Outlook 2016 command line switches. Free Download Age Of Empires 3 PC game full version ISO setup with direct download links highly compressed. You can also download Age Of Empires III full version game for PC Android APK+Data OBB files free.
Age Of Empires 3 is absolutely off the charts, there has never been a game released like this with perfect precisproton. The game is finally progressing towards the new age, where European colonizatproton and civilisatproton takes place. In Free Download Age Of Empires 3 PC Game, players will continue to play the sotryline mode in the offline game. The game starts from a town-hall or from a town located at the center of a newly developed civilisatproton. Players in the beginning can choose to play different ages of Age Of Empires III. In Free Download Age Of Empires 3 PC Game, players at the beginning or starting of the game will have limited troops and resources but later players can develop their economy and promote their specific civilizatproton related business.
Players in Free Download Age Of Empires 3 PC Game, can choose to play three different acts which are Blood, Ice and Steel. Each act in Age Of Empires 3 has its own way of progressing in the game. Free Download Age Of Empires 3 PC Game also includes eight strong empires that are Spanish, British, French, Portuguese, Russian, Dutch, German and the famous Ottoman Empire. Players can also continue to play the Vikings Age, which is indeed another great age in Free Download Age Of Empires 3 PC Game.
Free Download Age Of Empires 3 PC Game Features:
Great Civilizations
New Empires Included
Viking Battle For Asgard Will Also Be Available In DLC
Mind blowing Age Of Empires III Visual Effects
1 :: Operating System :: Windows 7/8.1/10 2 :: Processor: Intel Core 2 Duo/AMD or better 3 :: Ram :: 2 GB RAM 4 :: DirectX: Version 10 5 :: Graphics:: NVIDIA GeForce GT 640/AMD Radeon HD 6 :: Space Storage:: 6 GB space
OR
Age of Empires III (sometimes abbreviated AoE III) is a real-time strategy (RTS) game developed by Microsoft Corporation’s Ensemble Studios and published by Microsoft Game Studios. The Mac version was ported over and developed by Destineer’s MacSoft Games and published by Destineer and MacSoft Games. The PC Version was released on October 18, 2005 in North America and November 4, 2005 in Europe, while the Mac version was released on November 21, 2006 in North America and September 29, 2006 in Europe. An N-Gage version of the game developed by Glu Mobile was released on April 28, 2009. It is the third game of the Age of Empires series and the sequel to Age of Empires II: The Age of Kings. The game portrays the European colonization of the Americas, between approximately 1492 and 1850 AD (expanded in Age of Empires III: The WarChiefs to 1876). There are eight European civilizations to play within the game. Age of Empires III has made several innovations in the series, in particular with the addition of the “Home City”, which combines real-time strategy and role-playing game features. Two expansion packs have been released: the first, Age of Empires III: The WarChiefs, was released on October 17, 2006, and introduced three Native American civilizations; the second, Age of Empires III: The Asian Dynasties, was released on October 23, 2007, and included three Asian civilizations. Age of Empires III has sold over 2 million copies as of May 2008. As well as receiving favorable reviews, it has garnered awards, including GameSpy’s “Best RTS game of 2005”, and was one of the best-selling games of 2005. In 2007, Age of Empires III was the seventh best-selling computer game, with over 313,000 copies sold that year.
System= Pentium IV CPU 1.7 GHz RAM= 512 MB Size= 565 MB Video Memory= 64 MB OS= Windows XP Windows Vista Windows 7 and Windows 8
Password= www.muhammadniaz.net Download Links Here
The other nine countries of South America lost the game.
Age Of Empires 3 Highly Compressed Kgb Download
'Where did all those majestic cliffs go in the interim 500 years?'
— The Nostalgia Chick on the towering cliffs of coastal Virginia in Pocahontas.
Advertisement:
A writer may want to set a story in a location, but that doesn't mean they want or need to be accurate. This form of Artistic License can happen in a number of ways. The most common seems to be setting a story in a particular city without consulting a map, thus placing locations that are nowhere near one another quite close by, underestimating the time it would take to get from one to another, and sometimes transplanting whole landmarks from somewhere else entirely.
Lack of knowledge of regional climate or local architecture can also be glaringly obvious. A show set in suburban Cleveland should notlook like Southern California. Often the lack of knowledge beyond common National Stereotypes results in a Hollywood Atlas or worse. This is often used in a stereotypical way, since well Viewers Are Morons, the popular image of a country or region's geography is used rather than the actual one.
Advertisement:
This trope may not be obvious to anyone unfamiliar with the locale in question, but anyone who lives there will spot it right away, and when it's bad enough it can destroy the believability of the entire project or at least make the filmmakers look lazy. In medieval and older works, this trope is a sign that the story was known in places far removed from where it originated.
Compare Television Geography. If the writer intentionally has a character make geography mistakes, then that's a case of Global Ignorance. Artistic License – Astronomy has some examples of this trope, only in space. Also, for geography that's explicitly fictional but still unrealistic, see Patchwork Map.
Advertisement:
Examples:
open/close all folders
The 'Junkface' ad from Neutrogena mentions 'provinces, territories, and Nunavut', fails to include the border separating Nunavut from the Northwest Territories, and the eastern regions of Newfoundland, Prince Edward Island, and Cape Breton are completely absent from the map.
An ad for the U.S. Postal Service tying in with the release of The Amazing Spider-Man 2 showed Spidey picking up a package at the main post office in Manhattan, swinging past the Queensboro Bridge, and delivering the package to a man at the Ziegfeld Theater. Except the bridge is north and east of both locations — quite a bit east, in fact, as in the other side of Manhattan.
In the 1980s, in a year when the World Science Fiction Convention was held in Brighton in Sussex, the announcement of it in magazines claimed Brighton to be 'near London'. Maybe it's because Britain is smaller than the USA, or because it has a higher population density (especially in Southern England), but the British don't regard a place 60 miles away as 'near'.
Actually, Koro-Sensei from Assassination Classroom passed the Philippines the first time he crossed the world in his drawing song. It's Indonesia he crossed when crossing back to Dubai. This inaccuracy only exists in the anime adaptation.
In 'London Calling' from the Beyblade series, the main characters are ditched in Southampton, England, on their way to Russia for a tournament battle. As the ship pulls into harbour at the start of the episode Southampton appears to have green mountains and picturesque brick houses. It's actually a large modern city and its docks look something like this.◊ Definitely no mountains, too. Then the show redeems itself only a little, relying mostly on Willing Suspension of Disbelief. The scene suddenly jumps from Southampton to London, which means a distance of eighty miles. Kenny has previously mentioned that they have no money, and it's not said whether they walked, hitchhiked or anything else. However, their arrival on foot does suggest that they walked. Yet the sky is still bright when they get there, and the only thing to suggest that Southampton is not right next door to London is Kenny's (vague) comment that seeing Big Ben reminds him of how much time they've lost.
Blood+ went for the climate. At one point in the series, when Red Shield ship came to Vladivostok, the heroes transferred to a train. Among them, only Lewis wore a hat. In the middle of the winter. Apparently, nobody told the authors that the winds at the time could lift an adult man off the ground, and temperatures routinely reached -25C (-13F) with precipitation of 400mm or 32 inches. You'd be lucky if you end up with only frostbitten ears in such conditions.
In one episode in Vietnam, Kai walked from Hanoi to a port and back in a day. Firstly, if you look at the map, Hanoi has no port, the nearest one from there is in Hai Phong, which takes 4 hours to travel by car (assuming it doesn't cross the speed limit), and another 4 hours to go back, and somehow Kai traveled back and forth between the 2 places on foot.. in a day.. before the sunset. And no, Kai is a human character in this vampire series, and for the vampire characters, only the Schiff variants have sonic speed power.
Averted, though, in Darker Than Black 2, where they did do the research. Sure, the weather was shown to be a bit too balmy for a season, but warm spells do tend to happen around New Year and everything else was spot on.
Gundam:
The most common one is the Colony Drop scene from the original Mobile Suit Gundam: although the city is said to be Sydney, Australia, the location that's shown is quite clearly New York (the Brooklyn Bridge is visible in the foreground, while what looks like the World Trade Center can be seen in the distance). Mobile Suit Gundam Unicorn re-creates the scene, and this time gets the city's look right (including the iconic Opera House).
Invoked in Gundam 0080; Bernie, disguised as an enemy soldier and claiming to be from Australia, talks about how much it would snow in December. Minutes later, the soldier to whom he was speaking realizes that the Southern Hemisphere is in the middle of summertime in December, exposing Bernie as a spy.
In ∀ Gundam, this map◊ places the Mountain Cycle near West Virginia and Vicinity Town in central Jersey. In the show, a group of teenagers is able to walk between the two locations in less than twelve hours. (Not even walking fast, either.) In general, the pace of movement between locations is far quicker than one would expect by looking at the map.
Shinzo takes place 300 years in the future; apparently, geography has changed until New York is nowhere near an ocean and the Statue of Liberty is partially buried by the land. At the same time, Egypt is entirely covered by ocean, and you can reach it in half a day starting from the Alps while moving in a vehicle that goes about 30 miles per hour.
Assuming Neo Domino City in Yu-Gi-Oh! 5D's is in Japan (and it probably is) the Crashtown Arc makes very little sense. Crashtown, which seems to fall under the jurisdiction of Sector Security (seeing as they showed up to arrest the villains in the end) is a town resembling an Old West mining town in a desert resembling the American southwest, and there simply aren't any places like that in Japan.
Parodied in Excel Saga. New Zealand is a massive desert filled with monsters, which Excel kills and sells their pelts in order to get back to Japan. It could be the usual mistake of thinking New Zealand is Australia.
In Chrono Crusade, Rosette's journey from NYC to San Francisco to rescue her brother goes as follows: She takes a pilgrimage to the time-frozen Seventh Bell Orphanage in Michigan. From there she drives to Washington DC (roughly 500 miles the wrong way), where Satella destroys her car. Then she takes a train to Chicago (which gets hijacked and wrecked). From there, her superiors get tired of all the accidental destruction and charter a plane to take her directly to California. Since this rescue mission was the most important thing on Rosette's mind for the four years leading up to this trip, there are only two possible explanations for such a roundabout route: Either the mangaka forgot to plot the journey out on a map, or Rosette is incapable of cross-country navigation. Even with the story taking place 30 years before the creation of the interstate highway system, there had to be a more direct route than that.
The novel A Dog of Flanders is very popular in Japan. This led to many anime adaptations of the story. Even though the story takes place in Antwerp, Belgium, some of these films depict the country in a stereotypical version of a neighbouring country, the Netherlands, complete with boys and girls on clumps walking in tulip fields.
The ROD OVAs start with a shot of the rolling, forested hills of Washington DC. The city was built in a filled-in swamp and has little greenery outside parks and the Potomac waterfront. It actually looks much more like Alexandria (which used to be part of DC and is across the Potomac) than DC proper.
In one episode of Lupin III, a sign shows the Kansas/Washington D.C. border. No points for figuring out the problem with that.
In one episode of Dinosaur King, Rex's father is somehow able to drive from the Museum of Natural History in New York City to the Statue of Liberty, even though they are on two different islands, and the Statue can only be accessed by ferry. He also makes the distance in about five minutes or so.
In the official translation of Hellsing, the location of the opening scene is identified as 'Cheddar, a small village in Northern England'. While Cheddar is a real village, it is located in Somerset, in the southwest of England, not far across the Bristol Channel from Wales.
Adventures of the Little Koala: The prominence of the Breadknife rock formation overlooking the village places it somewhere in New South Wales, about 350 miles from Sydney. However, in 'Heavenly Fireworks', Weather journeys on foot to Ayers Rock to research the likelihood of a spectacular meteor shower, a journey which appears to take a day at most. The Breadknife and Ayers Rock are over 1,000 miles apart, so to make that journey on foot would take over a month; the writers evidently decided to set the distance aside in the interest of having an excuse to depict Ayers Rock's visual splendour.
Averted in the first two versions (the unfinished 1939 one and the 1949 one) of Tintin: Land of Black Gold. Much of the action took place in British Mandate Palestine and in particular in Haifa,note which before Israeli independence was an important port for the export of Middle Eastern oil, even if there was precious little oil in the territory of the Mandate of Palestine itself. After crossing a desert, Tintin arrives at the town of Wadesdah where he meets the oil-rich Emir Ben Kalish Ezab. The logical explanation is that he is the Emir of a small country still under British mandate, and this is borne out by what was Tintin: The Red Sea Sharks (1958) established about Khemed, the little country ruled by the Emir: It is situated on the Arabian Peninsula on the Red Sea coast, in a place which in the real world belongs to Saudi Arabia. So it is not within an impossible distance from the former Mandate of Palestine, especially as some analysts place Khemed on the Gulf of Aqaba. In the 1969 version — rewritten at the behest of the British publisher Methuen — the references to British Mandate Palestine are excised, the three-cornered fight between the British forces, Irgun and Arab insurgentsnote is changed into a two-sided one between two factions in the independent country of Khemed, and the Mediterranean port of Haifa becomes the Red Sea port of Khemikhal (French: Khemkhâh).
Exaggerated in the Sam & Max: Freelance Police debut issue, in 'Monkeys Violating the Heavenly Temple', when Sam and Max take a trip to the Philippines. Max lampshades the fact that the background behind him is drawn without reference material.
The Asterix series also like to feature travel episodes, where the characters visit a country and are confronted with many references to their modern-day equivalents. Since the comic strip is humoristic and anachronistic itself, many stereotypical jokes should not be taken that seriously.
Asterix in Britain: The Tower of London wasn't built until the Middle Ages. But then, the tower of Londinium as shown in this story looks nothing like the medieval or present-day one.
Asterix in Belgium: The Belgian landscape is portrayed as being nothing but a flat, monotonous grassy field without any other vegetation on it. Funnily enough, according to Uderzo, what really caused complaints was the depiction of the Belgian coast, which in reality consists of just long sandy beaches without the hills, bushes, and trees he had drawn in the traditional scene with the pirates.
Jet Dream: In 'The Powder Puff Derby Caper,' Jet is shot down over a 'South Pacific island' somewhere between Honolulu and San Francisco.
The Avengers: A villain controlling the Red Ronin mecha tried to fly to the USSR to start World War III, and was thwarted because he tried flying eastward from the USA when he could have had a much shorter flight flying north and over the North Pole to that nation. Marvel's official handbooks actually acknowledged the guy tried to take the long way. Then again, the guy's plan was to start World War III by attacking the USSR with a Japanese mecha. He might not have been the best planner.
In Ultimate X-Men #10, Proteus comes from 'Land's End, Scotland' (Land's End is the most southern part of England; John O'Groats is the northern counterpart) and #11 refers to the 'A90 motorway' (should be either the A90 road or the M90 motorway depending on where exactly you are). This prompted Paul O'Brien to wonder if Mark Millar was really Scottish at all.
Uncanny X-Men Vol 3 #15 has a caption stating the female X-Men are shopping in 'London, Piccadilly Square' (the square is actually called Piccadilly Circus). The UK reprint mag Essential X-Men actually added a Note From Ed from the Marvel UK editor saying 'Yes, we know. Don't laugh.'
Cable: Blood & Metal Vol 1 #2 shows the Uruguayan Kallawaya mountain range. Such mountain range does exist in South America, the problem is that it's located in Peru. To put things in perspective, both countries are basically on opposite sides of the continent.
In , Peter claims to be from 'the borough of Staffordshire'. This is like saying you come from 'the city of New York County'. Also, he says it while explaining he's Scottish, but Staffordshire is in the English Midlands.
As a result of making the phrase 'imagination always trumps research' the guiding ethos of his life, Who Let The Dog Out's version of Mark Haddon has a very interesting understanding of the world map.
In a case of failing canonical geography, legolas by laura has Mirkwood, Mordor, and Rivendell about five minutes' walk away from each other, as opposed to the hundreds of miles separating all three in The Lord of the Rings canon. Then again, Mirkwood and Mordor are persistently called 'Milkwood' and 'Mondor', which may be entirely different places that are closer together.
A lot of fanfic writers think that California is sunny all year long when the weather from September to mid/late May is completely unpredictable. Winters on the coast are also extremely rainy, windy, and cold. Though given media portrayal, one can hardly blame them..
In Chapter 4 of Sherlock Season 4, it's possible to drive from London to Paris in a matter of minutes, and you can easily throw an atomic bomb from the Eiffel Tower into the English Channel.
It's not uncommon to run across Harry Potter fanfic which misunderstands where Hogwarts is, portraying it as being 'just outside London' (the city is big, but not so big it takes the best part of a day to travel across via train) instead of in Scotland.
Hogwarts Exposed has one scene in which Hermione watches the sunset at 4 pm on the 1st September. If there's anywhere in the northern hemisphere where this is possible, it certainly isn't in Scotland. For the record, it's over four hours too early, and verges on Critical Research Failure since it's before the equinox and during daylight saving time. An earlier scene had it still dark at 5:50 am in August.
Light and Dark The Adventures of Dark Yagami has all of chapter 10, which takes place in 'francs'. In 'francs', the locals speak in bizarre pseudo-French, which is mostly just English with -ez stuck on the end, random French pronouns and random accents on vowels (and on one odd occasion, Spanish), one can buy guns from 'gun shops' without any kind of legal issue, it's home to 'the mona lisa church' and the 'Eyfal tower', which you can apparently jump off of into the 'river tames'. The author butchers London (all of Great Britain) just as badly. The Channel Tunnel goes directly to London, from which you can catch the Tube to 'whales', home to cliffs from which you can jump into Loch Ness.
Lampshaded in regards to timezones in Calvin and Hobbes: The Series:
It was Easter Morning in the town that Calvin and Hobbes live in. Is it Easter Morning where you are? Probably not, but go ahead and watch the show anyway.
In Supper Smash Bros: Mishonh From God, Asia is one big country.
Dumbledore's Army and the Year of Darkness:
Scotland does not have a Himalayas-like climate, despite the assertion while explaining a hidden Demiguise farm. Also, demiguises are described as wild and ape-like in 'Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them'; the fic treats them as some sort of invisible domestic sheep.
In one scene, Neville and several characters use a National Express East Coast train as part of a journey to Gretna Green. In 1997/98, the route from King's Cross to the North was controlled by Great North Eastern Railway..and the far more convenient way to get to Gretna Green by train is via the line from Euston to Carlisle.
In Violine, a Running Gag is that a tribe of Amazonian headhunters is living in Africa somehow, and multiple characters lampshade this.
Due to a sense of geographical haziness and A.A. Pessimal agreeing he was too lazy to look at an atlas, in the Discworld's Up to Eleven analogue of South Africa, the home town of Assassins Johanna and Mariella Smith-Rhodes shifts from the 'Transvaal' to 'Natal' and back again several times. Okay, both provinces of SA have similarly-named towns that can be plausibly contracted and conflated into 'Piemberg'. Or 'Piemburg'. Spelling varies, making it even more of a Saffie Brigadoon.note Proving one-to-one mapping between Real Life and a Fantasy Counterpart Culture isn't always possible or indeed desirable, Pessimal also moves an entire mountain range, the Drakensbergs, several hundred miles closer.
Invoked in Yu-Gi-Oh! The Abridged Series: a flashback where Bakura is introduced as a new student from Britain has some generic student yelling 'Go back to Russia!'
A 2017 storyline in Mary Worth, in which Wilbur Weston was in Bogotá, Colombia, repeatedly showed him and his Colombian girlfriend walking on the beach. Bogotá is on a plateau high in the Andes, and about 370km from the coast.
A 2012 storyline in Apartment 3-G had LuAnn dating the Governor of New York State. The writer seemed completely unaware that the governor would be based in Albany, some 150 miles from New York City, because NYC is not the state capital.
The Rescuers:
Perhaps mice divide the world up differently than humans, but some of the Rescue Aid Society nameplates in the original Rescuers are rather.. interesting. For example, there's a mouse representing Vienna (a city) and another mouse representing Africa (a continent). And there's a mouse representing Austria — you know, the country that contains Vienna. Incidentally, there's some accidental I Knew It! mixed in with Germany and Latvia represented as countries. At the time the film was made (1977), Germany was divided and Latvia was part of the Soviet Union, but both are countries now, so at least the real world had fixed those two by the time The Rescuers Down Under came out in November 1990.
Near the beginning of The Rescuers Down Under, when we see the Travel Montage following the telegraph signal from Australia to the United States, Australia for some reason is unusually small and the United States is unusually big. In real life, both countries are approximately the same size. Also, Papua New Guinea is shown being the same size as Australia, the Marshall Islands the size of New Zealand, and Hawaii the size of Indonesia.
The globe that was seen in various promotional media for Cars 2 showed some continents as being either much larger or smaller than they are in real life. Justified, since the Cars series films all take place in a world populated entirely by anthropomorphic vehicles, and therefore everything in their world down to the rocks, trees, clouds, and 'animals' (they are also shown as vehicles) is given a car motif, and the same is for countries and continents.
Disney's Pocahontas depicts majestic cliffs and pine forests in the Tidewater region of Virginia. While western Virginia is mountainous and thickly forested, the Tidewater is a low-lying coastal plain characterized by a lot of swampland. Even the Appalachian areas of western Virginia (hundreds of miles from Jamestown) look nothing like the movie.
In 101 Dalmatians (the Disney cartoon), a reference is made to the 'small village of Suffolk'. Suffolk is a county, just like the ones in Massachusetts and New York.
The 2007 Beowulf movie is set in Denmark. The highest above-sea-level point in Denmark is a television tower. The highest natural point weighs in at a whopping 170 meters above sea level. But in the film, it is full of huge cliffs, rivers and mountains.
In Dumbo, the view of the United States from the heavens is cartoonishly represented as a giant map. On this map, 'KY' (the abbreviation for Kentucky) appears where Tennessee ('TN') should be.◊ Slightly less egregious is that Alabama is missing the portion of the state that drops down to the Gulf Coast (the counties of Baldwin and Mobile).
In Yellowbird, though the flock eventually make it to Africa, the towering trees dotting the landscape look remarkably similar to a species of baobab, Adansonia grandidieri. This baobab species, however, is native to Madagascar only.[1]
The So Bad, It's Good 1965 war film Battle of the Bulge combines this with Hollywood History in so many, many ways. Most glaringly, the use of the arid plains of Spain to depict a battle that took place in a Belgian forest in the middle of winter in Real Life. Deep snow and biting cold were notorious among the soldiers participating in the battle. Not to mention the clear and sunny conditions; in real life a heavy fog descended over the forest and all Allied aircraft were grounded during the battle. Really, the film's account of the battle is practically a day at the beach by comparison.
In Knight and Day, Tom Cruise's character seems to hop around different places in Salzburg during his stay there. This is especially apparent in the roof chase sequence, where he starts off in Altstadt centre on the roof of the Residenz* to the south of the river Salzach, and ends up on the northern bank near the foot of the Kapuzinerberg mountain before falling off and plunging into the aforementioned river (and not smashing head-first into the two-lane street, promenade and gravel bank that are actually there).
Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters mostly takes place in Augsburg, a German village with half-timbered houses. In reality, medieval Augsburg was a thriving center of trade with its own bishop and looked more like this.◊
Indiana Jones
The map in Raiders of the Lost Ark shows Jordan and Thailand, which did not exist in 1936 when the film is set. Jordan would have been known as Transjordan, and Thailand would have been known as Siam.
The map in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull shows Belize, which would have been British Honduras when the film was set. As for the Mayan civilization, see Mayincatec.
In the 2010 film The Tourist, Frank Tupelo walks out of the Santa Lucia train station in Venice, and is immediately invited aboard Elise's boat. The shot then pans out as the boat speeds off, showing them to be moving north on the grand canal from Piazza San Marco, actually heading towards Santa Lucia from the opposite end of the island.
In The Guardian (1990) the protagonist family lives in Los Angeles, amidst enormous lush green forests.
