and leave with it on foot. The next scene shows them in Utah, which is 300+ miles away over the Rockies.
 * Nicolas Cage's Knowing, set in Boston and New York, was filmed in Melbourne, Australia. One of the scenes was filmed on the steps of the state Parliament House. Imagine, Americans, a film set halfway around the world with a scene taking place outside your State Capitol.
 * Knowing is theoretically set in the Lexington area, Massachusetts, but you can safely say that the film's director has never even seen pictures of Lexington. This is most evident on any scene set on a highway, where there are huge desolate areas with no trees, where Massachusetts has an overabundance of them near its highways.
 * Lake View Terrace is very clearly not Lake View Terrace. It was actually filmed in Walnut, about 40 miles away. Especially jarring for the fact that any production company based in Southern California would know that Walnut cannot pass for Lake View Terrace.
 * The Left Behind movie was filmed in Toronto, setting the city hall as UN headquarters, but that's not the bad part. You want to hear what's just ridiculous? The flags out front were from all the Canadian provinces and territories.
 * The building destroyed at the beginning of Lethal Weapon 3, a movie series set in Los Angeles, is obviously the old Orlando City Hall, with the new City Hall, the Suntrust Tower (the tallest building in the city) and other notable Orlando landmarks featured in the background. Made even better by the fact that the cop who says "Bravo" is Bill Frederick... Orlando's mayor at the time.
 * Parts of the Sci-Fi Channel Original Movie Locust take place in Southern Indiana/Kentucky, and one scene features the main characters driving from Kentucky to Indiana. They pass a "Welcome to Indiana!" sign by the side of the road with trees and dirt and such. Go check out a map of the Indiana/Kentucky border to see why that wouldn't work. (Hint: the Ohio River defines the entire Indiana/Kentucky border). That's not even mentioning the scenes taking place in southern Indiana showing perfectly flat, level ground despite the huge number of thousand-foot hills in that area.
 * Looking at a map of Indiana, there is one location in the southwest part of the state near Evansville where the Indiana/Kentucky border is north of the Ohio River on solid ground. 200 years ago it followed the river, but the river changed paths and the border stuck, so a land crossing between the two states does exist. Still, that does not account for the issue with the hills in Southern Indiana.
 * The 1961 film The Long Ships takes place in Scandinavia and North Africa, but was entirely filmed in Yugoslavia, which, needless to say, looks very little like either location.
 * The ballpark used for the Cleveland Indians' home stadium in Major League was actually County Stadium in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. The filmmakers had to shoot there to work around Bob Uecker's schedule (since they cast the real-life Brewers broadcaster as the fictional Indians broadcaster Harry Doyle), and they thus also recast the Milwaukee TV station with its real life logo on the outfield scoreboard as a Cleveland station.
 * And Major League II used Camden Yards and Memorial Stadium in Baltimore and Comiskey Park in Chicago.
 * By the same token, much of the scenes in the 1994 remake of Angels in the Outfield were shot at Oakland's Alameda Coliseum rather than the Angels' home field of Anaheim Stadium.
 * The first Men in Black film shows K spying on his pre-Masquerade wife in Truro. The map starts with all of Massachusetts, zooms in on Cape Cod ... and zooms in on Sandwich, about as far as you can get from Truro. Ironically, the lush forest in the background of "Truro" looks much more like Sandwich.
 * When the Griswolds set out from Chicago in ~National Lampoon's Vacation~, oil rigs can be seen in the background. L.A. has plenty of these (and even southern Illinois has some oil deposits), but not Chicago. Much of the rest of the movie was filmed on location.
 * Some tall palm trees, and maybe even mountains, can be seen in the background of the early scenes at the car dealership as well. Oops.
 * Another Nicolas Cage example, from National Treasure 2: Book of Secrets. In the car chase in London Town, the cars cross Westminster Bridge north to south, engage in a chase in what is clearly the City of London, which is north of the Thames - you can see the street signs, then cross Southwark Bridge again north to south.
 * In No Way Out, there's the (nonexistent) Georgetown Metro stop, with the DC Metro being portrayed by the Baltimore Metro.
 * Exactly whose mega-mansion was depicted in Out of Sight?
 * As with the TV show Inspector Morse, films set in Oxford (England) tend to frequently play fast and loose with geography -- characters in The Oxford Murders, for instance, step out of a pub onto the sidewalk in front of a lingerie store on the other side of the road.
 * Morse has, for instance, stepped from a cobbled street in the town centre to a park two miles away.
 * The Isis (the Oxford stretch of the River Thames) gets similar treatment in the rowing film True Blue, when the climactic race scene jumps randomly back and forward on the river, changing directions occasionally and at one point teleporting to Marlow, 25 miles away in a straight line and much further if you follow the river. Given they seem to have filmed (most of) the race on the fairly short stretch of river that it was supposed to be set on, it must be down to odd dramatic editing choices rather than any lack of care on the director's part.
 * Consider an early scene in The Prestige when Hugh Jackman's character arrives in Colorado Springs. The town he arrives in is high in the mountains (the Springs, like Denver, is situated on the Front Range, just east of the Rockies), and Pikes Peak is nowhere to be seen. Later, he approaches Tesla's lab on a path lined with deciduous trees, not the pine and aspen forests common in that part of the world.
 * Not to mention the fact that Tesla's Lab was in a very flat, comparably treeless portion of town as compared to the steep sloped, heavy woodlands depicted.
 * The indie movie A Problem with Fear is supposedly set in the Calgary subway. Calgary doesn't have a subway, and if it did the ads in the subway would likely not be in French, as they were in the movie. One wonders why they didn't just set the damn thing in Montreal.
 * It's terribly obvious they filmed Resident Evil Apocalypse in Toronto. An opening shot in the theatrical version shows the CN Tower, and the climax of the movie occurs at another famous landmark -- Toronto's uniquely designed City Hall. Granted, a city so much like Raccoon City doesn't exist.
 * This takes the entire thing apart.


