History Main / ArtisticLicenseGeography

* Music/CWMcCall: "Four Wheel Cowboy" has [=McCall=] driving south from Denver to Santa Fe, supposedly going straight... but some of the places named appear to be rather out of order, implying that he must have backtracked for some reason. ''Especially'' notable when he's "Rattlin' down off a' Raton Pass", with the next spot being "Glorieta Hill like a sheet a' glass". Glorieta Hill is about 160 miles (260 km) from Raton Pass, so he wouldn't be going anywhere ''near'' it if he's trying to go as straight as possible. However, because Interstate 25, which is the fastest route between the two cities, has to wind its way through very mountainous terrain on its way to Santa Fe, it takes a very indirect route in northern New Mexico. From Raton Pass on the Colorado–New Mexico border, I-25 takes a roughly southwest route to reach Glorieta Pass, after which it takes a sharp turn to the northwest toward Santa Fe.

* In "Folsom Prison Blues" by Music/JohnnyCash, 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.

* ''[[Anime/FullmetalAlchemist2003]]'': [[spoiler:The ending of the anime indicates that Amestris is an AlternateHistory version of Europe. However, the geography of the country, with a large arid area leading to a desert on its eastern frontier, doesn't match that of Europe, despite being implied to have diverged from our world's history.]]

-->-- '''WebVideo/TheNostalgiaChick''' on the towering cliffs [[TheMountainsOfIllinois of coastal Virginia]] in ''WesternAnimation/{{Pocahontas}}''.

* In WebVideo/Jerma985's video called [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lrq_ne4N3JQ Jersey Boys in Sentry Town,]] WebVideo/{{STAR}} held this license when he said that Plymouth Rock is in Pennsylvania somewhere during his RamblingOldManMonologue 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''.
* ''WebVideo/FrenchBaguetteIntelligence'': In ''[[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jcUUNpMwTjQ Geography Makes No Sense...]]'', Fuck Cares argues that Americans decided that North and South America are different continents because of the Panama Canal, not because they are actually separate and that Australia isn't a continent; Oceania is. [[spoiler:Then Harry states that one could argue that they are separate continents because they are on different tectonic plates, meaning that Europe and Asia are the same continent, but Arabia and India are separate from Eurasia and New Zealand is its own continent (Zealandia).]]
* ''WebVideo/VaguelyRecallingJoJo'': 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 [[http://www.cracked.com/article_19168_6-myths-about-famous-places-you-believe-thanks-to-movies.html "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 WebVideo/MatthewSantoro, Matthew says that Mexico is part of South America, but it's actually only part of North America.
* ''WebVideo/GeminiHomeEntertainment'': In "The Deep Blue", the Marianas Trench is represented by a photograph of a marine sinkhole surrounded by a coral reef. In reality, the Marianas Trench is completely underwater, without any surrounding reefs. The picture is actually from the Great Blue Hole in Belize... some 13,000 kilometers[[note]]For the American audiences, roughly more than 8,000 miles.[[/note]] away.

* Exaggerated in the ''ComicBook/SamAndMaxFreelancePolice'' 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 ''ComicBook/{{Asterix}}'' series also likes 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.
** Recap/AsterixInBritain: 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.
** Recap/AsterixInBelgium: 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.
* ''Comicbook/JetDream'': In "The Powder Puff Derby Caper," Jet is shot down over a "South Pacific island" somewhere between Honolulu and San Francisco.

* ''ComicBook/{{Superman}}'' story ''ComicBook/TheSuperDuelInSpace'': Judging by one panel, Rome consists entirely of the Coliseum and some few surrounding ruins sitting next to the mouth of an estuary. The real Rome is a huge city, famously surrounded by seven hills, and located 216 km (134,21 miles) from the Tyrrhenian Sea.
* ''ComicBook/Marvel1602'', Peter Parker 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.

** In ''ComicBook/UltimateXMen'' #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 [[Podcast/HouseToAstonish Paul O'Brien]] to [[http://web.archive.org/web/20080213061034/http://www.thexaxis.com/reviews/050502.html#ultimate-x-men wonder]] if Creator/MarkMillar was really Scottish at all.
** ''Uncanny ComicBook/XMen'' 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 NoteFromEd from the Marvel UK editor saying "Yes, we know. Don't laugh."

** ''X-Men Unlimited'' #4 features the Mississippi river with waterfalls.
* ''ComicBook/BatmanAndTheOutsiders'': The first issue calls Markovia "Eastern European", only to provide a map placing it in ''southern Belgium'', next to Luxembourg, which is four hundred miles from even the most generous definition of Eastern Europe.[[note]]Nobody can quite agree on where "Eastern" Europe starts and what constitutes Central Europe, but the two main consensus answers are "everything east of Germany and Austria" if people favour a simple East/West divide, or "everything east of Poland" if they favour a West/Central/East divide.[[/note]] Ironically, the given borders would encompass Bastogne, one of the few places in Belgium [[Series/BandOfBrothers Americans have heard of]]. Later maps would place it between Switzerland and Italy (still not Eastern, but at least it's further east) or between Austria and Hungary, which is ''Central'' Europe.

* When ''Website/{{WrestleCrap}}'' inducted the 2019 Wrestling/{{WWE}} angle of Wrestling/RomanReigns' attacker, the writer pointed out that, contrary to what wrestling announcers have been telling us for years, there is no "Isle of Samoa", the nation actually being a ten-island archipelago. That's true for the sovereign state of UsefulNotes/{{Samoa}}. Only one problem—Reigns' [[Wrestling/SamoanDynasty family roots]] aren't in the sovereign state, but instead are in ''UsefulNotes/AmericanSamoa'', a U.S. territory that consists of six other inhabited islands plus a couple of uninhabited ones.

* In ''Comicbook/UltimateXMen'' #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 [[Podcast/HouseToAstonish Paul O'Brien]] to [[http://web.archive.org/web/20080213061034/http://www.thexaxis.com/reviews/050502.html#ultimate-x-men wonder]] if Creator/MarkMillar was really Scottish at all.
* ''Uncanny Comicbook/XMen'' 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 NoteFromEd from the Marvel UK editor saying "Yes, we know. Don't laugh."
* ''Comicbook/{{Cable}}: Blood & Metal'' Vol 1 #2 shows the Uruguayan Kallawaya mountain range. Such a 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 ''Comicbook/SpiderMan [[Comicbook/{{Marvel 1602}} 1602]]'', 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.
* ''X-Men Unlimited'' #4 features the Mississippi river with waterfalls.
* Issue 1 of ''ComicBook/BatmanAndTheOutsiders'' calls Markovia "Eastern European", only to provide a map placing it in ''southern Belgium'', next to Luxembourg, which is four hundred miles from even the most generous definition of Eastern Europe.[[note]]Nobody can quite agree on where "Eastern" Europe starts and what constitutes Central Europe, but the two main consensus answers are "everything east of Germany and Austria" if people favour a simple East/West divide, or "everything east of Poland" if they favour a West/Central/East divide.[[/note]] Ironically, the given borders would encompass Bastogne, one of the few places in Belgium [[Series/BandOfBrothers Americans have heard of]]. Later maps would place it between Switzerland and Italy (still not Eastern, but at least it's further east) or between Austria and Hungary, which is ''Central'' Europe.

!!Examples:

[[folder:Films -- Live-Action]]
* Played for laughs in ''Film/{{Airplane}}'' The male lead, Ted Striker, says he was stationed off the Barbary Coast, but also that the Magumba bar in the (fictional) country of Drambuie was populated with every reject and cutthroat from Bombay to Calcutta. The Barbary Coast is on the Mediterranean coast of Africa, while Bombay and Calcutta are on opposite sides of ''India''. Meanwhile, all the bar patrons are white.
* The Creator/JohnRitter film from the '70s ''Film/{{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 "UsefulNotes/NorthDakota has become the first all-gay state." This is accompanied by a picture of Mount Rushmore, with one of the presidents wearing an earring. Mount Rushmore is in UsefulNotes/SouthDakota. 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 Mount Rushmore reference was this trope, or just another political-merger joke?
* The SoBadItsGood 1965 war film ''Film/BattleOfTheBulge'' combines this with HollywoodHistory 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 RealLife. 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.
* 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, [[TheMountainsOfIllinois who knew Illinois had so many mountains?]]
* ''Film/BirdOnAWire'' 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 RealLife, two ferries connect Michigan to Wisconsin across Lake Michigan: the SS ''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 (UsefulNotes/{{Vancouver}}) to Swartz Bay (Victoria).
* Máramaros, the fictitious place where the 1934 film ''Film/TheBlackCat'' is set, can not be that far from Viségrad in Hungary, since the police called to protocol an accident arrives from there, yet the real [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maramureș Máramaros]] [[note]]Máramaros is the Hungarian name of the Maramureș region, and unlike in the vicinity of Viségrad, Russian troops did fight there in World War I[[/note]] is 350 km to the east in Romania and Ukraine [[note]]in 2020, in 1934 the Ukrainian part was in Czechoslovakia[[/note]]. Also, one of the officers tells he is from Pistyan, a town in Slovakia [[note]]in 2020, in Czechoslovakia in 1934[[/note]] 120 km to the northwest. This is probably not due to ignorance, since director Edgar G. Ulmer was born in Austria-Hungary [[note]]in what is Czechia in 2020. All of the above places were in Austria-Hungary in 1904 when he was born[[/note]].
* The climax of ''Film/BladeRunner'' 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.
* ''Film/{{Borat}}'' [[InvokedTrope deliberately does this]], to represent the stereotypical American view of foreign countries. The titular character's country, Kazakhstan, is depicted as a backwards {{Ruritania}} built around stereotypes of Eastern European countries as antisemitic, misogynistic, and all-around xenophobic hillbillies. Scenes in Kazakhstan were filmed in Romania. The real Kazakhstan is a Turkic nation of the steppes and bears little relation to the fictionalized version presented in the film, nor to the nations that the film is actually lampooning.
* In ''Film/TheBoyInBlue'', the river that stands in for The Thames looks like no UK river at all.
* Amusingly enough, the three main characters in ''Film/DeltaFarce'' 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.
* Early in ''Film/TheDeerHunter'', 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 CaliforniaDoubling (the film was shot in Washington).
* ''Film/Derailed2002'' has a road sign identifying a crossing of the German/Slovakian border. Germany and Slovakia do not have a common border.
* ''Film/DogSoldiers'': The rescued damsel comments that the nearest city is Fort William and at least 2-3 hours drive. Unless you're driving ''very'' slowly, that's basically impossible. Then again, she was probably lying, because [[spoiler:she was one of the werewolves.]] Alternatively, it's simply a case of ''WildWilderness'', using that setting in Western Europe — with, just maybe, the exception of remote parts of the Pyrenees or the Alps — always requires some fantasy.
* In ''Film/TheGuardian1990'' the protagonist family lives in Los Angeles, amidst enormous lush green forests.
* Also done in Creator/KennethBranagh's version of ''Film/{{Hamlet}}'' (though it is not like the bard's was good with geography either, see down).
* ''Film/TheFourthKind'': An alien abduction thriller set in a version of Nome, Alaska that is nestled between towering mountains and lush evergreen forests with only a tiny inlet connecting it to the Bering Strait. While this is by no means an uncommon landscape in Alaska, it is also in no way an accurate representation of Nome which is surrounded on all sides by either flat arctic tundra or the ocean.
* ''Film/FreddyVsJason'': Springwood is in Ohio. Crystal Lake is in New Jersey. Originally there was supposed to be a sequence to show the teenagers driving all night to show how long it took for them to get between the locations. But the way the film was cut in the final production, it gives the impression that the towns are side by side.
* The 2008 ''Film/GetSmart'' movie has a long sequence taking place in UsefulNotes/LosAngeles, 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 UsefulNotes/{{Montreal}}...
* ''Film/HanselAndGretelWitchHunters'' 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 [[http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/20/Nuremberg_chronicles_-_Augusta_vendilicorum.png more like this.]]
* 2007 film adaptation of ''Film/{{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.
* In ''Film/IAmDavid'' 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.
* ''Film/IndependenceDay'':
** 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. This really fails when the establishing shot of Will Smith outside his house ''in LA'' shows it ''farther'' away than the establishing shot of Quaid's trailer park.
** The "top-secret, not marked on any map" Area51 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 [[UnintentionalPeriodPiece (which was closed a year after the movie was released)]] is located in a temperate coastal valley in Orange County, California, surrounded by suburbs, 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 four hundred miles south, in the Indian Ocean.
** 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 Bombay[[note]][[UnintentionalPeriodPiece it was renamed Mumbai after the film's release]][[/note]] instead of New Delhi. (The War of 1996 viral site made for [[Film/IndependenceDayResurgence the sequel]] [[HandWave does 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 different 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. intercepted) 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 southwest of Algiers, yet the site has it at least 200 miles to the southeast. Also, the site thinks it's a rural desert location instead of a 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).
** A map of Russia in one news report in the movie shows cities in completely wrong places. Also, Moscow is shown to be covered in snow... in ''July''. (And, for an added bit of fun, the map shown is that of the Soviet Union.)
* ''Franchise/IndianaJones''
** The map in ''Film/RaidersOfTheLostArk'' 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 ''Film/IndianaJonesAndTheKingdomOfTheCrystalSkull'' shows Belize, which would have been British Honduras when the film was set. As for the Mayan civilization, see {{Mayincatec}}.
* ''Film/InnocentBlood'' confuses UsefulNotes/{{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.
* The final heist in ''Film/TheItalianJob2003'' is a '''20-minute long''' application of this trope. [[spoiler:The armored truck starts at Yucca and Vine,[[note]]near the Capitol Records building[[/note]] then appears a mile away and turns twice[[note]]once to the south, then to the west[[/note]] through Hollywood and Highland. It then goes west past Grauman's Chinese Theater, the Mini Coopers drive off, and the van stops in front of the Chinese Theater ''again'' before the street collapses. Learning that the subway tunnel is blocked, Steve sends his men to Figureoa and 11th, which is ''nine miles away'' in Downtown Los Angeles. Charlie's team then drives 8 miles through the storm drain to the L.A. River,[[note]]east of Downtown L.A.[[/note]] emerges at the Sepulveda Basin Recreation Area,[[note]]20 miles northwest of Downtown L.A.[[/note]] then go past Staples Center[[note]]southwest of Downtown L.A., and now known as Crypto.com Arena[[/note]]. Finally, after Steve loses his helicopter, he chases Charlie to Union Station by going west on Arcadia Street, even though Union Station is ''immediately behind'' them.[[note]]a road sign in the background points out the Union Station exit[[/note]] ]]
* ''Franchise/JurassicPark'':
** ''Film/JurassicPark'' 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...
** ''Film/TheLostWorldJurassicPark'': For the cargo ship to aimlessly drift into the Port of San Diego from the Pacific Ocean, it must have somehow swerved around the Coronado peninsula by itself, which divides the San Diego Bay from the ocean. When the ''Tyrannosaurus'' is seen roaring in front of downtown San Diego it's suddenly on the other side of the bay to boot.
* In ''Film/KnightAndDay'', Creator/TomCruise's character seems to hop around different places in [[https://maps.google.at/maps?oe=utf-8&client=firefox-a&q=47.800559,13.046283&ie=UTF-8&hq=&hnear=0x47769063cca7009b:0x6770528c7143e4d3,47.800559,13.046283&gl=at&ei=DLuSUvPyEaW9ygOB2ILwAg&ved=0CCoQ8gEwAA 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''[[labelnote:*]](with several faculty buildings of Salzburg University seemingly standing in as his hotel building)[[/labelnote]] 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).
* ''Film/KrakatoaEastOfJava'' managed to get this in the title: Krakatoa is actually ''west'' of Java. Reportedly, they actually knew this, but decided that [[RuleOfCool East sounded more exotic]].[[note]]Well, it's east of Java if you go east [[MetaphoricallyTrue for long enough]], by which we mean across the entire globe back to Krakatoa itself.[[/note]]
* ''Film/TheLeagueOfExtraordinaryGentlemen'' features a [[ChaseScene car chase]] in Venice, ''which has no roads.'' A car chase in Venice is like having a yacht race in the Atacama Desert (Creator/RogerEbert 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.
** In addition, the climax takes place in Mongolia. The heroes and villains both supposedly reach Mongolia by sea, even though the country is landlocked with no rivers that go anywhere near the Pacific Ocean.
* One scene in ''Film/LooneyTunesBackInAction'' has Brendan Fraser chasing a villain leaving the Louvre... and somehow immediately reaching the Eiffel Tower like two seconds later. [[http://maps.google.com/maps?q=Musee+du+Louvre+to+Tour+Eiffel In real life, they're about 4 km apart.]]
* ''Film/{{Niagara}}'': Relatively minor. Not only did the "Rainbow Cabins" motel never exist, but there's no courthouse in Niagara Falls, Ontario. Or a "City Morgue". Then or now! When the movie was made, Niagara Falls was in Welland County, with the historic Welland Country Courthouse being in Welland, Ontario. Welland County was amalgamated with neighboring Lincoln County in 1970; however criminal cases in "Niagara South" are typically still tried at the Welland County Courthouse. As for the morgue, the body would have been sent to the local Greater Niagara General Hospital.
* ''Film/NoWayOut1987'' is legendary for its mashing of Washington, D.C., area geography.
* The Madrid airport shown on screen in ''Film/OperatioFortuneRuseDeGuerre'' resembles more a regional airport than [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adolfo_Su%C3%A1rez_Madrid%E2%80%93Barajas_Airport the real deal]].
* In ''Film/OrangeCounty'', 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.
* In ''Film/OxfordBlues'' 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.
* The EarthAllAlong twist ending of ''Film/PlanetOfTheApes1968'' makes those arid and mountainous landscapes out of the American Southwest turn out to be the American Northeast, which is anything but (and even a nuclear winter wouldn't change that much).
* 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.
* ''Film/TheSecretLifeOfWalterMitty'':
** You can't get to Afghanistan through Yeman by bus as shown. The only land route would have taken Walter into Saudi Arabia Iraq and then Iran.
** As of right now, you can't fly directly from New York City to Nuuk, Greenland as shown. The only flights that go to Greenland are from Iceland and Denmark, so it is plausible to fly directly from New York City to Copenhagen then to Nuuk.
** Stykkishólmur is not right next to Eyjafjallajökull. The map shown is of the Westfjords, north of Stykkishólmur, with both the town and Eyjafjallajökull edited in.
* ''Film/SonOfTheMask'' This movie is set ten years after ''Film/TheMask'' 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 into the river to retrieve the Mask.
* ''Film/TheSoundOfMusic'': 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 UsefulNotes/WorldWarI, so he and his family could claim Italian citizenship.
* {{Parodied|Trope}} in ''Film/TeamAmericaWorldPolice'', where Team America's operations regularly destroy historical landmarks that are [[TheThemeParkVersion nowhere near each other]] (for example, the Pyramids and the statues of Ramses).[[note]]A statue was later moved to the Giza Plateau, not far from the Pyramids, but at the time the film was made, the move was still in the planning stages and that statue remained in central Cairo, about 20 kilometers away. Also, the statues depicted were at ''Abu Simbel'', which is at the other end of the country, over a thousand kilometers away.[[/note]]
* A less extreme example is ''Film/TenThingsIHateAboutYou''. Only someone familiar with UsefulNotes/{{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.
* In the 2010 film ''Film/TheTourist'', 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 movie version of ''Film/{{Twilight}}'', the scenes supposedly taking place in UsefulNotes/{{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. Furthermore, while Forks is 30 miles south of the Canadian border, Multnomah Falls is in UsefulNotes/{{Oregon}}. However, this might simply be [[CaliforniaDoubling Oregon Doubling]], since Oregon is cheaper to film in than UsefulNotes/{{Washington}}, and filmmakers figured most viewers wouldn't know the difference.
* The ''Film/TransformersFilmSeries'' franchise makes several errors.
** ''Film/Transformers2007'' 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 [[HandWave handwaves]] this by referring to it vaguely as Mission City, only for [[Film/TransformersRevengeOfTheFallen the sequel]] to then refer to it as LA without explanation.
** ''Film/TransformersRevengeOfTheFallen'' 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 [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wadi_Rum Wadi Rum]], in southern ''Jordan'' very close to the Saudi Arabian border.
** The whole scene where we are introduced to Jetfire in ''Revenge of the Fallen'' is confusing. The opening shot is of the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum, located in downtown Washington, D.C. (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 ''Film/TransformersAgeOfExtinction'' 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 [[Film/PacificRim 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. To top it off, you can briefly see the Willis Tower 311 South Wacker Drive (both located in Chicago) in a background shot, giving away some CaliforniaDoubling.
*** The characters are also shown driving from Beijing to Hong Kong in only a few hours, despite the fact the two locations are roughly thirteen-hundred miles away; you'd be travelling across nearly the length of the entire country.
** A scene in ''Film/TransformersTheLastKnight'' shows Stonehenge as being isolated. A quick look at Google Maps shows the A303 within 200 metres from the monument. It also shows a character running down an alley in Oxford to get to a library, which is actually in the opposite direction, and also shows a library in London that is actually in Trinity College, Dublin.
* ''Film/TheMightyDucks'' movies are set in the [[UsefulNotes/TwinCities 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 RealLife (and don't allow rollerblading in the first place).
* In the Creator/DisneyChannel Movie ''Film/PrincessProtectionProgram'', 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'', which is four states away.
* ''Film/{{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 Creator/TimBurton's ''Film/CharlieAndTheChocolateFactory'', Düsseldorf is depicted as [[YodelLand a quaint little Alpine town with half-timbered houses and tall mountains in the background]] instead of the modern industrial city on the Rhine that it actually is, not in plain view of any mountains.[[note]]The movie Düsseldorf is actually Gengenbach, about 320 km south of Düsseldorf. Note also that while "Dorf" means village, at over 600,000 people, Düsseldorf has long outgrown its name.[[/note]]
* ''Film/{{Left Behind|2000}}'':
** 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've ''always'' been an hour ahead of Israel and Syria (both use DST to this very day).
* Film/KingdomOfHeaven - apparently Jerusalem is right in the middle of a flat desert rather than built on green hills.
* {{Parodied}} repeatedly in the ''Film/AustinPowers'' movies. In the second, Austin and Felicity are driving through "[[CaliforniaDoubling the English countryside]]." As they pass palm trees, Austin remarks how it "[[LampshadeHanging looks nothing like southern California]]." In the third, special effects were purposely used to put Mount Fuji (located specifically in Yamanashi Prefecture) in the background of every single exterior shot in Japan.
* In ''Film/MeanGirls'' 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.
* Creator/TommyWiseau spliced in a slew of establishing shots of San Francisco in ''Film/TheRoom2003'', 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 ''Film/TheXFilesFightTheFuture'' 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''...
* Creator/JackieChan's ''Film/RumbleInTheBronx'' features shots of the lovely snow capped mountains for which the Bronx is known far and wide. [[TheMountainsOfIllinois Oh, wait]]... Also, many shots feature highly distinctive Vancouver landmarks in the background. And sometimes the foreground.
* Jackie Chan's ''Film/MrNiceGuy'' features a chase sequence through central Melbourne, Australia, that features about two dozen sharp turns, two or three of which actually do exist in real life.
* ''Film/TheCovenant'' 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.
* ''Film/BladeTrinity'' 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 ''Film/TheNakedGun'' movie, Creator/LeslieNielsen 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 ''Film/TenThousandBC'' 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. [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BfssSi2d66w Film Brain]] from ''WebVideo/BadMovieBeatdown'' has a lot to say about the absurd geography in this film.
* In ''Film/{{Speed}}'', the freeway depicted as I-10 at the start of Annie's ride is actually I-105, which was already completed during filming. The I-105 jump sequence was filmed on the I-110/I-105 interchange (specifically, the southbound 110 offramp to the westbound 105), which actually was unfinished at the time.
** The bus exits the east I-10 freeway onto Western (south) using a cloverleaf ramp that doesn't exist in RealLife, then goes from there to the I-105 in El Segundo (around 18 miles away) in ''under a minute''.
* The opening freeway chase in ''Film/{{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.
* ''Film/CannonballRunII'' 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 Creator/AmyAdams film ''Film/{{Leap Year|2010}}'' 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 ''Film/LifeSize'', 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, [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunnyvale Sunnyvale is a very real location in California.]]
* In ''Film/JoyRide'' 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.
* ''Film/TakingLives'', somewhat unusually, rather than having UsefulNotes/{{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 ''Film/AnAmericanWerewolfInLondon'', there are no hospitals in Yorkshire. The nearest hospital is apparently 250 kilometres away in [[BritainIsOnlyLondon London]]. Might be {{justified|Trope}}: 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 ''Film/MrBeansHoliday'', 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. [[FridgeBrilliance Maybe the cabbie was taking an extra screwy route to collect a better fare]]?
* ''Film/IStillKnowWhatYouDidLastSummer'' 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 indicative of a Mexican shooting location.
* In ''Film/{{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 Creator/AudreyHepburn never transfers from one train to another.
* In ''Film/TheJackal'', 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 UsefulNotes/{{Montreal}} Metro, which looks nothing like the distinctive DC Metro architecture and has rubber tires.
* ''Film/JamesBond'':
** ''Film/{{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, which is in a completely different hemisphere.
** The London boat chase in ''Film/TheWorldIsNotEnough'' is full of this.
** The Rome car chase scene in ''{{Film/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.
** ''Film/OnHerMajestysSecretService'' features Piz Gloria, a peak in the Swiss alps. Seems fair enough so far. However, upon reading some of the signs in the village at the bottom of the mountain, it is implied that it is set in the Bernese Oberland. "Piz" is a Romansh word meaning "Peak", and it is used as a prefix for several mountains in eastern Switzerland, but the Bernese Oberland is not in the area of the country that names their mountains that way.
** Speaking of Bond movies, a VeryLooselyBasedOnATrueStory 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 ''Film/NorthByNorthwest'', 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.
* The war propaganda film ''Film/TheGreenBerets'' 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).
* In ''Film/MyBestFriendsWedding'', 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.
* ''Film/TheGreatEscape''. A character gets on his motorcycle near Sagan in Western Silesia, and seemingly within ten minutes, he's on the border of Switzerland. It's actually quite a long distance away.
* ''[[Film/{{Elizabeth}} 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 [[UsefulNotes/{{Vancouver}} 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 [[RuleOfCool for the very nice views]] crossing the bridge.
* In ''Film/{{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 ''Film/GreenZone'', 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 ''Film/{{Monsters|2010}}'' stand atop a ziggurat while looking at the American border wall.
* The 1954 movie ''Film/DrumBeat'' 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 ''Film/{{Pathfinder|2007}}'' 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.
* ''Film/ScaryMovie 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 on it whatsoever). But the city in the footage is actually San Diego.
* The Creator/JeanClaudeVanDamme film ''Film/DoubleTeam'' 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 ''Film/MrAndMrsSmith2005'', at the start of the film, Creator/BradPitt and Creator/AngelinaJolie's characters claim that they met in Bogotá, Colombia. In a flashback to said moment, 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 ''Film/{{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. This was done by compositing Kuala Lumpur, which looks [[https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/b/b3/Kuala_Lumpur_Malaysia_-_panoramio_-_Chanilim714_%284%29.jpg/800px-Kuala_Lumpur_Malaysia_-_panoramio_-_Chanilim714_%284%29.jpg?20161019092049 like this]], with the Malacca river, 122km away. [[http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/375244.stm The Malaysian government disapproved.]]
* ''Film/XMenFilmSeries'':
** ''Film/XMen1'': There is no Laughlin City within the province of Alberta.
** ''Film/XMenFirstClass'': 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 UsefulNotes/WorldWarII with the help of President Perón. So the mistake wasn't ''that'' big, but it was extremely hilarious for the Argentinian and German publics.
** ''Film/XMenDaysOfFuturePast'': UsefulNotes/ThePentagon 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.
** ''Film/XMenApocalypse'': 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 ''Film/AllThePresidentsMen'', Woodward and Bernstein's car seems to teleport around UsefulNotes/WashingtonDC, from shot to shot, at random.
* ''Film/TheDevilsAdvocate'': 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 ''Film/JayAndSilentBobStrikeBack'', 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 ''Film/TheGraffitiArtist'', one of the first scenes in the film is supposed to be set in UsefulNotes/{{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 Creator/JoeDante's film ''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 into the future.
* In the first ''Film/NationalTreasure'', 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 ''Film/PiratesOfTheCaribbeanAtWorldsEnd'', 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 [[http://www.elitisti.net/web/public/captures/reviews/001750/001993-b.jpg 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 [[SoBadItsGood burst into laughter]].
* Similarly, ''Film/DoctorZhivago'' 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 Creator/TommyLeeJones vehicle ''Film/BlownAway'' 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.''
* ''Film/HomeAlone2LostInNewYork'': 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'', when it would at least take half a day to do so.
* ''Film/BruceAlmighty'' 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 [[EvilPlan grand conspiracy]] to form a [[OneWorldOrder one-world government]]. So what happens to South America, then?
* The scene in ''Film/{{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 ''Film/RunLolaRun'' needs to get to her boyfriend in 20 minutes by running across UsefulNotes/{{Berlin}} -- or, judging by the route she takes, schizophrenically teleporting....
* ''Film/BeverlyHillsChihuahua'' 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 [[TheMountainsOfIllinois the rugged, pine-forested mountains]] seen in the climax of ''Film/TheLoneRanger''.[[note]]The state does have rugged mountains and pine forest, but the former are located in the far west of the state with the latter hundreds of miles away in east Texas.[[/note]] Also, Promontory Point (where the transcontinental railroad was completed) is in Utah.
* ''Film/BloodSuckingPharaohsInPittsburgh'' 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 ''Film/{{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.
* ''Film/Godzilla1998'':
** A major plot point about how Godzilla remains hidden despite his size is because he burrows into the New York subways and sewers. But these are only about fifty metres down at their deepest; Godzilla wouldn't be able to tunnel through them without leaving obvious {{Wormsign}} and easy detectable seismic disturbances (never mind the fact he definitely couldn't fit into them anyway).
** During the helicopter chase sequences, Godzilla and the copters are funnelled down labyrinth-like streets of squashed-together skyscrapers that all tower above Godzilla. It should go without saying that Manhattan doesn't remotely resemble that.
** During the military's second fight with Godzilla, there's an underwater naval battle between the monster and three submarines in the Hudson River. However, the Hudson is only about two-hundred feet in depth at its deepest (with an average depth of only ''thirty'' feet); Godzilla could stand on the bottom and his head would be well above the surface. In the film though, Godzilla is shown ''diving'' in the Hudson and the riverbed is still nowhere in sight.
** At the finale, the main characters lead Godzilla from the Park Ave Tunnel to the Brooklyn Bridge after stating its the closest suspension bridge over the East River to their location. It's actually the ''furthest'': Manhattan Bridge and Williamsburg Bridge are both much closer.
* ''Film/Godzilla2014'':
** 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 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.
* Franchise/MarvelCinematicUniverse
** ''Film/TheAvengers2012'' first uses UsefulNotes/{{Cleveland}}, Ohio as Stuttgart, Germany. The aerial view looks as if the city was on a plain, while the real Stuttgart is as hilly as San Francisco. Stuttgart's main shopping street is indeed called Königsstrasse, but no building there is more than six stories high and Königsstrasse 22 opens onto a street. Also, the city does not have elevated railways.
** Later in the movie, parts of the Chitauri invasion in ''Film/TheAvengers2012'' use Cleveland as New York City. One can tell this because the traffic lights don't look like New York City traffic lights.
** Cleveland also doubles for Washington DC in ''Film/CaptainAmericaTheWinterSoldier'', 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.
** ''Film/AvengersAgeOfUltron'': The theatrical version does leave one with the impression that Johannesburg, a landlocked city in UsefulNotes/SouthAfrica, is located pretty close to the coast instead of hundreds of miles inland as it feels like the deranged Hulk managed to get there within minutes.
** ''Film/AvengersEndgame'': The scenes from New Asgard were filmed in a tiny, hilly Scottish village, but we are told it's actually the town formerly known as Tønsberg, Norway. The real Tønsberg is much bigger, with a population of 40 000, and is situated in the Norwegian lowlands.
** ''Film/BlackWidow2021'': Natasha goes after her 'mother' who now lives in a pig farm in St. Petersburg. Along with that being Russia's second biggest city instead of some rural town, St. Petersburg is usually too cold to do such rural activities.
* In ''Film/{{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.
* ''Film/HotShotsPartDeux'': Played for laughs, with the American strike team infiltrating a prison compound in the Iraqi jungles.
* ''Film/TheMummyTrilogy'':
** The opening of [[Film/TheMummy1999 the first film]] features lovely CGI-crafted establishing shots of the Ancient Egyptian city of Thebes in 1290 BC, complete with smooth pyramids resembling those of the Giza necropolis in the background. What's wrong with this? Well, the Giza necropolis is located in...[[ExactlyWhatItSaysOnTheTin Giza]], which is in Lower Egypt and far, far away from Thebes, a city located deep in Upper Egypt. In fact, all of the famous pyramids are in Lower Egypt, as they were mostly built during the Old Kingdom period, when the capital was in Memphis, and the latter part of the Middle Kingdom period, when it was in Itjtawy, 40 km south of Memphis. Upper Egypt does have a couple of pyramids, but they are all located away from Thebes (the closest is the Pyramid of Naqada, situated a good 37 km north along the Nile) and either small step pyramids or cenotaphs, not humongous Giza-style smooth pyramids. Finally, even if Thebes ''did'' have pyramids, they wouldn't have been built smack-dab in the city center, seeing as they were tombs, and should have been west of the Nile because the Egyptians believed that dead souls entered the underworld with the help of the setting sun.
** The EstablishingShot of London in ''Film/TheMummyReturns'' shows St Paul's Cathedral, Tower Bridge and Big Ben all in the same shot. Apparently, the scenes are set inside the [[http://i.ytimg.com/vi/11mwW9MKAf0/maxresdefault.jpg Thames Television logo]]. The creators actually did film in London and knew where things were, but went for RuleOfCool.
* ''Film/RobinHoodPrinceOfThieves'':
** 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 [[OopNorth North of England]] and is over shooting Nottingham by an extra 180 miles, but is somehow within five miles of Locksley Manor in the movie. Given the movie's writers were both born in Britain, you'd think they knew better — though perhaps the locations were chosen without regard for the script.
** He also over shoots Nottingham on the way back from his detour to Hadrian's Wall by over 200 miles to the south since Locksley Manor is in fact Old Wardour Castle in Wiltshire. They must have walked fast back in 12th Century if he managed to cover over 800 miles in one day.
** The distinctive waterfall Robin washes under at one point is a well known tourist attraction called Hardraw Force in the Yorkshire Dales, which is around 150 miles north of Nottingham and Sherwood Forest, while the river where Robin first meets Little John and the Merry men is Aysgrath Falls in North Yorkshire, which is over a 100 miles north of Sherwood Forest.
* In ''Film/FastFive'', the main characters are hiding out in the favelas of Usefulnotes/RioDeJaneiro. 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]]The most arid regions are in the Northeast Region, really far from Rio[[/note]] much less near Rio, which lies firmly in the tropics.
* The AnimatedCreditsOpening in ''Film/{{Mannequin}}'' in which the Egyptian princess travels the world while being whisked through history and, among other things, [[HistoricalInJoke proves to Columbus]] [[BeamMeUpScotty that the world]] [[ArtisticLicenseHistory is round]]. She briefly visited the future before backtracking. All in line with the RuleOfFunny.
* In ''Film/AngelsAndDemons'', the entire scene with [[spoiler: 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 [[spoiler: attempted assassination via drowning]] very unlikely.
* In ''Film/StuartLittle'', 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 ''Film/{{Eurotrip}}'', and PlayedForLaughs.
-->'''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 ''Film/EscanabaInDaMoonlight'', 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.
* ''Film/SpiderMan2'': Spider-Man and Doc Ock's fight [[TrainTopBattle on board an elevated train]] takes place on what is clearly a UsefulNotes/ChicagoL train dressed up to look like a UsefulNotes/NewYorkSubway 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. To their credit, they do their best to hide the fact they're in Chicago, such as dressing up the train in appropriate signage, but even so, you can see the station signs for Clark / Lake station as Spider-Man and Dock Ock are gaining their footing on the train roof.
** On top of that, the elevated train is designated as an R train, which runs underground along its entire route.
** Not all of the fight was filmed in Chicago, though, as the scene where Spider-Man is thrown from the train, and is briefly dragged along the street was filmed under the Harlem Valley viaduct on the IRT Broadway-Seventh Avenue Line, one of the only two above-ground segments of track within Manhattan.
* ''Film/StarTrekFirstContact'' shows the southeastern Pacific from orbit at one point. Australia is clearly visible, but New Zealand for some reason is completely missing (or at the very least offscreen).
* ''Film/CloudAtlas'': 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 ''Film/TheCassandraCrossing'' 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 anything 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.
** 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 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 [[spoiler: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.
* ''Film/WhatsUpDoc'' 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 ''Film/TheFullMonty'' could get a five-minute bus ride covering 30 miles from one side of the city to the other.
* ''Literature/AScannerDarkly'' gets a lot right about its Orange County, California, setting, to the point that the filmmakers have ShownTheirWork. However, there are a few nits. For example, when the main characters are in a car on Interstate 5 traveling south from Anaheim to San Diego, they break down at Culver Avenue in Irvine. The views outside their car show the proper landmarks for these locations. When they take a tow truck back home, they're traveling north, and we see them pass proper landmarks around the Marketplace shopping center and office park in Irvine and Tustin. However, people familiar with this stretch of highway will notice that they pass the same locations several times.
* ''Film/JackReacher'' takes place in UsefulNotes/{{Pittsburgh}} and was filmed on location. Except Reacher seems to teleport around the city during the same sequences. For example, one car chase involves him speeding through a tunnel for a good 20-30 seconds before slamming into water barrels on the other end and getting out. Any denizen of Pittsburgh will instantly recognize the Armstrong Tunnel, which is only 0.02 miles in length, and the street where the tunnel comes out, Forbes Ave, doesn't have any barrels at the end, since that would prevent traffic along the street. You also wouldn't expect to see a crowd of older people just standing at an intersection there, since it's the location of Duquesne University (true, people could be coming to or from a Penguins game, but no one in that crowd was wearing the team colors). And a key plot point about "''the'' auto part store" makes zero sense, since there isn't one key auto part store that immediately comes to mind to Pittsburghers.
* In ''Film/AGoodDayToDieHard'', [=McClane=] and Jack drive from Moscow to Chernobyl in what looks like a few hours. First of all, the two locations are in different countries, with about 530 miles separating them. And the roads there aren't exactly the well-maintained autobahn. In addition, you have two Americans crossing borders without passports in a stolen car full of weapons, with plenty of police and military checkpoints between them and their destination (which is located in a restricted area, mind you). They also somehow catch up to a helicopter that flew in that direction several hours earlier.
* ''Film/{{Troy}}'' expects us to believe that Mycenae was located on a sea coast, when, in fact, the real city was about 12 miles inland.
* In ''Film/SonicTheHedgehog2020'', when Sonic and Robotnik arrive in Egypt near the Giza pyramids, there's nothing but desert visible in all directions. The pyramids and the Sphinx are actually surrounded by roads, numerous other monuments, and city on three sides. In fact, there's a KFC/Pizza Hut combination restaurant ''less than 1000 feet'' from the Sphinx itself.
* ''Film/FiftyShadesOfGrey'''s poster. 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.
* ''Film/ArmyOfDarkness'' is set in a medieval European kingdom that looks ''exactly'' like Southern California, deserts and all, and makes absolutely no attempt to hide this. It's probably a quiet joke, and extremely endearing in its own relatively low-budget way.
* ''Film/BoilerRoom'': Before the interview, Seth notices the guys at J.T. Marlin ([[spoiler:which is actually a criminal operation]]) look like they're taking the 6 local to Fulton Street. In reality, the 6 doesn't go to Fulton Street as it ends at Brooklyn Bridge-City Hall, one stop before. Riders wishing to get off at Fulton Street must take the 4 or 5 expresses along the Lexington Avenue Line.
* ''Film/ReignOfFire'': The Americans came to Britain by plane and landed near Manchester with plans to head to London, which is southeast of Manchester. And yet somehow they ended up in the protagonist's hideout in Northumberland, which is north of Manchester.
* ''Film/{{Titanic|1997}}'': Jack mentions going ice fishing on Lake Wissota in Wisconsin with his father. Except Jack dies in 1912, and Lake Wissota is an artificial reservoir that wasn't filled until about 5 years later. Some fans speculate that Rose is an UnreliableNarrator and could've simply messed up her facts.
* ''Film/TheFourthKind'': Set in Nome, Alaska but fails spectacularly at looking like it in any facet. The establishing shot of the city would seem to indicate that it's nestled in between towering snowcapped mountains and lush evergreen forrests with only a small inlet connecting it to the ocean when in reality Nome is surrounded on one half by the ocean and on the other half by arctic tundra and is thus decidedly flat and barren as a result. This is extra egregious considering how the filmmakers went to extreme lengths to try and sell the movie being based on real events and also incorporating real footage and yet handicapped themselves right out of the gate by neglecting to establish any verisimilitude with the setting of the story.
* ''Film/KacWawa'': In what is just one of the screenplay's issues, one character goes through downtown Warsaw on a walk between two locations on the western bank of the Vistula. However, for some reason he is shown crossing the river, which in real life would just make the trip unnecessarily long.
* One gets the impression that the American scriptwriters of ''Film/KangarooJack'' never so much as glanced at a map of Australia.
** Frankie tells Charlie and Louis to fly to Sydney, and from there drive due north to Coober Pedy. In reality, Coober Pedy is west-northwest from Sydney (and a 2000-km[[note]]1250 mi[[/note]] drive, in case anyone's interested).
** And then they somehow end up in Alice Springs, nearly 700 km[[note]]about 440 mi[[/note]] north of Coober Pedy.
* Minor example in the opening sequence of ''Film/WhenHarryMetSally'', when the two characters are driving away from the campus of the University of Chicago. The car makes a turn, then there's a cut, and the car is in a completely different part of the campus, in a place they couldn't possibly have driven to.