A less extreme example is 10 Things I Hate About You. Only someone familiar with Seattle would realize the featured high school is actually in Tacoma, and that realistically it would take much more time to travel from the Fremont troll to the U-District. The only real misrepresentation is somewhat incidental, and that's the climate. Seattle never gets that much sun during an actual school year.
The climax of Blade Runner ostensibly takes place in and atop the Bradbury Building in downtown Los Angeles, but during the sequence where Deckard climbs up to the roof, he is obviously climbing up the side of one of the Rosslyn Hotel buildings several blocks away, as evidenced by the blue orbs on the roof line, as well as the increased height of the building itself (the Bradbury having only five floors in real life). Possibly justified in that most of the old buildings in the movie's 2019 L.A. seem to have been given major vertical extensions, and the fact that it is a very cool-looking roof line.
Also done in Kenneth Branagh's version of Hamlet (though it is not like the bard's was good with geography either, see down).
2007 film adaptation of Hitman has the main character driving through the 'Russian-Turkish border'. Russia has no land borders with Turkey. Although one could see where this mistake comes from: the Soviet Union DID share a border with Turkey before its dissolution.
Dog Soldiers is guilty of this when the rescued damsel comments that the nearest city is Fort William and at least 2-3 hours drive. Which is a technical impossibility. What's worse is that the main actor is Scottish and should have known this. Then again, she was probably lying, because she was one of the werewolves. Alternatively, it's simply a case of Wild Wilderness, using that setting in Western Europe — with, just maybe, the exception of remote parts of the Pyrenees or the Alps — always requires some fantasy.
Bird on a Wire has the main characters taking a ferry from Detroit to Racine, Wisconsin, on a ferry explicitly labeled 'DETROIT TO RACINE'. That's a trip of approximately 500 miles by water, as one would have to travel around most of Michigan's Lower Peninsula to reach Racine from Detroit. In Real Life, two ferries connect Michigan to Wisconsin across Lake Michigan: the S.S. Badger, which connects U.S. 10 from Manitowoc, Wisconsin, to Ludington, Michigan, and the Lake Express, connecting Milwaukee to Muskegon, Michigan. The latter (which only opened in 2004) is as close to a Detroit-to-Racine connection as you can get.. if you consider that, plus three hours on westbound Interstate 96 and about 45 minutes on southbound SR-32 'close'. Racine doesn't even have a dock that can handle a vessel of the size a ferry like that would be likely to be, and that it's a BC Ferry they're riding, from Tsawwassen (Vancouver) to Swartz Bay (Victoria).
The 2008 Get Smart movie has a long sequence taking place in Los Angeles, in which the characters drive among the core downtown area, the Port of Los Angeles and Van Nuys Airport within the span of about 10 minutes. The thing is, the Port of Los Angeles is actually in Long Beach, some 20 miles away, and Van Nuys Airport is in the San Fernando Valley, not much closer. You'd think L.A. would be the one town Hollywood filmmakers could get right. And the tracks where the cars crash for the explosive finale are in Montreal..
Krakatoa, East of Java managed to get this in the title: Krakatoa is actually west of Java. Reportedly, they actually knew this, but decided that East sounded more exotic.note
You would think they could at least get southern California right, but Independence Day manages to mangle the map beyond all recognition. One of the alien saucer ships is parked above downtown Los Angeles, but Randy Quaid can see it from Imperial County? Yeah, okay, they're only 200 miles apart. They also conveniently ignored the existence of the counties of San Diego, Orange, and Riverside, three major and about fifty minor cities, and five mountain ranges in the way. Even if he lived in Palmdale, which is actually in Los Angeles County, he still wouldn't be able to see it.
Apparently, the aliens parked over LA, decided to move, got lost, and wound up over San Diego County's Laguna Mountains before they checked their map. The exterior shot of the trailer park shows the eastern slopes of the Laguna Mountains, and the ship appears to be centered above the tiny mountain town of Pine Valley (population 800), which is far, far away from Los Angeles.
Really fails when the establishing shot of Will Smith outside his house in LA shows the damn thing farther away than the establishing shot of Quaid's trailer park.
The 'top-secret, not marked on any map' Area 51 is both well-known and clearly marked on any map of central Nevada. Area 51 is Groom Lake Airfield, just one of the many widely-scattered facilities that make up the Nellis Air Force Base complex. You can see it from the perimeter fence, and everybody and their dog knows where it is. The movie shows it in the middle of an enormous salt flat with mountains on the horizon. The real one is indeed right next to a dry lake bed, but it's much smaller and the mountains are much closer. The Area 51 exteriors were shot around Edwards Air Force Base, in the western Mojave Desert of San Bernardino County, California. (along with the Bonneville Salt Flats in Utah)
MCAS El Toro (which was closed a year after the movie was released) is located in a temperate coastal valley in Orange County, California, surrounded by urban and suburban areas, with the relatively-verdant Ortega Mountains to the east. It is not in a remote, arid desert surrounded by rocky hills and sparse scrub brush.
On the other side of the world, a British commander sends a message to the Americans, telling them that Israel and Syria have prepared air-strike wings to take out one of the alien spaceships. He says the aircraft are being prepared in the Golan Straits. The straits nearest to the Golan Heights are about a four hundred miles south, in the Indian Ocean.
Plus there's an impossible road sign. The University of Houston and North Houston are a good thirty miles away from each other.
A news broadcast mentions that one of the ships has arrived over the capital of India, and is illustrated with a map that shows a ship over Bombaynote instead of New Delhi. (The War of 1996 viral site made for the sequeldoes imply that both cities were attacked on the same day at the same time, but it still doesn't add up).
Of all people, the designers of the War of 1996 viral site did this five times with locations:
One of the errors is that Yokohama was destroyed 6 hours after Tokyo: however, given the supposed radius (20 miles) of the spaceships' weapon, Yokohama is far too close to Tokyo to survive the first wave (the two cities are about 17 miles apart). Nagoya and Osaka are given as third wave and fourth wave targets, respectively; with Yokohama gone, Nagoya would more likely have been a second wave target, while Osaka would not even have survived the third wave. More reasonable fourth (i.e. interpreted) wave targets would have been Kyoto, Okayama, Kitakyushu, Niigata, Sendai or even Fukuoka. Hiroshima would be out of the question here as the ship that destroyed Seoul is supposed to have targeted it.
The second error: the segment on the reconstruction of the world shows a destroyed Taj Mahal in Agra, India. Agra is over a hundred miles from New Delhi, and none of the ships in South Asia targeted it.
The third error is Denver's supposed destruction. NORAD HQ is nowhere near Denver: it is actually in Colorado Springs, over 50 miles away. The wiki for Independence Day (eventually) got this right.
The fourth error: Algiers, Algeria (a third wave city) and Casablanca, Morocco (a fourth wave city targeted by the same ship as Algiers). Casablanca is over 600 miles south-west of Algiers, yet the site has it at leas 200 miles to the south-east. Also, the site thinks it's a supposedly-rural desert location instead of the real-life coastal city home to over 3 million people!
The fifth error: There is no city called Pingxiang in Hebei province, China. There is a Pingxiang County in that province, but it is administrated by the government of Xingtai city, instead of being independent (most of the major cities in China are treated the same way as prefectures would be). The confusion must have arisen from that fact. The biggest locale in China by the name 'Pingxiang' is in Jiangxi province, the closet major city to which is Changsha (in nearby Hunan).
The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen features a car chase in Venice, which has no roads. A car chase in Venice is like having a yacht race in the Atacama Desert (Roger Ebert made fun of this faux pas when he reviewed the movie on TV). Venice's canals are apparently also deep enough to accommodate a battlecruiser-sized submarine, and have bridges over them on the sixth floor of the buildings lining the canals, under which said submarine's fuselage (never mind the turret) can fit. There are also cemeteries with below-ground plots—in a city at sea level.
One scene in Looney Tunes: Back in Action has Brendan Fraser chasing a villain leaving the Louvre.. and somehow immediately reaching the Eiffel Tower like two seconds later. In real life, they're about 4 km apart.
No Way Out is legendary for its mashing of Washington, D.C., area geography.
Amusingly enough, the three main characters in Delta Farce are State Military Reservists sent to Iraq (to the east of the United States) during the Gulf War due to a shortage of manpower, yet they somehow end up in Mexico (directly southwest-ish of the United States). The fact that they were living in the state of Georgia makes it that much more absurd.
In Orange County, Shaun goes to Orange County High School. There is no Orange County High School in California, though Orange County School of the Arts, in Santa Ana, was known as Orange County High School of the Arts until 2012. There is an actual Orange County High School in Virginia.
Shaun's brother tells him he can get him to Stanford University, located in Palo Alto, in three hours. He must really floor it, because driving from So Cal to the Bay Area usually takes twice that long.
Son of the Mask This movie is set ten years after The Mask and in Fringe City, which is 270 miles southwest of Edge City. Stanley Ipkiss tossed the Mask into the ocean at the end of the first movie, and at the start of the second, it's floating in a river toward Fringe City. So, not only did the Mask travel the wrong way up the river, it appears to be moving at about five miles an hour. In ten years it would have moved about 17,520 miles away from the coast. It's even more baffling because the first film ends with both his best friend and his dog jumping in the river to retrieve the Mask.
The Sound of Music: Even if you did 'Climb Ev'ry Mountain' from Salzburg, Austria you would not end up in Switzerland. So where would you end up? Germany! Specifically, Berchtesgaden, where Hitler had his Alpine retreat. Furthermore, the actual Austrian-Swiss border is not mountainous at all, and actually lies along part of the Rhine. The real Von Trapps simply took a train to Italy for 'vacation' and never came back; Georg had been born in a part of Austria-Hungary that was ceded to Italy after World War I, so he and his family could claim Italian citizenship.
Parodied in Team America: World Police, where Team America's operations regularly destroy historical landmarks that are nowhere near each other (for example, the Pyramids and the statues of Ramses.)note
In the movie version of Twilight, the scenes supposedly taking place in Arizona are completely inaccurate. It is clear in the book that Bella's house is in Paradise Valley, a highly populated suburb of Phoenix known for its large houses and for being a valley. However, her house in the movie is clearly not in Paradise Valley, especially because it is on a mountain. Also, the scene when the Cullens and Bella are playing baseball there is a view of a tall waterfall. That falls is called Multnomah Falls on the Columbia Gorge. And where Forks is 30 miles south of the Canadian border, Multnomah Falls is all the way in Oregon. However, this might simply be Oregon Doubling, since Oregon is cheaper to film in than Washington, and filmmakers figured most viewers wouldn't know the difference.
The Transformers franchise makes several errors.
The 2007 movie has the characters go from the Hoover Dam in Nevada to what appears to be Los Angeles, California in a short space of time, when in actuality they're about a four and a half hour drive from each other. The film handwaves this by referring to it vaguely as Mission City, only for the sequel to then refer to it as LA!
Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen acts as though Giza, Aqaba, Petra, and Luxor and their associated landmarks are within an hour or less of each other. Its depiction of Petra suggests that there are driveable roads leading up to Ad-Deir. In actuality, any visitor to Petra has to hike up a long trail (with regular steps) to get to it, unless you want to pay the Bedouins the exorbitant fee they charge to ride a camel or donkey up. The filmmakers also assiduously avoid showing you the rather large snack bar/gift shop complex that's right next to it. Also, the orangy-red desert that is represented as being in Egypt is recognizably Wadi Rum, in southern Jordan very close to the Saudi border.
The whole scene where we are introduced to Jetfire is confusing. The opening shot is of the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum, located in downtown Washington, DC (never mind that the Space Shuttle and Blackbird are located in the Udvar-Hazy Museum, located just off of the Dulles Airport, some 40 miles away!). When Jetfire leaves the hangar/museum, Jetfire and the others find themselves walking around in a rural desert-like area. What happened to downtown DC?????
Among its other inconsistencies with its depiction of Hong Kong, apparently Transformers: Age of Extinction thinks that there's a suspension bridge connecting Hong Kong Island with Kowloon, when in fact the island is exclusively connected by either ferry or three cross-harbor tunnels. The bridge depicted is actually the Stonecutters Bridge crossing over the Kowloon Container Terminal (something that another movie about giant robots fighting in Hong Kong managed to get right, even though that film didn't have any actual street scenes shot on location). Also, the sprawling landscape of Wulong Karst National Park is on Hong Kong Island for some reason, even though it would've probably taken up a quarter of the whole island.
Early in The Deer Hunter, the characters, who ostensibly live in Western Pennsylvania, go deer hunting in a wilderness where there are many bare-topped, snowcapped peaks, betraying the film's California Doubling.
Bert I. Gordon's giant grasshopper film Beginning of the End is fairly good on Illinois geography, at least on paper. When it comes to filming, who knew Illinois had so many mountains?
Cheapo '50s proto-technothriller Radar Secret Service is set in Washington D.C., but looks suspiciously like Southern California. Also there's apparently a canyon near Washington.
Jurassic Park has a scene that takes place at an oceanfront restaurant in San José, Costa Rica, but San José is inland. The subtitles establishing this had to be redubbed for the film's Caribbean release, but remain uncorrected elsewhere. It also ends with the helicopters flying off from Isla Nublar towards the setting sun — due west out over the Pacific Ocean, where there's no land for thousands of miles..
In I am David the titular character escapes from Belene camp (which is shown to be in a mountainous area) simply by running away when the electric fence is shut off. The real Belene camp was on a flat island in the middle of the very wide Danube river and could only be escaped by swimming for the river shore nearly a kilometer away.
Innocent Blood confuses Pittsburgh geography. A character demands to know how one gets to the neighborhood called Shadyside, whereupon the action cuts to a very recognizable intersection in another part of town entirely. In another scene, characters drive along the same short stretch of highway about seven times, because that's all the highway there is and the makers wanted a longer car chase. In another instance, a vampire drives out of the Fort Pitt Tunnels and sees the sun rising directly in front of him, between two skyscrapers of the city. The Fort Pitt Tunnels empty out in a northeast direction. There's no way the sun could be coming up in front of him. Note the shadows on the traffic don't reflect the sun directly in front, either. During the latter half of the year, the rising sun would shine directly on the Fort Pitt Tunnel exit at a roughly 2 o'clock angle to the direction of traffic.
In Oxford Blues the sculling race on the Isis (the Thames in Oxford) is all over the place, if you're familiar with that stretch of river. They even randomly skip to Pangbourne (about 30 miles away by river). The funny thing is that it appears they had enough footage of the right stretch that they could have put the clips together in a realistic order if they'd been bothered.
In The Boy In Blue the river that stands in for The Thames looks like no UK river at all.
The John Ritter film from the '70s Americathon (set in the near future) includes an opening montage/narration to get the audience up to speed about what has happened to America. One included bit of information is that 'North Dakota has become the first all-gay state.' This is accompanied by a picture of Mt. Rushmore, with one of the presidents wearing an earring. Mt. Rushmore is in South Dakota. The same film had Great Britain as the fifty-somethingth state of the United States, and Israel united with its Islamic-state neighbors as the 'Hebrab' coalition. Who knows if the Mt. Rushmore reference was this trope, or just another political-merger joke?
The Mighty Ducks movies are set in the Minneapolis/St. Paul area of Minnesota and frequently feature local geography. Which would be great if it didn't feature 13-year olds rollerblading to locations that are up to 60 miles away from each other in Real Life (and don't allow rollerblading in the first place).
In the Disney Channel Movie Princess Protection Program, the swamp in Louisiana is shown to be very mountainous. The only problem? The highest point in Louisiana is only 535 feet (163 m) high, and is nowhere near the swamps. Worse yet: the description on the DVD cover (or at least the one on the Redbox vendor screen) states the movie takes place in Wisconsin.
Highlander has Connor and Duncan MacLeod being born in Glen Finnan, but Glen Finnan is not in fact within the MacLeod clan's lands.
In Tim Burton's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Düsseldorf is depicted as a quaint little Alpine town with half-timbered houses and tall mountains in the background instead of the modern industrial city on the Rhine, not in plain view of any mountains.note
Left Behind:
A shot labeled 'Israeli-Syrian Border' and shows tanks driving over desert. The border of Israel and Syria, which is called the Golan Heights, is actually green and mountainous (and is a subject of dispute partially for this very reason).
The film opens with a shot of Jerusalem, with the morning sun glinting off the eastern face of the Dome of the Rock, and the subtitle, 'Jerusalem, 6:00 p.m.' A moment later we see the title 'Iraq, 6:03 p.m.', as Iraqi fighter planes stream west into the setting sun; and then, 'Syrian-Israeli border, 6:03 p.m.', and flocks of helicopters and tanks with their shadows stretching out in front of them — except that Syria is east of Israel, so these helicopters and tanks appear to be invading Syria from Israel (Clark gave up after the next shot, 'Mediterranean Sea 6:04 p.m.', which showed fighter planes with the sun directly overhead).
Also, Iraq is an hour ahead of the other two countries. At the time the film was released, Iraq was still using DST (which was abolished in 2007). Whether it was summer or winter, it would always be an hour ahead of Israel and Syria (both use DST to this very day).
Parodied repeatedly in the Austin Powers movies. In the second, Austin and Felicity are driving through 'the English countryside.' As they pass palm trees, Austin remarks how it 'looks nothing like southern California.' In the third, special effects were purposely used to put Mount Fuji in the background of every single exterior shot in Japan.
In Mean Girls the students go to 'Old Orchard' mall, a well known mall in suburban Chicago. The mall shown in the movie is indoors (the scene was filmed at Sherway Gardens in Toronto), whereas Old Orchard is an outdoor mall.
Tommy Wiseau spliced in a slew of establishing shots of San Francisco in The Room, but the movie was filmed in LA. In addition to a very improbable scene of the lead character returning home from work on a cable car line that obviously could not exist, the rooftop scene is done using a 'green screen'. As the apartment building appears in the film, backgrounded by a postcard skyline view, the apartment building would have to be built out in the middle of the bay, or maybe on Alcatraz. It would look ridiculous to any San Francisco resident.
In The X-Files: Fight the Future movie, the government sets up its alien research camp in the desert just outside of Dallas, TX where the creature was found. Dallas and the North Texas area are located on the southern extension of the Great Plains, with the closest desert region at least 200 miles west of the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex. Even worse, you wouldn't be able to see the Downtown Dallas skyline from that angle and distance. Too many hills and forests block the view. And let's not get started on those accents..
Not to mention all those mountains seen in the movie behind the Dallas skyline. Granted, Central Texas is known as the Hill Country, but that area starts approximately 100 miles south of Dallas - and there is a difference between hills and mountains..
Jackie Chan's Rumble in the Bronx features shots of the lovely snow capped mountains for which the Bronx is known far and wide. Oh, wait.. Also, many shots feature highly distinctive Vancouver landmarks in the background. And sometimes the foreground.
Jackie Chan's Mr Nice Guy features a chase sequence through central Melbourne, Australia, that features about two dozen sharp turns, two or three of which actually exist in real life.
The Covenant is particularly bad at this, if you know anything at all about the geography of Essex County, Massachusetts. Spencer Academy supposedly is in Ipswich, which is also the town where the party takes place near the beginning of the film. One of the characters mentions cutting across Marblehead to get away from the cops, which happens to be 20 miles away, down on the other side of Salem. Also, there are absolutely no cliffs along the coasts of Essex County. They are all either sandy or rocky, depending on how sheltered the coastline is, and how close it is to the mouth of the Merrimac River.
Blade: Trinity is filmed in Vancouver, and local residents would notice that the characters seem to teleport around the city. The film is not actually supposed to be set in any particular city. The director purposefully included some Esperanto signs and even an Esperanto film (Incubus) to make the city seem somewhat foreign to everyone.
In the original The Naked Gun movie, Leslie Nielsen is picked up from LAX and taken to the Los Angeles Police Department Headquarters (presumably in Los Angeles). On the way, they pass the San Onofre Nuclear Power Plant, which is in San Diego County, just past the Orange County line but easily 75 miles from LAX. As this was a comedy and the power plant looks like two giant breasts (pointed out in this scene as a reference to one character's ex-girlfriend), the writers surely knew this. This is likely a reference to the short-lived TV show Police Squad! (which Naked Gun was based on). Even though the show took place in New York, you would frequently have backgrounds that clearly did not belong to New York City (i.e. when they are driving through 'Little Italy' the background depicts the Roman Colosseum). The movie starts off with an LAPD detective running an undercover operation in the Middle East, so accuracy went right out the window from the word go.
Two otherwise good war movies betray their locations: Dawn Patrol was set in Belgium but obviously filmed in Southern California (like every movie was at the time); Dark Blue World mostly takes place in southern England, but there are some conspicuous Eastern European mountains in the background of many scenes.
In 10,000 BC the protagonist lives in a massive Ice Age mountain range, filled with tundra, glaciers, and mammoths. He then treks down from those mountains, almost immediately entering a verdant jungle with a transitional climate about ten yards across. On exiting said jungle and crossing another ten yard transition, he's in an arid desert. Film Brain from Bad Movie Beatdown has a lot to say about the absurd geography in this film.
In Speed, the freeway depicted as I-10 is actually I-105, which was already complete in real life, and the I-105 sequence was filmed on I-110, which actually was unfinished at the time. The bus also exits the east I-10 freeway onto Western (south) using a cloverleaf ramp that doesn't exist in Real Life, then goes from there to the I-105 in El Segundo (around 18 miles away) in under a minute.
The opening freeway chase in Hancock is clearly filmed on a short one-mile stretch of the I-105 freeway in El Segundo, California (watch the buildings in the background). After the car is stopped on the I-105/I-405 transition, when Hancock carries it off, downtown Los Angeles is clearly shown in the background, even though it's 25 miles away.
Cannonball Run II is about a cross-country race from the West Coast to the East Coast of the United States. However, the entire movie was filmed in the outskirts of Tucson, AZ—even the finish line, which is said to be in Vermont, but there is a large saguaro cactus visible on the screen.
The 2010 Amy Adams film Leap Year is all over the place regarding Irish geography. The heroine's plane, traveling from Boston to Dublin, is forced to land in Cardiff, Wales due to terrible weather. She ends up hiring a boat to go to Cork for some reason; now even if we are to assume the storm blocks off Dublin Port, there are plenty of harbours closer to the city than Cork, which is on the southern coast of Ireland. Not that it matters, since bad weather forces the boat to put ashore in Dingle.. which is not only west of Cork but right on the west coast of the country, and yet further away from Cardiff. Further, as in about adding about a third again onto her trip.
In Life-Size, Casey Stuart tries to convince her father that Eve is a plastic doll come to life. Part of her argument is that Eve says she's from Sunnyvale, which is an obviously fake place that does not exist. Except that.. yes, Sunnyvale is a very real location in California.
In Joy Ride the boys drive through Wyoming, stopping to sleep at a hotel in Rawlins. When the sheriff shows up the next day to investigate a murder, his car identifies him as the Rawlins County sheriff. Problem is, there isn't a Rawlins County in Wyoming. There is a Carbon County, where Rawlins is.
Taking Lives, somewhat unusually, rather than having Montreal stand in for some random American city, set the action in Montreal. Which they indicated with a big establishing shot of the Château Frontenac, the most famous landmark in.. Quebec City (it's a little like establishing a scene in L.A. using a shot of the Golden Gate Bridge).
In An American Werewolf in London, there are no hospitals in Yorkshire. The nearest hospital is apparently 250 kilometres away in London. Might be justified: the dialogue with the doctor after David regains consciousness suggests that he's been transferred to a London hospital because he's suspected of having some rare and exotic disease, which needs highly specialised skills and equipment of the sort that are usually only available in the more densely-populated south of England. The process of getting him to the nearest emergency room for an initial assessment and then down south for further treatment would still have been a significant undertaking however, probably involving a helicopter ride, but none of this is even touched upon in the film.
In Mr. Bean's Holiday, Mr Bean accidentally takes a taxi in Paris from the Gare du Nord (in the North-East corner of the city) to the business district of La Défense (west of Paris). The taxi passes the Eiffel Tower (which is not even on the way) and then Notre-Dame de Paris (which lies to the East of the Eiffel Tower). Also, if the previous example could be explained, there is no way the Millau Viaduct is remotely on the way between Avignon (the station where Mr Bean was filmed escaping the police) and Cannes. But then, there is no way either a road trip in France can take more than ~10 hours, and that's if the motorways are really clogged. And if you cross the whole country. This film has some screwed up geography. Maybe the cabbie was taking an extra screwy route to collect a better fare?