 * In one scene, Resident Evil 2 seems to place Raccoon City in somewhat central New Jersey. Oddly enough, they realistically portrayed an evil pharmaceutical company having a research office, in the middle of nowhere NJ, yet relatively near a larger city. Johnson and Johnson, Sanofi-Aventis, Novartis, Pfizer, Merck, Wyeth, Hoffman-LaRoche, Bristol-Myers Squibb, and Schering-Plough all have locations in NJ that somewhat parallel this. No zombies yet though...
 * The 1976 Robin Hood film Robin and Marian was filmed in Pamplona, Spain, which, needless to say, looks nothing at all like Nottinghamshire.
 * Much later, Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves manages to walk the 170 miles from Hadrian's Wall to Nottingham in a day.
 * The Jackie Chan movie Rumble in the Bronx, filmed in Vancouver, makes little attempt to hide that fact. The snow-capped coast mountains are visible in many scenes, as are various Vancouver landmarks.
 * In Short Circuit 2, the Unnamed American City which hosts the action also hosts the CN Tower, the Toronto Transit Commission subway, World's Biggest Bookstore and Roy Thompson Hall (lesser known than the CN Tower, but still landmarks).
 * Dialog between characters establishes the movie is set in New York City.
 * Sleepless in Seattle showed everyone, including Seattlites, that Seattle has a subway. Underground bus tunnels, yes. Subway, no.
 * Part of Spider-Man 3 (which is nominally set and filmed in New York City) was filmed in Cleveland, Ohio, but you mostly can't tell because the empty, dilapidated buildings along Euclid Avenue were covered with shiny fake storefronts for the movie. The one exception is the brief shot where Spidey leaps in front of the Trust Company Building. The rotunda, and the concrete tower behind it are clearly recognizable to those in the know.
 * Scenes from Spider-Man 2 (which is also set in New York) showing Spidey rescuing an elevated 'R' subway train, in Manhattan were actually filmed using the Chicago "L" as a stand-in. The "R" does not run aboveground in Manhattan.
 * At the end of Splash, Tom Hanks and his mermaid girlfriend jump off a wharf in New York City, swim a few hundred feet to get away from some scuba-clad pursuers, then stop to smooch against a glorious background of pristine tropical branch corals.
 * Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home generally wreaks havoc with the geography of the San Francisco Bay Area. A particularly notable moment comes when Kirk and Spock have just left the Cetacean Institute in Sausalito (for which the Monterey Bay Aquarium, well to the south of the Bay Area, is obviously being used). Gillian Taylor pulls over to offer them a lift back into San Francisco. In the background is the Golden Gate Bridge in all its glory, and they are already unmistakably on the San Francisco side of the bridge.
 * Taking Lives is set in Montreal, which you can tell from the establishing shot of... the Château Frontenac. Oh, dear.
 * The Tom Hanks vehicle Turner and Hooch includes a conversation scene that repeatedly switches back and forth between two camera angles -- one angle looking out at Moss Landing Harbor, and the other, looking inland at Pacific Grove, twenty or thirty miles south.
 * ~You've Got Mail~ takes place in New York but the Golden Gate Bridge is visible when Tom Hanks is walking his dog, Brinkly.
 * There is an Alfred Hitchcock thriller in which the American protagonist comes to Stockholm to receive a Nobel Prize. In one scene he falls off the Symphonic Hall into Lake Malaren, which in fact is about a kilometre away from that building. Also, the seasons are wrong: the Nobel Prizes are awarded in early December when Lake Malaren is about +4 degrees Celsius. If you fall into it, the cold will paralyze you in seconds.
 * The movie is called "The Prize" and is well worth watching even if it has some minor mistakes. (Also, it was directed by Mark Robson rather than Hitchcock.)
 * The dramatic US Robotics tower in the I Robot film is placed in downtown Chicago...however, its location based on clues from the movie is impossible, appearing in both the Loop and North Michigan Avenue, several miles apart. One shot shows it apparently standing on a large fictional plaza built over the Chicago River, so this may have been intentional. This movie is also an example of Vancouver Doubling, but at least the filmmakers bothered to do some location shooting in Chicago.
 * The horse/motorcycle chase in True Lies for the first time, as Ahnuld and his horse teleported from Georgetown to the distinctive atrium lobby of the Crystal City Hilton, which is across the Potomac in Virginia near the Pentagon, and doesn't have a condo with a pool across from it. The establishing shot outside the building matched the exterior at least, except that they matted in at least twenty extra stories.
 * The Rock: towards the climax of the movie, a nerve gas missile is fired from the titular island, programmed to hit the Oakland Coliseum Stadium. Seconds later, when the missile is shown approaching its target, the stadium shown is actually Candlestick Park in San Francisco; it's most obvious when you consider the stadium's red seats, and that Candlestick is neighbored by the water and hills shown in the movie while the now-named McAfee Stadium is surrounded by flat dry land next to a basketball arena and a freeway.
 * Run Lola Run has the heroine run all over Berlin in the space of twenty (real time) minutes. For example her house is just north of the Spree and she starts running north, then moments later ends up south of the river, considerably further east, running north across the river. That section of the U-bahn does NOT come out of the ground as is shown. Definitely covered by Rule of Cool.
 * Trainspotting is the Scottish city of Edinburgh, right? Then what can explain the scene where Renton and Diane come out of the nightclub and it is revealed to be the very distinctive exterior of the Volcano... which is Glasgow, a good fifty miles from Edinburgh?
 * People from Bayonne, New Jersey, had a lot of fun in the remake of The War of the Worlds starring Tom Cruise. The house in the beginning of the movie is in downtown Bayonne, right underneath the Bayonne Bridge. However, during the alien landing, Tom Cruise walks over to a church that is actually in Newark in under a minute. Beyond the miles of distance required to walk there, Cruise would also have to either swim across Newark Bay or dodge highway traffic across the NJ Turnpike bridge.
 * Also at the beginning, when the lightning strikes the ground to activate the tripods, it's seen hitting a spot that seems to be just off Route 440 in Jersey City (admittedly, not too far from Bayonne but definitely a few miles from where Tom Cruise's house and nowhere near quick walking distance)...and yet, Cruise and his neighbors are able to quickly walk out and observe the site, mere blocks away into downtown Bayonne.
 * Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull was filmed, in part, at Yale University, including a chase scene. Indy and Mutt travel at about the speed of sound, judging from how fast they get from some points to others.
 * While this may be, the scenes aren't set at Yale University but at the (seems to be) fictional Marshall College, so they are completely incorrect anyway
 * While The Blues Brothers mostly averts this, with most of the exteriors actually being shot in Chicago, the Palace Hotel, supposedly in Wisconsin, has an Ohio flag flying in front of it.
 * Also, the unfinished highway ramp in the Chase Scene at the end is in Milwaukee, which doesn't seem so bad until you realize that they landed in Chicago.
 * The fact that the Nazi car following them ran off the end of the ramp and ended up falling nearly from orbit puts such magical travel times entirely within the scope of the film. They're on a mission from God, after all.
 * Die Jungfrauenmaschine is a German film that takes place in San Francisco. At one point a character is in a car driving north in North Beach, which immediately transitions to driving north in South of Market. As one can guess from the names, this would be a geographical impossibility.
 * Wildflowers features a full, dense forest that characters run and hide in, in the heart of North Beach, which is one of the most urban neighborhoods in the city. The forest appears to be either Golden Gate Park or one of the other parks close to the beach, which are essentially on the opposite side of town.
 * Sid And Nancy features the characters leaving San Francisco to go to the San Francisco International Airport (which is south of the city) by going across the San Mateo bridge, which is even further south of the airport and which leads to the other side of the Bay from where the airport is. If you are already in the city you don't cross any bridges to get to the airport.
 * Averted in Ghostbusters as explained in James Rolfe's tour of New York following the movie.
 * In the film Driving Lessons, Rupert Grint and Julie Walters drive to Edinburgh, arriving on a scenic road down a hillside... which is in the centre of the city and can only be reached once you're already in the city. This is after they've driven south past a recognisable nuclear power station to get there, and following this, you see them going up alleyways and out of entirely different alleyways on the opposite side of the castle. It's a bit disorientating.
 * Baltimore tourists are often told that the Step Up movies were filmed at the famous Baltimore School for the Arts, probably because the school in the film is based on that. In fact, they were filmed at a local middle school.
 * The beginning of Zombieland supposedly takes place in Garland, Texas, a suburb of Dallas, but the details in the background make it painfully obvious to locals of North Texas that it was actually filmed in Georgia.
 * The Dark Knight Saga may count if only peripherally, as it takes place in fictional Gotham but was filmed in Chicago. Bruce seems to teleport all over the city, the most outrageous example of which has him leaving his penthouse, with a view that shows it's in the same building as the downtown post office, racing across western Chicago and the loop, in a desperate attempt to get to someone who was, at the time, in a building filmed in the first floor of the very same post office. He could have gone down a flight of stairs.
 * Averted in the Hong Kong scene where Batman glides from one building to the other and the distance seems accurate.
 * A minor plot hole emerges in The Dark Knight as a result. In Begins, Gotham is shown to have very wide rivers and a Manhattan-esque central island. In Knight, Joker makes his threat not to cross the bridges and tunnels (necessitating the ferries), but the shot used is the Chicago river - only a few hundred feet wide and easily swimmable. Indeed, the ferries shown would be long enough to use as a bridge.
 * 48 Hrs.; Chinatown is not "down the alley" from the Mission District.
 * In the climax of Guy Richie's Sherlock Holmes, characters somehow manage to run from the sewers of the Houses of Parliament to the top of the newly constructed tower bridge within minutes. The two land marks are miles apart.
 * In ~Planes, Trains and Automobiles~, Steve Martin and John Candy are taking a bus from Kansas to St. Louis... cue iconic shot of The Gateway Arch as the bus they are traveling on crosses the Mississippi River. Problem is, the bus is now traveling west from Illinois instead of east from Kansas.
 * Legally Blonde 2 takes place in Washington, D.C. Not a single scene was filmed there. Luckily for the filmmakers, plenty of states have state capitols that look very similar to the US capitol. They chose Illinois' and Utah's, then hung around Salt Lake City to film other scenes in the Energy Solutions Arena's offices.
 * Rocky II: During the opening credits, an ambulance takes Rocky from the (now-demolished) Spectrum over a Delaware River bridge (which would take you to New Jersey), into downtown Philadelphia, around City Hall twice, and to Pennsylvania Hospital. The actual route would be a straight shot 20 blocks up Broad Street, six blocks down Locust, and one block over. Even then, you'd pass several closer hospitals.
 * Blow Out: John Lithgow drags Nancy Allen onto a subway-surface trolley car at the 15th Street underground station. Cut to them climbing to street level at Penn's Landing, 15 blocks away. The subway-surface lines terminate at 13th Street. There is no underground station of any kind at Penn's Landing.
 * In Next the main character enters a building on Fremont Street, Las Vegas and then exits the building onto the main strip.
 * Wayne's World takes place in Aurora, Illinois. Near the beginning of the film Wayne & Garth are cruising around and pass the Spindle in Berwyn - a trip of almost an hour each way. Some joyride.
 * The King Kong rip-off A.P.E. was set in South Korea. For some reason, despite being filmed in Korea and being co-financed by a Korean film company, they did few establishing shots of Seoul. Instead, two characters simply sit in the backseat of a car and describe Seoul landmarks as they come (the main train/subway station, city hall, the capitol, etc.) In order to see all of these landmarks, they would spend a couple hours driving in different directions.
 * The Green Lantern film takes place in fictional Coast City, but there are a lot of recognizable New Orleans landmarks in several scenes. Then again, almost every DC Universe city is a disguised version of a "real world" city. (Just which city, though, is sometimes open to debate...)
 * In The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the Eighth Dimension has a number of these scattered throughout. For instance, palm trees are visible in front of what is alleged to be the New Brunswick, NJ police headquarters. And Grovers Mills, NJ -- in reality a rural area made up mostly of farmland and residential districts -- looks like a giant industrial park.
 * The Descent is supposedly set in the American south, but the flora in the external shots is glaringly incorrect, especially the overhead shots of the pine trees. It was filmed in Scotland, which has a completely different conifer species predominating.
 * Jingle All the Way is set in the Twin Cities, but occasionally can't decide which of the two cities it's in. In one scene, the action jumps from Rice Park (in downtown St. Paul) to background shots of downtown Minneapolis (about 9 miles away).
 * In The X Files Fight the Future, they try and convince the audience that downtown LA is downtown Dallas, and that north Texas is both undeveloped and desert, whereas in reality it's developed and grassland.
 * In Scary Movie 4 the characters come across video footage of Detroit before and after the alien attack (setting up a joke that nothing really had changed). Unfortunately the city in the footage was actually San Diego (with CGI blast damage added). San Diego and Detroit look nothing at all alike.
 * In Escape From L.A. Snake Plisskin flies a home-built hang glider from Griffith Park to a climactic final battle at the site of the former Disneyland in Anaheim in under 10 minutes. Mind you, these locations are roughly 30 miles apart.