[[folder:Literature]]
* Creator/DanBrown's ''Literature/TheDaVinciCode'' 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.
* ''Literature/TheDresdenFiles'' 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 [[DirectLineToTheAuthor reading over the notes for accuracy's sake]], sardonically laughs about it.
* ''Literature/LeftBehind'':
** In the first 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, which is actually very shallow and could not accommodate ships of any kind.
* Rick Riordan:
** Based on ''Heroes of Olympus'', Riordan 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 PlotPoint, 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.
** ''[[Literature/PercyJacksonAndTheOlympians 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 [[https://archello.s3.eu-central-1.amazonaws.com/images/2018/07/30/180519-0154-----2017-Alex-S.-MacLean.1532932056.7648.jpg this photo]] for reference.) Even during flood season, the closest the river has ever been to the Arch is halfway up the staircase.
* ''Literature/TheTwilightSaga'' is absolutely ''terrible'' about this. Author Creator/StephenieMeyer 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.
* Creator/ArthurConanDoyle:
** Probably done deliberately in Literature/SherlockHolmes, for the same reason as the Series/ILoveLucy 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 ArtisticLicenseGeology.
* Creator/RudyardKipling: "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 [[ArtisticLicense 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.
* Creator/DamonKnight'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 ''[[Literature/{{Illuminatus}} 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.
* Creator/JohnSteinbeck's ''Literature/TheGrapesOfWrath'' 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.
* ''Literature/TheGunsOfTheSouth'' 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, Creator/HarryTurtledove 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 {{handwave}}d if it was just them, but the fact that one of the main characters is also from the town becomes an important plot point.
* Creator/StephenKing did this on purpose in ''Franchise/TheDarkTower'' series. In the foreword for ''Literature/TheWasteLands'', 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 {{discusse|dTrope}}s this trope when talking about ''Film/TheGoodTheBadAndTheUgly''. 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 ''Literature/BurningWater'' 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' ''Literature/GoAskAlice'' 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 TimeTravel powers.
* The chemistry of Creator/HalClement'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 HandWave in ''Literature/YoungWizards'' 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 ''Literature/AtlantaNights'' features a lovely photograph of a beach sunset with palm trees in the foreground. Atlanta is several hundred miles away from the nearest coastline. [[StylisticSuck This is intentional.]]
* In ''Literature/WorldWarZ'', 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 ''Literature/{{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" MiseryLit book states stuff as inaccurate as ''Jordan sharing a border with Kuwait'' [[note]](for the record: Jordan is bordered by Saudi Arabia to the south and east, Iraq to the north-east, Syria to the north, and Israel and Palestine to the west, while Kuwait only shares borders with Iraq and Saudi Arabia)[[/note]], fake "fanciful" depictions of Amman, and false statements about Jordanian law as a whole make this even worse.
* ''Literature/FiftyShadesOfGrey'':
** 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 [[http://www.hillsboroflying.org/files/HfcNewsletter200812.pdf 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''?
* ''Literature/TheChemicalGardenTrilogy'':
** Apparently, among other things, WorldWarIII 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. [[spoiler:''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 ''Literature/TheFinalWarning'' 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 [[UsefulNotes/TheLondonUnderground 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 easternmost 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 Literature/InDeath'', Cornwall, in the UK, is repeatedly referred to as north of London. It is in South-West England, with Cornwall being the most southern and western county in the whole of England.
* ''Literature/WetDesertTrackingDownATerroristOnTheColoradoRiver'': The reservoir held up by Davis Dam is named "[[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Mohave Lake Mohave]]"; "Lake Mojave", which is how the lake is named in the book, is [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Mojave something completely different]] in RealLife.
* Near the start of ''Literature/HarryPotterAndTheChamberOfSecrets'', 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 ''south''west 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".
* ''Literature/ReturnOfTheWolfMan'': Talbot is identified as having lived in "Wales, England". Throughout the rest of the novel the names of the two countries are used more or less interchangeably.
* ''{{Series/Animorphs}}'': Cassie is trapped on a commercial jet while the group is trying to retrieve a piece of Yeerk ship wreckage. The plane is headed to Sydney, Australia and Cassie bails out over the Northern Territories to escape controllers. But a plane going to Sydney from the western U.S where the series is set wouldn’t go anywhere near the Northern Territory, which is hundreds of miles northwest of Sydney.
* ''[[https://mek.oszk.hu/01000/01010/01010.htm János vitéz]] (John the Valiant)'' starts out with the protagonist being a Hungarian shepherd. When he joins the army, which is on its way to France to fight off the attacking Turks, he goes through, ''in this order'', "Tatar Country"[[note]]the Mongols that invaded Hungary in 1241 were misnamed as Tatars[[/note]], Italy, Poland and India before arriving in France. The poem even spells out that India and France share a border. The later chapters are set in entirely fictional locations.
* ''Literature/HoverCarRacer'': Based on the lengths of the race courses, Tasmania is less than a quarter of the scale it is in real life (which would also explain how the entire island being bought by the International Race School would be plausible in any way).
* In ''Literature/TheMister'', Albania gets portrayed as being a rather primitive country, with Alessia being amazed by all the modern shops in Britain and calling a credit card "magic". Albania actually does have shops no different from ones in Western Europe. It's even weirder considering Alessia says she's from Kukës, which isn't some backwater rural village but a small city; it's a popular tourist destination (with an international airport) and just Googling pictures of the place will demonstrate it absolutely has modern supermarkets and convenience stores. Credit cards are also used in the country (although a lot of places only accept cash, so it's recommended to not rely only on credit cards while travelling).