I Still Know What You Did Last Summer supposedly takes place in the Bahamas, but the hills and rock formations give away that it was filmed in Mexico. There is also a lot of Spanish architecture, also from Mexico.
In Charade, a climactic ride on the Paris Metro is between clearly-labelled stations that are not connected by any single line; so it's important to the plot that Audrey Hepburn never transfers from one train to another.
In The Jackal, Bruce Willis flees through a DC Metro tunnel from Capitol Heights to Metro Center stations, with Richard Gere in hot pursuit. Those stations are ten stops and a few miles apart. Never mind that the scenes are shot in the Montreal Metro, which looks nothing like the distinctive DC Metro architecture and has rubber tires.
James Bond:
Moonraker has a particularly bad scene where Bond is fleeing down the Amazon River, then comes to Iguazu Falls (a distance comparable to Los Angeles-Chicago; to make matters worse, the Amazon doesn't end in a waterfall, and the Iguazu Falls aren't even in the Amazon watershed), for his meeting with Q, then somehow walks to the enemy base in a Mayan temple (in Mexico, a whole different hemisphere).
The London boat chase in The World Is Not Enough is full of this.
The Rome car chase scene in Spectre is a little strange if you're familiar with the local layout. Note that the cars turn right when they reach the Vatican, right again onto Via dei Corridori, then left onto Via del Mascherino..away from the Tiber. In order to get anywhere near the water, they'd have to immediately circle back towards Castel Sant'Angelo. Even then, the riverside sequence was shot by Ponte Sisto, which is further south.
Speaking of Bond movies, a Very Loosely Based on a True Story biopic of Bond author Ian Fleming showed how he was part of a secret WWII mission to recover some important German files located in 'Halmstad, Norway'. A quick research found the city of Halmstad in neutral Sweden, but this sort of artistic lisence is probably a Bond movie tradition.
In North by Northwest, Roger O. Thornhill is seen driving on a treacherous, winding coastal road along cliffs several hundred feet high.. in Long Island, New York! While there are some small cliffs in parts of Long Island, there is no scenery or road there anywhere approaching the type of landscape Grant was driving in, which was clearly modeled after the California coast.
Though in another scene the movie got it right: when Roger and his secretary are riding in a taxi from his Madison Avenue office to the Plaza Hotel, the rear-projected view through the taxi's back window is the actual route a vehicle would take between the two locations.
The war propaganda film The Green Berets ends with a shot of the Sun setting over the ocean. Only it's set in Vietnam, which has no western coastline, meaning the Sun would have to be setting in the east. There's also a suspicious lack of tropical vegetation and abundance of pine trees (it was filmed mainly in western Georgia).
Vietnam does have a west-facing coastline in the very south of the country, in Kien Giang and Ca Mau provinces. However, that would put the film's heroes in the Mekong Delta area, which has a rather wet and tropical climate — not one in which you typically find pine trees. Also, if it was filmed in Georgia, USA, where did they find a west-facing coast? They probably shot that bit in California, then.
In My Best Friend's Wedding, Cameron Diaz is at her wedding at some large estate with at least a few acres of lawn. She goes running out the front gate.. into downtown Chicago.
The Great Escape. As Eddie Izzard puts it: 'So, he gets on his motorcycle and starts driving, and within ten minutes, he's on the border of Switzerland. This is from Poland. In case you don't know the real geography, the map goes something like this: Poland, Germany, Venezuela, Africa, Beirut, THE HANGING GARDENS OF BABYLON, and then Switzerland.'
To be precise, the camp was situated near Sagan in Western Silesia, which only became part of Poland after the war (not that far from the current Polish-German border). The shortest way at the time would most likely have been through Saxony, Bavaria and Western Austria (then part of Germany) if you wanted to reach a place where you did not have to cross the Rhine or Lake Constance to reach Switzerland.
While Izzard's description also fails geography he isa comedian commentating on and exaggerating another failing of geography. [[Don'tExplainTheJoke If you want to know the real thing]], modern Poland borders Belarus, the Czech Republic, Germany, Lithuania, Russia, Slovakia, and Ukraine, while on the day before the official start of WWII (in which it was absorbed by the Third Reich), Poland bordered the Free City of Danzig, Germany, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia, and the Soviet Union. In both cases, Switzerland is at least one country away.
Elizabeth The Golden Age: There is no cliff in England upon which Elizabeth could have stood to watch the Battle of Gravelines. The English Channel is in the way (there's also the problem that Elizabeth's speech to the troops was not given before the Battle of Gravelines, but some days after; the troops were there to repel a possible invasion by the Duke of Parma, which never materialized). Any film about Elizabeth I that uses the phrase 'golden age' non-sarcastically (her regime killed people at four times the rate of the Spanish Inquisition, and with much less fair trials) obviously doesn't care about historical details in the first place.
Intersection is one of the few Hollywood movies not only filmed in Vancouver, but actually set there too. As long as they are keeping it real, one wonders why they felt compelled to move the University of British Columbia to the North Shore of Burrard Inlet rather than keeping it in its real location at the edge of the peninsula that forms the city of Vancouver. Perhaps for the very nice views crossing the bridge.
In Paycheck (set in Seattle, Washington), John Wolfe shouts their location as 6th Avenue and Pine Street, which in real life is smack-dab in the middle of Downtown and has a number of buildings surrounding it.
In Green Zone, the main character, Chief Miller, needs to get to the Republican Palace. He enters the Green Zone through the Assassin's Gate, which is located in the northeast side of the Green Zone. In the next shot, he's traveling East past the crossed swords toward the Monument of the Unknown Soldier, then he ends up at the Republican Palace. The problem is, the Republican Palace is in the southeast corner of the Green Zone and the crossed swords are near the northwestern border. To get to the Republican Palace from the Assassin's Gate through the crossed swords would require driving back and forth or around in circles. All he needed to do was stay on the same road south from the Assassin's Gate and he would have ended up at the palace.
So apparently there are thick rainforests and Mayan ziggurats just south of the Rio Grande, since the main characters of Monsters stand atop a ziggurat while looking at the American border wall.
The 1954 movie Drum Beat about the Modoc Indian War, shows beautiful scenery better placed in the southwest. The real Captain Jack's Stronghold was a rocky outcropping of jagged lava flows.
In action in Pathfinder which takes place between Vikings and natives in the new world. This means either the rocky coastal meadows of Newfoundland or the rocky coastal forests of Maine. Instead, it appears to be a Pacific Northwest-ish rainforest tucked away in the Alps, if not the Andes.
Scary Movie 4 shows the characters watching news footage of the city of Detroit before and after the aliens attack (the joke being that Detroit was already so bad that the aliens didn't have any effect whatsoever). But the city in the footage is actually San Diego.
The Jean-Claude Van Damme film Double Team shows how Van Damme visits a huge bordello in Antwerp, which cannot be found there in real life. What makes this mistake even more perplexing is that Van Damme is actually a Belgian himself!
In Mr. & Mrs. Smith (2005), at the start of the film, Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie's characters claim that they met in Bogotá, Colombia. Flashback to said moment, and they show Bogotá, a real-life city of nearly 7 million (at the time of filming) with a cool climate, portrayed as a small river-side town where the sun always shines, people listen to flamenco music and there's no need for clothes. To make things worse, a soldier speaks with a heavy Mexican accent. Even the actors said that they've never been to Bogotá, or Colombia, for that matter. Colombians were so not happy.
In Entrapment, the protagonists head off to Malaysia to carry out a heist in the Petronas Towers at Kuala Lumpur. The movie portrays rural, ramshackle slums with open views onto the fabulous towers themselves. Kuala Lumpur looks like this◊. In addition, scenes often depict the towers overlooking the Malacca river. In real life, the cities of Kuala Lumpur and Malacca are 122km apart.
X-Men Film Series:
X-Men: There is no Laughlin City within the province of Alberta.
X-Men: First Class: There's a scene where Erik kills some bad guys that supposedly takes place in the Argentinian city of Villa Gesell. The establishing shot shows snowy mountains and a beautiful lake surrounded by hills; the only problem is, although you can find a lot of cities that look like that in the southern part of the country, the real Villa Gesell is a beach city located nowhere near that area. The shot resembles the Argentinian city of Villa La Angostura where, according to legend, some Nazis hid away after World War II with the help of President Perón. So the mistake wasn't that big, but it was extremely hilarious for the Argentinian public.
X-Men: Days of Future Past: The Pentagon is definitely not in Washington, DC. It's across the Potomac in Arlington, Virginia. It's understandable because it has a Washington, DC mailing address, and Arlington was once part of DC.
X-Men: Apocalypse: Stryker manages to go from the X-Mansion (Northern New York, Eastern USA) to Alkali Lake (stated in the first two movies to be in Alberta, Western Canada) in a helicopter, without refuelling.
In All the President's Men, Woodward and Bernstein's car seems to teleport around Washington, D.C., from shot to shot, at random.
Cracked once ran an article that pointed out several common artistic licenses shown in film, such as Australia being stereotypically shown as being unmercifully hot all year round, or anything taking place in Australia usually taking place in the summer, despite Australia getting its fair share of snow (and more), or Russia being depicted as being constantly snowy, usually having at least a somewhat thick coating of snow on the ground, no matter when the story is taking place, although usually being shown in the winter. Also, Washington, D.C. will often be depicted as a colossal metropolis with as many skyscrapers as many other very large cities, despite the fact that Washington has no true buildings taller than sixteen stories (and actual laws against buildings over thirteen stories).
The parts of DC with skyscrapers could theoretically be Arlington, Virginia, right across the river, which does have a traditional (if smallish) skyline. The other part of DC with skyscrapers would be the satellite city of Tysons, connected to central DC by two Metro lines.
The Devil's Advocate: The movie opens in 'Gainesville, Florida'. Or rather, a small rural town that looks nothing like the actual, modern, skyscraper-encrusted college town that is the real Gainesville, Florida, but does look like a one-horse hick town in the middle of nowhere, which was probably the point. Apparently the producers wanted Kevin Lomax to be from a small rural town and picked Gainesville, Florida off of a map at random, not realizing that 'small rural town' does not describe Gainesville, Florida, and hasn't for about a hundred years. The Civil War-era 'courthouse' where the trial was taking place is actually in a one-stoplight town some thirty-two miles east of Gainesville, for example; the courthouses in Gainesville proper are all modern, multistory buildings.
In Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back, the duo steal a monkey from an animal testing lab in Boulder, Colorado and run off with it on foot. The next scene they are out in the wilderness, and the scene after that they are in a diner in Utah. Boulder to Utah would be a 300+ mile hike, over the Rocky Mountains, and would take weeks even for seasoned backpackers.
In The Graffiti Artist, one of the first scenes in the film is supposed to be set in Portland, Oregon and has the main character getting on what is clearly a Seattle Metro bus at what is clearly 3rd and Pine, in the middle of downtown Seattle, as identifiable by the businesses around it and the appearance of the bus shelter. The disregard for the differences in geography between the two cities is in some cases justified because Seattle has better graffiti art (thanks to much more permissive laws), but there is no need for it in this scene.
In Joe Dante's film Matinee the action takes place in Key West during the Cuban Missile Crisis, but in the final shot there's a great view of the Space Shuttle sitting on its launch pad in the background — 400 miles to the north and 20 years in the future.
In the first National Treasure, there is a chase scene on foot in Philadelphia. Everything is fine until the characters run the wrong way to get where they wind up.
In Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End, Singapore is depicted as a valley full of hills and high rock formations, which does not describe the country at all (mind you, there are hills in Singapore; they are just not tall and numerous enough to justify what are shown in the film). At times, it looks suspiciously more like Hong Kong.
The obscure American 1940 movie Ski Patrol follows a group of Finnish soldiers in the 1939 Winter War between Finland and the Soviet Union. The movie depicts the countries' border as a Middle European mountain range◊ — for reference, even the highest points of the countries' border don't rise above half a kilometre in height. Reportedly, the first panorama of this sight made the Finnish audience burst into laughter.
Similarly, Doctor Zhivago represents the Urals as high, rocky and snowcapped—like Glacier National Park, where the scene was filmed. In actuality they look more like the upper Appalachians, to which they are more comparable in height.
The Tommy Lee Jones vehicle Blown Away culminates with a car careening, in a straight line, through the Back Bay of Boston while our hero tries to defuse a bomb attached to the dashboard. If you traveled through the Back Bay for that long, that fast in a straight line, you wouldn't need to worry about the bomb, because you'd be underwater.
Home Alone 2: Lost in New York: Shortly after Kevin arrives in New York City, the film presents a montage of his sightseeing adventures that attempts to cram in every interesting location in Manhattan. Kevin is seen taking a picture outside of Radio City Music Hall, which is in midtown Manhattan, and then at the Empire Diner in Chelsea. Next, he is shopping in Chinatown (which is in lower Manhattan), and then looking at the Statue of Liberty from Battery Park, which is all the way on the southernmost part of the island. After that, he heads up to the World Trade Center's observation deck, visits Central Park, and finally arrives at the Plaza Hotel. And Kevin somehow manages to do all of this in just a couple of hours.
Bruce Almighty features streets on some awfully steep hills in Buffalo, NY. There's no place like it in Buffalo.
Zeitgeist posits that the supposed North American Union, African Union, European Union, and 'soon-to-be' Asian Union will be merged as the final step in a grand conspiracy to form a one-world government. So what happens to South America, then?
The scene in Trainspotting where Diane and Rents come out of the nightclub? Filmed outside the Volcano, in Glasgow. The characters are based in Edinburgh, which is fifty miles away. The taxi fare must have been ruinous.
Lola of Run, Lola, Run needs to get to her boyfriend in 20 minutes by running across Berlin — or, judging by the route she takes, schizophrenically teleporting..
Beverly Hills Chihuahua is quite hilarious in its geography for someone who has ever lived in Mexico. The female protagonist and her friends take a weekend trip to Puerto Vallarta from California (which would be a two-day drive if they took a bus), and the titular Chihuahua gets kidnapped and driven to Mexico City, however, some scenes are set in Guadalajara, which is six hours away from Mexico City. Going to all these places would have taken an entire week by car, yet, the film's time frame is set within three days. And, the most egregious example of all, in which both History and Geography fail in one scene, presumably all the Chihuahua dogs in Mexico gather by a Mayan temple in the state of Chihuahua, for a ceremony. The Maya civilization was set on the far South of Mexico and most of Central America, while Chihuahua, which borders on New Mexico and Texas, never housed a particular culture for an extended time. Also, the state is depicted as a jungle-heavy terrain, when it is mostly desert.
In Wild Orchid a cab driver goes from Galeão Airport to what seems to be some beach in Recreio (a 55 km travel, at longest), but he was considerate enough to take the passenger to visit the Pelourinho, a beautiful landmark .. in Salvador, Bahia! A detour that turns a 55 km trip in a 1,624 km travel! The Pelourinho isn't even located in the same region of Brazil. To a Brazilian, or anyone who has taken one extended vacation on Brazil, it was a blunder comparable to a cab leaving JFK, taking a shortcut in Gateway Arch, in St. Louis, before arriving in the Bronx.
Real-life Texas does not have the the rugged, pine-forested mountains seen in the climax of The Lone Ranger.note Also, Promontory Point (where the transcontinental railroad was completed) is in Utah.
Bloodsucking Pharaohs in Pittsburgh was actually filmed in Pittsburgh, and several locations are instantly recognizable to residents. However, Pittsburgh does not have an 'Egypt District' as seen in the film.
In Savages, at one point the protagonists are instructed to drive from Los Angeles to Chula Vista, a city south of San Diego. Besides the fact that the streets looking nothing like the actual city, not even the highway sign for the distance driven is accurate.
Godzilla (2014):
There are plenty of radiation sources in China and Japan far closer to the Philippines than the Kanto region, Yucca Mountain was never operational nor that close to Las Vegas, and all three creatures take the long way from their respective positions to end up in San Francisco. Within the locations however, the geography is quite good — Godzilla takes a reasonable path from Waikiki to the airport, the Female MUTO heads the right way on the Vegas Strip, and so on.
Ford's son is evacuated to Oakland Regional Park (which doesn't actually exist, though Redwood Regional Park in Oakland does) by bus. Via the Golden Gate Bridge. Those familiar with the the layout of the city know the Golden Gate Bridge leads north while Oakland is in the east. To get there via the Golden Gate Bridge would take far longer. It would make more sense to head east via the Bay Bridge. A possible explanation though is that the city needed to be evacuated at all points due to the sheer amount of traffic trying to evacuate roughly a million people out of the city would create. It would make sense then to have some people evacuated to the north while others are evacuated to the south and directly to the east. It's still a stretch though.
The Golden Gate Bridge itself is 220 feet above the water, which is an additional 360 feet deep. Godzilla is 350 feet tall, so standing it wouldn't even break the surface near let alone whack into the middle span, and could easily swim under it.
Marvel Cinematic Universe
Parts of the Chitauri invasion in The Avengers (2012) had Cleveland, Ohio passing for New York City. One can tell this because the traffic lights don't look like New York City traffic lights. Cleveland earlier also stood in for Stuttgart, as the real city has no skyscrapers like the ones shown, no building on Königstrasse is more than six stories high, Königstrasse 22 opens onto a street and the city doesn't have elevated railways.
Cleveland also doubles for Washington DC in Captain America: The Winter Soldier, most noticeable as Nick Fury is involved in a lengthy car chase, that actually begins and ends on adjacent streets which form the southeast corner of the Cleveland Public Library.
Avengers: Age of Ultron: The theatrical version does leave one with the impression that Johannesburg, a landlocked city in South Africa, is located pretty close to the coast instead of hundreds of miles as it feels like the deranged Hulk managed to get there within minutes.
In Kingpin, they are driving to Reno from the Midwest; however, the film has them arriving on I-80 from the west. This was likely a deliberate choice by the director as this view of the Reno skyline is from the top of a hill, and is better visually than the correct eastern approach.
Hot Shots! Part Deux: Played for laughs, with the American strike team infiltrating a prison compound in the Iraqi jungles.
The Establishing Shot of London in The Mummy Returns shows St Paul's Cathedral, Tower Bridge and Big Ben all in the same shot. Apparently, the scenes are set inside the Thames Television logo◊. The creators actually did film in London and knew where things were, but went for Rule of Cool.
In Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, when Robin arrives in Dover he heads off to his father's castle in Nottingham and says they'll be there by nightfall. Which is extremely unlikely given they're more than 200 miles apart, and he isn't driving. And as one reviewer asked, 'if Robin Hood lands at Dover and is walking to Nottingham, then why does he go via Hadrian’s Wall?'.. which is located in the freaking North of England. Given the movie's writers were both born in Britain, you'd think they might have known better.
The distinctive waterfall Robin washes under at one point is a well known tourist attraction in the Yorkshire Dales, around 150 miles north of Nottingham and Sherwood Forest.
In Fast Five, the main characters are hiding out in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro. They take a job hijacking a train that is travelling through a desert scrubland. The job is supposedly within driving distance of Rio, however there is no such desert anywhere in Brazil,note much less near Rio, which lies firmly in the tropics.
The Animated Credits Opening in Mannequin in which the Egyptian princess travels the world while being whisked through history and, among other things, proves to Columbusthat the worldis round. She briefly visited the future before backtracking. All in line with the Rule of Funny.
In Angels & Demons, the entire scene with Cardinal Baggia's near-death assumes the viewer isn't familiar with Piazza Navona. While it is technically possible for a van to drive onto Piazza Navona, it would be way too crowded due to the tourist and cafe nightlife for anyone not to immediately notice. Also, the real Fontana dei Quattro Fiumi (AKA Fountain of the Four Rivers) is surrounded by small, spaced concrete pillars designed to protect it from any vehicles getting too close. The real fountain is also smaller and shallower, which would make attempted assassination via drowning very unlikely.
In Stuart Little, the cats lay an ambush in Central Park for the returning Stuart, whose homeward route they know will take him through the park. This makes not much sense considering the layout of Manhattan and the bridges leading to it, one of which Stuart is shown crossing.
Very often in Eurotrip, and Played for Laughs.
Cooper: Europe is like the size of the Eastwood Mall. We can walk to Berlin from there [London].
Cooper, again: Relax, Paris is practically a suburb of Berlin. It's a nothing commute.
In the opening montage of Escanaba in Da Moonlight, Reuben is supposed to be driving north of Escanaba to deer camp. In one scene, however, he can clearly be seen heading south on U.S. Highway 2, which leads back into Escanaba.
Spider-Man 2: Spider-Man and Doc Ock's fight on board an elevated train takes place on what is clearly a Chicago L train dressed up to look like a New York City Subway train, given that there have been no elevated lines in Manhattan below 125th Street since the 1950s saw the dismantling of the Second and Third Avenue els.
Star Trek: First Contact shows the southeastern Pacific from orbit at one point. Australia is clearly visible, but New Zealand for some reason is completely missing.
Cloud Atlas: Given that California was admitted to the Union as a free state, it's highly unlikely that a family who works in the slave trade would have put down roots there.
The 'Europe-Express' in The Cassandra Crossing takes a zig-zag path through Europe that's just outlandish. It's clear that the script of this film was written by Americans who didn't know jack about Europe and just lined up what few European cities they could think of. For example:
The train starts in Geneva which is close to the French border. It could directly head for Paris via Mâcon. So why send it via Basel?
A stopover in Paris is next to impossible or at least very difficult to carry out. All major stations in Paris are dead-ends, and there isn't a single mainline going through Paris, they all end there, each of them in one designated station (for example, trains from Belgium terminate at the Gare du Nord, trains from eastern France and southern Germany terminate at the Gare de l'Est, and trains from Switzerland and southeastern France terminate at the Gare de Lyon). Since the French mainline network is designed mostly in a hub-and-spoke fashion with Paris being the sole hub, sending trains to a different terminal would involve gigantic detours, at least one more change of direction and/or chugging along slowly on non-electrified branch lines behind a diesel. It was even worse in those days without the high-speed network. Now, in order to travel from Switzerland to Belgium, the train would have to either stop and change directions at the Gare de Lyon and take enormous detours to get to Belgium or take enormous detours to the Gare du Nord from where it's easier to continue to Belgium.
Actually, the standard way from Basel to Belgium is not via Paris at all, but directly from Basel into France and then via Strasbourg, Metz and maybe Luxembourg. Way shorter. And re-routing the train to Germany would be a lot easier.
If a hypothetical train were to travel from Basel via eastern France, Luxembourg and Belgium to Germany (which in reality it wouldn't, see below), it'd leave Brussels out.
Long-distance trains in general don't go through Amsterdam either. While it's technically possible, it simply isn't feasible, seeing as where Amsterdam lies. Whenever international trains coming from Germany did a stopover in Amsterdam CS, they terminated just a few miles further west at Schiphol airport station or in Hoofddorp, but they would never continue to Brussels. And trains coming from Brussels would always terminate at Amsterdam CS. For passenger rail traffic between Germany and Belgium, the way via Cologne is always the best.
Trains from Switzerland to northern Germany or Scandinavia have never taken a route via France and Benelux, and they never would. They'd most likely go directly into Germany, down the Rhine, via Cologne and through the Ruhr Area. Either that or past Frankfurt eastward, up the North-South Line and via Hanover.
The writers obviously didn't know anything about the Warsaw Pact either. The train is being re-routed through Czechoslovakia to Poland, both Warsaw Pact countries, with NATO armed forces aboard. The Soviet Red Army has sent troops and tanks into Warsaw Pact countries in reality for probably less than this. Even if the train did make it to the Cassandra bridge, it would leave behind traces of a top-secret biological weapon developed by the USA, so secret that hundreds of innocents have to be killed in a cover-up, but then ready to be picked up by the KGB.