Literature

 * Left Behind describes Turkey as being in Western Europe. Slacktivist's page includes a handy map to demonstrate that is not, in fact, the case.
 * Kafka's unfinished book "Amerika" features some serious geographical anomalies -- like the city of Boston being located "just across the Hudson River" from New York City, or having a character try to travel from New York to San Francisco by heading EAST. Scholars are divided as to whether this was intentional surrealism or Kafka just not doing his homework.
 * Twilight suffers from this horribly. For instance, Forks is described as being a gloomy town. The real Forks is just as sunny as any other town.
 * The story acts like Forks is every cliche about England having way to much rain and clouds in just one town all the time. Its more likely slightly overcast some of the time.
 * Then there's the infamous honeymoon on the "west coast of Brazil"...
 * In the first movie, which was filmed in Oregon, the scene at the river is clearly on the wrong side of the state borders.
 * Sherlock Holmes is a regular offender. Conan Doyle was a Scot with little knowledge of London, and it shows; it's quite impossible to establish the location of 221b Baker Street because Conan Doyle had no accurate knowledge of the area and simply made it up, and many of Holmes' journeys around London are no better. The "opium den" in Limehouse is clearly taken from generic period fiction.
 * Holmes also visits Cambridgeshire in "The Missing Three-Quarter" and walks in an afternoon between three villages which would represent a round trip of about forty miles; this is a rare example as most of his country locations are fictional places with generic orcharacter-based names like "Musgrave Hall", or like Hound of the Baskervilles based in locations whose names were well-known but with little actual details
 * the only accurate part of Holmes' journeys are his train trips, because Conan Doyle could presumably read Bradshaw ( a very popular railway guide of the time ) as well as anyone else
 * Rosemary Edgehill is atrocious on New York layout. In one of her "Twelve Treasures" fantasies, she puts the Arms & Armor collection in the basement (?) of the "Museum of Natural History"... and moves THAT to Museum Mile, when it is on the West Side.