[[folder:Live-Action TV]]
* On ''Series/ThirtyRock'', 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.
* ''Series/BoyMeetsWorld'' 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 ''Series/TheChasersWarOnEverything'' 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 [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Eiffel_Tower_replicas quite a few]] replicas of it all around the world.
* ''Series/DaVincisDemons'' 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.
* ''Series/SonsOfAnarchy'':
** 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 ''Series/CarShare'' 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 [[Series/DoctorWho Tardis]], and in one scene it appeared to visit a completely different town ''sixty miles away'' from Manchester. Although the show {{lampshade|Hanging}}d Peter's inability to use a [=SatNav=] and his lack of any maps in the car...
* In an episode of ''Series/ItsAlwaysSunnyInPhiladelphia'' 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.
* ''Series/ILoveLucy''.
** 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 as long as they live in New York City 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.)
* ''Series/{{Justified}}'': The show seems to think that Raylan can just make a quick drive from Lexington to Harlan County, Kentucky, a few times a day. The two are about a 3-4 hour drive apart.[[note]]The US Marshals office to which Raylan is assigned, which include Harlan County, is indeed based in Lexington. That office has two other potential duty stations that are considerably closer to Harlan (the county seat). However, even those are at least 1½ hours from Harlan (London to the west, Pikeville to the northeast).[[/note]]
* ''Series/MysteryScienceTheater3000'' has too many to count, mostly in service of comedy. Besides the RunningGag that any town in the U.S. is Circle Pines, Minnesota, one of the most overt appears in [[Recap/MysteryScienceTheater3000S10E01Soultaker "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. [[MST3KMantra Oh well...]]
* ''Series/TwentyFour''
** An important plot point in Season 4 occurs near {{the mountains of I|llinois}}owa. Take a good look at this [[https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/iowa-state-map.gif 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; Houston Street, in downtown Manhattan, is about 40 minutes’ drive, and that’s ''without'' the notoriously bad traffic in the area. Trying to decipher the geography of ''24'' is an exercise in futility.
* The first season of western ''Series/HellOnWheels'' 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.
* ''Series/{{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 [[CaliforniaDoubling shot in Hawaii]].
** In "Hearts and Minds" a flashback shows Boone staying in a hotel room in Sydney with a view of the Sydney Opera House which would only be possible if the room was in the middle of the Harbour directly over the water.
* ''Series/TheWestWing''
** The [[VerySpecialEpisode 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 the 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.
* ''Series/WhoseLineIsItAnyway''.
** Creator/DrewCarey once said that "[[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GNT3BGvyePM 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 ''Series/{{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 ''Series/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.[[note]]"Kennedy" refers to the Kennedy Expressway, which runs northwest from The Loop (downtown) to O'Hare Airport. The closest that Sheridan Road gets to it is about 3 miles.[[/note]]
* Invoked InUniverse during a Quiz Bowl in the ''Series/CityGuys'' 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?...
-->'''El-Train''' (with confidence): East Dakota![[note]]For reference, there is no U.S. state with the word "east" at the beginning of its name. The only U.S. states with a direction in their name are North Carolina, North Dakota, South Carolina, South Dakota (the correct answer to the above question) and West Virginia. There are also no states with omnidirectional names (i.e., "northeast," "southwest") in their name.[[/note]]
-->'''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.
* ''Series/HappyDays'' 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 [[https://cloudfront.mediamatters.org/static/images/item/live-20090727.jpg Iraq labeled as Egypt]].
** They also illustrated a story about the 2008 conflict between the country of Georgia and Russia with a road map of, ooops, wrong Georgia, leading to some confusion as they talked about advancing Russian tanks.
** 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 ''Series/TheDailyShow'' called them out on) where they called the Galapagos Islands "Hawaii".
* In Season 1 of ''Series/{{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.
* ''Series/Jericho2006'' seems to forget that Kansas is bigger than Rhode Island. Throughout the series, characters see mountains from ''[[TheMountainsOfIllinois Central Kansas]]'' (mountains are not visible from anywhere in Kansas), travel less than an hour to drive over 500 miles from Wichita to UsefulNotes/{{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.
* ''Series/SpenserForHire'' 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 {{lampshade|Hanging}}d in an episode of ''Series/HomicideLifeOnTheStreet'' 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 ''Series/TheAmazingRace'', 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?)
* ''Series/{{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 SoapOpera ''Series/TheYoungAndTheRestless'' 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.[[note]]The real Ottawa, which is Canada's capital, is regarded as a fairly dreary place full of bureaucrats with no nightlife to speak of. It ''is'' on a river -- the Ottawa River -- but it's considerably inland from any lake (which is why it was chosen as Canada's capital, because in 1867 it was the major city farthest from the American border).[[/note]] 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.
* ''Series/{{Friends}}'':
** In "The One with Joey's Big Break", while he and Chandler are driving out of Manhattan for Las Vegas, the ([[DrivingADesk 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 OrbitalShot 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.
** ''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, NL,[[note]]Newfoundland and Labrador[[/note]] and THEN a two-hour ferry ride to NS.
* In ''Series/HowIMetYourMother'', 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 [[UnreliableNarrator Ted]] is telling it.
* In an episode of ''Series/HaveIGotNewsForYou'', 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 ''[[Series/BeverlyHills90210 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.
* The [[Series/ShamelessUS 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 ''Series/GoGoSentaiBoukenger'' 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 ''Series/TheEvent'' 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]] Siberia isn't a well defined area, but everyone agrees that it is east of the Urals. Murmansk, on the other hand, is west of the Urals.[[/note]]
* 1967 western ''Series/CimarronStrip'' 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.
* ''Series/TorchwoodMiracleDay'' 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 ''Series/{{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 ''Series/{{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 UsefulNotes/WashingtonDC 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 ''Series/LawAndOrder'' 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 ''Series/StarTrekTheNextGeneration'', 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.
* ''Series/StarTrekEnterprise'' 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.
* ''Series/{{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. [[RuleOfCool 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 UsefulNotes/{{Chicago}} Police Department vehicle (Monk being positioned so as to hide the word "CHICAGO" on the car's doors).
* In one episode of ''Series/{{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.
* ''{{Series/Glee}}'' was notorious for getting various details about UsefulNotes/{{Ohio}} wrong. For instance, almost all the towns mentioned in the show are real places, and none of them are anywhere near each other even though characters leisurely travel from one town to the next all the time. The show is mainly set in Lima near the Indiana border; rival glee club Vocal Adrenaline is based in Akron, 154 miles away on the opposite end of the state. Then there are the boys from Dalton Academy in Westerville, a suburb of Columbus and 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.
* ''Series/TheOfficeUS'', 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).
** In the episode ''Employee Transfer'', the fact that Nashua is a seven hour drive from Scranton is a major factor in Michael and Holly's breakup, but Nashua is barely a five hour drive from Scranton, seven hours will get you all the way to Augusta, Maine, which becomes doubly amusing when they arrive at the halfway point (four hours) and it's an overgrown forest, whereas halfway between them would put the driver in the middle of Connecticut (Danbury is roughly halfway between Scranton and Nashua) and four hours would be nearly to Boston. Notable for the fact that the Office is usually pretty good about driving times.
* ''Series/{{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.
* ''Series/WizardsOfWaverlyPlace''
** 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 [[HollywoodProvincialism 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 ''Series/MurderSheWrote'' 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 ''Series/TheRealWorld'', 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 UsefulNotes/StLouis, with Owensboro about 100 miles north''east'' 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.
* ''Series/TheXFiles'' 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 the major port city of Norfolk, Virginia, 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 ''Series/LastWeekTonightWithJohnOliver'' RunningGag, 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''.
** [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3KndYcoWoSo 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.
** [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2_jqALy1Gu8 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.
** [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uTBIcdtTuaY 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.
** [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uHovZr5itPU 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 [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0V5ckcTSYu8 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, [[TakeThat that's it. End of sentence.]]"
** In the introduction of the segment about the release of the Panama Papers,[[note]]Documents that revealed prominent individuals with offshore accounts in the Central American nation[[/note]] the false Panama shown is a rough outline of a Scottie dog, which the actual country shown afterward strangely resembles.
** [[https://youtu.be/3saU5racsGE?t=14m32s 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!
* ''Series/{{Fargo}}'': Luverne, being in southwest Minnesota, is a prairie town in RealLife. 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.
* ''Series/{{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 UsefulNotes/{{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: KirksRock.
** 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.
* ''Series/TheWalkingDead2010'' 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 UsefulNotes/WashingtonDC, 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.
* ''Series/GilmoreGirls'' 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.
* ''Series/TerminatorTheSarahConnorChronicles'': 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, [[https://www.google.co.il/maps/@36.0178316,-109.000782,98m/data=!3m1!1e3?hl=en but it certainly does not look like a 'hicktown']].
** There is no place called West Fork in Nebraska.
* Marvel's Creator/{{Netflix}} universe:
** ''Series/Daredevil2015'' takes place in Hell's Kitchen, but is filmed in Brooklyn and Queens.[[note]]The justification is that Hell's Kitchen is worse off because of damage from "The Incident".[[/note]] 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 WalkAndTalk 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 location of Karen's hometown Fagan Corners, Vermont is never stated. The newspaper article on her brother's death in "Seven Minutes in Heaven" reports that he[[note]]actually Karen. Kevin was riding shotgun[[/note]] 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. Some of this could be justified by the fact that Fagan Corners is a fictional town.
*** 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.
*** In one episode, Matt tells Elektra that he's never been north of 116th street. Considering he has a degree from Columbia Law, he has to have been, at some point, at least a few hundred feet north of 116th Street.
** ''Series/JessicaJones2015''
*** 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. 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, and which is clearly being filmed on the PATH platforms at 33rd Street.
*** 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.
** ''Series/LukeCage2016''
*** 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, Wilmington[[note]]Although these two can be bypassed via the New Jersey Turnpike[[/note]], Baltimore, Washington DC, and Richmond).
* ''Series/ThePunisher2017'': The caption when Rawlins is introduced in episode 5 says the CIA headquarters is in Fairfax, Virginia, not Langley where it's actually based. Though Langley ''is'' in Fairfax ''County'', it's far from the city of Fairfax (which lies within but is separate from Fairfax County) or even the area served by the Fairfax post office.
* There's a ''Series/{{Columbo}}'' episode set in London, which ends with Columbo leaving "the wax museum" ([[WritingAroundTrademarks 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 ''Series/AgentsOfSHIELD'' episode "The Asset" bizarrely and insultingly depicted UsefulNotes/{{Malta}} as a developing-world rogue state whose dictatorial government was in the pocket of a millionaire DiabolicalMastermind. 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}}[[note]]presumably, the episode would have been set in Latveria if it wasn't for the fact that, at the time, Fox still owned the rights to the Fantastic Four, which would've included Latveria[[/note]].
* ''Series/TheStrain'' 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 [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chapel_of_the_Good_Shepherd_(Roosevelt_Island) there is such a church]], the show places it under the Queensboro Bridge, whereas in reality it's significantly further north.
* ''Series/{{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 ''Series/TheKingOfQueens'', 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 Northwest. 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 Rocky Mountain state of Wyoming. It does not ever directly connect to Highway 28.
* ''{{Series/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.
* ''Series/TheTwilightZone1959'': In George P. Hanley's fantasy about being U.S. President in "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS4E114IDreamOfGenie I Dream of Genie]]", the Capitol Building can be seen out the window of the Oval Office. This is not the case in reality. It also appears to be much closer to the White House than it actually is.
* Series/{{Arrowverse}}:
** Central City is located in Missouri and is 600 miles away from Star City. Yet Star City is located on the West Coast of the United States,[[note]]The franchise gives conflicting evidence as to where Star City is located. It's usually construed to be in the Seattle metropolitan area. However, one map suggests that it is in the San Francisco Bay Area.[[/note]] which is over 1000 miles away from Missouri no matter how you look at it. Central City also repeats the ''Smallville'' mistake by having a prominent waterfront, betraying its filming location (Vancouver, like the rest of the Arrowverse).
** In ''Series/Batwoman2019'', Gotham is revealed to border Blüdhaven, which in ''Series/{{Arrow}}'' is close enough to Star City to have a direct train line with it. This suggests that Gotham is located in the Western United States. However, in-universe maps show that Gotham is essentially in the same spot as Chicago (as opposed to its usual location of New Jersey).
* ''Series/StargateSG1'' places the Russian city of Magnitogorsk somewhere in the vicinity of Magadan, over 3000 miles away.
* ''Series/Lucifer2016'' is set in Los Angeles. In one season three episode, Dan goes to Hawaii on vacation. He has three layovers on this trip, due to his "airline miles." LAX is one of the primary hub airports to Hawaii, no matter how cheap Dan's mileage program is he should have had no trouble booking a direct flight. He ends up on a layover in Vancouver, British Columbia. Somehow.
* ''Series/HomeImprovement'':
** The show itself is set in Detroit, which in the series is depicted as [[MonochromeCasting astoundingly white]], nothing like real life. There are, however, hints and mentions that it actually takes place in the suburb of Royal Oak.
** And even then, it's extremely obvious that it was filmed in Los Angeles, as noted by distant mountains in multiple outdoor shots, as well as occasional appearances of California architectural styles that were nonexistent in Michigan.
** In an episode where Tim invites one of Jill's former coworkers to her birthday, and finds out later that the two weren't exactly friends anymore, but the coworker still calls up to get directions to the house, Tim intentionally sends her "on 94 west" to "10, and go 12 exits", as doing so would make her end up in Canada. Getting from the I-94/M-10 interchange in Detroit to the Canadian border only involves passing seven exits along southbound M-10 before the freeway ends at a traffic light at Jefferson Avenue and Griswold Street, and then from there, passing two additional traffic lights, making a right turn at the second, ''does indeed'' take you into Canada (via the Detroit-Windsor Tunnel).
* ''Series/TheWire'': In season 2, the prostitutes who were being trafficked are shown with Republic of Russia passports. There is no such thing as a "Republic of Russia". There's the Russian ''Federation'', which is divided into [[UsefulNotes/TheGloriousFederalSubjects a multitude of subjects]], some of which are republics and some of which aren't.
* ''Series/AgathaRaisin'': Carsley is meant to be somewhere in Gloucestershire, presumably in the north east of the county somewhere by either by Bourton on the Water or Morton in the Marsh. Somehow, the local police are based in Evesham, which is not only in a different county to the north of Gloucestershire in real life, but it is also covered by a completely different police force, the local bus company is from an area south of Gloucestershire, and Bath is apparently only a half an hour drive away, when in reality it is over an hour away.
* ''Series/OnceUponATime'': Multiple establishing shots of Hyperion Heights show the Seattle Monorail running through the neighborhood. Based on its proximity to the famous Fremont Troll, Hyperion Heights is located just off the Aurora Bridge. The Seattle Monorail doesn't run through that part of the city.