The train's destination is named Janov and located in southern Poland. If anything, it should be spelled 'Janów' then.
In the German film Zugvögel — Einmal nach Inari, there are a few shots from inside a train that's supposed to approach the German island of Fehmarn via the Fehmarnsund Bridge on its way to Scandinavia. However, those familiar with the island can easily tell that the shots were taken from a southbound train that left the island. It was shot on location at least, but still.
What's Up, Doc? was filmed on location in San Francisco, but a number of locations were intentionally changed into fictitious settings. The Hotel Bristol that much of the film takes place in was actually the Hilton. As for two locations specified by address in the third act, Mr. Larrabee's home at '888 Russian Hill' was actually 2018 California Street, while the jewel thieves' hideout at '459 Dirella Street' was actually Historic Pier 70 located around 22nd Street.
Sheffield locals would be bemused at the ease that characters in The Full Monty could get a five-minute bus ride covering 30 miles from one side of the city to the other.
Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code also fails in this area. When leaving the Louvre, the main characters head to the American embassy, realize they can't get there, and head for Gare Saint-Lazare. To get from the Louvre to where they start making their detour, they would already have passed the American embassy. Teabing parks on the House Guard Parade, so he can see the Parliament and Temple Church. In reality, from that position, he would be able to see neither. Several buildings block the view, and there are no parks to look across, as claimed in the book.
Brown also claims the church of Saint-Sulpice lies on the Paris meridian; as a sign in the actual church helpfully points out, it doesn't.
The Dresden Files early books were pretty bad on Chicago geography. Particularly notable was when Harry had a meeting in the massive parking lot outside Wrigley Field (in reality, it has about twenty spaces). He also moves the University of Chicago from Hyde Park (on the south side) to Lincoln Park (on the north side). Possibly he mixed up U of C with DePaul. Later on, after author Jim Butcher actually visited Chicago (and got info from fans who live there), he got better about it. This is lampshaded in the Tabletop RPG core book. The section on City Creation features, 'For instance, let's say the local baseball stadium suddenly gains a parking lot..' Harry, who's reading over the notes for accuracy's sake, sardonically laughs about it.
In the first Left Behind novel, Buck is forced to make his way from Chicago to New York after the Rapture causes all manner of destruction. The timeline described is ridiculous, with Buck taking far longer using chartered planes and such to travel the distance than he would have simply by driving back roads. It culminates in a 20-mile bike ride along 13-mile long Manhattan.
One of the later books describes huge ships on the river Jordan. Said river is actually very shallow and could not accommodate ships of any kind.
Rick Riordan (Heroes of Olympus) seems to think Mt. Diablo is like some kind of lowland Yosemite mixed with the Australian outback when truthfully it's just a gentle rolling brown hill with hardly any foliage on it. Anyone who actually looked at Mt. Diablo at even Google Maps could tell you the top is NOT a depression with eucalyptus trees, but rather a visitors' center, and there really aren't any cliffs like described. And while it is a Plot Point, there are not enough—or any—eucalyptus trees surrounding the mountain, certainly not enough to be overpowering. Early morning in the middle of winter might not be freezing, but it's cold. And the Golden Brown Berkeley hills are just that, golden brown — during summer. They do, in fact, get green(ish) in the winter.
The Lightning Thief has a scene where Percy jumps from the top of the Gateway Arch into the Mississippi River. Considering that the Arch is a hundred yards or more from the river under ordinary circumstances, with some wide concrete walkways, a huge 64-step grand staircase, and a road in between, he'd need a hang glider to do that in real life. (See this photo◊ for reference.) Even during flood season, the closest the river has ever been to the Arch is halfway up the staircase.
Twilight is absolutely terrible about this. Author Stephenie Meyer seems to have confused the Olympic Peninsula with northern Alaska, since she represents Forks as almost consistently overcast (simply googling 'Rainiest Town in America' is more or less all Meyer did by her own admission in the introduction) and, well, twilit, yet at the same time underestimates how cold it can get at night, even in summer. She also seems to have forgotten that, yes, the Pacific Northwest does have a summer. A very sunny summer. It could go all of July and August, and sometimes September, without being completely overcast. Do the Cullens go on a three-month camping trip every year? At another point 'the west coast of Brazil' is mentioned. Anyone who did basic research would tell you that 'West' is probably the one cardinal direction you couldn't really say that Brazil has a coast on. There are also multiple problems with Seattle geography: Lake Union is referred to as 'Union Lake', and the shady part of town that Bella visits in the last book is vaguely reminiscent of some parts of Aurora Avenue but doesn't come close enough to any real part of the city to be believable. There is also no accounting for distance. The entire state of Washington appears to be significantly scaled down, as drives from Forks to places like Seattle and Port Angeles are described as taking far shorter than they would in real life. A drive from there to Alaska is also described as taking 16 hours, which is simply not possible on land.
Arthur Conan Doyle:
Probably done deliberately in Sherlock Holmes, for the same reason as the I Love Lucy example; when the first stories were written, house numbers in Baker Street only went up to 100.
In The Terror of Blue John Gap, the narrator at one point travels from the eponymous cave (which is a source of the semi-precious stone Blue John) to Castleton in Derbyshire, some 14 miles away. In reality, Blue John is found only in the vicinity of Castleton, a roughly 3-mile radius. Maybe this one is also Artistic License – Geology.
'On the road to Mandalay where the flying fishes play, and the sun comes up like thunder out of China 'cross the bay.' The poem is set in Burma, as various references make clear. Burma has no seacoast of any kind facing China. It could be chalked up to Poetic License: Kipling was very well-traveled and knew geography very well; the bit about 'thunder from China' is a simile (parsed 'the dawn comes up like thunder outer China 'crost the Bay'), and specifying a bay makes it clear that he's talking about the east-facing coastline of the Gulf of Martaban. Specifically in Rangoon, which is also home to the 'old Moulmein Pagoda' mentioned in the first line. So..
Andrew Holleran admitted that he had written the part of Dancer from the Dance set in Washington, D.C., before ever setting foot in D.C. I could tell. Not only was the park scene improbable, but also, another scene described the garish commercial signage of a neighborhood whose only nonresidential land use is a country club.
Played with in the Dragaera novels, where Vlad complains about how the human ghetto of Andrilanka is called South Andrilanka, yet isn't located in the south part of the city.
Damon Knight's novella 'Rule Golden' contains the line 'England is only about 400 miles long, from Land's End to John o'Groats.' While the first half of this sentence is roughly true, John o'Groats is not in England. Scotland adds another 4–500 miles to the length of Britain.
The hero of a Heian Japanese tale somehow manages to be shipwrecked on the Persian coast while traveling from Japan to China.
The Jack Prelutsky poem New York is in North Carolina is essentially one big lampshading of this trope.
Invoked in The Historical Illuminatus Chronicles when the main character is told a Masonic parable of the King of France who got lost riding in the woods and suddenly found himself in Scotland. He proceeds to comment on the intelligence of a King who fails to notice his horse swimming across the Channel.
John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath has a particularly egregious example of this in the form of the main character's home town of Sallisaw, Oklahoma. In the book, the Joads are driven from Sallisaw due to the Dust Bowl ruining the land. The problem? Sallisaw is located in the eastern half of Oklahoma, commonly referred to as green country. It never experienced the Dust Bowl.
The Guns of the South has a scene where Robert E. Lee and his staff survey the heart of Washington D.C. from a nearby hill; in the author's notes, Harry Turtledove admits that this is impossible, remarking 'Sometimes geography has to bend to suit the author's wishes.'
There's also the fact that he invents a South Carolina town out of the blue for the time-travelers to come from; it could have been handwaved if it was just them, but the fact that one of the main characters is also from the town becomes an important plot point.
Stephen King did this on purpose in The Dark Tower series. In the foreword for The Waste Lands, he notes that his New York readers will notice that he has taken 'certain geographical liberties' with the city. In the later books, when he writes himself into the story, he distorts the geography of Maine (where he lives) because he doesn't want people harassing him in his home. The former becomes a plot point later on when Eddie finds out that Co-op City, where he's from, is in a different part of New York City on Keystone Earth than it is in the version of Earth he's from.
He discusses this trope when talking about The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. He points out that Sergio Leone apparently thought Oklahoma City is about half an hour by train from Chicago. A quick look at a map of the United States will show how unlikely that is to be the case. For reference, it's more than a 2-hour trip by plane.
In Burning Water by Mercedes Lackey, a modern horror/fantasy novel, an ancient god is claiming sacrifices in Dallas, Texas. One victim is found on a rock at Bachman Lake Park. The hero of the story, a paranormal investigator, is examining the crime scene with a local police detective. Their conversation is pretty standard for the genre—bloodstains, time of death, witnesses, &c. What's missing from their exchange are the times when they would not be able to hear each other due to the jet airliners landing at and taking off every five minutes from the adjacent Love Field airport.
Beatrice Sparks' Go Ask Alice is laughable for many reasons, but when our heroine tells us she's in Coos Bay, Oregon and then proceeds to describe hippie stores that only existed in San Francisco and closed long before she got there, one begins to wonder if the drugs she's taken have confused her that much or given her Time Travel powers.
The chemistry of Hal Clement's Iceworld may be solid enough; the Inland Northwest geography he describes is rather less so. It starts in chapter 2, where he places the Lightning Creek trail on the wrong side of the valley (it's on the east side, since the creek runs up against the hillside on the west), requiring the characters to cross the creek when they turn east (in June, it's still in full spring flood, and crossing is best done another day's travel upstream) and proceed through a Douglas Fir forest (it's actually Ponderosa) that is remarkably mud- and snow-free. A character proceeds to map the area from a mountaintop, noting that Snowshoe Peak is visible 'between east and south', that parts of Lake Pend Oreille are visible (this is true of only three peaks in the eastern Lightning Creek drainage, and all three are very nearly due west of Snowshoe Peak), and that mountains are visible in every direction except west (oops, all three have mountains to the west). By chapter 7, it's clear he's making terrain up as he needs it: the hills are a thousand feet taller than they actually are, the slopes lessened so that a character can reasonably climb straight up-slope, and the trees are removed from the ridgelines for improved visibility (and plot-relevant reasons later on); directions to reach a highly-secret middle-of-nowhere location place it solidly in the middle of the well-traveled Bull River valley. The climax of the story involves a fast-spreading crown fire of the sort only seen in late August of especially dry years but happens in late June when the forest is much too wet to burn.
Given a Hand Wave in Young Wizards by Diane Duane in an 'Admonition to the Reader' before her fourth book, A Wizard Abroad'. She explains that the book geography of Ireland isn't necessarily the same in real life.
The cover of Atlanta Nights features a lovely photograph of a beach sunset with palm trees in the foreground. Atlanta is several hundred miles away from the nearest coastline. This is intentional.
In World War Z, Arthur Sinclair — director of DeStRes — describes his justification for agricultural land seizures in a way that does not reflect the actual capabilities of the area. Sinclair calls the land used by cattle ranchers in the west as 'prime potential farmland' — however, in the West, cattle are run on dry rangeland that has insufficient irrigation to raise crops. In the fuel-starved area (which the western strip of the US was described as) it would only be harder, not easier, to irrigate those areas. Using cattle to convert grass into protein is actually the efficient use of the land.
Wolfram von Eschenbach's Parzival takes place in a Europe that is, even for a medieval writer, chaotically mixed up. People can, for example, ride (fairly easily) from Spain to Wales.
While Norma Khouri's Forbidden Love is already fishy due to its incredibly inaccurate portrayal of Jordanian society, the fact that a supposedly 'researched' Misery Lit book states stuff as inaccurate as Jordan sharing a border with Kuwaitnote , fake 'fanciful' depictions of Amman, and false statements about Jordanian law as a whole make this even worse.
Fifty Shades of Grey:
Anastasia Steele drives south from Vancouver, Washington to Portland, Oregon to get to Seattle, Washington (which is north of Vancouver, Washington).
In Fifty Shades Darker, Christian Grey says the following after disappearing for about eight hours:
'I heard the TFR was lifted a while back and I wanted to take a look. Well, it’s fortunate that we did. We were flying low, about two hundred feet AGL when the instrument panel lit up. We had a fire in the tail—I had no choice but to cut all the electronics and land.” He shakes his head. “I set her down by Silver Lake, got Ros out, and managed to put the fire out.”
A TFR is a Temporary Flight Restriction. There were no Temporary Flight Restrictions on Mount St. Helens for all of 2011, when this book is set. There were none for all of 2009, either, when E.L. James wrote the fanfic Master of the Universe. The last time that there was a TFR in effect around Mount St. Helens was in 2008… three years before the timeline of the book.
According to the FAA, the minimum safe altitude for helicopters in a congested area—cities, towns, settlements, or open-air gathering places like campgrounds, bandshells, arenas, stadiums, etc.— is an altitude of 1,000 feet above the highest obstacle within a horizontal radius of 2,000 feet of the aircraft. Grey said that his altitude—his AGL—was about 200 feet. In addition to Mount St. Helens being 37 miles from Longview, Washington, 43 miles from Vancouver, Washington, and 51 miles from Portland, Oregon—thus making this a congested area—guess what the highest obstacle in the vicinity of Mount St. Helens is? Mount Adams, which is about thirty-four miles east of Mount St. Helens. Mount St. Helens is 8,635 feet high. Mount Adams is 12,277 feet high. If Grey didn't want to smash into the largest active volcano in Washington state, he should have been — at a minimum — 13,277 feet up.
Silver Lake is part of has three hiking trails running through it, one of which is right next to the area where Grey allegedly landed and which encircles the entire park. Grey and Ros could have started at one end and gone all the way to the other; they were, at MOST, three miles away from help. And the GPS on their phones, which Grey mentions, should have told them this. Silver Lake is also adjacent to a state highway, an interstate highway, and a 475-acre campground, and has two Visitor's Centers within walking distance.
Also the Forest Learning Center is on Highway 504, inside the blast zone of the volcano. That's operated by Weyerhaeuser Company, the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation, and the freakin' State Department of Transportation. Oh, and it features HELICOPTER TOURS. Helicopter tours that leave every half hour from 10-6 daily. Gee, do you think that one of those 'copter pilots would have seen a private helicopter on fire and trying to land, or would have seen the flames on the ground? Do you think that info might have been relayed to every pilot and ranger around Mount St. Helens?
The movie adaptation's poster gets this. Unless Christian's office is located on a SHIELD Helicarrier, the skyline in the movie poster is being shot looking out of a building that physically does not and cannot exist in Seattle.
The Chemical Garden Trilogy:
Apparently, among other things, World War III caused the ice caps to melt and now everything but America is underwater. However, Manhattan and America's coastline are somehow completely fine. Furthermore, all of the countries and continents are rubble, destroyed during the war. Rhine mentions that all that's left are tiny uninhabitable islands and the continent of North America. All of this destruction has absolutely no ill effects on the ecosystem, weather, sea level, or anything else in America. Sever hints at this not being entirely true, however.
Antarctica is also included as a casualty. Antarctica. The one place where a nuke would be completely unnecessary under any and all circumstances.
Max claims in The Final Warning that 'every last freaking, gol-danged thing' in Antarctica is white. In reality, exposed rock is visible along many areas of the coastline, and the ice tends to appear rose- or emerald-colored rather than white.
In his Scientific American column 'The Church of the Fourth Dimension' (reprinted in Further Mathematical Diversions), Martin Gardner speaks of 'an imaginary visit' to London and the titular Church, during which 'a mist was blowing in from the sea' as he exited from the Tube. The problem here is that in the lack of definite identification as such (as is the case with a mist), something is only identifiable as being 'from the sea' if the sea is only a few miles away (preferably above the horizon). The nearest seacoast to London is Brighton, about 60 miles away; a mist attempting to drift from there would almost immediately run into Shacktonbury Ridge, a tall and densely-wooded hill, and if it got past that would have to somehow survive passing over several towns — and Gatwick Airport.
London is much closer to the east coast than the south. The centre of the City of London is only about 25 miles from the sea, while the eastern-most tube station is Upminster on the District line, only about 10 miles from the sea. In addition, the Thames is tidal for almost its whole length through London, so it can reasonably be described as being the sea just about anywhere in the city.
In Betrayal In Death, Cornwall, in the UK, is repeatedly referred to as north of London. It is in the West Country, literally as far west as one can go in England.
Wet Desert: Tracking Down a Terrorist on the Colorado River: The reservoir held up by Davis Dam is named 'Lake Mohave'; 'Lake Mojave', which is how the lake is named in the book, is something completely different in Real Life.
Near the start of Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, when Harry and Ron miss the Hogwarts Express, they decide to steal Ron's father's flying car and follow the Express to Hogsmeade. Later on, they are told that they were seen by several Muggles in various places — including 'Flying around the Post Office Tower'. A few minutes with Google Maps shows that all tracks from King's Cross initially head towards the northwest, while the BT Tower (to give it its actual modern name) is southwest of King's Cross. So essentially Harry and Ron must have said: 'it's important that we follow the Hogwarts Express and keep it in sight, but before we do that, let's waste several minutes on flying in the wrong direction'.
On 30 Rock, Kenneth Parcell describes his hometown of Stone Mountain, Georgia as full of hillbillies. While such towns do exist in Georgia, the real-life Stone Mountain is a middle class, predominantly-black suburb of Atlanta.
Boy Meets World is set in Philadelphia, despite looking nothing like the real city. It's possible, however, that the show takes place in one of the city's suburbs like Montgomeryville or Ardmore.
Several episodes of CNNNN and The Chaser's War on Everything have featured Julian or Firth talking with Americans on the street and exposing poor general knowledge about the world. One memorable segment had people being asked which country the US should attack next in the War on Terror. Thanks to deliberately mislabeled maps, at least three people thought the country they'd chosen was located in Australia (specifically, Iran, France and North Korea (with Tasmania representing South Korea).
Another segment had Julian ask how many Eiffel Towers Paris had; one person suggested that there were ten of them. There's only one Eiffel Tower in Paris. But there are quite a few replicas of it all around the world.
Da Vinci's Demons has several ships sailing across the Atlantic from Italy to the New World, and landing in some jungle apparently right beside the Andes.. which would be those mountains in the western side of South America.
Sons of Anarchy:
The show is set in the in the fictional town of Charming, California, a short distance away from Lodi, which would place it in the San Joaquin Valley. Shots of people riding around the surrounding country roads frequently feature hilly landscapes, but the San Joaquin Valley is flat, being a valley and all.
Characters frequently ride around Northern California, often to their destination and back before sunset. It takes at least 4 hours to travel from the Lodi area to places like Redding and Red Bluff.
The state prison and DOJ facility in Stockton are fictional.
It has been observed that the journey across Manchester in Car Share takes anything but the shortest line between two points. This is possibly due to the vagaries of shooting and re-shooting dialogue scenes, and a not unreasonable assumption that the vast majority of viewers will not have local knowledge of Greater Manchester streets and landmarks and will in any case be looking at the characters and not the backgrounds. The journey taken in Episode One was observed to go round in circles, double back on itself, meander miles to the north and miles to the south of the assumed destination, leap instantly between locations as if the car was a Tardis, and in one scene it appeared to visit a completely different town sixty miles away from Manchester. Although the show lampshaded Peter's inability to use a SatNav and his lack of any maps in the car..
In an episode of It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia Dee describes running down Spring Garden Street, through Fairmount Park, in order to get to Paddy's Pub which is in South Philly. Feel free to look at a map of Philadelphia and try to figure out how that works?
Spring Garden Street runs east-west through Center City and is located south of Fairmount Park.
One of the first instances on TV likely occurred on I Love Lucy. Lucy thinks that Ricky is homesick and decides to make over the house to look like 'home.' Ricky is Cuban, but she makes the house over to look more like Mexico (complete with sombrero-and-poncho stereotypes a la Speedy Gonzales). They both speak Spanish and are in the same general area, so, bless her heart, she was close, but then comes out and sings a song dressed as Carmen Miranda, who was a Portuguese-speaking Brazilian. Wrong continent, wrong language, wrong hemisphere.
Lucy and Ricky's address for the entire series is 623 E. 68th Street. In real life, that would be somewhere in the East River. (Although this is likely intentional. Many shows use deliberately fake addresses and phone numbers so the real places aren't constantly hassled by fans and pranksters.)
Mystery Science Theater 3000 has too many to count, mostly in service of comedy. Besides the Running Gag that any town in the US is Circle Pines, Minnesota, one of the most overt appears in 'Soultaker,' the Season 10 premiere — at the time the episode was written, a restaurant called The Hot Fish Shop existed — but it was in Winona, not Osseo (a distance of about 130 miles). It also closed the weekend before the episode premiered. Oh well..
24
An important plot point in Season 4 occurs near the mountains of Iowa. Take a good look at this topographic map◊ of Iowa. See any mountains? The highest point in the state is a little under 1,700 feet above sea level. (In fairness, the midwest in general is rather generous with its use of the word 'mountain'; the St. Francois Mountains in Missouri which contain the highest point in the state, have a maximum elevation of 1772 feet.)
The real-time gimmick gets it into a lot of trouble geographically. Just one example: in the final season, set in NYC, Jack is in Middle Village, Queens and tells Chloe he's 10 minutes away from Houston Street. Maybe if he traveled by helicopter. Trying to decipher the geography of 24 is an exercise in futility.
The first season of western Hell on Wheels is set in Iowa. At the end of one episode, the two leading men ride into the sunset with mountains behind them, to the east.
Lost claimed that the discovery of the missing Oceanic airliner in the waters off Bali would allay suspicion. Bali is so utterly off course from the plane's planned flight path (several thousand miles in a completely wrong direction) that even in the weird universe of Lost, it would raise alarms. This is pointed out in extra on the season 4 DVD box set
Shot in Hawaii for the tropical setting of the survivors' beach encampment, many other locations supposedly set on the continental United States and other locations are still shot in Hawaii.
The West Wing
The 9/11 episode refers to a terrorism suspect entering the United States via the 'Ontario/Vermont border.' It is Quebec, not Ontario, that borders Vermont.
The episode 'Two Cathedrals' has the presidential motorcade driving past National Cathedral to get from the White House to the State Department, which has to be a detour of at least 20 minutes.
In the first episode of the first season, there's a scene with Mandy driving fast in her convertible around the National Mall while having an argument on her cell phone. Now to the show's credit, this one was filmed on location. However, anyone familiar with the layout of the National Mall quickly realizes that Mandy's car either magically flew backwards between cuts or she for some reason made a full circuit of the Mall (which would probably take at least five minutes, even going 60 or so in some sort of Bizzaroland where there is apparently no other traffic). Also unrealistic is the fact that she was going about 60 miles per hour on Jefferson Drive, and yet does not appear to have bits of jaywalking tourists and school groups lodged in the grille of her cute convertible.
Whose Line Is It Anyway?.
Drew Carey once said that 'Africa is a big country.' The rest of the cast mercilessly ragged on him about it for the rest of the episode.
During one 'Scenes From a Hat' where the topic was 'Unlikely State License Plates,' Colin Mochrie gave 'Miami: The Land That Time Remembered.' When Drew buzzed and reminded him Miami is a city, not a state, Colin changed it to 'Florida: Not To Be Confused With Miami.'
There was once a special episode of CSI that took place in Detroit, but was quite obviously filmed in Los Angeles. Many of us have been to Detroit to point out that there are no palm-trees lining the streets of Detroit; also, it'd be hard to find mountains on the horizon.
In another, the crime lab has to send some people up to Carson City to secure some evidence. They arrive in the middle of a blinding sandstorm, something that any person who lives in Carson City would tell you doesn't happen.
In the pilot of the short-lived series Smith, there are a number of howlers. The alley out of which one character staggers to distract the cops, for instance, is downtown and a good five miles from the building the group is supposedly robbing—which is itself represented on the exterior by a completely different building. Then the crooks make their getaway in a boat that goes down the wrong river, and stops about 50 yards before they would have gone over a dam.
Carly's grandfather in iCarly lives in Yakima and commented on why he can't drive a hour-and-a-half to Seattle to see his grandchildren. Driving from Seattle to Yakima takes about two more hours than he claims.