Live Action TV

 * Happens occasionally on Bones, which is set in DC but filmed in California. This leads to such geographical wackiness as the team visiting a racetrack in the middle of what appears to be a desert...in Virginia.
 * The pilot episode of Bones - the very first establishing shot, in fact - shows an airplane coming down in Dulles Airport. The caption tells you that this is "Dulles International Airport, Washington, DC," and it shows a domed building (possibly the Jefferson Memorial, but it didn't look quite right) in the background, along with other clear signs of a large city. First of all, Dulles is not even in DC; it's in, well, Dulles, VA, which is almost on the edge of the DC area. It's not a particularly metropolitan area either, with plenty of open space around. Also, being near the edge of the DC area, there is no way you could see the Jefferson Memorial (or any other major DC landmark) from the airport. No, try driving another hour or so from there, depending on traffic of course. Now, the airport actually just outside DC would be Reagan National, but even from there, the most you could see is the top of the Washington Monument.
 * Metropolis, which is supposed to be near Smallville in this setting, has a dock.
 * The guys' apartment in The Big Bang Theory is supposed to be in the South Lake apartments, where you can see a pristine view of the Downtown Pasadena skyline. Though the angle is correct, that view would be blocked out by much taller office buildings.
 * Making matters worse, their address was stated in one episode as "2300 North Los Robles". Los Robles Avenue doesn't go that far north, and if it did, the apartment would actually be in neighboring Altadena.
 * And then in another episode, Leonard lies to Sheldon about using the bathroom at the gas station across the street in order to avoid explaining . Sheldon identifies said gas station as "The Colorado Boulevard Chevron". Colorado Boulevard divides north from south in Pasadena, so 2300 North could not possibly exist within walking distance of Colorado. This may be an intentional case of Where the Hell Is Springfield?.
 * There's also a fantasy sequence in which Sheldon imagines himself as the Flash, running all the way to the Grand Canyon from his apartment to scream in frustration. When leaving Pasadena, he runs across the Colorado Street Bridge, which is on the western edge of town. The Grand Canyon is in Arizona, east of California. (To be fair, the Flash doesn't necessarily need to take the most direct route, and there aren't really any identifiable landmarks on Pasadena's eastern boundary.)
 * Everybody Loves Raymond, set in Lynbrook, NY has an episode where Deborah wants to sell Girl Scout cookies in front of the busiest place in Lynbrook, a pizzeria, but is banned from doing so. However, the closest Pizzeria to Fowler Ave (which looks nothing like its TV counterpart) has a Coldstone and a movie theater within 500 feet of it, both of which are far busier than the pizzeria.
 * In ~It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia~, the exterior of Paddy's is often shown briefly from an angle where you can see a street sign in the background that looks just like one from Philly. Look closer. The sign says "Second." Numbered streets in Philly go "2nd," "3rd" and so on; the word is not written out. (The exterior was shot in LA)
 * Occurs to excess in 24, often as a consequence of the show's real-time format. In one particularly jarring example, Jack Bauer infiltrates a warehouse in North Hollywood and, upon climbing to the roof, is in downtown LA (with Union Station clearly visible nearby).
 * The most blatant ~They Just Didn't Care~ moment came in Season 4, where the Terrorminions hijack a nuclear missile transport and manage to lose the satellite tracking in the mountains... of IOWA.
 * Not quite so They Just Didn't Care. While the northeast corner of Iowa is not exactly "mountainous", it's not normally what you'd think when you think of Iowa. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Driftless_Area. Ironically, this same geological area extends partly into Illinois.
 * In the first episode of Season 2, President Palmer and his son are shown fishing in a large, empty lake in the middle of a pristine tranquil meadow at the foot of a snowcapped mountain. A subtitle reveals that they are in 'Lake Oswego, Oregon'. Lake Oswego is an affluent suburb just outside of Portland, the lake itself is surrounded by dozens of multi-million dollar houses, and there isn't a snowcapped mountain for a good 85 miles.
 * Another jarring one, from Season 3, has Jack travelling c. 70 miles in about 15 minutes. In a helicopter, which isn't capable of that speed.
 * How about when the terrorists ship their bio-weapon into the (non-existent) large scale cargo port at Alexandria, VA? Or when the frogmen gain access to The White House via the Potomac River?
 * The frogmen thing sorta makes some sense depending on how the sewers work out. There's a creek in DC called Tiber Creek that was canalized and then enclosed during the 19th century(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiber_Creek), which ran about where Constitution Avenue is today. So if it's still possible to get into the tunnel from the Potomac you could handwave a connection into existence.
 * In the episode of Angel where Angel and the gang visit Lorne in Las Vegas, several of the characters step out of the Tropicana casino (on the south side of the Las Vegas Strip)...and wind up on Fremont Street (with its distinctive lighted canopy) several miles to the northeast.
 * The Bill is set in East London (albeit a fictional part of it), but filmed in South London, with the frequent result that you see the trains of certain train companies go past that have no business being anywhere near East London (plus the fact that most National Rail lines in East London operate on overhead wires, not third rail). In "Killer on the Run", a character boards a north-bound Northern Line train at Charing Cross, gets off at the next stop and arrives in a mainline rail terminus. You'd have to go a few stops further along to reach one (Euston).
 * The show has frequent cases when it is clear that the characters are on the wrong side of the Thames.
 * An episode of the new Bionic Woman had a meeting arranged to take place at a sulphur plant on the waterfront...which would be instantly recognizable to anyone who has ever been in downtown Vancouver and looked across the harbour at North Vancouver.
 * In one episode of the Rebus series, John Rebus's car stalls out and starts smoking on a hill overlooking central Edinburgh. One cut later, and he deposits it somewhere west of Forth Bridge, roughly in the area of East Shore Wood, having apparently limped bloody miles in a smoking car. If the shot hadn't blatantly included the Forth Bridge and the Forth Rail Bridge (the position of the former beyond the latter makes his location very clear) then the scene wouldn't be so ridiculous in hindsight.
 * The frequent presence of lush greenery and vegetation, and moderately frequent rain, in desert Las Vegas on CSI (filming in LA, also a desert but heavily watered) is often a source of amused derision by show fans. Also, Geoff Duncan has written two articles on the geographical inaccuracy of two outside jobs, one in "Jackpot" and another in the 2004 season premiere.
 * Actually, most of Los Angeles has Cool-summer Mediterranean climate, with some parts of the county(Pasadena, etc) getting well over 20 inches of rain per year due to the rain shadow.
 * There's a third unlikely/impossible "outside job" where the team travel to the Nevada town of Sparks (which is, in reality, adjacent to Reno, not Las Vegas). Not only is it in a different county and therefore outside of their jurisdiction... it's also eight hours away.
 * Iconic soap opera Dallas has an absolutely ludicrous commute from South Fork Ranch (3700 Hogge Road, Parker TX 75002) to downtown Dallas. They go down US-75, past the two gold buildings (never adding the brown-brick hotel that was built in between), and somehow enter downtown by going east on the I-30 Causeway. A two-hour commute each way. Always inspires laughs from Texans.
 * Dead Like Me is nominally set in Seattle, but they never made any effort to disguise the fact that it was actually Vancouver. They often would do beautiful pans across the city and its landmarks.
 * Lampshaded in Due South, which is set in Chicago but filmed in Toronto. When they did an episode set in Toronto... they filmed it in Chicago. That's fair, isn't it?
 * In an episode of The Facts of Life, set in Peekskill, New York, Mrs. Garrett brings in the newspaper -- the Los Angeles Times, which is not usually found on the porch in New York.
 * Averted in Forever Knight. The Pilot Movie took place in the usual Unnamed American City, but the series, filmed in Toronto, was explicitly set in Toronto.
 * The substitution of Vancouver for an unnamed city in the US Northwest (presumably Seattle) is so common that the term "Seacouver" is the setting's unofficial name. The Sentinel and Highlander the Series are examples.