[[folder:Music]]
* In "Folsom Prison Blues" by Music/JohnnyCash, 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.
* Music/{{Journey|Band}}'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.
* 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]]Tech's location of Blacksburg is in the New River Valley of ''southwest'' Virginia, a good four hours' drive from anything that's locally considered to be part of ''Northern'' Virginia.[[/note]]
* Averted/parodied by Music/TheBeatles' "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 UsefulNotes/{{Georgia|USA}} and/or a woman named Georgia) and the UsefulNotes/{{Georgia|Caucasus}} 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.''
* British artist Music/KimWilde'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 Music/ElioELeStorieTese takes place on the Italian-Bulgarian border. Needless to say that the Italian-Bulgarian border ''doesn't exist''.
* Music/LemonDemon's ''Music/UltimateShowdownOfUltimateDestiny'' has UsefulNotes/AbrahamLincoln [[OurZombiesAreDifferent came out of his grave]], in {{Tokyo|IsTheCenterOfTheUniverse}}...
* Paper Lace's "The Night Chicago Died" says that the police shootout took place on the east side of UsefulNotes/{{Chicago}}. 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 (who, like Paper Lace, are British) 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 Music/WeirdAlYankovic's "Canadian Idiot", where the singer mentions "driving a Zamboni all over [[AccentUponTheWrongSyllable 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 (interestingly, there ''is'' a Jackson along I-40 between Nashville and Memphis). 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 Music/RobertJohnson 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 UnreliableNarrator doesn't know that Chicago isn't in California. Or Johnson was giving a ShoutOut to friends/relatives who lived in the small California towns of Chicago Park or Port Chicago.
* {{Music/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 [[UsefulNotes/HorseRacing 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".
* Music/JonLajoie's character, [[JerkAss MC Vagina]], did "[[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fi6Ddd6eRqM Very Super Famous]]", which is about how [[GermansLoveDavidHasselhoff 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. Justified, as it's a metaphor for death and moving on to Heaven and is not referring to the literal river.
* Invoked in "Wagon Wheel", originally recorded by Music/OldCrowMedicineShow and CoveredUp by Music/DariusRucker. 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"...)
* Music/TravisTritt'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.
* Music/{{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.
* "Hazard" by Music/RichardMarx is set in Hazard, Nebraska, because he liked the name, but the real Hazard is just a village, not the town depicted in the song, and doesn't have a river.
* "U2" by Music/{{Negativland}} samples an infamous outtake of Creator/CaseyKasem introducing a record by Music/{{U2}}, introducing them as Irish, starting to give their lineup, then breaking off and exclaiming "These guys are from England and who gives a shit?" (this line would subsequently become the title for an expanded reissue of the [=EP=]). Ireland is not even part of the UsefulNotes/UnitedKingdom, and has ''never'' been part of England.
* "The Last Saskatchewan Pirate" by Music/TheArrogantWorms talks about a pirate on the Saskatchewan River, but also refers to "Regina's mighty shores", implying that the river flows through the city; it doesn't even come close. Regina isn't even located on anything that approaches a river; it's bisected by Wascana Creek, which is a low-flow, mostly seasonal stream (though it was dammed in the 1880s, creating a still-existing lake in the central portions of the city).
* [[Music/TheyMightBeGiants John Linnell's]] "Arkansas" mentions "the coast of Arkansas", which is a landlocked state, and claims the state could one day sink into the ocean. Since the song is mainly about the improbable design of a ship the exact size and shape of Arkansas, this was probably just meant to add further absurdity to the premise.
* Creator/LoganPaul's "It's Everyday Bro" has Nick Crompton refer to England as his "city".
* "Africa" by Music/{{Toto}} has the line "Sure as Kilimanjaro rises like Olympus above the Serengeti". Kilimanjaro is around 250 miles from the Serengeti, in a completely different National Park (Kilimanjaro National Park, oddly enough). At least they're both in Tanzania.
* Music/CWMcCall: "Four Wheel Cowboy" has [=McCall=] driving south from Denver to Santa Fe, supposedly going straight... but some of the places named appear to be rather out of order, implying that he must have backtracked for some reason. ''Especially'' notable when he's "Rattlin' down off a' Raton Pass", with the next spot being "Glorieta Hill like a sheet a' glass". Glorieta Hill is about 160 miles (260 km) from Raton Pass, so he wouldn't be going anywhere ''near'' it if he's trying to go as straight as possible. However, because Interstate 25, which is the fastest route between the two cities, has to wind its way through very mountainous terrain on its way to Santa Fe, it takes a very indirect route in northern New Mexico. From Raton Pass on the Colorado–New Mexico border, I-25 takes a roughly southwest route to reach Glorieta Pass, after which it takes a sharp turn to the northwest toward Santa Fe.

[[folder:Pinballs]]
* A small one occurs in ''[[Pinball/LightsCameraAction Lights... Camera... Action!]]'' Although it is set in UsefulNotes/SanFrancisco, 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.

[[folder:Pro Wrestling]]
* The following was said in ''Website/{{Botchamania}} 21'' by Macho Man Wrestling/RandySavage, 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, [[WildMassGuessing 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 [[FireAndBrimstoneHell Hell]]! Yeah!

[[folder:Radio]]
* In a November 2016 broadcast of ''Radio/ImSorryIHaventAClue'', 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.

[[folder:Sports]]
!!Multiple Sports
* Dallas' sports teams have it crazy.
** The [[UsefulNotes/NationalFootballLeague Dallas Cowboys]] are in the NFC East with all Northeast teams, the closest of whom (the Washington Commanders) is more than 1,200 miles away -- 9 out of 12 other teams in the Conference are closer than that. This was insisted upon during the latest NFL realignment in 2002 in order to preserve long-time rivalries.
** The [[UsefulNotes/MajorLeagueBaseball Texas Rangers]] were in a division consisting of all West Coast teams until the Houston Astros were moved in 2013.
** The [[UsefulNotes/NationalHockeyLeague Dallas Stars]] were in the Pacific Division along with teams in California and Arizona between 1998 and 2013, until they were realigned (back) into the Central Division with teams in the same time zone (plus the Colorado Avalanche).
** The [[UsefulNotes/NationalBasketballAssociation Dallas Mavericks]] get to be in a division with two other Texas teams, one in New Orleans, and one in Memphis.
* 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 [[UsefulNotes/NationalFootballLeague NFL]] has several examples:
*** The Washington Commanders 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. (It ''is'' in Miami-Dade County, but a good distance from the Miami city limits.)
*** With the opening of their new stadium, the San Francisco 49ers now play next door to their HQ 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). They also haven't had their HQ in the Big D for decades; they were in Irving from the move to Texas Stadium until opening their current HQ in Frisco in 2016. Irving is in Dallas County, but Arlington and Frisco are in other DFW counties.
*** The two Los Angeles teams, the Chargers and Rams, currently play in Inglewood, though that's at least in Los Angeles County. The Chargers started out in 1960 in the old AFL playing in LA proper, but moved to San Diego after their first season. The Rams played in the LA Coliseum from their arrival from Cleveland in 1946 until leaving for Anaheim after the 1979 season. After spending 1995–2015 in St. Louis, the Rams returned to the LA Coliseum in 2016, playing there until [=SoFi=] Stadium opened in 2020. While the Chargers returned to the LA area in 2017, they played in Carson (admittedly, in LA County) at the LA Galaxy's soccer stadium until moving in with the Rams. Both teams also have their offices and practice facilities outside the LA city limits—the Rams in Agoura Hills (also in LA County), the Chargers in Costa Mesa (in Orange County).
*** The Las Vegas Raiders don't play within the Las Vegas city limits; their stadium is in the unincorporated community of Paradise. However, this example splits hairs in that the US Postal Service considers all unincorporated areas in the vicinity of Vegas to have a "Las Vegas" address, and locals normally use "Las Vegas" or "Vegas" to refer to the entire built-up area. That said, the team has its HQ in a suburb that is ''actually'' a separate city, namely Henderson.
** UsefulNotes/MajorLeagueSoccer has several examples of its own. 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 (which is still in Salt Lake County, so you could take "Salt Lake" as a reference to the county, or even the Great Salt Lake). Sporting Kansas City technically averts the trope, since they do play in Kansas City, although the soccer club plays in ''Kansas'' whereas most pro teams in KC play in the larger Missouri city.
** 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, and the Vegas Golden Knights, who play in the aforementioned community of Paradise). That said, at least a couple of teams have their offices and practice facilities outside their eponymous cities—the Dallas Stars in Frisco, and the Washington Capitals in Arlington County, Virginia.
** Zig-zagged by two [[UsefulNotes/NationalBasketballAssociation 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 Rocket Mortgage [=FieldHouse=]) 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 did play one 1984 home game in the city of Detroit due to a scheduling conflict, and in the 1984–85 season played 16 games in the city after the Silverdome's inflatable roof collapsed.[[/note]] They returned to Detroit proper in 2017, sharing Little Caesars Arena with the [[UsefulNotes/NationalHockeyLeague Red Wings]].
** Also zig-zagged by the San Jose Earthquakes of MLS. They started out playing at Spartan Stadium (now CEFCU 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 what's now known as [=PayPal=] Park.
** The Atlanta Braves' 2017 move to the Cobb County venue now known as Truist Park played with the trope. While the Braves no longer play within the city limits, the new stadium has an Atlanta address. Not due to any shenanigans by the Braves; it's simply that the part of Cobb County that's home to the stadium is next to the city of Atlanta and has always been served by an Atlanta post office, since Cumberland is presently not a formally incorporated city.
* 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 UsefulNotes/LeBronJames, 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 [[UsefulNotes/MLBTeams 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.
* Any time a team from Buffalo is shown on national TV you'll see lots of shots of UsefulNotes/NiagaraFalls, along with at least one shot of someone preparing chicken wings and beef on weck. Niagara Falls is actually about 45 minutes away from Buffalo (and an hour away from where the Bills play), and all the parts that tourists would actually want to visit are in Canada.
* The UsefulNotes/OlympicGames are awarded to a city. Despite this, there are usually some events — usually association football, sailing, and surfing (the last of these added for 2020) — that take part many miles away from the host city. This is justified, though, for reasons that vary by sport. Football requires multiple stadiums for group phases and knockout rounds in both men's and women's competitions, with all needing to be above a certain capacity (the host city rarely has more than one that meets FIFA standards). Sailing and surfing [[CaptainObvious need a decent expanse of water]], with surfing also needing reliable waves of a certain size, and the host city is rarely a coastal city.[[note]]For an extreme example, the surfing competitions at the 2024 Paris Games will be held in the French overseas territory of [[UsefulNotes/FrenchPolynesia Tahiti]].[[/note]]