In the series finale of Sisters, which took place in the Chicago suburb of Winnetka, Illinois, a man tells a taxi driver to 'Take the Kennedy to Sheridan Road.' Those roads/highways are not connected in real life.
Invoked In-Universe during a Quiz Bowl in the City Guys episode 'Keep on the Download'. Manny High's team (consisting of Dawn, Al and El-Train, the latter two of whom replaced Cassidy and Martin after they quit due to Dawn's rigid teaching) is asked, 'in which Dakota is Mount Rushmore located?' El-Train's answer?..
Dawn: No! No, that's not our answer!
Ms. Noble: Sorry, I said I could only accept one answer and that answer, East Dakota, is very, very wrong.
Happy Days seems to take place in a Milwaukee where mountains and palm trees populate the landscape (especially in the opening credits), along with California housing styles which never went near Wisconsin.
Fox News Channel broadcast a map of the Middle East with Iraq labeled as Egypt◊.
They also placed Sydney, Australia on the north coast of Australia during their 2011 Tsunami coverage.
CNN also had a blunder covering the same story (which The Daily Show called them out on) where they called the Galapagos Islands 'Hawaii'.
In Season 1 of Heroes, Sylar visited a man in Virginia Beach, VA. A quick peek outside the door revealed rocky hills, scrub, and lots of dust. Viewers in coastal Virginia rolled their eyes.
An episode of MSNBC's To Catch a Predator was set in Riverside, California, but all of the wrap-around shots were from Huntington Beach, which is 50 miles away from Riverside. This might be okay, except that several shots featured the Huntington Beach Pier. Riverside has several things between the city and the ocean, including several other cities and a mountain range.
Jericho seems to forget that Kansas is bigger than Rhode Island. Throughout the series, characters see mountains from Central Kansas (mountains are not visible from anywhere in Kansas), travel less than an hour to drive over 500 miles from Wichita to Denver and act like Topeka is next door. (There are approximately 140 miles and several towns between the two.)
The made-for-TV Olsen sisters' film Passport to Paris had a huge blooper. An animation sequence showed their plane crossing over the Atlantic, flying over London, then over the Channel, then over France and the Mediterranean sea to eventually land somewhere in North Africa. The Channel is not the Mediterranean sea.
Spenser For Hire was filmed in the Boston area, but the editing made Boston-area viewers giggle as a chase would jump towns just by turning a corner. This was especially amusing when the towns involved were separated by several other towns.
Hilariously lampshaded in an episode of Homicide: Life on the Street when scenes supposed to be in Pennsylvania were shot in a distinctive area of Ellicott City, Maryland. The characters mention every few minutes that they're in Whatevertown, Pennsylvania. (The show was filmed on location in Baltimore and was fairly popular there.)
It happens from time to time on The Amazing Race, what with teams traveling all over the world and all, but never so gloriously as in the Season 16 premiere, when Jordan, despite constantly being reminded that they were going to Chile, proceeds to request tickets to Santiago, China.
In British magician Derren Brown's one-off show The Gathering he performed a trick whereby he predicted which country somebody would think of out of all of the countries in the world. The 'country' he predicted? Africa. He was correct. (Is this a failure on the part of him, or the audience member?)
QI. One example being a question about the smallest English county — expected 'wrong' answer being Rutland, with the 'correct' answer being the Isle of Wight, which apparently has a smaller area at the relevant tidemark. Unfortunately, in traditional terms the Isle of Wight isn't a county (it's part of Hampshire, and Rutland was the smallest traditional county), and in modern terms, both the reinstated Rutland and the IoW are unitary authorities — the smallest of which is Blackpool.
The traditional counties are counties which used to exist but don't necessarily still exist or have their original boundaries. A unitary authority, while being for most purposes a county in all but name, is still considered for ceremonial purposes to be part of a county. Hence the entities known as Ceremonial Counties, which are the current officially existing counties, which have the ceremonial institutions of a county such as a Lord Lieutenant and which may govern all their own territory, or alternatively some or even all of their territory may be under the control of unitary authorities. In any case, QI was wrong because the City of London is a separate Ceremonial County in its own right, not part of Greater London.
In one episode, Welsh comedian Rhod Gilbert seemed completely unable to comprehend that Denmark and Norway are not the same place, repeatedly claiming Denmark gets no sunlight in winter despite being told multiple times that it doesn't by an increasingly annoyed Sandi Toksvig (who is Danish). Alan Davies cuts the tension beautifully when he tells the Welshman, 'Denmark's the same latitude as Scotland. You know, where you're from!'
The Soap OperaThe Young and the Restless featured a storyline where a character faked his own death and escaped Wisconsin. Then he went to Ottawa. Then he went to Brazil. So his father followed him to Ottawa on a vengeance mission. Apparently, Ottawa is some harbour-front dive-down, inhabited by rednecks in cowboy shirts. In order to enter Ottawa, you have to parachute out of a clunker aeroplane. And then, another character follows the father to Ottawa. By chartering a boat. From Wisconsin. While geographically possible, it still requires a detour through four lakes and the St. Lawrence Seaway.
Friends:
In 'The One with.. Joey's Big Break', while he and Chandler are driving out of Manhattan for Las Vegas, the (rather grainy) bridge is obviously the Queensboro Bridge, which crosses the East River and connects Manhattan to Queens, but after Joey kicks out Chandler for saying the movie won't be his break, the Orbital Shot is of the Manhattan Bridge, also spanning the East River but connecting Manhattan to Brooklyn. At the coffee shop, Chandler mentions it was the George Washington Bridge, which would have been correct as it crosses the Hudson and connects Manhattan and Fort Lee, New Jersey.
Phoebe had a scientist boyfriend called David, who went to Minsk on a research trip. Minsk is stated to be in Russia several times, while it actually is the capital of Belarus. Belarus was the part of the Soviet Union to which Americans often referred as 'Russia', but the Soviet Union was dissolved years before Friends even started.
Friends seemed to live in a strange, compressed geography that takes its characters anywhere they need to go in about twenty minutes. This compression also seems to extend to other places. On 'TOW The Girl From Poughkeepsie' Ross falls asleep on the train and wakes up in Montreal. He meets a young woman who says from there 'it's only a two-hour ferry ride to Nova Scotia.' Actually, it's another six hours to get to St. John's, Nfld., and THEN a two-hour ferry ride to NS.
In How I Met Your Mother, when Robin speaks of how she met her Argentinean boyfriend Gael, it shows how they first got involved in a secluded little beach-side cabin surrounded by palm trees, a beach that looks oddly Caribbean. Argentina's beaches are all on the Atlantic, and you're more likely to find pine trees than anything even slightly resembling Robin's flashback. This is probably to do with how Ted is telling it.
In an episode of Have I Got News for You, Angus Deaton describes a US event has happening in 'Carolina'. Evidently the HIGNFY writers (or one the newspapers they got the story from) didn't realize that the state name was North Carolina, and it wasn't a phrasing analogous to how you might say something happened in 'north(ern) France'. Perhaps their confusion was reinforced by the common North Carolinian habit of referring to that state as 'Carolina'.
In 90210, Oscar figures out that there is something suspicious about rapist Mr. Cannon when he claims to be from Chelsea but clearly has a Dagenham accent. Now, while Chelsea has many upper-class parts to it, there are also several working-class areas as well. There is no way that anybody could identify a 'Dagenham accent' as opposed to any other working-class area of London. But just try convincing Henry Higgins of that.note
The US version of Shameless had a character drive from Chicago to Detroit to Toronto and then back to Chicago during the span of a single night. It takes about 9–10 hours to make that drive one way, not counting any delays at the border. The dialogue suggests that they thought that Toronto was just across the river from Detroit. It's not. Windsor is directly across the Detroit River from Detroit. Toronto is more-or-less across Lake Ontario from Buffalo, New York, almost 300 miles and four hours of non-stop, absolute-speed-limit driving further east from Detroit.
On one of the early episodes of GoGo Sentai Boukenger has the team traveling to Canada looking for the Power Item of the week. The Area that they head to is located in south-eastern Saskatchewan (known for being mostly flatland with some hills), yet features a huge Mountain range and obviously Japanese Flora. South-western Alberta might have been a better call on that one, what with the Rockies in all.
In The Event Vicky describes Murmansk as being in 'Western Siberia.' This could be a in-show mistake, but Murmansk is near the Finnish border in the most northwestern part of Russia, further west than Moscow (similar to saying Maine is in the Eastern part of the Old West).note
1967 western Cimarron Strip was filmed in a variety of places, including Utah and Southern California — both of which look nothing like the Oklahoma panhandle, where it purportedly took place; where the real 'Cimarron Strip' is flat and covered in prairie grass, the show's version is mountainous and sandy.
Torchwood: Miracle Day has the main characters arrive in Venice, California on their way to a location in Los Angeles. When asked by the Gwen, the Welsh character where their final destination is, the American character Esther answers that it's technically in another city: Los Angeles while they're in Venice. Venice is part of the City of Los Angeles.
It's also a plot point in Miracle Day that Shanghai and Buenos Aires are antipodes. According to Google Maps, that's about 150 miles off.
Viewers who are familiar with Kansas can never watch Smallville without smirking at how much greener, hillier, and wetter the in-show Kansas is compared to the real-world Kansas, and how much the in-show Kansas looks like the Vancouver area. Metropolis is within visual range and an hour or two's drive from Smallville. It has a waterfront. The nearest ocean to Kansas is the Gulf of Mexico, over 400 miles away through Oklahoma and Texas. The nearest major water body is Lake Michigan, through Missouri and Illinois. It might be a large river, but there are none of those in Kansas, barring the Missouri, and the water establishing shots is pretty clearly too wide to be that. Oddly enough, Vancouver has docks as well. Even in the DC Universe this is artistic license. In the comics, Metropolis is in Delaware, which you might notice is nowhere near Kansas.
On one episode of JAG, Harm's partner is kidnapped by gangbangers in South Central L.A. They tell Harm to drive back to Camp Pendleton, grab one of their members who has joined the Marines, and bring him back in one hour. Camp Pendleton is 90 miles from Los Angeles — even with no traffic it would be extremely difficult to make the drive down there in one hour, let alone back.
In several episodes they also drive awfully fast from Washington, D.C. to both Norfolk and Blacksburg in Virginia. Norfolk is in the southeast corner of Virginia, about 3 hours and change from DC without traffic delays. Blacksburg is near the western end of Virginia, about 4 hours from DC and even farther from Norfolk.
In one episode of Law & Order the evidence trail led to Lenny calling the Newburgh Arena in that city in the Hudson Valley. He says 'what do they have going on there? Deer ticks?' In actuality, Newburgh is a city with almost 30,000 people and, at time, enough street crime to make Lenny appreciate his job in Manhattan. Justified, because the assumption that all of upstate is extremely rural and that life there is altogether uneventful is an entirely realistic depiction of the attitudes of people from the city.
On the other hand, Newburgh is located in Orange County, which has one of the highest rates of Lyme Disease of any county in the United States.
In one episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, Picard sits in a cafe in Paris with the Eiffel Tower behind his table. He then gets up, turns in a different direction to look at the view.. with the Eiffel Tower in the background. This could be somewhat forgiven as it takes place on the holodeck.
Star Trek: Enterprise has an attack that etches a swath of destruction 4000 kilometers long, stated to be all the way from Florida to Venezuela. 4000 kilometers would indeed reach all the way from the northwestern corner of Florida almost all the way across Venezuela, but it starts in lower central Florida and proceeds almost due south, which is accurately shown to cut across Cuba and Panama (and, by extension, well into the Pacific Ocean). Unless at least Columbia and Panama got folded into Venezuela, it's not exactly on the way.
Monk:
Though set in San Francisco, this show was mostly filmed in Los Angeles. This was painfully evident in 'Mr. Monk Is Up All Night' when Monk goes to a train station and it's obviously Los Angeles Union Station, not the Fourth and King Street Station. So one wonders just how far he wandered off into the night. It's a much nicer train station, but still..
'Mr. Monk and the Other Detective' has a body being dumped near the San Bruno Caltrain station. On screen, the body is found in a hilly wooded area. You couldn't possibly really hide a body near the real San Bruno Caltrain or BART stations, as they sit in the middle of very dense neighborhoods, on flat ground, with no palm trees.
In 'Mr. Monk Can't See a Thing,' a house catches fire and a young woman is killed. Stottlemeyer says in the alleyway scene that the house is in the same area of the city as the alley dumpster where the fireman's coat and hat were found, which is said to be the Tenderloin. Except the house shown is clearly in a suburban residential neighborhood. The Tenderloin is a rough neighborhood of downtown San Francisco where there are single row occupancy units and apartment buildings, not nice homes.
Furthermore, the firehouse where Monk is blinded is said to be five blocks from the scene of the fire, but the buildings around the garage in the establishing shot clearly do not look anything like the Tenderloin region, which is also very hilly. In fact, based on the appearance of the surrounding area, it would be more realistic if the firehouse was in the Sunset District of San Francisco.
'Mr. Monk is On The Run' Part Two depicts Riverton, California as a small town. It's actually just an unincorporated community on US Highway 50.
In that same episode, you see Stottlemeyer receive a postcard from Monk, in hiding. The address shown on the card is for the city of San Francisco with the zip code 90019. That's actually a zip code for Los Angeles. The actual zip code for the address shown, after checking with the U.S. Postal Service website, is 94105.
Likewise, in 'Mr. Monk Goes to a Rock Concert,' there is no valley close to San Francisco inside the SFPD jurisdiction that would match the area where the concert grounds are. A nice aversion comes if you notice that there is a postcard in Greg Murray's trailer addressed to a postal box with an actual San Francisco zip code (94188).
Monk's apartment in the series and in the novels is said to be on Pine Street a few blocks west of Van Ness Boulevard. However, the stock establishing shots show his apartment as being on the southeast corner of Taylor Street and Broadway, far removed from Pine Street.
The cover art of the novel Mr. Monk on Patrol gets this. The novel starts in San Francisco, takes place primarily in Summit, New Jersey, but the police car on the cover art is clearly a Chicago Police Department vehicle (Monk being positioned so as to hide the word 'CHICAGO' on the car's doors).
In one episode of Vegas (2012) Sheriff Lamb establishes himself as a badass by throwing a suspect through a window in downtown Las Vegas (as indicated by the establishing shot of the Golden Nugget). However, the suspect lands near the sign for the Stardust, several miles away on the Las Vegas strip. It's probably best not to wonder why the casino even has windows on the ground floor in the first place.
Glee was notorious for getting various details about Ohio wrong, such as characters casually travelling between cities that are hours apart in real life. The show is mainly set in Lima near the Indiana border; rival glee club Vocal Adrenaline is based in Akron, which is near Cleveland on the opposite end of the state. Characters would go from one city to the next all the time even though it's a 154-mile drive. Then there are the boys from Dalton Academy in Westerville, which is near Columbus and almost 90 miles from Lima. The show implies that all these places are a short drive from each other rather than the all-day trip that they actually are.
The Office (US), set in Scranton, Pennsylvania, and filmed in Los Angeles, frequently shows palm trees and LA's surrounding mountains in the background in exterior shots (the title sequence is actual footage of Scranton, filmed by John Krasinski, and the show is actually quite faithful to the location otherwise).
ER has a rather nebulous idea of the location of Cook County Hospital. Some exterior shots place it near the Chicago River where it intersects with Michigan Avenue. Others have it well south of the Loop. And the actual hospital is on the West Side, miles away from either location.
Wizards of Waverly Place
Most things regarding New York locations. For example, in the episode with a flying carpet, they are badly superimposed over Manhattan, where they see Shea Stadium. Shea Stadium, when it existed, was very much in Queens.
Not only that Waverly Place itself is about a two block street just off Washington Square by NYU, at least the portion that is east of Washington Square Park, and this portion is definitely nothing like the SoCal-icized location shown. It does continue west of the park, however, for several blocks well into the West Village, and the set depicted on the show appears to be a somewhat plausible fictionalization of Waverly Place in the West Village. Not overly so, but at the very least, it's probably intended that the Russos live on Waverly Place somewhere in the West Village, as opposed to the eastern portion of it, which in reality is bounded by nothing but NYU buildings and one or two non-NYU apartment buildings.
The most egregious error regarding the actual depiction of Waverly Place is that it's shown as a pedestrian mall/walkway, complete with a staircase in the middle of it just before the entrance to the Waverly Sub Station. The real Waverly Place is a major thoroughfare for car traffic, like any other major street in a large city. Such a blatant error was probably done to make the set more friendly for television production.
Additionally, the area surrounding the baseball field in the episode 'The Supernatural' has a little too much fauna (and not exactly specific to Downstate New York) to be located anywhere in the five boroughs.
One episode of Murder, She Wrote referred to a character coming from someplace 'twenty miles east of Sheboygan, Wisconsin.' Which would place it in the middle of Lake Michigan. And no, there are no inhabited islands in the vicinity. (There is a Cheboygan—pronounced the same—MICHIGAN, almost directly opposite from the Wisconsin town. Perhaps the writers were confused by that.)
Doesn't help. 20 miles east of there would still be underwater, just in Lake Huron instead.
In the San Francisco season of The Real World, two of the housemates fly into Nashville and (apparently) rent a car to pick up Jon, who lived in Owensboro, Kentucky, so they can go to SF together. However, the next shot, shown before they get to Jon's house, makes no sense to anyone familiar with the geography of the western end of the state. The shot shows a sign on westbound Interstate 24 near Eddyville. Take your pick:
They took the wrong road out of Nashville, sending them northwest toward St. Louis, with Owensboro about 100 miles northeast of their then-current location.
The shot was taken while they were on their way from Owensboro to SF — which makes even less sense, as anyone who would plan on taking that trip would almost certainly start by crossing the Ohio River into Indiana and then picking up I-64.
The X-Files is a regular offender with, e.g. characters driving from Washington, DC to New York City in under three hours.
In the episode 'Ghouli,' allegedly set in Norfolk, Virginia, a major port city, a few scenes show mountains on the horizon. The nearest mountain range, the Blue Ridge (part of the Appalachian chain), is inland, halfway across the state.
Invoked in a Last Week Tonight with John OliverRunning Gag, in which John mentions a country, saying 'a country you think about so little..', and then revealing that the map graphic he's using is highlighting the wrong country (exposing the viewers' unfamiliarity with such countries).
It started with his segment on smoking, in which John brings up a graphic of South America with Uruguay highlighted. He then points out that most of his viewers know so little about the country, they didn't realize he's actually highlighted Paraguay, at which point the highlight switches to the correct country.
The joke is repeated with Bolivia in the next week's segment on judicial elections, highlighting two wrong countries before moving to the right one and lampshading that it will always be funny. Perhaps because they reused the same graphic and didn't think to adjust it, the background flag is that of Uruguay.
And repeated again with Venezuela, this time going through several wrong countries before revealing that he actually had it right the first time, but now that the viewers know the joke, they didn't realize it.
Done again with Nebraska. In a segment on the abolition of the death penalty in Nebraska, he first highlights South Dakota before switching to the correct state. He rightfully scolds the audience for not knowing the geography of their own country.
Repeated once again with Azerbaijan. This time, the false Azerbaijan he initially highlighted wasn't even a land mass, but a body of water, upping the element of surprise.
Repeated yet again with Guatemala. This time he just shows a map with nothing highlighted at all, and tells us to just look it up for ourselves if we want to know which country Guatemala is.
When discussing the 2015 Canadian elections, the joke is subverted, as instead of showing a map, John refers to Canada as 'the country you think about so little, that's it. End of sentence.'
In the introduction of the segment about the release of the Panama Papers,note the false Panama shown is a rough outline of a Scottie dog, which the actual country shown afterward strangely resembles.
In his student film on special districts, he has the kids pull this with the Nile in Egypt.
When he returns to the gag in Season 4 at the start of his segment about the Bolivian 'Zebras for Road Safety' program, he does a particularly elaborate version of it:
John Oliver: Bolivia. A country you think about so little, you haven't realized that's not Bolivia, it's Colombia. Except no, it's not, it's Venezuela, this is Colombia; no, it's not, that's actually Bolivia. Where's Colombia? No one knows!
Fargo: Luverne, being in southwest Minnesota, is a prairie town in Real Life. The show, however, regularly portrays Luverne with lots of pine forests — a feature of the northeastern part of the state.
In 'Loplop,' Peggy tells Constance that 'We're southwest.. Near Vermilion? The lake.' The lake actually sits on the Boundary Waters (the border with Canada) and would be a long day's drive northeast from Luverne, not to mention a far cry from Sioux Falls.
NCIS:
A few episodes make reference to Shenandoah National Park, but the terrain and scenery don't match the real thing.
One episode has them in a trailer park in Arlington, Virginia, an area with no trailer parks.
The season six finale features scenes at an airfield in Israel clearly shot at Sacramento. Look for the USCG Hercules behind Ziva at the end.
In another episode, where Tony pretends to be a convict to trace artifacts smuggled out of Iraq, they end up in a storage facility across the street from the Walmart in Lynchburg, Virginia; such a facility doesn't exist due to railroad tracks.
Another episode has members of the team follow a lead in Arizona. In clear view behind them when talking to a local cop, Kirk's Rock.
An episode from season 9 ends with the team racing to a football stadium to stop an attack on some high ranking military members in attendance. The overhead shot of the stadium is of the venue now known as TIAA Bank Field, which is in Jacksonville, Florida.
One episode features Gibbs and Ziva driving down a wide boulevard with steep-sided hills covered in dried grass and rock outcroppings in the near background. Such hills are common in the Los Angeles basin, but would be much further away and covered in trees in Virginia where the episode is supposed to take place.
The team is often seen canvasing the scene of a crime somewhere in DC or the surrounding area. Anyone who knows DC will know that there are absolutely NO art deco bridges. Los Angeles, however, is littered with them.
The Walking Dead from Season 5B on is set in Northern Virginia, yet, like seasons 1-4 is still filmed in Georgia. The characters are roaming around what is supposed to be Alexandria, Virginia, which is depicted as heavily wooded rural areas, scattered solitary warehouses, two-lane roads with forest on both sides, and the occasional farm. The fact they are near Washington, D.C., their original goal is never mentioned and why they never head into the city is ever brought up. Alexandria in real life is a heavily developed and urbanized part of the nation's capital, filled with housing developments, towns, government facilities, a major highway (I-495 of the Capital Beltway cuts through it) and Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport, a major domestic hub, nearby.
Gilmore Girls has a brief example in 'Like Mother, Like Daughter' when Luke and Lorelai debate the fastest way to get from Stars Hollow to Connecticut. Lorelai mentions taking I-5, which is an interstate on the other side of the country.
Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles: in the pilot episode Sarah and John Connor move from West Fork, Nebraska to Red Valley, New Mexico.
There is an area called Red Valley in New Mexico, but it certainly does not look like a 'hicktown'.
There is no place called West Fork in Nebraska.
Marvel's Netflix universe:
Daredevil (2015) takes place in Hell's Kitchen, but is filmed in Brooklyn and Queensnote . It causes the occasional slip-up, like:
The warehouse where Matt holes up with Vladimir in 'Condemned' is said to be at the northwest corner of 47th Street and 12th Avenue. That would be impossible as 12th Avenue at Hell's Kitchen is the West Side Highway, as opposed to a regular street. On the opposite side of the street from the buildings is the USS Intrepid Museum, which is not visible in any shots. The West Side Highway is also eight lanes at this point, not a two-lane road with buildings on both sides. This part of Hell's Kitchen is also primarily residential buildings, and no industrial warehouses.
'Bang' opens with a Walk and Talk of Matt and Foggy walking to work, ostensibly in Hell's Kitchen. However, a street sign for East 116th Street appears in the background, betraying the Upper East Side filming location.