 * In the case of The Movie upon which Highlander the Series was based, London doubled for New York.
 * Frasier - No building in Seattle has the view seen from Frasier's window. The shot was taken from the top of a cliff and was chosen so the Space Needle could be prominently seen from the window.
 * In the pre-air pilot of Fringe, two characters visit a sprawling, isolated storage facility in "Back Bay, Massachusetts." Back Bay is actually a high-end neighborhood in Boston, mainly full of rich people and expensive shops, with a significant lack of storage facilities of any kind. The version of the pilot that eventually aired changed the title card to Chelsea, which is more believable, but the previous scene still has a character claiming that the "Back Bay police" reported suspicious activity in the area.
 * Also, the show frequently uses title cards that claim shots are taking place at Harvard University. In fact, the show has moved production so many time that perhaps as many as five other universities have doubled for Harvard: none of these buildings resemble anything like the architecture found anywhere on Harvard's campus. During the majority of the first season, when the series was filmed in New York, Yale doubled for Harvard! This also explains why the appearance of the outside of the building where the lab is located has changed over time.
 * In one episode of the second season, Olivia and Peter go to visit a woman at her house in "Beacon Hill, Massachusetts". In a mistake much like the Back Bay one above, we are shown an evergreen-filled suburban neighborhood of well-detached houses. In reality, Beacon Hill is another high-end Boston neighborhood that is made up entirely of old brick townhouses on narrow, hilly cobblestone streets.
 * And in Season 1 episode 5, "Power Hungry", supposedly takes place entirely in the medium-sized city of Worcester, Massachusetts. I happen to be from a suburb of Hartford, Connecticut, which is somewhat smaller but has a distinct skyline with more skyscrapers than many other cities in New England. The beautiful aerial establishing shot labeled "Worcester, Massachusetts" is actually of Hartford! Presumably this is because, even though Worcester is the third-largest New England city, it's very much lacking in a city-scape skyline.
 * An early episode also has a prospective Pattern event ostensibly happen in South Station, but is filmed in a claustrophobic building that doesn't remotely resemble the high-vaulted and open South Station. On top of that "The Box" has a scene take place in Kent Street Station, underground. Except Kent Street is on the C line, above ground, and isn't a station so much as, well, a stop.
 * Happy Days frequently displayed palm trees in what was supposed to be Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
 * I think you're thinking of Laverne and Shirley, which moved to California in its later seasons. And of course the iconic episode where Fonzie did something that changed everything. (He did end up moving to a "singles community" in the final episode with a vaguely Polynesian theme and fake palm trees-- a sad end for what was once the coolest man in America.)
 * The original Hawaii Five-O averts this (somewhat) by being mostly filmed in Hawaii. (Exception: "The Singapore File," where Hawaii played Singapore - although the two-part "Once Upon A Time" and the two-hour episodes "Nine Dragons" and "The Year Of The Horse," respectively set mainly in California, Hong Kong and Singapore, averted this trope.) The reboot not so much, despite also being filmed in Hawaii.
 * Like rushing on to Ford Island to get to a ship docked in Honolulu Harbor.
 * Someone in a SUV gets attacked near Hilton Hawaiian Village after passing Aloha Tower on the way to Hickam AFB.
 * A chase sequence featuring an escaped convict shows him driving towards the airport, taking the airport exit off H-1 (which would put him about 2 minutes away from the check-in lobby, not including time to park the car), then turning around at a roadblock on a four-lane road that clearly isn't anywhere near the airport (probably in Leeward Oahu, along Kualakai Parkway), followed by him traveling along the H-3 freeway. The convict then somehow manages to exit the freeway in the middle of Halawa Valley (something impossible to do between Halawa Interchange and the Harano tunnels, short of pulling to the side of the road and jumping off the viaduct), and hijacks a Makani Kai tour helicopter even though said company is located near the airport itself and there aren't any heliports in Halawa Valley. The rest of the episode was reasonably good about avoiding this trope, which only makes it worse.
 * Two words: Waikiki Bay.
 * Lex Brodie appears to have relocated their Honolulu store from Queen St. to Ala Wai Blvd.
 * The McGarrett house is in the middle of Ala Moana Beach Park.
 * Pretty much everything on Heroes is filmed in or near Los Angeles, including the fictional town of Costa Verde.
 * Little House On the Prairie: Note the title, taken directly from the series of autobiographical children's novels, with its reference to the lush, rolling grasslands characteristic of much of central North America. The TV series is specifically set about midway through the trek, in Minnesota. Anybody surprised that the onscreen scenery routinely featured Southern California-style mountains, trees, scrub-brush, chaparral, etc? Didn't think so.
 * Lost, naturally enough, uses Honolulu as a stand-in for such diverse cities as Seoul and LA and Sydney and Edinburgh. One scene with Jin and Sun set in Korea takes place along the distinctive (and famously dirty) Ala Wai Canal. In another scene with Kate set somewhere in the southern US, palm trees are visible (which might be plausible for Florida, granted) and several buses drive by with the distinctive livery of Honolulu's transit service.
 * An episode of Mantracker "Jim and Nichola" is filmed in Carcross, Yukon, Canada; but while the highly detailed zero-in GPS map is clean and linear, the actual scenery and locale are decidedly not so. The episode jumps back and forth between Montana Mountain and the south-east side of Carcross, to the dunes and desert and beach on the other side with absolutely no linear travel whatsoever, and there is no sign of the town itself, though they would've been absolutely forced to cross one of the bridges there or likely drown in the powerful currents of either Windy Arm or Bennett Lake. Additionally, the GPS map itself is nearly 100% inaccurate, and none of the focus spots matches any of the locations actually filmed.
 * Midnight Man - not only is Westminster tube station not served by the Northern line, the Jubilee line platforms there have glass barriers for safety. It's clearly the closed Charing Cross Jubilee platforms being used.
 * Though set in San Francisco, Monk is mostly filmed in Los Angeles. This was painfully evident when Monk goes to a train station and both the external and internal shots clearly identify it as Union Station in Downtown LA.
 * To be fair, it's a much nicer train station.
 * Another episode referenced the San Bruno train station, which on screen was next to a hilly wooded area where they found a body. You probably couldn't really hide a body near the San Bruno train station, since there's a densely built neighborhood about 50 feet away from the train tracks... on flat ground... with no palm trees.
 * One episode of the US version of The Office had the cast visit Lake Scranton for a beach party. There is no beach or sandy shore at Lake Scranton, which is on a hillside and surrounded by trees, a result of California Doubling.
 * Spoofed in Police Squad!, where the Roman Colosseum and Leaning Tower of Pisa are back-projected during a trip to "Little Italy."
 * Power Rangers has been filmed for the last several years in New Zealand, with geography that is obviously not North American. And the seasons reversed. Some Lampshade Hanging has been employed with minor characters being "sent to New Zealand" to get rid of them. Of course, through the show's entire history, Stock Footage obviously shot in Japan has been commonplace, leading to the overwhelming prevalence of Japanese cars (not Everybody Owns a Ford in this universe), Japanese signage, a usually large number of HOV and bicycle lanes, and extras who spontaneously become Asian.
 * The 15th season went even further in their mistakes as the Rangers were constantly visiting other countries in their quest. They visit the Florida Everglades which, unlike the real place, has a very noticeable mountain range in the background.
 * On another occasion they visit Stonehenge in Britain. The field in which it's set is supposed to be flat, with a fence surrounding the structure itself and two roads very close by. Neither the roads nor the fence can be seen in the episode and the field is fairly hilly.
 * When launching one particular jet zord from their base in California, Mt. Fuji can be seen in the background.