!!US college sports

* 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 University 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]] four of them are the Founding Schools of the Big East Conference in 1979 [[/note]] due to them sharing that denomination) [[ScrewThisImOuttaHere got fed up]] in 2012 and all left to form their own conference altogether, winning the rights to the Big East name in the process.
* As for the conference that the Catholic 7 left behind, which became the American Athletic Conference, it played with the trope for a few years. With [[MilitaryAcademy Navy]] joining the league for football only in 2015, The American 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 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 [[SemperFi Marine]] officers it trains, geography isn't as big a factor as it is for most other schools.) The divisional setup ended in 2020 after [=UConn=], a founding member of the original Big East, pulled its own "Screw This!" and bolted for the current Big East, parking its football team as an FBS independent.
* 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 on the wrong side of the Appalachians from that coast. Adding to the madness are the more recent ACC additions Louisville and Notre Dame. Even if one stretched the definitions of Atlantic and coastal, neither school's location (central Kentucky and Indiana, respectively) in the conference makes sense geographically. The ACC took this trope ''beyond eleven'' by announcing that it would add San Francisco Bay Area rivals California and Stanford, plus Dallas–Fort Worth school SMU, in 2024.
* While we're on the subject of conferences with "Atlantic" in the name, the Atlantic 10 Conference is both geographically and mathematically inaccurate, as it has 15 teams, including Saint Louis, Dayton, Loyola of Chicago, and Duquesne, the latter of which is located in Pittsburgh. It also has two teams in Philadelphia (Saint Joseph's and La Salle) - as noted above, Pennsylvania is not on the coast but Philly is closer to the Atlantic Ocean than some teams in states that are, such as St. Bonaventure in Western New York, so it's debatable whether these two teams count. However, as there's no rational argument that only ''one'' of the Philly teams is "Atlantic", that still means there are either nine or eleven "Atlantic" teams in the Atlantic 10, plus four or six others, so you can't even argue it's technically true that there are ten Atlantic teams in the conference. %% The city is officially rendered as "St. Louis", but the university is "Saint Louis". St. Bonaventure officially abbreviates the word "Saint".
* Subverted with the Ohio Valley Conference. Although none of the teams are located in the state of Ohio, the name refers to the Ohio River Valley, which includes parts of several states, and most of the teams are located within it.
* Associate memberships (cases where a team's primary conference does not sponsor a particular sport, so they have to join another conference for that sport) are particularly bad, especially when there are few or no conferences in a particular part of the country that sponsor a certain sport.
** In field hockey, three California teams (UC Berkeley [aka "California"], Stanford, and UC Davis) are in the America East Conference because there are no other West Coast schools that sponsor the sport. The University of the Pacific[[note]]the one in California; there's also a "Pacific University" in Oregon, but it's NCAA Division III[[/note]] used to be as well before they dropped the sport citing travel challenges. However, with Cal and Stanford now off to the ACC (which sponsors field hockey), it remains to be seen what will happen to UC Davis' team.
** In 2007, several men's golf schools formed the America Sky Conference, a single-sport conference centered mainly on the Rocky Mountain states. However, it eventually included Binghamton University (upstate New York) and the University of Hartford (Connecticut). Conference realignment in the early 2010s gave the mountain-centric Big Sky Conference enough men's golf schools to form a league for that sport. The easiest way to form a league was to absorb the America Sky, but the Big Sky could only get an automatic NCAA tournament bid for its team champion if it kept Binghamton and Hartford. Accordingly, the two northeastern schools became Big Sky associates. Both remained Big Sky men's golf members through the 2022–23 season, after which Binghamton moved that sport to the much more geographically appropriate Northeast Conference and Hartford left as part of its transition to NCAA Division III.
** In lacrosse, a primarily east-coast sport, Denver plays in the Big East Conference while fellow Colorado school Air Force and another western team, the University of Utah, play in the Atlantic Sun (or ASUN) Conference,[[note]]The conference went to the "ASUN" branding in 2016, but went back to "Atlantic Sun" in 2023.[[/note]] which consists primarily of southeastern teams. ASUN men's lacrosse features several other schools outside the conference's core region—Cleveland State, Detroit Mercy, Lindenwood (out of the St. Louis area, and also an ASUN women's lacrosse member), and Robert Morris (suburban Pittsburgh).
** Bryant University, which is located in Smithfield, Rhode Island and has most of its sports in the America East which accurately reflects its northeastern location, moved its football team into the Big South Conference in 2022, as the AEC does not sponsor football. Bryant is playing the 2023 football season in an alliance between the Big South and the (also geographically inappropriate) Ohio Valley Conference, but will avert this trope in 2024. The football team will move to the very geographically appropriate CAA Football (the legally separate football arm of the Coastal Athletic Association), which features teams in East Coast states stretching from Maine to North Carolina.[[note]]Of the CAA Football states, Pennsylvania is the only one that doesn't touch the Atlantic, and it's close enough to the ocean that it's generally treated as an East Coast state.[[/note]]
** Longwood University, located in Farmville, Virginia, and Appalachian State University, located in Boone, North Carolina, are members of the Mid-American Conference for field hockey, which as the name implies, consists mostly of midwestern teams. This is because their primary conferences, the Big South and Sun Belt respectively, do not sponsor the sport. A third school that's a MAC field hockey member plays with the trope—Bellarmine University, otherwise a member of the ASUN Conference (which also doesn't sponsor field hockey), is in Louisville, a city on the Ohio River that has a ''long'' tradition of blending midwestern and southern cultures. Another Virginia school, Sun Belt member James Madison University (Harrisonburg), will join this group in 2024.
** The Southland Conference, whose current full members are all in Louisiana and Texas, has one past and several present examples.
*** In 2015, the SLC formed the Southland Bowling League, a technically separate conference for women's bowling (the NCAA sponsors that sport for women but not men). At the SBL's founding, only two of its members were full SLC members, but most were within the general SLC footprint (including neighboring states). Charter SBL member Vanderbilt was a little outside the SLC footprint, but being in Nashville was still very much Southern. However, two other charter SBL members were far outside the region—Monmouth (out of New Jersey; now a full member of the Coastal Athletic Association) and Valparaiso (in Indiana; now in the Missouri Valley Conference). In 2018, Monmouth bowling left the SBL for the somewhat more geographically appropriate Mid-Eastern Athletic Conference and was replaced by an Ohio school, Youngstown State (full member of the Horizon League). The trope was averted after the 2022–23 season when the SBL agreed to merge into the very geographically inclusive Conference USA. All of the final SBL members were included in the merger.
*** In 2021, the SLC added five schools as associate members. Two schools that joined for golf were outside the main footprint, but still indisputably Southern—Augusta (from Georgia; men and women) and Francis Marion (from South Carolina; men only). Two other new women's golf members, Delaware State and Maryland Eastern Shore, were in states sometimes considered Southern but more often mid-Atlantic. The fifth wasn't Southern by any stretch of the imagination—NJIT (in full, New Jersey Institute of Technology), which joined in men's and women's tennis. Delaware State and Maryland Eastern Shore left the SLC after only a year when their full-time home conference, the Mid-Eastern Athletic Conference, entered into a partnership with the aforementioned Northeast Conference that saw all MEAC schools that sponsored baseball and men's and women's golf become NEC associates in those sports.
*** While two associates left in 2022, four others joined, none of them even close to the SLC footprint. The aforementioned Bryant moved its men's and women's teams in golf and tennis into the SLC. Boise State and San Jose State, the only two full members of the Mountain West Conference that sponsored beach volleyball (also a women-only sport at the NCAA level), joined the SLC for that sport. UIC[[note]]Illinois–Chicago[[/note]] joined for men's tennis; it had just moved from the Horizon League (which sponsors tennis for both sexes) to the Missouri Valley Conference (which sponsors it only for women). However, it only stayed in SLC men's tennis for a year, moving to the Mid-American Conference.
** The Northeast Conference has a very indicative name when it comes to full members; it has never had such a member south of Maryland or east of Pennsylvania, and as of the 2023–24 school year all of its full members are within the Northeast megalopolis except for Le Moyne (next door to Syracuse in upstate New York) and Saint Francis (in west-central Pennsylvania). However, when conference realignment hit the MEAC in the early 2020s, the NEC and MEAC entered into the aforementioned alliance for baseball and golf. Most of the new associates were within the general NEC footprint, but new baseball member Norfolk State is somewhat outside the footprint in the southeast corner of Virginia, and new men's and women's golf member North Carolina Central is a bit farther outside it in the Research Triangle region.
** The OVC may subvert the trope when considering full members, but it dove head-first into it when it established a new men's soccer league starting with the 2023 season. The new league started out with eight members, evenly divided between full members and associates. The four associate members all exhibit this trope to at least some degree. Chicago State may be in an Ohio River state, but it's all the way at the opposite end of the state and in a totally different watershed (that of the Great Lakes). [[StrawmanU Liberty]] is in Virginia, whose southwestern parts are in the Ohio watershed, but is on the opposite side of the UsefulNotes/{{Appalachia}}ns; its home city of Lynchburg is on the James River, which drains into the Atlantic through Chesapeake Bay instead of the Gulf of Mexico. The others are Houston Christian and Incarnate Word, respectively in [[ExactlyWhatItSaysOnTheTin Houston]] and [[UsefulNotes/OtherCitiesInTexas San Antonio]].
** Lower NCAA divisions (II and III) have examples as well, including a particularly crazy one: the Great Northwest Athletic Conference shut down its football league after the 2021 season, by which time only three of the 10 full members still played football—Central Washington, Western Oregon, and Simon Fraser, the last of which is the only Canadian member of the NCAA (it's in the Vancouver suburb of Burnaby). These schools were also the only D-II football schools west of Colorado, making any conceivable conference home problematic at best. SFU had an added problem of COVID-related border crossing restrictions. These schools ended up parking football in the Lone Star Conference, named after Texas' longstanding nickname and featuring mainly schools from that state (or bordering states). In the 2022 season, SFU played its "home" games south of the border in Blaine, Washington, 25 miles[=/=]40 km from campus, due to said border restrictions. The LSC was apparently willing to put up with the Oregon and Washington schools, but decided SFU was too much of a headache and kicked the Red Leafs out of the conference, effective at the end of the 2023 season. SFU responded in April 2023 by dropping football entirely, effective immediately.

!!American Football
* 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 [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AFL%E2%80%93NFL_merger#The_merger_agreement was drawn out of a hat.]]
** The Cowboys remain in the NFC East solely because of their longtime rivalries with the Washington Commanders 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 Carolina Panthers are considered a regional franchise, representing both North and South Carolina.[[note]]They play at Bank of America Stadium in Charlotte, North Carolina, which sits on the NC[=/=]SC state line. The Panthers hold their training camp in Spartanburg, South Carolina on the campus of Wofford College (of which the Panthers' founding owner Jerry Richardson is an alumnus), and the team played its first season at Clemson University in the South Carolina city of the same name.[[/note]] One time, Nike accidentally printed T-shirts [[http://www.cbssports.com/nfl/blog/eye-on-football/22744089/nike-yanks-geographically-incorrect-nc-panthers-shirt with South Carolina identified as North Carolina]].

!!Association Football
* 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.
* [[UsefulNotes/AssociationFootball FIFA]] and its affiliates have a few.
** Australia was tired of winning the Oceania qualifiers only to lose UsefulNotes/TheWorldCup playoff, so they moved to the Asian confederation.
** Kazakhstan is also in Asia but switched from the AFC to UEFA in 2002.
** Given that Suriname and Guyana are already odd countries in South America and culturally identify closer to the Caribbean (plus 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).
** As many of the Asian members, most notably several Muslim-majority countries, refuse to acknowledge the existence of Israel, they play the European qualifiers instead in the UsefulNotes/FIFAWorldCup. The winner of the 1958 CAF/AFC (Africa and Asia) qualifier for the FIFA World Cup, for example, was Wales, which decidedly is not in either of those continents, as everyone else in the final round had refused to play Israel and thus a European runner-up was brought in instead, as FIFA refused to allow a country other than the host and defending champions to qualify without playing a match.
* 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 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|Trope}}—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.
** On a similar note, six Welsh clubs - Cardiff City, Colwyn Bay, Merthyr Town, Newport County, Swansea City and [[Series/WelcomeToWrexham Wrexham]] - play in the English leagues (Cardiff and Swansea both competed in the UsefulNotes/EnglishPremierLeague in the 2010s). Teams from counties on the English side of the England/Wales border also used to be allowed to take part in the Welsh Cup[[note]]although, in the event of one winning, they weren’t allowed to enter the European Cup Winners’ Cup; that place went to the best placed Welsh team[[/note]]. This stopped happening in 1996, when the Welsh FA banned them from taking part.
* 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.
** Scotland has a similar competition to this, which, since the 2018/19 competition, has featured eight guest teams - two each from England, Northern Ireland, the Republic of Ireland and Wales.
* The Copa América usually has only the 10 South American countries of CONMEBOL. Between 1993 and 2019, to make for a better format more competitors were invited to make 12 (or 16 in 2016), usually from North and Central America... aside from Japan and Qatar, straining the definition of "América". 2021 would've had Qatar and Australia before they withdrew, as COVID-19 postponed the World Cup qualifiers enough to cause scheduling conflicts.

!!Baseball
* 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]]In the current regional setup, established in 2022, the flagship tournament, the Little League World Series (for players 12 and under), features 20 teams. Ten are U.S. regional champions. Canada, Mexico, Japan, and Australia send national champions every year. Four larger regions also send champions each year—the Caribbean (restricted to islands in that area), Latin America (apart from Mexico and the Caribbean), Europe and Africa, and Asia–Pacific and Middle East (excluding Japan and Australia). Cuba, Panama, and Puerto Rico fill two berths on a rotating basis; two send their national champions, while the third plays in its normal region (Caribbean for Cuba and Puerto Rico, Latin America for Panama).[[/note]]
* 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).
* 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.
* 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.
* In 2018, the Augusta [=GreenJackets=] of the South Atlantic League, which then played at the Single-A level and is now in the Low-A level,[[note]]Before the 2021 reorganization of Minor League Baseball, Class A was split into three levels, with "Single-A" being in the middle of the three. The reorg collapsed those three levels to two.[[/note]] moved into a new ballpark in North Augusta, South Carolina, a suburb directly across the Savannah River from downtown Augusta, Georgia.

!!Basketball
* 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".
* 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 at that point and the Mavs and Jazz were in the same division at the time. Then again, Nowitzki might have made the remark to troll Malone, who was still playing for the Jazz.

!!Hockey
* 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, [[http://bleacherreport.com/articles/1478230-nhl-realignment-problems-that-must-be-solved-and-mistakes-that-must-be-avoided/page/4 closer to most eastern teams than California]]; and the Columbus Blue Jackets was also in the Western Conference (Detroit being in the West was justified by both its location and the rivalry with Chicago). Then came [[http://cdn.bleacherreport.net/images_root/article/media_slots/photos/000/765/132/img21767981_original_original_original.jpg?1363329751 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 many complained was also a misnomer: Boston and Florida border the ocean, but most are instead around the Great Lakes -- Buffalo, Detroit, Montreal, Ottawa, and Toronto -- while Tampa Bay is near the Gulf of Mexico[[/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.
*** In the 2020-21 season, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, it happened again with the temporary realignment: the Central division included Carolina and the two Florida teams. Meanwhile, the St. Louis Blues were in the West division, despite being east of Dallas, which were in the Central.
* Two teams in the minor league ECHL, the Atlanta Gladiators and Kansas City Mavericks, do not play in their namesake cities, instead playing in smaller arenas in the suburbs. The Gladiators play in Duluth, Georgia whereas the Mavericks play in Independence, Missouri. The two teams originally averted the trope, originally named the Gwinnett[[note]]after Gwinnett County, where Duluth is located [[/note]] Gladiators and Missouri Mavericks respectively; the two changed their region identity to reflect the metropolitan areas they play in.
* On a college level, the Air Force Academy, which is located in ''Colorado'', is in the Atlantic Hockey Association, which as its name implies, exists for ice hockey only. (What the name ''doesn't'' make clear is that it's a men-only league. US college ice hockey has some men-only and women-only conferences.)

!!Auto racing
* The UsefulNotes/{{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.
* In UsefulNotes/FormulaOne, the San Marino Gran Prix was in the Italian city of Imola, 98 km from said micronation (this happened because the owners of the Imola circuit didn't want to lose their place in the calendar, and asked the Automobile Club of San Marino to apply for a race). Ditto the Luxembourg Grand Prix at the German track Nürburgring, 80 kilometres (50 miles) from the Germany–Luxembourg border.
** While on San Marino, [=MotoGP=] had a San Marino GP that has since incorporated the name of the Italian region where the race actually happens, San Marino and Rimini Riviera GP. And that's not counting how four times the San Marino GP was in [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mugello_Circuit Tuscany]], even more distant from the micronation than Imola.

[[folder:Tabletop Games]]
* ''Franchise/TheWorldOfDarkness'':
** ''TabletopGame/OldWorldOfDarkness'' was excused by White Wolf saying it was an AlternateUniverse, and they took liberties with the geography [[ArtisticLicense to fit the mood of each game]]. Still:
*** One supplement infamously placed Oxford within easy walking distance of [[BritainIsOnlyLondon 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 ''TabletopGame/NewWorldOfDarkness'' 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!
* ''TabletopGame/{{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. On the flip side, 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 [[GlobalIgnorance globally ignorant]] player who pipes up and gives this response may end up winning the round for their team.
* One ''TabletopGame/{{Shadowrun}}'' adventure taking place in Bogotá describes the landlocked mountain city as having a port. It has an ''air''port, but no ''sea''port to speak of.
* The ''Atlas of Earth-Prime'' for ''TabletopGame/MutantsAndMasterminds'' got into a bit of a muddle with UsefulNotes/BritainVersusTheUK, 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.
* ''TabletopGame/TicketToRide'' is prone to placing cities creatively to fit them on the map. On the original map, Raleigh is more-or-less overplayed with Charlotte's real-life location, Duluth is placed closer to real-life Twin Cities than its place along Lake Superior, and Boston gets shifted up into Maine.

[[folder:Theatre]]
* Creator/WilliamShakespeare has been accused of this, accurately and inaccurately.
** The Italian Errors -- None, actually, as the accusations are based on the accusers' own error.
*** In ''Theatre/TwoGentlemenOfVerona'', 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 ''Theatre/TheTempest'', 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 ''Theatre/TheTamingOfTheShrew'', 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 ''Theatre/RomeoAndJuliet'', Romeo is exiled and goes to Mantua -- Mantua is within a reasonable distance of Verona.
** The Bohemian Errors -- Shakespeare was actually criticized for them [[OlderThanTheyThink 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 ''Theatre/TheWintersTale'', 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 ''Theatre/TheWintersTale'' 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 UsefulNotes/{{Holy Roman Emp|ire}}eror 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.
** In ''Theatre/TimonOfAthens'', 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 ''Theatre/{{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 [[TravelingAtTheSpeedOfPlot 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 ''Theatre/{{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 [[http://www.archive.org/stream/ralphfitchenglan00rylerich/ralphfitchenglan00rylerich_djvu.txt 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 ''Theatre/SundayInTheParkWithGeorge'' 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 ''Theatre/AnnieGetYourGun'', 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".
* Subverted in ''Theatre/TheAddamsFamily''. Gomez talks about an ancestor setting sail from UsefulNotes/{{Madrid}} to North America, then adds, "And three weeks later...he was still in Madrid, because it is 400 miles from the nearest ocean."