The newspaper article on the death of Karen Page's brother in 'Seven Minutes in Heaven' reports that he had been 'heading east on Vermont Route 12 from the Hill Road exit ramp off Interstate 89'. Vermont Route 12 is a north-south highway that runs parallel to Interstate 89 for much of its length, with the two highways only crossing at the state capital in Montpelier. There's also no direct off-ramp between VT-12 and I-89. There also is no Windler County in Vermont, as Montpelier is in Washington County.
Early in 'Into the Ring,' Foggy meets with Sgt. Brett Mahoney as Brett emerges from what is supposed to be the 50th Street station on the IND Eighth Avenue Line. The entrance signage on the stairwell is accurate, but the landscape of the surrounding buildings isn't. The area around 50th Street and Eighth Avenue in the show is depicted as low-rises that don't exceed five stories at most. In reality, this stretch of Eighth Avenue is primarily composed of highrises exceeding 20 stories. That is actually the entrance to Bedford Avenue on the BMT Canarsie Line with the real signs being temporarily replaced.
Jessica Jones (2015)
In one episode, Jessica very briefly follows Wendy Ross-Hogarth from Tompkins Square Park to a subway entrance at 34th Street — Herald Square, which is 25–30 blocks away in real life. They end up on the subway platform for Lower East Side — Second Avenue on the IND Sixth Avenue Line, which is a few miles and several stops away on the Lower East Side.
There is no intersection of a Birch Street and a Higgins Drive anywhere in the New York City area. Jessica's childhood house is actually located in the outer Queens neighborhood of Douglaston at 15 Prospect Avenue.
Luke Cage (2016)
Cornell 'Cottonmouth' Stokes' main stash house is the Crispus Attucks Community Center. While many schools, parks, theaters, playgrounds, and community centers have been named in honor of the Boston Massacre victim, none of those various establishments are located in Harlem like the series suggests.
The show seems to imply that Claire Temple and Luke Cage drive from New York to Georgia in what seems to be a single day and drive back in about the same amount of time. That's at least 12 straight hours of nonstop driving on Interstate 95, assuming they never stop for gas, sleep, food, or restroom breaks. And that's also before factoring in the inevitable traffic congestion in the metropolitan areas along the way (Newark, Philadelphia, Wilmingtonnote , Baltimore, Washington DC, and Richmond).
The Punisher (2017): The caption when Rawlins is introduced in episode 5 says the CIA headquarters is in Fairfax, Virginia, not Langley where it's actually based.
There's a Columbo episode set in London, which ends with Columbo leaving 'the wax museum' (obviously meant to be Madame Tussauds) and crossing a road to the Royal Albert Hall, which is miles away. Although it might possibly have been a fictional wax museum in Kensington.
The Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. episode 'The Asset' bizarrely and insultingly depicted Malta as a developing-world rogue state whose dictatorial government was in the pocket of a millionaire Diabolical Mastermind. In fact, Malta is a developed country, a democracy, and a full member of the European Union (which dialogue in the episode specifically denied). It's hard to see why they didn't make up a Ruritania, or simply set the episode in Latveria.
The Strain has a plot line running through Season 2 where Setrakian does business with a gang operating out of the Chapel of the Good Shepherd on Roosevelt Island. While there is such a church, the show places it under the Queensboro Bridge, whereas in reality it's significantly further north.
Emmerdale had a police officer informing the family of a missing person that Interpol had told them that the body of a man had been found 'at a harbour in Prague' - the capital of the landlocked Czech Republic.
In an episode of The King of Queens, Doug and Carrie Heffernan go on a holiday elsewhere in the USA having chosen a direction at random. They are next seen driving along Highway 28, which runs through Oregon in the Pacific North-West. A scene or two later, Doug is seen conferring with a local as to the best route: to stay on 28 or to take the intersection to Highway 414. the problem is.. Highway 414 runs several hundred miles to the East of 28, in the Mid-west state of Wyoming. It does not ever directly connect to Highway 28.
Vikings: Where to start..
Kattegat is in Norway, but can somehow be reached from Hedeby in southern Denmark or northern Germany on horseback with no mention of a sea journey.
Kattegat is a real place, but the real-life Kattegat is the ocean strait between Jylland (the Danish peninsula) and the west coast of Sweden.
Uppsala is depicted as in the mountains, rather than in the middle of the lightly wooded plain it is in in real life.
Both the area around Uppsala and what is today south-western Sweden are portrayed as inhospitable wastelands, when,in real life, these areas are two of the most fertile agricultural areas in Scandinavia, and would definitely have been so in Viking times.
In 'Folsom Prison Blues' by Johnny Cash, he is in Folsom Prison because he 'shot a man in Reno/Just to watch him die.' Folsom Prison is a California state prison, and Reno is in Nevada, just across the California line. But there's no rule that the state a person is imprisoned in has to be the same one their crime was committed in.
In Lefty Frizzell's 'Saginaw, Michigan', the narrator claims that he lived in a house on Saginaw Bay. Saginaw, Michigan is about 20 miles inland from the bay, so it would be physically impossible to be in both Saginaw and on Saginaw Bay.
And then there's Lead Belly's 'Cotton Fields' song which mentions a place 'in Louisiana, just about a mile from Texarkana'. Texarkana is sitting on top of the Arkansas/Texas border, but it's nowhere within one mile from Louisiana's borders.
Journey's 'Don't Stop Believin' has the line 'Just a city boy, born and raised in South Detroit.' There is no South Detroit; directly south of downtown is Canada (specifically Windsor, Ontario), while the area south of the city on the Michigan side of the Detroit River is known as 'Downriver' and is more of a collection of suburbs than the 'city' of the lyrics.
Similarly, The Feeling's 'Without You' (its lyrics referring to the Virginia Tech spree shooting) mentions 'North Virginia', a term that is not used by locals and in no way describes the location of Virginia Tech within the state of Virginia.note
Averted/parodied by The Beatles' 'Back in the USSR'; the lyric 'and Georgia's always on my mind' refers both to the song Georgia on my Mind (about the US state of Georgia and/or a woman named Georgia) and the Georgia in the Caucasus.
The very first verse of the Canadian-geography-extolling patriotic song 'Something to Sing About' begins, 'I've stood on the sand on the Grand Banks of Newfoundland..' The Grand Banks are between 24 and 100 metres under water.
Very, very strong diving suit?
Actually at low tide there are areas you can wade on (or if you're trying to actually fish, avoid like crazy.) That's justification after the fact though: it was probably originally just put in to sound good.
British artist Kim Wilde's 'Kids in America' includes a perplexing line about 'East California'. California is long and narrow and is usually divided into north and south regions. The northeast part is dominated by mountains, the southeast is dominated by desert, and both are sparsely populated.
Sade's 'Smooth Operator': 'Coast to coast, LA to Chicago', though you can argue that they're supposed to be two unconnected phrases.
Music video for 'Pippero' by Elio e le Storie Tese takes place on the Italian-Bulgarian border. Needless to say that the Italian-Bulgarian border doesn't exist.
Lemon Demon's Ultimate Showdown of Ultimate Destiny has Abraham Lincolncame out of his grave, in Tokyo..
'The Night Chicago Died' says that the police shootout took place on the east side of Chicago. As Dave Barry pointed out in his 'Bad Song Survey' column, Chicago has no east side. East of Downtown Chicago is Lake Michigan. There is a neighborhood in Chicago called East Side; it's on the Far South Side, along the Illinois/Indiana state line. In the 1920s, East Side was a quiet, residential, and predominantly Swedish neighborhood — hardly the site of the bloodbath described in the song. There's also a district in downtown called the 'Near East Side', north of the Chicago River and east of Michigan Avenue.
The songwriters said in interviews — most notably on Beat-Club shortly after the song's smash success — that they had never been to Chicago before that time, and that their knowledge of the city and that period of its history had been based on gangster films. Paper Lace did send the song to Mayor Richard J. Daley, who was not impressed with the song and greatly disliked it.
Parodied in 'Weird Al' Yankovic's 'Canadian Idiot', where the singer mentions 'driving a Zamboni all over Saskatchewan'. Saskatchewan is actually considered a prairie province and definitely isn't covered in ice. This, however, is making fun of people who think that all of Canada is a frozen wasteland as if the Great Plains stopped at the US-Canadian border for some reason..
In the song 'Uneasy Rider', Charlie Daniels sings about his left rear tire being 'about ready to go' just as he crosses the Mississippi line on his way to Los Angeles. He limps along the shoulder until he gets to a bar in Jackson. This doesn't make sense no matter how hard you squint. If he had started in Nashville, Tennessee, or Muscle Shoals, Alabama, his best route would be I-40 through Memphis, not I-20 through Jackson. If he'd started in Atlanta, Georgia, then I-20 does make sense, but then he wouldn't go through Arkansas at all. In any case, he was really pushing his luck to drive on a bad tire and on the rim to Jackson — it's at least 130 miles from any 'Mississippi line'.
There's still lots of debate over the chorus of the Robert Johnson blues classic 'Sweet Home Chicago': 'Oh, baby don't you wanna go?/Back to the land of California/To my sweet home, Chicago.' The consensus is that this wasn't a mistake on Johnson's part, but there are endless guesses as to why he wrote it that way. The song's supposed to be about a road trip from California to Chicago. Or he was combining two places that people in the Mississippi Delta wanted to move to. Or the song's Unreliable Narrator doesn't know that Chicago isn't in California. Or Johnson was giving a Shout-Out to friends/relatives who lived in the small California towns of Chicago Park or Port Chicago.
Pavement's 'Box Elder' has the line 'I'm gonna head to Box Elder, M.O.' There are a few places in the United States called Box Elder, but none are in Missouri, the state with the post office abbreviation of MO; the band most likely meant to refer to Box Elder, Montana, which would be 'Box Elder, M.T.'
Dan Fogelberg's 'Run for the Roses', about the Kentucky Derby, begins with the lines 'Born in the valleys/And raised in the trees/Of western Kentucky..' Although Kentucky is indeed the epicenter of the American Thoroughbred industry, the horse farms are mostly around Lexington, locally considered to be in Central Kentucky, and far removed from anything that anyone from Kentucky would call 'Western'.
'Rollin' Home' by Pirates of the Mississippi: 'Picked up a load in San Angelene / Dropped a transmission down in New Orleans'. There is no place anywhere in the world called 'San Angelene'.
Jon Lajoie's character, MC Vagina, did 'Very Super Famous', which is about how he is loved by women all over the world. Given that MC Vagina is a moron, it would probably be easier to list the stuff he gets right.
Invoked by 'Jack' to yank his friend's chain in the opening dialogue of the Arrogant Worms' 'Bitchin' Camaro', when Jack claims his parents drove his new car (the titular Camaro) up from the Bahamas for him.
In Jason Derulo's hit 'Talk Dirty', he sings about how he's been all over the world and doesn't need to speak the local tongue to flirt with women. However, half of the places he name-drops are predominantly English-speaking (New York and London), and one of them has English as a required academic subject from age 8 onwards, with many schoolchildren starting to learn it much earlier (Taiwan).
'Michael Row the Boat Ashore' has the line '[the] River Jordan is deep and wide'. Today's River Jordan is neither of these things.
Invoked in 'Wagon Wheel', originally recorded by Old Crow Medicine Show and Covered Up by Darius Rucker. When Ketch Secor wrote the lyrics, he knew that 'west from the Cumberland Gap to Johnson City, Tennessee' was wrong (one would head east through said gap to get to Johnson City), but left it anyway because he thought 'west' sounded better. (Although why he didn't just swap 'to' and 'from'..)
Travis Tritt's 'Modern Day Bonnie and Clyde' also gets geography wrong regarding Johnson City. The song begins in that city, while the chorus has the line 'It's a long way to Richmond, rolling north on 95'. Interstate 26 is the main freeway through Johnson City (although at the time of the song's recording, it was part of Interstate 181, which ended south of town), and the most direct route to Richmond would be via Interstates 81 and 64. While I-95 does travel through Richmond, going from Johnson City to Richmond using I-95 would first require one to travel south to Asheville (again, keeping in mind that I-26 between Johnson City and Asheville had not yet been completed at the time of the song's writing) and then cut all the way across North Carolina on I-40.
Alabama's music video for 'Tar Top' shows an Interstate 40 shield with the state name of Alabama on it (at the time, many Interstate shields bore the name of the state through which the highway ran). I-40 never runs through Alabama at any point.
A small one occurs in Lights.. Camera.. Action! Although it is set in San Francisco, the right side of the table shows an orange suspension bridge with three towers. Either the Oakland Bay Bridge is miscolored or the Golden Gate Bridge got a sudden extension.
The following was said in Botchamania 21 by Macho Man Randy Savage, completely seriously and unironically. Whether or not it's a straight example due to Savage being a bit of a Cloudcuckoolander remains to be seen. Well, if we presume that Mars is Mars, Pennsylvania (near Pittsburgh), and Hell as Hell, Grand Cayman Island, that would put the danger zone somewhere roughly on the American East coast, or possibly Cuba. Though maybe this is reading a bit too much into obscure placenames..
Randy Savage: I've been in the danger zone — yeah! — I've been in the danger zone east of the Pacific Ocean, west of London, England, south of Mars, and north of Hell! Yeah!
In a November 2016 broadcast of I'm Sorry I Haven't a Clue, Jack Dee's patter includes a joke about 'Equatorial New Guinea'. The joke works but the nation should either should be Equatorial Guinea or Papua New Guinea.
FIFA and its affiliates have a few.
Australia was tired of winning the Oceania qualifiers only to lose The World Cup playoff, so they moved to the Asian confederation.
As many of the Asian members refuse to acknowledge the existence of Israel, they play the European qualifiers instead note . Kazakhstan is also in Asia but joined UEFA in 2002.
Related, the winner of the 1958 African/Asian qualifier was Wales, as everyone else on the final round had refused to play Israel and thus a European runner-up was brought instead.
Given Suriname and Guyana are already odd countries in South America (and the other teams are much stronger), they play in the North/Central America zone. French Guyana is also a member of CONCACAF, but not FIFA as they are still part of France (thus they can't go to the World Cup).
In his first press conference after being drafted by the Utah Jazz, Karl Malone told the Salt Lake City media how happy he was to be in 'the city of Utah'.
Year later, when the Dallas Mavericks faced the Utah Jazz in the 2001 NBA playoffs (the Mavs' first playoff in 11 years), Dirk Nowitzki caught flak for saying how Dallas was going to the 'city of Utah'. True, Nowitzki is German, but he'd been in the league three years and the Mavs and Jazz were in the same division at the time.
The Big East Conference, which was originally comprised of all Northeast schools, really went to hell with this after the turn of the century. In an attempt to expand their base (and status as a football conference), they added the University of Louisville, Cincinnati, Chicago's DePaul University and others to make up for the departing Boston College and University of Miami, then they started going after Texas teams like TCU (who eventually went to the Big 12 instead), SMU and the University of Houston and even further west with Boise State and San Diego State (both of which ended up staying in the Mountain West Conference). They had enough teams to make East and West Divisions and put Philadelphia's Temple University in the West while Louisville and Cincinnati were in the East. All this led to longtime members West Virginia, Syracuse, and Pittsburgh bolting for other conferences, and then seven schools in the conference (dubbed the 'Catholic 7'note due to them sharing that denomination) got fed up in 2012 and all left to form another conference altogether, winning the right to the Big East name in the process.
As for the conference that the Catholic 7 left behind, which became the American Athletic Conference, they're playing with the trope. With Navy joining the league for football only in 2015, they split into East and West divisions for that sport and started playing a conference championship game. Navy specifically asked to be in the new West Division, despite being located on the Chesapeake Bay in Maryland. (Since Navy has a national following, and also uses its national schedule as a recruiting tool for the future Navy and Marine officers it trains, geography isn't as big a factor for them as it is for most other schools.)
Speaking of Syracuse and Pittsburgh, in the midst of the conference realignment, both schools settled in the Atlantic Coast Conference, which, as the name suggests, is a conference that consists of schools near the Atlantic coast of the US. While New York, the state that Syracuse is in, is on the Atlantic coast, Pittsburgh is nowhere near the coast. Adding to the madness are the recent ACC additions Louisville and Notre Dame. Even if one stretched the definitions of Atlantic and coastal, neither school's location in the conference makes sense geographically.
Dallas' sports teams have it crazy. The Cowboys are in a division with all Northeast teams (see above) while the Texas Rangers are in divisions with all West Coast teams. From 2000 to 2013, the Dallas Stars were in the NHL's Pacific Division, with teams from California and Arizona, but they're now in the Central Division with other teams in the Central Time Zone, plus the Colorado Avalanche. The Mavericks get to be in a division with two other Texas teams and one in New Orleans. And the Memphis Grizzlies.
From 1969 until Major League Baseball expanded and reorganized divisions in 1994, the Cincinnati Reds and the Atlanta Braves were in the National League West division, while the St. Louis Cardinals and the Chicago Cubs were in the NL East. This was solely to ensure the Cubs and Cardinals were in the same division due to their rivalry; why they couldn't have both gone to the West and made things much easier is anyone's guess.
The stated reason was that the Cubs and Cardinals, by being placed in the NL East, would get more games against the Philadelphia Phillies and New York Mets, which would result in a more lucrative schedule — whether that meant more fan interest against the big cities of the Northeast where baseball was most strongly-rooted or an easier schedule in a division with a Phillies team whose history is dearth of success (at that point, the Phillies had won two NL pennants and zero World Series in 81 years of play) and a seven-year-old Mets team whose best finish up to then was 9th place out of 10 is not clear (it could be both). Outside of that, the league also had competitive balance concerns about placing the top three NL teams from the 1968 season (the Cubs, Cardinals, and San Francisco Giants) in the same division (only division winners played postseason baseball — the Wild Card would first be used in 1995).
If the Cubs' reason for insisting on being in the Eastern Division was for an easier schedule, they got their comeuppance that season — the '69 Cubs held a 9-game lead in the division in mid-August over the Cardinals and Mets before the latter earned their 'Miracle' nickname by finishing 37–11 while the Cubs choked out a 20–28 finish, with the end result of the Mets claiming the division by 8 games and eventually winning the World Series that year.
The NFL, up until the 2002 realignment, was an exercise in geographical insanity. Of the five teams in the NFC West division in 2001, three of them (New Orleans Saints, Atlanta Falcons, Carolina Panthers) were Southern cities while the Arizona Cardinals of the NFC East were the westernmost team in the NFC after the San Francisco 49ers. There are still a few oddities present today (the Indianapolis Colts of the AFC South are farther north than the Baltimore Ravens of the AFC North; also, prior to the Los Angeles Rams' re-relocation from St. Louis, they were east of the NFC East's Dallas Cowboys but in the NFC West), but for the most part, the current alignment makes a lot more sense.
Somewhat justified, as the Cardinals had moved from St. Louis in the late '80s, and when the Panthers came into existence in 1995, the NFC West had an open spot, having only four teams to the other divisions' five. And when the AFL and NFL merged, the new NFC alignment was drawn out of a hat.
The Cowboys remain in the NFC East solely because of their longtime rivalries with the Washington Redskins and Philadelphia Eagles.
NFL geography has been somewhat jacked up since 1953, with the Baltimore Colts joining the Western Conference. It got worse with the 1967 realignment into four divisions, with teams going all over the place. Oddly enough, one 1967 division remains intact (and geographically reasonable) to this day: the Central Division, which became the NFC Central, and since 2002 has been the NFC North. The division has had Chicago, Detroit, Green Bay, and Minnesota the entire time (adding Tampa Bay from 1977-2001).
The NHL had quite a bit of it once changed into Western and Eastern conferences: the Pacific Division had Phoenix (like in the eponymous NBA division, where the Suns are the only non-California team), and Dallas, closer to most eastern teams than California; and the Columbus, Ohio team was also in the Western Conference (Detroit being the West was justified by both its location and the rivalry with Chicago). Then came the realignment where a division consisting mostly of Northeastern US/Canada teams has also the Florida ones (though at least it's been renamed from the 'Northeast' to 'Atlantic' Division..note which forced the hitherto 'Atlantic' Division to be renamed the 'Metropolitan'.).
Their woes began from the very moment they expanded beyond the 'Original Six' teams. To make sure people would tune in to the Stanley Cup—and to guarantee an O6 team would be in said finals—the Eastern Conference was composed of Boston, Toronto, Montreal, Chicago, New York, and Detroit, and the Western Conference was Oakland, Los Angeles, Minnesota, St. Louis..and Pittsburgh and Philadelphia, two cities that are further east than some of the Eastern Conference teams.
Many American pro sports teams are not based in the cities they represent, but bordering suburbs. Justified to some extent as they're representing the metropolitan area as a whole, not just the city itself.
The NFL has several examples. The Washington Redskins currently play at FedEx Field in Landover, Maryland, and have their offices and practice facilities in northern Virginia. The New York Giants and New York Jets don't play in New York (the city OR the state) unless they're playing the Buffalo Bills on the road; their shared home ground at MetLife Stadium is in East Rutherford, New Jersey (this has led combative New Jersey governor Chris Christie to refer to the Jets as the 'Jersey Jets' on at least one occasion). And, on top of that, both also have their offices and practice facilities in New Jersey. The Buffalo Bills play in the suburb of Orchard Park. The Miami Dolphins do play in a city with the word 'Miami', but it's Miami Gardens. With the opening of their new stadium, the San Francisco 49ers now play in Santa Clara, which is closer to San Jose than it is to San Francisco. The Dallas Cowboys haven't played in the Big D itself ever since they left the Cotton Bowl in 1971 (Texas Stadium was in Irving, the current one is in Arlington).
Major League Soccer has nearly as many examples as the NFL. The Chicago Fire play in Bridgeview, Illinois. The New York Red Bulls, like the Giants and Jets, play in New Jersey but have their own home stadium in Harrison. The Philadelphia Union play in Chester, Pennsylvania. FC Dallas plays in Frisco, the LA Galaxy in Carson, and Real Salt Lake in Sandy (although in the latter case, 'Salt Lake' could refer to Great Salt Lake, Salt Lake City, or both).
Finally averted by the team now known as the Arizona Coyotes in the 2014 offseason. They had been playing as the Phoenix Coyotes in the suburb of Glendale since December 2003. (The Coyotes had played in Phoenix from 1996, when they arrived from Winnipeg, until moving to Glendale.)
Speaking of the NHL, they've pretty much completely averted this trope. Now that the Coyotes have rebranded themselves as an Arizona team, there's not a single team in the league that bears a city name that plays outside its namesake city. The only other teams that play in unmistakably suburban cities either bear the city's name (Anaheim Ducks) or are named for their region (Florida Panthers, who play in the Miami–Fort Lauderdale suburb of Sunrise).
Zig-zagged by two NBA teams:
The Cleveland Cavaliers originally played in the Cleveland Arena until it was torn down in 1974, then they played in Richfield, almost an hour south, for 20 years. However, Gund Arena (now Quicken Loans Arena or 'The Q') was built in downtown Cleveland in 1994, and the Cavs have been playing in Cleveland proper ever since.
The Detroit Pistons played in the city of Detroit from their arrival in 1957 until moving to the Pontiac Silverdome in 1978. From there, they went to The Palace of Auburn Hills in 1988.note They returned to Detroit proper in 2017, sharing Little Caesars Arena with the Red Wings.
Also zig-zagged by the San Jose Earthquakes of MLS. They started out playing at Spartan Stadium on the campus of San Jose State University. After the 2005 season, the team left for Houston (becoming the Dynamo), but left their history behind for a new ownership group that emerged in 2007. When the Quakes resumed playing in 2008, they played most of their home games in Santa Clara, with occasional big games in other Bay Area cities, but none in San Jose proper. Finally, in 2015, they returned to their namesake city with the opening of Avaya Stadium.