 * In a possibly karmic turnabout the ending to Gekiranger was also filmed (at least in part) in New Zealand. With a Bank New Zealand logo clearly visible on one storefront.
 * Magiranger's opening credits were also filmed in New Zealand.
 * Everything in Primeval happens in or around London, according to their website. Including Episode One, which was set and filmed in the Forest of Dean (in Gloucestershire!).
 * They're not even trying in season 4, where Matt's flat has a view of Dublin's Smithfield, including the very distinctive streetlights, Jameson's distillery chimney and LUAS stop.
 * An old Seven Days episode had Parker chasing the Villain of the Week through Washington, DC. Specifically, from the White House (across the street from the Capitol!), past the Washington Monument, down the steps of the Jefferson Memorial, and back to the White House, where he collapses out of breath. You would be, too, if you'd just run 5 miles in 12 seconds.
 * In the first episode of Shoebox Zoo (little-known BBC kids' programme), the protagonist and her father leave a small independent cinema (The Dominion, a real cinema in Edinburgh, Scotland) and in the very next shot are walking down Cockburn Street two and a half miles away.
 * Simon and Simon, set in San Diego, but mostly filmed in Los Angeles, aside from a few inserts here and there. And they did things like taking Balboa Avenue (which does exist in S.D.) to reach Balboa Park (which also exists, but Balboa Avenue does not go to it, or past it, or anywhere near it). Oops.
 * Sliders -- nominally set in San Francisco, yet clearly actually filmed in Vancouver -- is notorious for this. One memorable example features the nonexistent Van Ness "BART" station.
 * In the premiere, Quinn leaves his Midwestern-looking neighborhood (you don't see many brick houses in California, for a reason) and jogs across Golden Gate Park to the Berkeley campus. Meanwhile Rembrandt, needing to get to Candlestick Park -- which is due south of his home on Telegraph Hill -- in a hurry, proceeds due west on Lombard Street.
 * In fairness to the show, however, production was shifted to Hollywood from season three onwards. Cue California Doubling (though most of the show still had them basically in California).
 * In Stargate SG-1 (filmed in Vancouver) episode "Memento Mori", Cameron Mitchell is on a highway presumably in Colorado (as that's where Cheyenne Mountain is). The roadsign says "Surrey", and there's no Surrey in Colorado.
 * In fact, every time SG-1 does scenes outside the base and not in generic wilderness invokes this trope. To a Colorado Springs (the city at the foot of Cheyenne Mountain) native, the gas station shots from season 6 episode "Sight Unseen," and to a lesser extent, the whole of season 8 episode "Affinity," shatter the suspension of disbelief. The shots of the Cheyenne Mountain Complex entrance, however, are spot on, (being actual footage of the location).
 * The problem with their use of actual footage is that the same truck seems to enter the complex every day for ten years.
 * Lampshaded repeatedly both on SG-1 and Atlantis when characters will point out that all of the planets they visit seem to look an awful lot like Canada. Both shows film in and around Vancouver.
 * Word of God is that they tried to put a Canadian reference into each episode, because so much of it was filmed in Canada.
 * The "oceanside" amusement park in the Title Sequence of Step by Step was actually 6 miles inland.
 * Just so that you'd understand - an amusement park (and especially its wooden roller coaster) built that close to an ocean or body of water like that would have a very hard time staying in existence against Mother Nature and plain old Laws of Physics - sandy beaches aren't exactly the most stable type of land to build roller coasters on, and said roller coaster and quite likely large portions of the park itself would be in danger of being washed away, regardless of whether the area is hurricane-prone or not. That said, there are amusement parks that are built close to bodies of water such as Lakeside Amusement Park in Denver, Colorado or the famous Coney Island Amusement Park in New York, New York; the former is built near a mundane man-made lake (as its name implies) and both are built on solid, paved ground.
 * And Coney Island features a wooden roller coaster that's been around since 1927.
 * Not to mention the famous Pleasure Beaches at Blackpool and Southport in the UK. They aren't actually on the beach, but they're very close to it.
 * The Giant Dipper wooden roller coaster has been on the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk in California since 1924, and an identically named wooden coaster has been on Mission Beach in San Diego, California since 1925.
 * Supernatural often has the brothers Winchester driving from place to place in a ridiculously short space of time - including, in one episode, Dean getting from Kansas to Colorado and back in a couple of hours.
 * Well, the two states do border each other, so it's more a question of where in Colorado and Kansas they're traveling between.
 * There was a great one in Season Five where the boys manage to go from Elk Creek, Nebraska to Alliance, Nebraska and back in the space of an afternoon. It's about an eight-hour drive one-way (six if you're heavy on the gas and light on the rest-stops.)
 * Also spoofed in one episode where the brothers Winchester visit a Hollywood studio and Sam comments that the place looks like Canada. Supernatural is, of course, filmed in Vancouver.
 * Actually averted in one episode. They arrive in Portland, OR, and are eating donuts out of a distinctive pink box, the trademark of a locally famous company. (Then played straight when they have to hunt through the sewers for something that would normally hide in tunnels, despite Portland having large and distinctive tunnels underneath most of the city.)
 * Sam also once managed to get to Indiana from California in the span of a few hours... which would have taken at least thirty-five, give or take.
 * Third Watch is an interesting case. It is set and filmed in New York, but the 55th Precinct seems to cover the whole city. (Filming took place across all 5 boroughs.)
 * The street containing the police station and firehouse is in Long Island City, Queens.
 * The "5x" Precincts are usually found in The Bronx.
 * An episode of the UK crime drama Trial and Retribution features a character landing at London City Airport. However, the place has grass - the real London City is in the middle of East London and pretty near the Canary Wharf skyscrapers.
 * Especially egregious because the main reason anyone flies to London City rather than Heathrow, Gatwick or Stansted is because it's handy for the business district.
 * An episode of The Unit set in London Town has three errors - using an establishing shot of the MI6 HQ and stating it is that of MI5, having St. Stephen's Tower (aka Big Ben) visible at ground level in the City of London and the wrong licence plate format for the UK.
 * The format changed from A123XYZ (or ABC123Z if really old) to AB51XYZ in 2001, and there are still loads of cars with the old registration plate format. Or maybe it was a foreign car, they're not unknown in London?
 * On Will and Grace, set in New York, Will's policeman boyfriend Vince receives a page to participate in a "187" investigation. He is pleased to be called in to investigate a murder. But 187 is the California police code for murder.
 * The short-lived TV show Wonderfalls was set in Niagara Falls, New York. Every shot of the waterfall depicted in the show, and the American-side gift shop where the main character works, is from the Ontario side. Additionally, in one episode, they are shown traveling to Canada through a border crossing surrounded by land on all sides, which implies that they drove a few hundred miles northeast or southwest to avoid using any of the Buffalo-Niagara area crossings, all of which involve bridges over the Niagara River.
 * The DVD commentary points out a scene between Jaye and her sister: an in-person (not phone) conversation where, because of location issues, Jaye's part was filmed in the US and her sister is standing in what is recognizably the Canadian side. Maybe they just have excellent hearing?
 * The first 5 seasons of The X-Files were filmed in Vancouver. On David Duchovny's insistence, they relocated to Los Angeles. At least a few fans complained that the new, sunny location didn't have the same gloomy atmosphere as its more northern predecessor.
 * One episode of The X-Files features a train rolling through an area of jagged hills, scrub brush, and very little green vegetation of any sort. In Iowa, of all places, where basically the entire state is green because if there's available land, somebody's planted corn or soybeans on top of it.