[[folder:Video Games]]
%%* Before anything else, most WideOpenSandbox games aren't exactly [[SpaceCompression realistic]] when it comes to actual size.
* In ''VideoGame/Battlefield4'', many features of the small island nation of Singapore have been seriously goofed up, probably best summarized by the fact that the map in question is based on the multiplayer level "Siege of '''Shanghai'''". 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.
* ''VideoGame/{{Diacrisis}}'': [[{{Prison}} Excellor Supermax Security Penitentiary]] is located on the Nunavut border. The problem? It's called the Nunavut border in 1985! Nunavut didn't become its own province until April 1st, 1999.
* ''VideoGame/RailroadTycoon 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 ''[[VideoGame/BackyardSports Backyard Hockey]]'', which says that Buddy Cheque came from the town of Janestown, which, they say, is near the [[LampshadeHanging geographically impossible]] border of Illinois, Wisconsin, and Canada.
* In ''VideoGame/RadRacer'', you're racing in the "Trans America'' competition, but one of the tracks is set in ancient Greek ruins.
* In ''VideoGame/RadMobile'', when you arrive in Chicago you'll see palm trees and a gigantic cruise ship on what is presumably Lake Michigan.
* ''VideoGame/{{Resistance}} 2'' has a secret military bunker on [[UsefulNotes/SanFrancisco Yerba Buena Island]]. When you exit the bunker The Bay Bridge has suspiciously been painted red.
* ''VideoGame/MetalGearSolid3SnakeEater'''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 ''VideoGame/MetalGear2SolidSnake'', 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.
* ''VideoGame/CommandAndConquerRedAlertSeries'': Abound in almost all missions that feature major cities and/or landmark structures. The most JustForFun/{{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.
* ''VideoGame/CommandAndConquerGenerals'': 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.
* ''VideoGame/AgeOfEmpiresIII'' 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.
* ''VideoGame/LetsGoFindElDorado'' 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.
* ''VideoGame/Halo3'' 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 ''Franchise/{{Halo}}'' takes place 500 years in the future, and mankind may have done a bit of terraforming. No excuse for the moving mountain, however.
* ''[[VideoGame/RushingBeat Rival Turf]]'' has a pretty bad one. The game is supposedly set in Los Angeles, yet the level screen shows a map of Canada.
* ''VideoGame/NeedForSpeed'':
** ''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.
* ''VideoGame/PrinceOfPersiaTheTwoThrones'' 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, ''VideoGame/EmpireEarth'' 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 ''VideoGame/SoldierOfFortune II'', there's a [[{{Mayincatec}} Mayan pyramid]] in the Colombian jungle.
* The ''Series/KnightRider'' NES game overlaps this and HollywoodAtlas. 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 [[AllDesertsHaveCacti 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 ''VideoGame/{{Uncharted}}'' series, particularly in [[VideoGame/Uncharted3DrakesDeception the third game]].
--> '''Sully:''' Only you could find a jungle in the middle of ''France''.
* Likely deliberate, but still quite noticeable in ''VideoGame/NoMoreHeroes'', 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.
* ''VideoGame/ProfessorLaytonAndTheMiracleMask'' 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.
* ''VideoGame/OgreBattle'' 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 {{handwave}}able depth) but a much more reasonable, Amazon-basin-sized area.
* In ''VideoGame/AssassinsCreedIVBlackFlag'', many of the Caribbean islands and coastlines are depicted as rocky and mountainous. In real life, they're mostly quite flat. For example, compare [[http://img3.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20140917175556/assassinscreed/images/d/d3/AC4_Crooked_Island.png Crooked Island]] in the game to [[http://www.sarlesrealty.com/images/seo/catlanding/crook1.jpg its real-world counterpart.]]
* Strangely enough, given that Penn and Teller specifically made ''[[VideoGame/PennAndTellersSmokeAndMirrors 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 ''VideoGame/MedievalIITotalWar'' 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.
* ''VideoGame/{{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 mph[[note]]in the North American version; other versions of the game alter the units so that it's 692 km/h or 430 km/h[[/note]], 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.
* ''VideoGame/CriminalCaseWorldEdition'' 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 route[[note]]a depiction of the BNSF Hi-Line Subdivision from Shelby to Whitefish, Montana via Marias Pass[[/note]] 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 ''VideoGame/TrueCrime'' 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 ''VideoGame/XCOMEnemyUnknown''. 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 ''VideoGame/MassEffect'', 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.
* ''[[VideoGame/{{Forza}} 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. WordOfGod 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.
** Ditto for ''Forza Horizon 5'', which features things such as the pyramids of Teotihuacán right next to the greenhouse farmlands of Tapalpa, Jalisco -- in reality, both are about 600 km apart. Likewise, the city of Guanajuato in the game is right next to the Gran Caldera volcano, when in reality, this city and the Popocatépetl volcano are also about 600 km apart.
* At one point in ''VideoGame/StreetFighterV'''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''. WildMassGuessing 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.
* A similar kerfuffle to the above occurs in ''VideoGame/WolfensteinTheNewOrder'', where Blazkowicz just finished destroying Nazi forces in London only to hear that [[spoiler:the rebel's home base is under attack]] in Berlin. He gets a pick-up from a friend and the two make the drive in literal minutes as it's still going on, despite the ocean channel and several hours of miles between the two. Even in a charitable circumstance of taking a bridge, this is a Nazi-occupied BadFuture where gunning through their checkpoints is tantamount to suicide.
* On the map accompanying the Tower Bridge stage of ''Super {{VideoGame/Pang}}'', Tower Bridge is shown as being somewhere in Lancashire -- over 200 miles from London.
* In ''Videogame/TheElderScrollsVSkyrim'', 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.
** Also in the series, the capital province of Cyrodiil is located in a tropical zone (Nirn is not exactly a planet as such, but otherwise obeys most geographical conventions). The first few games thus described it as a jungle-heavy area, which fits since its immediate neighbors include a coastal desert (Elsweyr), warm marshy regions (Black Marsh) and a Middle Eastern FantasyCounterpartCulture (Hammerfell) - Skyrim is behind a high mountain range, and the truly cold continent of Atmora is further north yet. Then ''VideoGame/TheElderScrollsIVOblivion'' came out and made it a bog-standard MedievalEuropeanFantasy setting. They had to pull a CosmicRetcon with AWizardDidIt to explain that one.
* Even though [[VisualNovel/{{Demonbane}} Arkham City]] is located in Massachusetts according to [[Franchise/CthulhuMythos the Mythos]], it's moved to the west coast in ''VideoGame/SuperRobotWarsUX'' to make crossovers with Manga/{{Heroman}} easier. The same goes for [[Literature/TheShadowOverInnsmouth Innsmouth]].
* ''VideoGame/Fallout76'' takes place in and around West Virginia, but unlike previous entries in the series which generally limited their geographic distortion to SpaceCompression, ''76'' is closer to TheThemeParkVersion 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.
* PlayedForLaughs in both ''VideoGame/SouthParkTheStickOfTruth'' and ''VideoGame/SouthParkTheFracturedButWhole'' where Canada is directly next to the border of South Park, Colorado.
* ''VideoGame/DaysGone'' takes place in the Cascade Range of central Oregon and its large open world features a number of real-life landmarks like lakes, mountains and towns. These places' positions relative to each other are complete fiction, however. Most obviously, the higher peaks of the Oregon Cascades are dotted all over the map, when in reality they exist more or less in a single-file north-south line.
** In addition, the western half of the map appears more arid and desert-like, when in fact the reverse is true--the entire map appears to be west of the Three Sisters, the highest mountains in the region, and Oregon's high desert only begins on the eastern slopes of those mountains, well outside the playable area in the other direction.
** Another egregious example is the inclusion of Lost Lake, which sits smack in the middle of the game's map despite actually being located about a hundred miles north on the slopes of Mt. Hood.
* In ''VideoGame/CityConnection'', Stage 11 is set on Easter Island, with its signature Moai statues, but also includes [[{{Mayincatec}} Mesoamerican temples]].
* The maps in ''VideoGame/TheCrew'' and [[VideoGame/TheCrew2 its sequel]] are [[SpaceCompression heavily condensed]] versions of the United States, although that still doesn't excuse why Las Vegas is so much further from its real life location, or why Florida and Michigan are so misshapen that they barely resemble their real-life counterparts. Plus, the games frequently get topograhical features wrong, particularly by placing mountains and hills in what is really flatlands, but this was likely to spice up the map and make it more interesting, given that much of the US is notoriously flat FlyoverCountry.
* ''[[{{VideoGame/SSX}} SSX Tricky]]'' has an easily-missed instance of this. Merqury City Meltdown, an urban snowboarding course, is explicitly located in East Coast USA - and is clearly based on [[BigApplesauce New York City]]. However, the level uses the skyline of ''Hong Kong'' as a background, as evidenced by the distinctive Bank of China tower being plainly visible. The rest of the level can be excused by RuleOfCool.
* ''[[{{VideoGame/Burnout}} Burnout 3: Takedown]]'': The FarEast tracks are clearly supposed to take place in Thailand, or a NoCommunitiesWereHarmed equivalent (Golden City looks like Bangkok, plus the Thai writing, the Tuk-Tuks, the nearby tropical jungles, and everyone driving on the left side of the road; not to mention, the camera zooming in to Southeast Asia in career mode). However, when you get to the Docklands course, the signs are all written in Chinese characters, not used in any official capacity in Thailand or any bordering country. It's not clear if this is a case of InterchangeableAsianCultures or an indication that SpaceCompression is in play and that particular area is supposed to be Hong Kong.
* In ''Videogame/TheLastOfUs'', at the end of the UsefulNotes/{{Pittsburgh}} portion of the game, Joel and Ellie encounter the Allegheny river which is characterized as a raging river. However, this section of the actual river is actually quite calm most times of the year with the exception of during major rainstorms. More outrageously they find themselves a mile or so down the Ohio river with the Pittsburgh to their east. To their west is what appears to be an ocean or a large bay with no mountains in sight. Guess Ohio doesn't exist in this world.
* According to a road sign, the service station in ''Videogame/{{Obduction}}'' originally stood in Riggsville, at the junction of US-19 and US-71. Thing is, odd-numbered US routes run north-south with the route numbers increasing as you go west; US-19 and US-71 are never less than 500 miles apart.
* ''VideoGame/CallOfDutyModernWarfare2019'' largely takes place in the nation of [[{{Qurac}} Urzikstan]], which is located on a peninsula in the Black Sea that doesn’t exist in the real world. Despite this, the people there speak Arabic, the name is Turkic and the climate and landscape are desert. All of this is a far cry from the temperate, sub-tropical landscape of the Caucasus region they’re right next door to. To make matters worse, one of the multiplayer maps suggests that the Euphrates river flows through Urzikstan. A river that flows through the ''actual'' nations of Iraq, Syria and Turkey.
* ''Franchise/{{Pokemon}}'':
** The DLC for ''VideoGame/PokemonSwordAndShield'' introduces a new area called the Crown Tundra. However, trees are plentiful even in the coldest areas; tundras are too cold year-round to support trees, meaning the Crown Tundra is not a tundra at all. There is also a lot of tall grass, which tundra climates don’t have either.
** In ''VideoGame/PokemonLegendsArceus'', while the Alabaster Icelands (Pure White Tundra in the original Japanese, and the ancient equivalent to the aforementioned Snowpoint City) are more tundra-like than the Crown Tundra, there are still too many trees in that area of Hisui to qualify as a tundra climate.
* Played for laughs in ''VideoGame/SummertimeSaga''. A map in one of the classrooms shows a map of "Yurup", with countries such as [[HornyVikings "Vikings"]] (Scandinavia), [[{{Oktoberfest}} "Beer"]] (Germany and Austria), and [[GloriousMotherRussia "Commie Bears"]] (Russia and neighbors).
* In ''VideoGame/MarioKartTour'', Uluru can be seen far in the background of Sydney Sprint. In real life, Uluru and Sydney are thousands of miles away from each other and not even in the same state of Australia (Uluru is located in Northern Territory, and Sydney is located in New South Wales). This was carried over to ''VideoGame/MarioKart8'' ''[[UpdatedReRelease Deluxe]]'' when the track was added to the game via the Booster Course Pass [=DLC=]. All the city tracks besides Singapore Speedway heavily condense their cities to [[EiffelTowerEffect include as many iconic landmarks as possible]].
* ''Videogame/{{Viva Pinata}}'': [[https://i.redd.it/9mu4szjoxz301.jpg The map in Trouble in Paradise]] is ridiculous in too many ways to count; most notably (and the reason why this image was uploaded), sizeable islands like UsefulNotes/NewZealand and UsefulNotes/{{Japan}} are nowhere to be seen, but hilariously, they added UsefulNotes/{{Iceland}}, a speck Northeast of UsefulNotes/{{Madagascar}}, and even what appear to be [[UsefulNotes/{{Ecuador}} the Galapagos islands!]] Perhaps [[Main/JustifiedTrope justified]] by the franchise's stylized designs.
* ''VideoGame/LifeIsStrangeBeforeTheStorm'': Rachel Amber says that she comes from Long Beach, California. Later, Chloe writes in her diary that Rachel moved to Arcadia Bay from Orange County. Long Beach borders Orange County but is in Los Angeles County.
* ''VideoGame/HyruleWarriorsAgeOfCalamity'' has a ConstructedWorld variation in it's initial release. In the opening narration for the Breach of Demise level, it's mentioned that the party is travelling from Hyrule Castle to the Hateno Ancient Tech, which is in the exact opposite direction that they're heading. The first DLC updated it to the far more accurate Royal Ancient Tech Lab (which is just north of the Breach).

[[folder:Visual Novels]]
* Crops up from time to time in ''VisualNovel/KatawaShoujo''. Assuming the game is indeed set somewhere around Sendai, it's about seven hours by conventional train to Hokkaido, and both trains that go that far are sleeper trains. (They also skip Sendai going the other way.) Hideaki also mentions that his and Shizune's parents' house is in Saitama, yet [[spoiler:Hisao manages to take a cab there in a very short amount of time in Lilly's route]], even disregarding the small fortune he'd have to pay to get there[[note]]Japanese cabs are ''insanely'' expensive and closer to a limo service than taxis in other countries. The average taxi cost in Japan is ~600-650 yen for boarding and first 1.5 km, and then 600-650 yen for each next kilometer. There is about 320 km between Sendai and Saitama, meaning something in the vicinity of ¥200,000 for the ride, or, in other words, roughly $2000[[/note]].
[[/folder]]

[[folder:Web Animation]]
* Whenever the Earth is shown in ''WebAnimation/HomestarRunner'', 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!
* ''Webanimation/StupidKids'': Sometimes it is implied [[DescriptiveVille HiVille]] and other locations shown take place in {{Usefulnotes/Hungary}} but the series also shows kind of places the country itself lacks, such as oceans, active volcanos, and a desert '''right next''' to the protagonists' home town.
[[/folder]]

[[folder:Web Comics]]
* 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 [[http://badwebcomicswiki.shoutwiki.com/wiki/La_Cosa_Nostra the only instance.]]
* In ''Webcomic/ScandinaviaAndTheWorld'', 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 ''Webcomic/{{Educomix}}'', Asia is a country, and [[BeneathTheEarth beneath]] Ireland. Likewise, [[LandDownunder Australia]] [[{{Pun}} is beneath]] America. And [[MysteriousAntarctica the South Pole]] is its own country. [[UsefulNotes/{{Britain}} 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!
[[/folder]]