The Atlanta Braves' 2017 move to SunTrust Park in Cobb County played with the trope. While the Braves no longer play in the city proper, the new stadium has an Atlanta address.note
Here's a fun one from Major League Baseball: the Angels started off as the Los Angeles Angels (named after the city itself) and actually played in Los Angeles. Just before moving to a newly constructed stadium in the suburb of Anaheim, they changed their name to the California Angels, which was less specific but had the advantage of being true for both the remainder of their time in LA and after the move to Anaheim. But then Disney bought the team and extensively renovated the stadium, with the City of Anaheim putting up some of the funding .. and contractually obligating the Angels to incorporate the city name in the team name. So they became the Anaheim Angels. Then a new owner realized Los Angeles was a much bigger market and the team was renamed the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim, honoring the contract in the letter if not in the spirit. That's still the official name, though in practice they're generally just called the Los Angeles Angels.
Many times in North American pro sports, the team offices are located in the namesake cities, and the stadiums (which are sometimes located in the suburbs for logistical and/or financial reasons) are meant to service customers in the entire metro area, not just that particular suburb.
In 2015, the official T-shirts for MLB's division champions included a silhouette of the team's home city skyline printed on the front. The AL West Champion Texas Rangers received shirts with the Dallas skyline printed on them. This did NOT go over well with the people of Arlington, where the team has played since moving to Texas in 1972; such a snit was raised that MLB chose not to make any more shirts after the original shipment.
Race tracks:
The NASCAR track known as the Charlotte Motor Speedway is not in Charlotte, North Carolina, but instead in Concord. which is not even in the same county as Charlotte. Its location in Cabarrus County puts it just across the county line from Mecklenburg County, the county that contains Charlotte. Not only that, but the Charlotte city limits are only a few miles away. As Charlotte is by far the more well-known city, well..
Similarly, the Milwaukee Mile is neither located in the city of Milwaukee (although West Allis, where the track is actually located, is still in Milwaukee County) nor is it a true mile.
Indianapolis Motor Speedway is not located in Indianapolis, Indiana proper, but an enclave within the city known as Speedway. Given that the city of Speedway is surrounded by the city of Indianapolis, this example splits hairs somewhat.
Talladega Superspeedway is a lot closer to Lincoln, Alabama and Interstate 20 than it is to the town of Talladega, Alabama. Its name still makes sense as it is located in Talladega County.
Atlanta Motor Speedway is not in Atlanta, Georgia, but in the town of Hampton in Henry County, two counties away from Fulton County where Atlanta is located. Henry County is still part of the Atlanta-Sandy Springs-Roswell, Georgia Metropolitan Statistical Area, so the name still fits.
The famous blunder of soccer player Andreas Möller when asked about his new team: Milan or Madrid as long it's Italy (it's the former, by the way).
The Carolina Panthers are considered a regional franchise, representing both North and South Carolinanote . One time, Nike accidentally printed T-shirts with South Carolina identified as North Carolina.
The annual championship series of North American-based Major League Baseball played since 1903 between the American League (AL) champion team and the National League (NL) champion is called 'The World Series' — though in fact one or two places other than the United States and Canada exist in the world, and some of them even play baseball.
Averted by Little League Baseball, whose World Series tournaments all feature teams from around the world.note
Despite having Grimsby in their name, Grimsby Town actually play their home games in the neighbouring town of Cleethorpes and have done so since 1899.
The New Saints, the most successful football club in the Welsh Premier League, are based in Oswestry, which is near the Welsh border, but definitely in England. It turns out that this arrangement is justified—in 2003, Oswestry's former club, Oswestry Town, voted to merge into TNS. The merged club chose to play at Oswestry's larger ground. Making it even more justified is that Oswestry Town, despite its English location, had long played in the Welsh league system.
One of the football tournaments in England and Wales is the EFL Trophy, which is currently open to teams from Leagues One and Two and is further divided into Northern and Southern Sections. It is not unknown for Cambridge United to be placed in the Northern Section and Peterborough United in the Southern Section — despite Peterborough being north of Cambridge.
American sportscasters love to refer to cities either by cliched nicknames that very few locals actually use ('Beantown' for Boston, 'Frisco' for San Francisco) or by famous areas of the city that are nowhere near the actual venues used by pro sports teams. One of those, 'South Beach' for Miami, was popularized by LeBron James, even though the arena the Miami Heat play in is actually located on the other side of Biscayne Bay from South Beach. It also gets applied to the Marlins (who play even further inland) and the Dolphins (who play many miles northwest in Miami Gardens). Similarly, no Los Angeles pro teams actually play in Hollywood.
The World of Darkness:
Old World of Darkness was excused by White Wolf saying it was an Alternate Universe, and they took liberties with the geography to fit the mood of each game. Still:
One supplement infamously placed Oxford within easy walking distance of central London, despite being nearly 60 miles away.
Auckland is located in Australia — and Australia's capital is Sydney.
New Orleans apparently has a subway system. Near the Gulf Coast. Below sea level. To put things in perspective, most houses in southern Louisiana lack basements precisely because they'd become indoor pools before long.
No one lives between Vancouver (Canada) and the Rocky Mountains, which is weird considering how much of that space would be great for farming, mining or logging.
The New World of Darkness somewhat esoterically treats Europe (and the American seaboards) this way in its Vampire installment. It's explained that vampires don't want to risk driving even to the nearest city from their own, because it might end up with them stranded with not enough time to make it back to their own city. This makes sense in the middle of the US or Canada, where it can take hours to drive to the city limits of the nearest city and more to drive to the centre and the same amount of time back. In Europe and along the coast, few cities outside Scandinavia are more than an hour from their nearest neighbours.
The Lexicon, the geography volume of Bard Games' Atlantean Trilogy, can be forgiven for re-drawing the map of Earth to make their ancient civilizations more interesting. However, referring to salt-water straits as 'rivers' merely because they're wet and narrow would surely have been a boo-boo even in the Second Age of Atlantis!
As pictured above, Risk redefines the borders of many countries by incorporating smaller ones into their larger neighbors or by grouping them together to form geographic regions in order to simplify the game and to make the map more legible. However, the game mistakenly refers to one region in Central Asia as 'Afghanistan' despite not incorporating the country at all; it's instead a part of the neighbouring 'India' region.
Interestingly, larger countries such as the USA and Russia get broken up into smaller territories. This is likely for the sake of game balance.
The game Outburst is playing by giving a team a category and seeing how many of the 10 examples of things within that category they can name within a short period of time. Somewhat like Family Feud, but without taking turns. Each card will feature at least one answer that is factually incorrect or just plain off-the-wall, on the basis that someone is likely to say it anyway. One edition had a card listing 'Cold Countries', with 'Siberia' as one of its answers. Siberia is a region of Russia, not a country unto itself. So a globally ignorant player who pipes up and gives this response may end up winning the round for their team.
One Shadowrun adventure taking place in Bogotá describes the landlocked mountain city as having a port. It has an airport, but no seaport to speak of.
The infamous War! book was famous for many, MANY Artistic Licenses, being Geography just one of them..
The Atlas of Earth-Prime for Mutants & Masterminds got into a bit of a muddle with Britain Versus the UK, first saying the Republic of Ireland is separate from 'England and Northern Ireland' (you missed two countries, guys), and then including Belfast in the Ireland entry anyway.
William Shakespeare has been accused of this, accurately and inaccurately.
The Italian Errors — None, actually, as the accusations are based on the accusers' own error.
In Two Gentlemen of Verona, the character of Valentine takes a ship to go to Milan from Verona. In the sixteenth century, Verona and Milan were connected by a canal, allowing Valentine to make his trip by boat to Milan from Verona.
In The Tempest, Prospero, Duke of Milan, and Miranda, are put forth from Milan on a 'bark', or boat, and are taken 'some leagues to sea' to 'a rotten carcass of a boat' (Act I, Scene 2). Milan's Grand Canal (Naviglio Grande), still around today, linked Milan to the Ticino river, which in turn empties into the Mediterranean Sea, some leagues away from Milan.
In The Taming of the Shrew, Tranio’s father was a ‘sailmaker’ from land-locked Bergamo. Bergamo is the nearest large city to Lake Iseo and close to Lake Como, creating a Bergamo boat-making and sail-making industry which started long before the 16th century and continues to this day.
In Romeo and Juliet, Romeo is exiled and goes to Mantua — Mantua is within a reasonable distance of Verona.
The Bohemian Errors — Shakespeare was actually criticized for them while he was still alive, but they depend on what is meant by 'Bohemia': is it the original country itself, or the entire kingdom of Bohemia? Also, what exactly is a 'desert' to an Elizabethan man?
In The Winter's Tale, Shakespeare gives Bohemia both a coastline and a vast desert.
This was also present in the original text that Shakespeare lifted the plot from, so it may be that Shakespeare doesn't fail geography, he just doesn't check the source material.
Originally 'desert' simply referred to wilderness rather than the more specific modern definition of a very dry region (usually hot and sandy/rocky), so Bohemia having a 'desert' might not be as bad as it sounds. At least to Britons and Americans who think that most of Central Europe consists of steppe.
King Ottokar II (r. 1253–78), King of Bohemia, extended his rule to the Adriatic Sea by inheriting Carinthia and Krain (which however did not become part of the Kingdom of Bohemia) in 1269. As Shakespeare's King Polixenes of Bohemia in The Winter's Tale vaguely parallels the life of King Ottokar II, some think that it is admissible to speak of a 'Bohemian coastline' with reference to the tiny part of the Istrian coast that belonged to Krain (most of that coast was Venetian), but it really is only as legitimate as referring to the White Cliffs of Dover as part of the Scottish coast after the accession of James I to the English throne. Not to mention that Ottokar lost Krain as well as his life after a grand total of nine years' possession.
The Habsburg ruler Rudolf II (1552–1612) became king of Croatia and Hungary in 1572, then became king of Bohemia in Germany in 1575 and Holy Roman Emperor in 1576, effectively creating a personal realm with an Adriatic Sea coastline and Bohemia combined. But the Hungarian-Croatian coastline was not regarded as 'Bohemian', even if Rudolf did make Prague his main residence.
Measure for Measure is a play with a Duke named Vincentio, his deputy Angelo, a nun named Isabella, her brother Claudio, his lover Juliet, and their friend Lucio.. set in Vienna.
It was hardly unusual in Shakespeare's era for noble families to not be ethnically of the country where they were living (nobility from one country routinely married into the nobility of other countries), or to choose names borrowed from a more prestigious language than the one the local common folk were speaking (and in that era the prestige language was Italian). And 'Isabella' is an especially weak example: although it is Latinate in origin, it was already a well-known and very common name in German-speaking countries in Shakespeare's day — there had already been several Isabellas in Austria's nobility ranks by the time Shakespeare was even born.
In Timon of Athens, his description of the Athenian countryside sounds nothing like Greece, but like so many of his other plays depicting foreign parts more like a generic culture with a generic wealthy society.
In Othello, he puts Venice only a day away by sail from Cyprus. Venice is over 1,100 nautical miles (2,000 km) from the Cypriot coast; in Shakespeare's time it could take up to three weeks if the winds were right to sail from one to the other.
Especially bad because in act 1, everyone seems to fully expect Othello to arrive in Cyprus before the Turks do, despite having to travel a much longer distance. Luckily a storm manages to sink all the Turks' ships anyway so it doesn't matter.
While the events of the play span three days, they occur in two periods: a time period of one day in Venice leading up to the departure in Act I Scene 3, and then the arrival in Cyprus in Act II Scene 1 starting another time period of two days in Cyprus, with an unspecified period of time between the two periods. Thus the actual length of the journey between Venice and Cyprus is never specified in the play itself.
In Macbeth. A witch says she'll keep a woman's ship-captain husband from making port in Aleppo because she wouldn't share her chestnuts. Aleppo is some distance from the sea, located near Euphrates River which empties into the Persian Gulf.
Shakespeare would have had easy access to the account of one Ralph Fitch, who in 1583 set sail on the Tyger bound for Tripoli and Aleppo in Syria. Aleppo's seaport in the late 1500s was located on the nearby Euphrates River. It was a seven-day journey according to Mr. Fitch. Mr. Fitch arrived back in London in 1591, with plenty of time to write his description before Shakespeare read it.
If Mr. Fitch claimed to have made port at Aleppo, he was either sorely mistaken or lying. The Euphrates flows, in fact, into the Persian Gulf. In order to make port there, a ship from England would have needed to circumnavigate Africa. Furthermore, Aleppo is in fact roughly 50 miles from the banks of the Euphrates, and cannot be said to have a port. It is more probable that Fitch made port at Tripoli, on the coast of the Levant, and subsequently traveled overland to Aleppo.
The final act of Puccini's Manon Lescault is set in the deserts of Louisiana, with the heroine eventually dying of dehydration right outside of New Orleans. (The original novel makes the same mistake.)
As already noted elsewhere on this page, 'desert' did not have the same 'vast expanse of sand' meaning in the era that Manon Lescaut was written as it does today, but referred to any large tract of wilderness at all. New Orleans was nowhere near as highly urbanized in the 1700s as it is today, so it's hardly an 'error' for a person lost in the wilderness to die of dehydration.
Stephen Sondheim's Sunday in the Park with George is set, in part, on the isle of La Grande Jatte, in Paris. At one point, Georges's mother comments on the construction of the Eiffel Tower, across the river from the island, when in reality the tower is more than a mile away and around a large bend in the river.
In Annie Get Your Gun, the title character, who is from Ohio, says she got to be a good sharpshooter when 'I'd be out in the cactus and I'd practice all day'.
In the United States Interstate Highway system, east-west highways are assigned even numbers and north-south highways are assigned odd numbers. This numbering system holds true even if the local direction of the route does not match the compass directions.
Interstate 94 is an east-west highway from Billings, Montana to Huron, Michigan. However, from Milwaukee, Wisconsin to Lansing, Illinois (just south of Chicago), a distance of about 117 miles, the highway operates on a north-south alignment as it follows the west shore of Lake Michigan. Here, signs for 'east'bound I-94 translates to 'south', and 'west' translates to 'north'. To a lesser extent, Interstate 94 runs roughly north-south between Detroit and Port Huron, Michigan, though the 22-mile stretch between New Baltimore and Marysville is northeast/southwest.
Interstate 90 is this trope through the parts of the Chicago area where it overlaps with Interstate 94 (the Kennedy and Dan Ryan Expressways). In fact, it has a second segment where it operates on a north-south alignment even though it has an east-west designation: from about Portage, Wisconsin to Rockford, Illinois.
Interstate 95 is the east coast highway from Maine to Florida. Through Connecticut, though, the highway has more of an east-west routing to follow the north shore of the Long Island Sound.
Through Virginia, Interstate 64 runs almost exactly the wrong way in the Hampton Roads region, where sections that once were labeled 'east' running almost due west have had these labels removed due to confusion in the Norfolk, Virginia area.
While in many cases, this is due to relatively short deviations, compared to the overall routing of the highway, it is not always the case. For example, Interstate 26 from Kingsport, Tennessee to Charleston, South Carolina is labeled east-west as its number suggests, but it carries a more generally north-south routing (the Tennessee portion of the route was originally designated Interstate 181). Interstate 24 from Pulley's Mill, Illinois to Chattanooga, Tennessee by way of Nashville has an east-west designation but a more northwest-southeast routing.
Diagonal highways can end up with either an odd or an even number. For instance, there is a 145-mile section of overlap between east-west Interstate 20 (which runs between Kent, Texas and Florence, South Carolina) and north-south Interstate 59 (between Chattanooga, Tennessee and New Orleans, Louisiana) from Meridian, Mississippi to Birmingham, Alabama. The overlap segment runs on a northeast to southwest diagonal.
Though on a north-south alignment, Interstate 25 has a 45-mile segment where it runs on a northwest-to-southeast diagonal between Santa Fe and Las Vegas, New Mexico, where it crosses Glorieta Pass.
Auxiliary Interstate highways can get this trope since the last two digits of their designation come from the parent Interstate highway that they branch off of. Thus, a spur from an even-numbered (east-west) highway can travel north-south (like I-380 in Iowa) or vice-versa.
Some interstate highways are located out of their proper place in the Interstate grid. Normally, the Interstate highways increase in number from west to east and south to north. However, exceptions occur:
Interstate 71 is a north-south highway from Cleveland, Ohio to Louisville, Kentucky via Columbus and Cincinnati, Ohio. The Ohio section of the route (which constitutes the majority of the highway's miles) is east of the higher-numbered Interstate 75.
Interstate 85 south of Atlanta, Georgia runs west of the lower-numbered Interstate 75.
Through the south Chicago suburbs and northwest Indiana west of Lake Station, Interstate 94 is situated to the south of Interstate 90. This is a justified example, as Interstate 90 operates over the entire length of the Indiana Toll Road within Indiana. Originally, I-94 operated over the western part of the Toll Road and the Chicago Skyway and switched to the Borman Expressway at Lake Station, while I-80 and I-90 operated over the Borman Expressway west of there (I-94's current route) and switched to the Toll Road at Lake Station. In 1965, I-90 and I-94 were switched to eliminate the confusion of the three Interstates all switching roads at Lake Station. As a result, I-90 operates entirely on the Toll Road, I-94 stays on the Borman, and I-80 is the only highway to switch between the Borman and the Toll Road.
Interstate 99 is a notorious case, as its route number was written into the law that authorized the route's Interstate designation, as opposed to being assigned by AASHTO, even though it runs west of Interstate 81.
Long tied up in Development Hell, Interstate 69 is a strange case. As the original route was extended through Michigan on freeways already planned as upgrades to the existing US-27 and state routes, the portion between Lansing and Port Huron would actually be signed east-west, with the changeover from north-south coming at the northern end of its concurrency with Interstate 96 (which itself runs north-south for the entirety of its concurrency with I-69, although I-96 remains signed east-west due to the rather short length of the concurrency). The under-construction future route of I-69 from Indianapolis to the Mexican border takes it west of I-65, I-55, and several other lower odd-numbered Interstates in the South.
Sometimes, you'll see highways that have control cities that they never actually go into. Others omit select control cities.
Interstate 65 is the main highway for travel between Indianapolis and Chicago. As a result, Chicago is the control city on northbound signs north of Indianapolis. However, I-65 doesn't quite go all the way to Chicago. It terminates at Interstate 90 and the Indiana Toll Road in Gary, Indiana, 26 miles southeast of Downtown Chicago, and you have to take the Toll Road to get the rest of the way to Chicago (or take Interstate 94 via the Borman, Bishop Ford, and Dan Ryan Expressways if you'd rather shunpike).
Although Interstate 55 does use New Orleans as its southernmost control city, it terminates at Interstate 10 in Laplace, twelve miles and two parishes away from Orleans Parish.
North of Baltimore, Maryland, there are some signs on I-95 that use New York City as a control city instead of the closer Philadelphia or Wilmington.
Interstate 275, a western bypass of Detroit, has a control city of Flint. It is possible to use the route to get to Flint, but this requires going west on I-96 and then north on US-23. It's signed as Flint because the route was originally planned to end at I-75 near Holly, just south of Flint, but the route was never completed due to local opposition.
Zig-zagged with highway M-123, a highway that runs through the eastern portion of the Upper Peninsula. The route runs north-south from just north of St. Ignace to the small community of Paradise, turns east-west, then turns north-south again to run through the community of Newberry to its final end at M-28. While the signage directions change at Paradise to keep the north-south alignment correct through Newberry, this also means that 'north' or 'south' M-123 for the leg in between is often times going more east-west.
In Battlefield 4, many features of the small island nation of Singapore have been seriously goofed up. The most egregious one being the distance between Tombstone's landing site to their objective. The Marines land around the Central Business District located at the mouth of the Singapore River and make their way towards Chinese-controlled Changi International Airport, which in reality it is at least 12–15 kilometres east, from the southern tip all the way to the extreme eastern part of the island nation (notwithstanding urban jungle in-between). In the level proper, the airport is depicted inexplicably sitting right next to the city, within perfect viewing distance from the landing site.
Railroad Tycoon 3 includes a mission to build a railroad over the Rocky Mountains.. Between Sacramento and Salt Lake City. Those are the Sierra-Nevada mountains, by the way.
Hilariously parodied by Backyard Hockey, which says that Buddy Cheque came from the town of Janestown, which, they say, is near the geographically impossible border of Illinois, Wisconsin, and Canada.
In Rad Racer, you're racing in the 'Trans America' competition, but one of the tracks is set in ancient Greek ruins.
In Radmobile, when you arrive in Chicago you'll see palm trees and a gigantic cruise ship on what is presumably Lake Michigan.
Resistance 2 has a secret military bunker on Yerba Buena Island. When you exit the bunker The Bay Bridge has suspiciously been painted red.
Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater's Soviet jungle. Even allowing for the fact that the Soviet Union wasn't just Russia, the Turkic ex-republics of the Soviet Union are very arid. It's, you know, in the middle of the world's largest continent, and the only (faux-)seashores are the western Caspian coast of Turkmenistan (western coasts tend to be arid throughout the world) and the Aral Sea between Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. Kazakhstan is steppe country, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan are mostly desert, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan are mountainous. No jungles, anywhere. Same for Zanzibarland in Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake, said to be in the 'former Soviet Union'. Conversely, there is a real archipelago called Zanzibar off the coast of Tanzania, which does have jungles.
Command & Conquer: Red Alert: Abound in almost all missions that feature major cities and/or landmark structures. The most egregious example is probably the final Allied mission in Yuri's Revenge, where the 1000-or-so-kilometer distance between Tierra del Fuego and the Antarctic Peninsula is compressed into about 1.
Command & Conquer: Generals: At one moment in USA campaign, we witness an American aircraft carrier in the waters of the Caspian Sea. The thing is, that 'sea' is actually a lake, and only has small-sized canals to the ocean not fitting for a carrier. Cue the thoughts of how that ship could get there in the first place.
Age of Empires III has the Netherlands as one of its playable countries. The capital, Amsterdam, is depicted with a mountain range in the background. It isn't called the Low Countries for nothing.
Let's Go Find El Dorado features great mountain peaks separating cities and rivers with random names on them. As such, you can go from Santa Fe, New Mexico, fly over the mountains, and end up in Panama City. Yep.
Halo 3 not only has jungles in the Tsavo area of Kenya, but also temperate plants native to the Pacific Northwest. Mt. Kilimanjaro looks more like Mt. Rainier, and is far too close for the location, which is on the opposite side of the country. The jungles of Tsavo may be forgivable, seeing as Halo takes place 500 years in the future, and mankind may have done a bit of terraforming. No excuse for the moving mountain, however.
Rival Turf has a pretty bad one. The game is supposedly set in Los Angeles, yet the level screen shows a map of Canada.
Need for Speed:
II features the Sydney Opera House, Harbour Bridge, and Uluru. All on the same track.
III has a track set in a Grand Canyon-type area, with an underground Greek temple.
Prince of Persia: The Two Thrones starts with the Hero on a boat, sailing to Babylon. He sails past a couple of huge rocks and spots his besieged and burning city. The problem is that Babylon was in what is now Iraq, which is a fairly flat country, so there are no huge rocks in the river.
While mostly faithful to actual geography, Empire Earth at times goes happy-go-lucky on perspectives. Examples include cities changing locations from a mission to another, Alexandria spreading over the whole Nile delta, or Brittany being completely obliterated from the map of France in the Roman campaign.
In Soldier of Fortune II, there's a Mayan pyramid in the Colombian jungle.
The Knight Rider NES game overlaps this and Hollywood Atlas. For instance, at the end of the Miami level, cacti appear on the side of the roads. The Houston level is set in a desert, complete with cacti appearing. The St. Louis level has the landmark arch on a hill and in a village setting. However, in real life, it's in the downtown area by the river on common ground. Phoenix has the Grand Canyon in the background when it is practically on the other end of the state.
Generally averted, but still lampshaded in the Uncharted series, particularly in the third game.
Sully: Only you could find a jungle in the middle of France.
Likely deliberate, but still quite noticeable in No More Heroes, namely in the positioning of Santa Destroy. Driving around will find the border with Mexico, and the city is on the coast, likely overwriting the existence of a little town called San Diego.
Professor Layton and the Miracle Mask takes place in the city of Monte d'Or, which is located in a desert.. in the United Kingdom, somewhere that doesn't have any deserts at all.
If you're on pogo.com and playing a hidden-object game set in London, expect numerous localization errors such as American power points in shops, and American fire hydrants on the streets.