 * The episode "Chimera" is set in Vermont in early April. The establishing shot opens onto an Easter picnic. The grass is a vivid bright green, and the children are running around in short-sleeved shirts and jeans or shorts, as are their parents. This is hilarious for any Vermont native (any New England native) because the temperature in Vermont in early April hovers in the mid-30's and there is usually still a good amount of snow on the ground. And even if there isn't snow, the grass is certainly not green. It's called "mud season" for a reason. This seems so ironic, too, for the episode, since other details--like area code and zip code (the fictional town Bethany is given real town Bethel's zip code) were correct. And of course, the vegetation is all off for Vermont, the result of filming in California.
 * The season 2 episode "Die Hand Die Verletzt" is set in New Hampshire, with many shots filmed in the woods. There is only one problem. Seasons 1-5 were filmed in Vancouver, which has a temperate rainforest feel, while New England has a temperate broadleaf/mixed forest. In other words, those who live in New England can easily spot that most of the trees and ferns simply do not grow in New Hampshire.
 * The McCloud episode "Night of the Shark" was set (and filmed) in Sydney, Australia (unlike the later "London Bridges," which despite involving London wasn't shot there). One scene shows McCloud dashing across the Sydney Harbour Bridge into the city centre. Except that he is going across the bridge in the wrong direction and would actually be heading away from the city.
 * An episode of Psych opens with Shawn telling Chief Vick that's he's going skiing, and she asks where he'd ski in the middle of summer; cut to Whistler, just over a hundred kilometers from Vancouver, with typical summer lows around seven degrees (the resort is used for bikes in the summer). Most of the action takes place in the even warmer seaside Vancouver, because Shawn and Gus went there (again, roughly a hundred kilometers away) upon seeing a criminal instead of going to the Whistler police, for no obvious reason. Even so, everyone acts like it's below freezing for the entire episode, even during the day, when it would likely be around twenty.
 * Maybe they didn't realize that those temperatures were in Celsius? Maybe they just looked up the weather there and thought it was in Fahrenheit? 'Cause they acted like it was around 20 F.
 * Psych is filmed in Vancouver. So someone should have worked it out.
 * They knew. It was a lampshade on this trope.
 * An episode of ~30 Rock~ had Jack and Liz travel to Stone Mountain, Georgia (Kenneth's home town) to scout out salt-of-the-earth 'Real American' talent. The real Stone Mountain is firmly within the orbit of metropolitan Atlanta and has a population that's mainly African-American, but the show depicts it as part of Hee Haw Land.
 * The Sopranos is actually quite good about their locations, as any Joisey troper can tell you. They do tend to play fast and loose with driving times, though.
 * The opening to Newhart is not filmed in Vermont, but near Squam Lake, New Hampshire.
 * Except for the exterior of the inn, which is actually in E. Middlebury, Vt, on the other side of the state from N.H.
 * The US version of Queer as Folk was set in Pittsburgh, complete with a Gayborhood centered around Liberty Avenue. There is in fact a Liberty Avenue in Pittsburgh, but it is not a gay village (Pittsburgh doesn't even have one), nor does it look even remotely as it is depicted in the show. The series was filmed in Toronto. Lampshaded in the episode where some of the main cast actually travel to Toronto and walk along Church Street remarking how similar it looks to Liberty Avenue, even pointing out that there is a bar called Woody's, just like the (fictional) one in Pittsburgh (Woody's is a real bar in Toronto.) Also in the same episode: All Canadians Are Polite, shown when two big Leather Men bump into Debbie on the street and then apologize profusely.
 * A Season 1 episode of Warehouse 13 had Peter and Myke travel to Chicago to investigate a series of unusual bank robberies. One outdoor scene showed streetcar tracks and a blue streetsign for York Av., Chicago, like most US cities, abandoned streetcars many years ago, and the streetsigns there are green, not blue. The shot is a dead giveaway for Toronto, where the series is filmed.
 * Several Season 2 establishing shots for Secret Service Headquarters are actually of the Colorado Supreme Court building in Denver, Colorado.
 * In one episode of Murder, She Wrote, a character is referred to as coming from a small town 20 miles east of Sheboygan, Wisconsin. Twenty miles east of Sheboygan would put you deep in Lake Michigan; and no, there isn't even an inhabited island in the vicinity.
 * Note to the makers of Rubicon: The Acela train from New York to Washington, D.C. leaves from Penn Station, not Grand Central.
 * Life Unexpected: Good news: The producers got pretty much every detail about Portland (the show's setting) correct. Bad news: That's pretty much where all the effort went.
 * In Angels in America, Joe's mother is standing outside a subway entrance with a sign identifying it as the Clark Street Station. There is a Clark Street Station, and the correct lines were shown ... but the real station has no entrances on the sidewalk. More blatantly, the dialogue suggested she was somewhere other than downtown Brooklyn, where Clark Street is.
 * In a season 1 episode of Haven, there is a wide panning shot of Haven Harbor in Maine. A big ol' Canadian flag can be seen flapping in the breeze (since it's really Nova Scotia).
 * It is possible to see Canadian flags flying in Maine, especially as you get closer to Canada.
 * In NBC's made for TV movie Atomic Train, we see several shots of what is supposedly the Denver skyline, populated by such logos as, Canada Trust or the Bank of Nova Scotia.
 * Additionally, the main plot of the movie is that a train is running away on a 300 mile downhill grade into Denver. In reality, the first roughly 250 miles of the track into Denver runs mostly uphill.
 * Touched By an Angel was based in Salt Lake City, so a lot of the "Average American Landscapes" in the show is northern Utah, which actually hosts varied geography, ranging from salt plains to snow-capped mountains with ski resorts.
 * Boston-area residents were amused when car chases in Spenser: For Hire frequently took a corner at high speed and suddenly found themselves on a street on the other side of the city. Averted in certain episodes, when locations were correctly identified as used as most locals would. One example would be what was supposed to be a romantic picnic near an old stone grist mill while staying at a nearby hotel; the mill is in Sudbury and is attached to the Wayside Inn- a popular spot for weddings and other romantic getaways.
 * Criminal Minds episode "Exit Wounds" supposedly takes place in Franklin, Alaska. The fishing ships in the opening would imply that Franklin is on the ocean. However, Franklin is on a creek, hundreds of miles away from the ocean, and more importantly, is uninhabited. The closest town, Chicken, had a grand total population of 17 in the year 2000. They also mention a Lake Lafayette, and in a state with over three million lakes, there are none named Lafayette. Most TV shows and movies do not to do research when it comes to Alaska, much less do they ever film there.
 * Taking place all over the US but being filmed in LA gives Criminal Minds this problem quite often. In Roadkill they even invented a whole highway.
 *  ~Spooks: Code 9~  was filmed in Yorkshire, so when they needed a flashback scene for someone driving from London, they just used a nearby motorway junction. The direction of the shot implies it was the series' actual location was bombed.
 * Even live sporting events aren't immune from Television Geography. In September 2011, ESPN aired what they claimed was a shot of the skyline of Madison, Wisconsin during a football game between the University of Wisconsin and the University of Nevada-Las Vegas. However, as CNBC's Darren Rovell noted, it was actually stock footage of the skyline in Minneapolis, Minnesota -- 230 miles northwest of Madison.
 * What made it even funnier is that it wasn't the first time that Minneapolis substituted for Madison -- the same mistake was made in 2008 on a website. But not just any website... a website run by the state of Wisconsin.
 * The Hardy Boys Nancy Drew Mysteries: the episode "Voodoo Doll" is just painful. Despite having a stock footage opening shot of the real Bourbon Street in New Orleans during Mardi Gras...the Hollywood backlot not only didn't bother to make buildings that looked like New Orleans, but the ep also refers to addresses that don't exist and has the Hardys wandering through a wide, spacious, bury-them-below-ground cemetery...never mind that cemeteries in NOLA in the Quarter are all bury-them-above-ground due to the high water table and jammed-packed.
 * Dog the Bounty Hunter seems to have suffered as of late this trope. For example, during Baby Lyssa's arrest episode, it appears that Leland and Beth are going in opposite directions from where they're intending to go on the H-1 Freeway via the dialogue. And when they went to Maui to apprehend a fugitive, they seem to be on streets that are blocks away from their intended locations.

