"You know what's remarkable? That England looks in no way like Southern California!"--Austin Powers, The Spy Who Shagged Me, while driving on an "English" country road that's clearly...in another country.
Hollywood has a long tradition of picking nearby, easy-to-drive-to locations in Los Angeles and Southern California to stand in for locales from the four corners of the Earth--and beyond, in the case of Star Trek and its many incarnations.
"Sgt. Mom" of the Sgt. Stryker group Weblog looks at the many places that Hollywood has doubled for:
One of the underappreciated sidelights of living in Southern California is seeing bits and pieces of it masquerading (sometimes quite unconvincingly) as someplace else on TV. You may know, for instance, that all those times that Kirk and Spock set down on a planet where they actually went out to a real non-studio set location, it always seemed to be an area north of the San Fernando Valley called Vasquez Rocks. The area is distinguished by all the rocks being round, from the largest boulders down to the tiniest pebble, which makes the place look quite weird and unearthly... but embarrassingly distinctive. If the location sports scrubby chaparral and all round rocks, they’ve been out to Vasquez Rocks again, no matter what the show is and what the plot calls for.I don’t know how many times I saw the same stand of papyrus swamp at the County Arboretum standing in for some Third World pretense of a nation on Mission Impossible, which along with Fantasy Island always made good use of that ornate little white cottage with the porches all the way around. It’s the guest cottage on the old Lucky Baldwin estate, and I don’t care how big you think it looks on TV, it actually is only about the size of a two car garage, and has only four teensy bedrooms.
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Article comments
1 - Tim Hall
The BBC were no different. Every alien planet from Dr Who and Blake's 7 was that same quarry in Surrey.
2 - Jim Carruthers
The Toronto convenience just across the street from my apartment played a Detroit convenience store in "Detroit Rock City". But I guess that's not much of a stretch.