In World Driver Championship for the N64, one of the tracks is in Sydney, Australia. The start/finish line is at Sydney Airport. Most of the lap runs through the city of Sydney.. and then towards the end of the lap, you get off the Sydney Harbour Bridge and find yourself driving through the Barkly Tablelands, in the Northern Territory, before arriving back at the airport. Google Earth approximates a 34-hour drive from one to the other. A good car in the game should be able to do an entire lap in, give or take, 1 minute 40 seconds.
Ogre Battle has Kastro Valley. According to the town of Almalyk, the Kastro Valley is, quote: '580 baums long, 75 baums wide, and 1.8 baums deep' and a baum is: 'the distance an adult walks in 1500 minutes,' or 25 hours. Assuming an average speed of three miles an hour, that gives us dimensions of 43,500 miles long, 5,625 miles wide, and 135 miles deep. Assuming an earth-like planet, that's a length nearly twice the circumference and depth enough to go well into the mantle. It's roughly one hundred times the area of the Amazon basin. Dividing the size of a baum by ten still gives us a problematic (but handwaveable depth) but a much more reasonable, Amazon-basin-sized area.
In Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag, many of the Caribbean islands and coastlines are depicted as rocky and mountainous. In real life, they're mostly quite flat. For example, compare Crooked Island◊ in the game to its real-world counterpart.◊
Strangely enough, given that Penn and Teller specifically made Desert Bus to be 'stupefyingly like reality,' the shape and length of the road from Tucson to Las Vegas, while stupefying, are not entirely 'like reality.' The road is not entirely straight, and it's more than 360 miles long.
The map of Europe and North Africa in Medieval II: Total War is accurate enough. However, once the player finally acquires the technology to cross the Atlantic they will find that the land on the other side does not match reality at all in either location or scale. It also doesn't help that the turn-based system results in an Atlantic crossing that takes about 20 years of game time.
Super Hang-On has you driving on cross-country highways to tour entire continents. Except the highways never have junctions, definitely do not curve in accordance with real-world geography, and are far shorter than what they would be if they were to scale.
OutRun 2019 has Stage 3, 'Around The World', with each route representing a country; the closed network of roads can take you through Sicily, the Mediterranean coast, Hong Kong, Antarctica, and various other corners of the world without your car ever having to ride a ferry or take more than 10 minutes to make the entire trip. Granted, your car can drive up to 692 mphnote , but even at that speed it would still take a few hours at the least just to travel across a modestly-sized country in real life.
Criminal Case: World Edition has a pretty fluid idea about how far the areas are from each other, and takes a lot of liberty to make the player go back and forth between the locations as if they're just a few minutes away when they are not. For example, when the player is told to go to India, they are sent to New Delhi, but the actual crime scene is in the Taj Mahal, which is in Agra — 180 km away from the capital city. And one of the suspects is a kid who offers elephant ride from the 108-feet Hanuman Statue, in Shimla — which is even farther away (557 km from Agra).
The original version of Microsoft Train Simulator had six default routes, based on real-life lines, but didn't exactly look like the real world counterparts.
For instance, the original Marias Pass routenote didn't accurately portray any of the many high trestles on this portion of the route. For instance, Goat's Lick Trestle near Essex is depicted as a small ditch rather than as a high trestle over a ravine. Same goes for the trestle at Java Creek, which is depicted as an ordinary bridge rather than a trestle.
Consequently, third-party users have made a point of going in and making modified versions of the default MSTS routes, altering the scenery and tracks to better resemble what actually exists there.
Notably averted in the True Crime games. These games use actual maps of Los Angeles and New York City, so distances between points are roughly accurate. However, locations of actual places in the game? Not so accurate.
This is also the case with XCOM: Enemy Unknown. The maps are completely randomized apart from few specific Council Missions and some DLC missions, and only a handful have small changes depending on location. This means that you may stumble upon a research facility surrounded by a pine forest. In India.
In the first Mass Effect, you can't travel to Earth, but you can travel to Earth's moon, where Earth will be visible above the horizon. Although you have to look hard to see through the clouds, once you make out the landmasses it becomes obvious that the image is backwards. The Gulf of Mexico is apparently west of Mexico and east of Florida.
Forza Horizon 3 takes some major liberties with Australian geography. For example, Surfers Paradise and Byron Bay are separated by Victoria's Great Ocean Road. Word of God is that they are fully aware of the inaccuracies and that it was done in order to fit as many different biomes onto the map as they could.
At one point in Street Fighter V's story mode, a character drives into Rio De Janeiro on an ATV, picks up two other characters - one of whom is unconscious and presumably dying - and drives off. The next time we see them, they're crashing that same ATV through a window.. in London. Wild Mass Guessing notwithstanding, the obvious implication is that they somehow drove that ATV several thousand miles northeast and across an ocean, and did so fast enough for their incapacitated passenger to be in the exact same state she was in when they left Rio. In a game revolving around superpowered martial artists, this may be the strangest thing that happens, which is saying something.
On the map accompanying the Tower Bridge stage of Super Pang, Tower Bridge is shown as being somewhere in Lancashire — over 200 miles from London.
In The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, the Whiterun region is described by in-universe sources as being a 'tundra.' However, the defining feature of tundra is permafrost, which prevents trees and tall grass from growing. And while Whiterun doesn't have many trees, they do grow throughout the hold along with tall grass, meaning that it's impossible for the region to be a tundra.
Even though Arkham City is located in Massachusetts according to the Mythos, it's moved to the west coast in Super Robot Wars UX to make crossovers with Heroman easier. The same goes for Innsmouth.
Fallout 76 takes place in and around West Virginia, but unlike previous entries in the series which generally limited their geographic distortion to Space Compression, 76 is closer to The Theme Park Version than a faithful recreation. Numerous major towns and landmarks are either in the wrong place, merged together, or missing entirely, sometimes for seemingly no reason.
Whenever the Earth is shown in Homestar Runner, the United States is actually drawn as a single landmass surrounded by oceans, with Alaska, Canada, Mexico, and Central and South America nowhere to be seen!
In the Mafia-themed La Cosa Nostra set in the mid-1800s where the Irish main character emigrating to America meets a Japanese boy on a ship going across the Atlantic without any suggestion that he came from anywhere but Japan. The sad part is, that isn't the only instance.
In Scandinavia and the World, America cannot see Denmark and cannot tell the difference between Sweden and Norway. On the flipside, he seems to be the only main character that acknowledges South America.
In Educomix, Asia is a country, and beneath Ireland. Likewise, Australiais beneath America. And the South Pole is its own country. England is a small, apparently independent island (no other real-life parts of Britain have been mentioned).
Jessica: With its purple roads and steaming chimneys, Texas is literally the best village in America!
This page mocks a news headline which claims that a man has disappeared on the border of Austria and Spain.
..because Lithuanians are skilled in disappearing in places which don't exist.
Not Always Right:
Several customers assume that We All Live in America. They are wrong. 'But.. isn't Europe part of the US?'
Some customers take this to extreme levels. The conversations they have with various cashiers and salespeople seem to imply that they are unaware that other nations besides the United States exist.
This woman believes that, since Ohio isn't in Austin (Texas), it must be overseas.
There are enough examples of Americans being ignorant about the rest of the world that listing them all would take too long..so here's an example of the opposite.
Quite a few seem to involve Americans across the border in Canada who are a bit surprised to learn that it isn't exactly like home.
This poor, geographically deluded soul.
This guy, on the other hand, manages to make the distinction between Canada and the US. But not between Canada and the Netherlands.
'CANADA IS PART OF THE UNITED STATES; YOU’RE ALL JUST IN DENIAL!' Bizarrely, the person making this claim is not from the U.S., nor even Canada, but New Zealand.
And again: an ignorant Jerkass makes the assumption that since a travel brochure for visiting Quebec was in English, that means it and the rest of Canada are part of America and the people there should be speaking 'American' at all times, solely for his convenience.
This tourist complains that all the road signs are in Spanish instead of English. The customer service person replies, 'We are in Spain, sir. Spanish is our official language.'
And then, there are cases where Americans don't assume other countries are like their own..but get other facts wrong. This one is especially egregious.
What travel is better — a train to Hawaii or a boat to Atlantis?
'You mean Japan's a real place?!' And even Australia isn't in the Middle East.
In turn, Europeans sometimes fail to understand that North America is a really big place populated mostly by European immigrants who may be even more into imitation than the rest of humanity.
Let's reiterate: 'The US is a big country, sir.'
This woman seems to be in total ignorance of state locations, cardinal directions, and linguistics. Also counts as Hypocritical Humor.
Who cares if Utah is landlocked; taunting an officer of the law about whaling is WRONG!
This person thinks all of Asia is a single country.
This person thinks the Great Lakes are divided into the Great Lakes of Canada, and the Great Lakes of America and that national borders can't run through lakes.
This Ohio woman is convinced she actually lives in Iowa.
This Tumblr tabulates maps and views of the world that forget that New Zealand exists, including the scene in Star Trek: First Contact.
Decker: At one point in Decker: Unclassified, Decker goes to 'Pearl Harbor, Japan'.
In Jerma985's video called Jersey Boys in Sentry Town,STAR_ held this license when he said that Plymouth Rock is in Pennsylvania somewhere during his Rambling Old Man Monologue when Jerma corrected him by saying that Plymouth Rock is in Massachusetts. STAR_ tried to justify it by saying that he never been to Massachusetts, cue the video captions stating that STAR_ lives there.
Vaguely Recalling JoJo: During their travels, the Stardust Crusaders somehow manage to travel to Singapore and then travel to its capital. In reality, they traveled to Hong Kong, and then they traveled to Singapore.
In the Cracked.com article '6 Myths About Famous Places You Believe (Thanks to Movies)', Canberra, Australia is referred to as being 'just outside Sydney.' 'Just outside' in this case refers to a distance of some 286 km.
In 'Catching Up: With Matt! (#1)' by Matthew Santoro, Matthew says that Mexico is part of South America, but it's actually only part of North America.
In the Dora the Explorer special where she travels the world, Dora can spot Africa by from where she's standing in Mexico by looking directly behind her.
The geographic sins of the Transformerslive-action movies are bad enough, but the original cartoonwas much worse. The link is to a Transformers Wiki page, including both an incredibly erroneous map of Europe and a comprehensive list of what is wrong with it, and a list of what historical and political events would have had to occur to alter the map such.
According to Transformers Headmasters, London is covered by trees and fog and people travel by horseback.
Headmasters takes place in the year 2011, making it that much worse.
In the X-Men episode 'Days of Future Past, Part 2,' Gambit travels to Washington, D.C. But the monitor shows the state of Washington (with Washington, D.C. captioned right below).
In the Direct-to-VideoFranklin special Back to School with Franklin, when Miss Koala points out where Australia is to the kids with a globe. Apparently, southern Thailand has ceased to exist on their version of Earth.
In Timothy Goes to School, an extremely huge lake has somehow formed in the mid-west of the US.
There actually was a large inland sea in the midwest of the USA during the Late Cretaceous period, about 75 million years ago, in which case their map is a little outdated.
In the Jonny Quest: The Real Adventures episode 'The Mummies of Malenque,' the Quest team goes on a trip to the South American country of 'Columbia.' The country's name is spelled 'Colombia.' 'Columbia' is a poetic name for all of the Americas, and often specifically the USA.
In Total Drama's 'Celebrity Manhunt Special' the gang travels from Ontario to New York, and somehow get lost in a desert with a nuclear testing site (Trinity Site is in New Mexico if you are wondering.)
In the Inspector Gadget episode 'Wambini Predicts', Gadget goes to 'Alpakistan', where there are diamond-spitting llamas. Llamas and alpacas are from South America, only camels are found in the Middle East.
Animaniacs:
The song 'Yakko's World', ostensibly listing all of the countries in the world, makes some errors:
It leaves out several countries, such as South Africa and Burkina Faso.
As is traditional, the song messes up the UK completely by listing England, Scotland, and Ireland. It should either list England, Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland, or just the United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland. And possibly adding Jersey, Guernsey and the Isle of Man, depending on the definition of 'country'.
The song mentions Greenland, Puerto Rico, Guam, French Guiana, and Taiwan, which are not countries in their own right but instead are constituent territories of Denmark, the USA, France, and China respectively.
The song, which first aired in 1993, also includes several outdated place or country names: Dahomey has been known as Benin since 1975 and Kampuchea reverted back to Cambodia in 1979.
The 50 states and capitals song:
The animation that goes with it is really fucked up. Many of the states are the wrong shapes in some shots (but correct in others), such as the ones bordered by the Missouri River, which are shown as having a straight north-south border. Iowa, in particular, is unrecognizable, with the eastern 'nose' and southeastern 'arm' missing.
Despite its name and theme, the song includes Washington D.C., which is the federal capital, not a state capital.
The Simpsons: The creators claim they often do a lot of research before they sent the family to another country. Yet they like to make use of stereotypes and intended mistakes, excused by the Rule of Funny. This makes it easy for less intelligent viewers to decide that these mistakes are really ignorant blunders rather than simply intended to be that way.
In 'The City of New York vs. Homer Simpson', Homer reaches the top of the (original 2 World Trade Center) South Tower and discovers the men's restroom is out of order. He has to travel back down to the ground, run across the plaza and go up the (original 1 WTC) North Tower. When he gets to the summit, the North Tower's 360 ft.-tall TV antenna is noticeably missing. It's worth noting because all other shots of the roof in this episode show it. This could also be considered a goof by the animators.
In 'The Bart Wants What It Wants' the family travels to Toronto, Canada. However, their depiction is absolutely abysmal; the biggest goof of the episode was depicting the C.N. Tower as being in the middle of a field.. anyone who has ever been to Toronto could correct that.
In '30 Minutes Over Tokyo' several Japanese landmarks are depicted being within a short distance of one another.
'The Regina Monologues' acts as if the United Kingdom still has the death penalty, which is acted out in a medieval fashion by ordering beheading in The Tower Of London. The same episode also features a secret tunnel from the Tower of London — which comes out in the Queen's bedroom in Buckingham Palace, which in reality is some five miles away.
Dino Squad tends to set itself in locations that actually exist, but at the same time tends to ignore the actual travel times. The episode 'Easy Riders and Raging Dinos' has the kids driving to places in excess of 400 miles away from their hometown (Kittery Point, Maine to Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and Niagara Falls) like they're going to the next town over.
In Justice League, the Thanagarians are building a planetary force field on the great Gobi desert, which covers part of China and Mongolia. However, we later the see that it's located in North Africa, in the Sahara desert (you can spot it on Batman's monitor during the Colony Drop).
In one Family Guy episode, Brian and Stewie visit Munich, and drive in a tour-bus past Munich's Old Town Hall, the Sendlinger Tor◊ and the Mariensäule◊, which are all presented next to each other on a medieval intersection. This couldn't be further from the truth — not only are there hardly any truly medieval buildings left in Munich, but the Mariensäule is in front of the new Town Hall building a hundred meters away from the old one◊ (and all three buildings are on the central Marienplatz square, not on some intersection), while the Sendlinger Tor is almost an entire kilometer away from the Marienplatz. Obviously, Family Guy's Munich was just a setpiece for yet another 'All Germans Are Nazis' joke. Some Germans actually took offense to that.
Family Guy is also inconsistent in showing the correct shape of Rhode Island, despite the fact the show is set there and its creator went to college in Providence. Some maps are pretty close to reality with only some minor inconsistencies, while others - as in the Animaniacs example above, forget to include islands in Narragansett Bay, annex chunks of Massachusetts or make the east of the state◊ much bulkier than it actually is.
The Doctor Who animated special Dreamland opens with an establishing shot of the 'New Mexico Desert, June 13, 1947◊'. Aside from the roadsign itself being an Anachronism Stew (due to neither the style of sign, nor Interstate routes, existing in 1947), it places the (not-yet-existent) I-25 within '35m'note of Roswell. The real-life I-25, built along the path of US Route 85 (which did exist in 1947), runs over a hundred miles west of Roswell.
One episode of The Powerpuff Girls has the Mayor give the geographic coordinates of Townsville (the intersection of Lincoln and Main, specifically) as 32 degrees north, 212 degrees west. Degrees of latitude and longitude only go up to 180, but even if you wrap around the globe past that mark, going 212 degrees west of the Prime Meridian puts you in the Pacific Ocean, off the coast of Japan. While the Mayor is The Ditz, the girls follow his advice and arrive at a proper location.
The King of the Hill episode 'Uh Oh Canada' depicts Boomhauer meeting up with a French-speaker in Guelph, Ontario, very improbable in real life, and them kayaking with mountains in the background. As anyone who has been to Ontario will tell you, mountains are nowhere to be found in the province, especially not in Guelph.
The Totally Spies! episode 'The Getaway' has the spies going to a volcano research lab in Iceland, which is covered in ice and snow, but it's actually Greenland that's covered in ice.
In 'Friends in the City' from Toot & Puddle, Toot and Puddle visit the Statue of Liberty on the final boat of the day and observe it amidst a beautiful sky filled with stars. But given the bright lights of New York City, that shouldn't be possible, and the version of New York City that they visit appears to be just as filled with tall buildings that would surely be lit up at night.
The episode of Mister T entitled 'Fortune Cookie Caper' is set in New York City and, apart from it being a strange, alternate-universe New York that has neither traffic nor parallel-parked cars (and where there are rickshaws in its Hollywood Atlas Chinatown), the plot relies on street addresses that turn out to be clues. All of the addresses are impossible and would send anyone seeking them deep underwater in either the Hudson or the East River, as The Agony Boothhad some fun pointing out. It would be one thing if it were just code, but actual buildings are shown with the addresses in question.
Index
Platforms:
PC
Publisher:
Sierra Entertainment
Developer:
Stainless Steel
Genres:
Strategy / Real-Time Strategy
Release Date:
November 21, 2001
Game Modes:
Singleplayer / Multiplayer
Still a peasant herding exercise at its core.
Empire Earth is an ambitious design, but only because it has so much stuff in it. There are fourteen eras, each the equivalent of an age in Age of Empires, ranging from prehistory to the hypothetical future. Each epoch has unique artwork and units. There are infantry, dogs, cavalry, archers, siege engines, ships, and eventually aircraft, tanks, and artillery, all in varying flavors appropriate to the epoch. There are spell-casting prophets. There are priests who convert the other guy’s armies. Each of the 200 or so units can be customized by upgrading one or more attributes: firepower, range, hit points, armor, and so on.
A wonderful Greek city. Or is it Roman? How do you upgrade your ship in starbound.
There are technologies that improve your units’ stats or your civilization’s resource gathering. There is farming, foraging, hunting, fishing, logging, and mining. There are food, wood, stone, iron, and gold. There are 21 civilizations with specific bonuses. There are eight formations to put your units in. There are six Wonders of the World. There are four AI settings for each unit’s behavior. There’s a 3D engine. There are two victory conditions. And there’s basically one way to play – gather a bunch of resources!
Pseudo-Historical Tapestry
It’s as if all that other stuff just falls away, betraying Empire Earth as yet another game about resource gathering. The winner is almost invariably the guy who cranks out enough peasants (called citizens here) to gather the most resources and who most efficiently converts them into military units. There’s something profoundly disappointing when such a vast game ultimately comes down to herding peasants. This isn’t to say that there isn’t a lot of tactical variety in the way the units fight. There is, but in the end, it’s driven primarily by simple economics.
EE most immediately resembles Ensemble’s Age of Empires. This is hardly surprising considering Rick Goodman was on the design team for both. The interface, the subject matter, the unit graphics, the marketing, and even the title seem calculated to say “Hey, if you liked Age of Empires, you’ll like this, too!” Which is probably true. Although both games have a historical motif slathered over them like icing, Empire Earth eventually turns into a sci-fi battle bot arena with special spell powers like cloaking (Refractive Cloaking), unit shields (Diffraction Shields), mind control (Assimilation), and teleporting (Teleporting).
Empire Earth’s greatest strength is that the epochs play like different games. Pay a sum of resources and you can upgrade to the next epoch, unlocking new units and technologies. You can effectively limit games to one or two epochs by playing with standard rules, in which the cost of “epoching up” is so prohibitive you’ll only see two or three before the game ends. Alternately, you can play tournament rules, in which the epoch costs are reduced to encourage faster progression and more variety.
You sunk my battleship!
Age Of Empires 2 Download Full Game
If you start at the prehistoric epoch, you’ve got a fairly tedious game with cavemen throwing rocks at each other. Then you get an Age of Empires clone for about three or four epochs. When guns and cavalry come into play, the game mechanics shift substantially. Then powerful artillery and machine guns dominate the battles, followed by tanks rendering cavalry obsolete. Then aircraft really shift the mechanics. Then a show-stopping nuclear bomb makes an appearance. Then the battle bots arrive and all pretensions of realism go out the window. Empire Earth ends with the defenestration of historical value.
Later stages of the game rely on more conventional combined arms attacks. Take out anti-aircraft guns with long distance artillery and follow up with bombing campaigns. Move in with infantry to kill your enemy’s citizens and cripple his economy. This works well enough with Empire Earth’s interface, which builds in nearly anything you’d expect in a real-time strategy game. One notable problem with the interface is that managing aircraft and naval units is like herding blind cattle. Combine an unwieldy system of separate waypoints for fighters, bombers, and individual planes with limited fuel for each aircraft and you’ve got stray airplanes everywhere. It’s a problem the enemy AI doesn’t seem to notice.
Rock, Paper, Battle Robot
Although each of the epochs encourages different tactics, Empire Earth wisely keeps base building and resource gathering consistent. Once you put up your walls, defensive towers, and basic unit-building structures, and once you’ve got your citizens going about their gathering, you can leave them alone and concentrate on military units. This is particularly important because even though the game ostensibly shows unit stats, it relies heavily on an under-the-hood system of unit trumps. Age of Empires did something similar, but it was limited to a fairly intuitive “cavalry trump archers trump infantry trump pikemen trump cavalry.”
Empire Earth, on the other hand, literally requires half a dozen flow charts to explain the unit relationships. Some of these are fairly silly. Why is a galleon more effective against a battleship than a frigate? Why are cavalry with guns more effective against other cavalry than infantry? In the final epochs, it breaks down into an arbitrary sci-fi slop. Let’s see, tanks are good against Pandoras, infantry are good against Minotaurs, Hyperions are good against both, and none are good against anti-tank guns except for Zeus robots. It’s almost pointless to show a unit’s stats when there are so many exceptions to whether an attack rating of 200 is better than an attack rating of 100.
The Kitchen Sink
Assaulting a castle with knights and trebuchets. It’s fortunate there’s no friendly fire involved.
Check out For the Kill by Biting Elbows on Amazon Music. Start your 30-day free trial of Unlimited to listen to this song plus tens of millions. Add to MP3 Cart. Biting Elbows Free music download on Jamendo Music. Cover Biting Elbows - World's Most Important Something. Cover Biting Elbows - Kill The Cooks. Biting Elbows (120 songs) mp3 download or listen to tracks, mp3 albums online word track for free, without registration and sms #1. For the Kill. Biting Elbows. Apr 3, 2016 - Buy 'For the Kill by Biting Elbows' MP3 download online from 7digital United States - Over 30 million high quality tracks in our store. Biting Elbows - For The Kill music MP3 album at CD Universe, enjoy top rated service and worldwide shipping. Biting elbows love song lyrics.
For such a derivative game, Empire Earth does have a few nice twists. As in Age of Empires, you can build wonders of the world for an alternate victory condition. But like wonders in Civilization, each one actually gives you an advantage. There is an adjustable unit limit, but it’s a global figure split among all surviving civilizations. This is a great incentive for defeating other players and it means bonuses that increase your limit can give you a significant advantage. The number of citizens that can gather resources from each source is limited, so competitive economies will have to expand across the map. This greatly discourages turtle-style players.
But on the whole, Empire Earth plays a lot like a hundred and one other real-time strategy games. It’s a very old school game. It tries almost nothing new. But manages to add lots of good stuff to the old.