Music

 * Canadian folk song "This Land of Ours" contains the line: "I have walked on the sand of the Grand Banks of Newfoundland." The Grand Banks are a site where ocean currents converge and are especially good for fishing; you may well have walked on the sand there, but it would have required SCUBA gear and significant weights.
 * Billy Joel's song "The Ballad of Billy The Kid" includes the lines "And his daring life of crime/Made him a legend in his time/East and west of the Rio Grande." Years later, Joel shamefacedly admitted bungling his geography -- the Rio Grande flows west to east, and you can only be north or south of it.

Tabletop Games

 * The Twilight 2000 adventure module "The Black Madonna" is supposedly set in Czestochowa in Poland.
 * Though, to be fair, apparently some writers did go to Krakow. In the middle of Cold War. To write a gamebook. Twenty years of post-Communist development and a conspicuous lack of World War III later, the geography and some of the descriptions are still recognisable.
 * The Werewolf: The Apocalypse module "Rite of Passage" appears to be set in some scrunched-up alternate version of Canada that is barely the size of Mexico and bears little resemblance to the real one. Among other things, it describes a village in northern Saskatchewan as being "nestled in the fog-shrouded mountains" and "mere 150 miles from Toronto".

Theater

 * There is "The Winter's Tale" with its infamous scene set on "The seacoast of Bohemia"
 * This is easily explained as a simple reversal of setting from the book it was based on ("Pandosto or the Triumph of Time" by Robert Greene) which has the action move from Bohemia to Sicily, rather than Sicily to Bohemia. A seacoast of Sicily makes perfect sense...Bohemia not so much.

Video Games

 * The opening cutscene for Resident Evil 2 shows a sign for "Grady's Inn" with a 212 area code, which is exclusive to Manhattan.
 * Resistance 2 has a secret military bunker on Angel Island when you exit the bunker The Bay Bridge has suspiciously been painted red.
 * Then again, the series is set in an Alternate Universe, with the point of divergence from ours being around the 1900s (the bridge's construction began in 1933)
 * In a mild subversion, the Shibuya featured in The World Ends With You is mostly identical to the real Shibuya, but with the names of many stores and buildings changed due to copyright issues (e.g. "Towa Records" instead of Tower Records).
 * Parasite Eve takes place in all sorts of New York landmarks, such as Central Park and the Museum of National History. While the general feel of the places are surprisingly accurate, they play merry hell with the layout, obviously in an attempt to RPG-ize it.
 * Chinatown doesn't look anything at all like Manhattan's Chinatown, or any other in NYC. Then there's the three East River crossings all looking like copypasted Brooklyn Bridges. For added hilarity, there's subway trains running across them, when in reality the Brooklyn Bridge is the only one of the three which doesn't have subway tracks, due to the bridge's age.
 * In Prototype, Manhattan is located in the middle of what appears to be a large bay instead of between 3 rivers, so that all other landmasses are too far to reach despite the Player Character's quite significant aerial movement capabilities.
 * There is an arcade game showing a scene of a helicopter flying through massive skyscrapers and listing the location as "Green Bay, Wisconsin". The tallest building in Green Bay is the 10-story St. Vincent's Hospital, as seen in this picture of the skyline.
 * Beautifully averted in Grand Theft Auto IV, which managed to capture the essence of New York City and most of its neighborhoods perfectly, to the point that some New Yorkers, when traveling around the city, will recognize areas from rampaging through them in GTAIV.
 * The trope's played straight in the stand-ins for the outer boroughs. While the landmarks themselves are portrayed accurately, and the look and feel of the neighborhoods is correct (enough that it made this NYC native troper homesick), there's a lot of almost 24-esque condensed geographical weirdness going on. Grand Army Plaza is not, in fact, a stone's throw from Coney Island. Then there's the complete absence of Staten Island, but most New Yorkers are cool with that.
 * Pokémon Black and White's map based on New York. The Mons...not so much. These include bison and a weird thing that is supposed to be based on the Nazca lines but looks like a mobile.
 * Similarly, the original games had a map based on Tokyo and the Mons included the platypus-like Psyduck and the Rafflesia-like Vileplume, among other not-Japanese natives.
 * The 1983 arcade game Moto Race USA. Race stages alternated between urban and desert zones, which were mostly suitable, except, for the leg between St. Louis and Chicago, Illinois was transformed into a desert.

Western Animation
"Lisa: "Aw, haven't we stood in five different states long enough?"
 * Lampshaded in Assy McGee. The series supposedly takes place in Exeter, New Hampshire, a small town, but it is depicted as a crime-ridden metropolis.
 * Not exactly geography, but in one episode of Gargoyles, King Arthur enters Westminster Abbey...by a door that does not exist. The Chapel of Henry the VII is recognisable enough, but the rather significant King Edward's Chair is on the wrong side, against a wall that also does not exist (the chair, at least, did still contain the Stone of Scone at the time the episode would've been written, however).
 * Averted in The Simpsons, which takes great care to get geography down accurately when they visit a major city and to include proper landmarks; for instance, having been released from prison in Tokyo, they are seen to walk away from the Tokyo Police Headquarters (a very distinctive building).
 * Of course, the layout of Springfield itself changes so much the place can't possibly have a definite map at this point.
 * And Springfield is somehow in a state that borders on Ohio, Nevada, Maine, and Kentucky, all at once.
 * All at one point too with a recent episode
 * Which was a Shout-Out Brick Joke to an earlier episode ("Itchy & Scratchy Land" ), where the Simpsons stop at Five Corners National Monument (a parody of the real-life Four Corners Monument) on their way to the park.

Homer: (petulantly) "No.""


 * It appears to be in eastern North America, since the log went through Yellowstone to get to San Francisco. (How this would happen with the Continental Divide is beyond the reach of this wiki.) And it's on a coast. We also know that it has both 636 (an area code for Missouri) and 939 (an area code for Puerto Rico) area codes.
 * Danville on Phineas and Ferb is within driving distance of Mt. Rushmore for a day trip, yet is also on the ocean.

Real Life

 * During a federal election leaders' debate, then-Canadian Alliance leader Stockwell Day made a reference to jobs flowing south "like the Niagara River." As was gleefully pointed out to him in most newspapers the next day, the Niagara River flows north.
 * This is Hilarious in Hindsight, because jobs have been steadily flowing north out of Niagara for decades.
 * Many people, most notably former governor general Michaëlle Jean, have mistakenly referred to the view of the Rocky Mountains from Vancouver. Those would be on the other side of the province, actually. The mountains around Vancouver are the North Shore Mountains, part of the Pacific Ranges.