[[folder:Web Original]]
* [[http://www.millionreasonswhylithuaniaisthebestcountryintheworld.com/lt/9570/ 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.''
* ''Website/NotAlwaysRight'':
** Several customers assume that we all live in America. They are wrong. [[http://notalwaysright.com/out-of-state-out-of-mind/3367 "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.
*** [[https://notalwaysright.com/lone-star-state-one-country-state-of-mind/25172 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...[[http://notalwaysright.com/the-fourth-is-not-strong-with-this-one/3386 so here's an example of the opposite.]]
** [[http://notalwaysright.com/yukon-see-it-on-a-map-part-2/4609 This guy seems to be under the impression that Illinois is a Canadian province.]]
** 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.
*** [[http://notalwaysright.com/one-nation-under-god-period/5354 This]] poor, geographically deluded soul.
*** [[http://notalwaysright.com/its-all-dutch-to-me/5808 This]] guy, on the other hand, manages to make the distinction between Canada and the US. But not between Canada and the Netherlands.
*** [[http://notalwaysright.com/canada-americas-hat-part-7/31619 "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''.
*** [[http://notalwaysright.com/french-disconnection/34669 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, [[ItsAllAboutMe solely for his convenience]].
** [[http://notalwaysright.com/when-in-rome-or-spain/15804 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. [[http://notalwaysright.com/first-ocean-to-the-right-then-straight-on-til-drowning/1823 This one]] is especially [[DrinkingGame/TVTropesDrinkingGame egregious]].
** What travel is better -- [[http://notalwaysright.com/here-today-gone-to-maui-2/5145 a train to Hawaii]] or a boat [[http://notalwaysright.com/i-have-a-sinking-feeling/10188 to Atlantis?]]
** [[http://notalwaysright.com/watashi-whaaa/7331 "You mean Japan's a real place?!"]] And even [[http://notalwaysright.com/not-in-ermurica/15071 Australia isn't in the Middle East]].
** In turn, Europeans [[http://notalwaysright.com/giving-the-french-stick/10042 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: [[http://notalwaysright.com/no-vocation-for-location-part-4/24409 "The US is a big country, sir."]]
** [[http://notalwaysright.com/a-state-of-mindlessness-part-3/12906 This woman]] seems to be in total ignorance of state locations, cardinal directions, and linguistics. Also counts as HypocriticalHumor.
** [[http://notalwaysright.com/asia-itll-amaze-ya/21691 "Oh yeah, I remember now. Vietnam is that little island next to Korea!"]]
** [[http://notalwaysright.com/a-whale-of-a-story-2/22165 Who cares if Utah is landlocked;]] taunting an officer of the law about whaling is WRONG!
** [[http://notalwaysright.com/asia-itll-amaze-ya-part-2/23859 This person]] thinks all of Asia is a single country.
** [[http://notalwaysright.com/inferior-knowledge-on-lake-superior/31423 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.
** [[http://notalwaysright.com/no-vocation-for-location-part-9/34898 "France ain't in Europe! It's just across the Channel!"]]
** [[https://notalwaysright.com/out-of-state-out-of-mind-part-2-3/81040 This Ohio woman]] is convinced she actually lives in Iowa.
* [[http://worldmapswithout.nz/ This Tumblr]] tabulates maps and views of the world that forget that UsefulNotes/NewZealand exists, including the scene in ''Film/StarTrekFirstContact''.
[[/folder]]

[[folder:Web Videos]]
* WebVideo/{{Decker}}: At one point in ''Decker: Unclassified'', Decker goes to "Pearl Harbor, Japan".
* PlayedForLaughs in ''WebVideo/TheInternetAndYou''. Captain Dial-Up provides internet to Abraham and Net-Meister by taking it from China, which is labeled "East Korea" in an on-screen map.
* In WebVideo/Jerma985's video called [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lrq_ne4N3JQ Jersey Boys in Sentry Town,]] WebVideo/{{STAR}} held this license when he said that Plymouth Rock is in Pennsylvania somewhere during his RamblingOldManMonologue 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''.
* ''WebVideo/FrenchBaguetteIntelligence'': In ''[[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jcUUNpMwTjQ Geography Makes No Sense...]]'', Fuck Cares argues that Americans decided that North and South America are different continents because of the Panama Canal, not because they are actually separate and that Australia isn't a continent; Oceania is. [[spoiler:Then Harry states that one could argue that they are separate continents because they are on different tectonic plates, meaning that Europe and Asia are the same continent, but Arabia and India are separate from Eurasia and New Zealand is its own continent (Zealandia).]]
* ''WebVideo/VaguelyRecallingJoJo'': 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 [[http://www.cracked.com/article_19168_6-myths-about-famous-places-you-believe-thanks-to-movies.html "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 WebVideo/MatthewSantoro, Matthew says that Mexico is part of South America, but it's actually only part of North America.
* ''WebVideo/GeminiHomeEntertainment'': In "The Deep Blue", the Marianas Trench is represented by a photograph of a marine sinkhole surrounded by a coral reef. In reality, the Marianas Trench is completely underwater, without any surrounding reefs. The picture is actually from the Great Blue Hole in Belize... some 13,000 kilometers[[note]]For the American audiences, roughly more than 8,000 miles.[[/note]] away.
* Often PlayedForLaughs in ''WebVideo/MapMen''. This usually manifests in the form of Jay or Mark visiting a place, but pretend they're actually somewhere else, despite all evidence to the contrary.
** Mark going to "China" to talk about why the country cares so much about the sea, when it's very obviously filmed in London's Chinatown, as shown by the London parking sign directly behind Mark, as well as the "Orient London" sign on the left of the video.
** In the "north[=/=]south divide" episode, when the north/south divide of France was mentioned, a map of ''Sudan and South Sudan'' was shown instead.
** Jay going to "Australia" while wearing a silly cork hat and driving, all the while while talking about tectonic plate shifting as ''a snowy blizzard rains down'' in what is clearly an English street.
** In "English counties explained", Mark shows various things with "Yorkshire" in their names that come from different parts of Yorkshire. The last of which is Yorkshire Tea, which he shows as being from Kenya (which he still says is part of Yorkshire).
** In "What will the world look like in 250 million years?", the scene of Mark as Alfred Wegener examining rocks in South America and Africa uses the same footage in the same beach for both continents, with one of them merely mirrored from the other.
*** The same episode has Mark ''avert'' this, where he pre-recorded himself saying "Here, in India" when on an unrelated trip to the country. They did this prior to COVID-19 restrictions being put in place, and partially did it just in case they ever got to use it.
[[/folder]]

[[folder:Western Animation]]
* ''WesternAnimation/{{Animaniacs}}'':
** The song [[ListSong "Yakko's World"]], ostensibly listing all of the countries in the world, makes some errors:
*** It leaves out several countries, such as UsefulNotes/SouthAfrica and UsefulNotes/BurkinaFaso.
*** [[UsefulNotes/BritainVersusTheUK As is traditional]], the song messes up the UK completely by listing UsefulNotes/{{England}}, UsefulNotes/{{Scotland}}, and UsefulNotes/{{Ireland}}. It should either list England, Scotland, UsefulNotes/{{Wales}}, UsefulNotes/NorthernIreland and the Republic of Ireland, or just the UsefulNotes/UnitedKingdom and the Republic of Ireland. And possibly adding Jersey, Guernsey and the Isle of Man, depending on the definition of 'country'.
*** The song mentions UsefulNotes/{{Greenland}}, UsefulNotes/PuertoRico, UsefulNotes/{{Guam}}, and UsefulNotes/FrenchGuiana, which are not countries in their own right but instead are constituent territories of UsefulNotes/{{Denmark}}, the UsefulNotes/UnitedStates, and UsefulNotes/{{France}} respectively.
*** The song, which first aired in 1993, also includes several [[PleaseSelectNewCityName outdated place or country names]]: Dahomey has been known as UsefulNotes/{{Benin}} since 1975 and Kampuchea reverted back to UsefulNotes/{{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.
* ''WesternAnimation/DinoSquad'' 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, UsefulNotes/{{Maine}} to Lancaster, UsefulNotes/{{Pennsylvania}}, and Niagara Falls) like they're going to the next town over.
* The ''Series/DoctorWho'' animated special ''[[Recap/DoctorWho2009ASDreamland Dreamland]]'' opens with an establishing shot of the "[[http://www.sfreporter.com/uploads/2009/11/drwho_roswell.JPG New Mexico Desert, June 13, 1947]]". Aside from the roadsign itself being an AnachronismStew (due to neither the style of sign, nor Interstate routes, existing in 1947), it places the (not-yet-existent) I-25 within "35m"[[note]]modern US roadsigns either spell out "MILES" in all-caps, or have no unit indicated as miles are assumed; the lower-case "m" shown is used to indicate ''meters''[[/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.
* In the ''WesternAnimation/DoraTheExplorer'' special where she travels the world, Dora can spot UsefulNotes/{{Africa}} by from where she's standing in UsefulNotes/{{Mexico}} by looking directly behind her.
* ''WesternAnimation/FamilyGuy'':
** In one episode, Brian and Stewie visit UsefulNotes/{{Munich}}, and drive in a tour-bus past Munich's [[http://tourismus.meinestadt.de/images/image.php?origin=gallery&id=185325&type=O Old Town Hall]], the [[http://www.mission-base.com/pictures/0404munich/big/muenchen-sendlinger-tor.jpg Sendlinger Tor]] and the [[http://www.mission-base.com/pictures/0404munich/big/muenchen-mariensaeule.jpg 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 [[http://www.tropicalisland.de/germany/bavaria/munich/images/MUC%20Munich%20-%20Marienplatz%20with%20Old%20Town%20Hall%20and%20Mariens%E4ule%20or%20column%20of%20the%20Virgin%20Mary%20at%20its%20center%203008x2000.jpg 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 'AllGermansAreNazis' joke. [[DudeNotFunny Some Germans actually took offense to that]].
** ''Family Guy'' is also inconsistent in showing the correct shape of UsefulNotes/RhodeIsland, despite the fact the show is set there and [[Creator/SethMacFarlane its creator]] went to college in Providence. Some maps [[https://vignette.wikia.nocookie.net/familyguy/images/5/5c/Newport.png/ 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 UsefulNotes/{{Massachusetts}} or make the [[https://vignette.wikia.nocookie.net/familyguy/images/e/e2/Rhode_Island.png east of the state]] much bulkier than it actually is.
** "Road to the North Pole", like most Christmas movies taking place at the North Pole, depicts it as on land and having a normal day and night cycle. The northernmost point of land is in Greenland at about 83.66 degrees north (read: 6.33 degrees south of the North Pole) and wouldn't experience daylight (or even twilight, for that matter) around the Winter Solstice.
* In the DirectToVideo ''Literature/{{Franklin}}'' special ''Back to School with Franklin'', when Miss Koala points out where UsefulNotes/{{Australia}} is to the kids with a globe. Apparently, southern UsefulNotes/{{Thailand}} has ceased to exist on their version of Earth.
* In the ''WesternAnimation/HouseOfMouse'' short "Mickey's Rival Returns", Mickey is flung into the sky by popped volleyball where you can see a few states which are labeled... completely wrong. For example, UsefulNotes/{{Nevada}} has UsefulNotes/{{New York|State}} written on it, and UsefulNotes/NewMexico is labeled as UsefulNotes/{{Florida}}.
* In the ''WesternAnimation/InspectorGadget'' episode "Wambini Predicts", Gadget goes to "[[{{Qurac}} Alpakistan]]", where there are diamond-spitting llamas. Llamas and alpacas are from South America, only camels are found in the Middle East.
* In the ''WesternAnimation/JonnyQuestTheRealAdventures'' 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 "UsefulNotes/{{Colombia}}". "Columbia" is a poetic name for all of the Americas, and often specifically the USA.
* In "When Johnny Comes Marching Home" from ''WesternAnimation/JohnnyTest'', a tourist guy and some visitors are able to see UsefulNotes/{{Antarctica}} from UsefulNotes/{{Argentina}}, which is impossible since Argentina is bordered by UsefulNotes/{{Chile}} at the south (even if they ''were'' in Chile, they still wouldn't be able to see it).
* In ''WesternAnimation/JusticeLeague'', [[spoiler: the Thanagarians are building a [[BlatantLies planetary force field]] on the great Gobi desert, which covers part of UsefulNotes/{{China}} and UsefulNotes/{{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 ColonyDrop)]].
* The ''WesternAnimation/KingOfTheHill'' 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.
* ''WesternAnimation/{{Metalocalypse}}'': In "Dethwater", Nathan Explosion states he wants to record the new album in the deepest, blackest part of the ocean: the Marianas Trench (near the Marianas Islands in the Pacific Ocean). However on a globe, he points to a spot just southwest of UsefulNotes/{{Portugal}} (almost on the other side of the world). Somewhat justified, as the members of Dethklok are very often shown to be varying degrees of BookDumb.
* The episode of ''WesternAnimation/MisterT'' 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 HollywoodAtlas 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 Website/TheAgonyBooth [[http://www.agonybooth.com/recaps/Mister_T/Fortune_Cookie_Caper.aspx had some fun pointing out.]] It would be one thing if it were just code, but actual buildings are shown with the addresses in question.
* One episode of ''WesternAnimation/ThePowerpuffGirls1998'' 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 UsefulNotes/{{Japan}}. Of course, this was likely deliberate to avoid pinpointing any specific place and having to deal with the repercussions of that.
* The ''WesternAnimation/RockosModernLife'' episode "Wimp on the Barby" has [[GlobalIgnorance Heffer mistaking Austria for Australia]]. While that part can be explained by the fact that [[TheDitz Heffer is an idiot]], the globe he uses has a UsefulNotes/{{Europe}}-like continent being labelled as UsefulNotes/{{Austria}}; Austria itself is landlocked and not a particularly large country. Also, UsefulNotes/{{Africa}} (south of Europe) and UsefulNotes/{{Asia}} (east of Europe) are nowhere to be seen on the globe.
* ''WesternAnimation/RockyAndBullwinkle'''s "The Ruby Yacht of Omar Khayyam" mislocates the [[UsefulNotes/{{India}} Indian]] city of Jaipur as being in UsefulNotes/{{Pakistan}}, and has it ruled by a pasha (the monarch was historically styled as a maharaja, and had no political power by the 1960s).
* ''WesternAnimation/TheSimpsons'': 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 RuleOfFunny. 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 "Itchy & Scratchy Land" the Simpsons stop by the five-corners monument, the location where (apparently) five state borders touch. This, of course, happens precisely nowhere in the USA (the closest thing to it is the ''Four'' Corners Monument, where UsefulNotes/{{Arizona}}, UsefulNotes/{{Colorado}}, UsefulNotes/NewMexico, and UsefulNotes/{{Utah}} meet).
** 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 UsefulNotes/{{Toronto}}, UsefulNotes/{{Canada}}. However, their [[CanadaEh 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 (and was built several ''centuries'' later than the Tower of London).
** In "Blame it on Lisa", Homer is kidnapped in UsefulNotes/{{Brazil}}. The kidnappers take Homer from UsefulNotes/RioDeJaneiro to the Amazon's Rainforest and back to Rio for the ransom during the same day, ''before sunset''. Rio de Janeiro and the Amazon Rainforest are more than 4200km (roughly 2600 miles) apart, which means that those travels would take several days in real life. It would've made more sense for the kidnappers to keep Homer in captivity around Rio, specifically in some favelas where the police hardly enters.
* The ''WesternAnimation/SouthPark'' episode "[[Recap/SouthParkS14E3MedicinalFriedChicken Medicinal Fried Chicken]]" features Cartman visiting [[UsefulNotes/KentuckyFriedChicken KFC's]] original home of Corbin, Kentucky to visit with Colonel Sanders. Corbin, a small town on the western edge of UsefulNotes/{{Appalachia}}, is depicted as being in a tropical rain forest. {{Justified|Trope}} by the RuleOfFunny, as the scene parodies a key plot point from the 1983 version of ''Film/{{Scarface|1983}}''.
* In ''WesternAnimation/TimothyGoesToSchool'', 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 ''WesternAnimation/TotalDrama'''s "Celebrity Manhunt Special" the gang travels from [[UsefulNotes/{{Canada}} Ontario]] to UsefulNotes/NewYorkCity, and somehow get lost in a desert with a nuclear testing site (Trinity Site is in UsefulNotes/NewMexico, if you are wondering.)
* The ''WesternAnimation/TotallySpies'' episode "The Getaway" has the spies going to a volcano research lab in UsefulNotes/{{Iceland}}, which is covered in ice and snow, but it's actually Greenland that's covered in ice; Iceland is actually pretty temperate considering its location ''just'' below the Arctic Circle.
* In "Friends in the City" from ''WesternAnimation/TootAndPuddle'', 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 geographic sins of the ''Franchise/{{Transformers}}'' [[Film/TransformersFilmSeries live-action movies]] are bad enough, but [[WesternAnimation/TheTransformers the original cartoon]] [[http://tfwiki.net/wiki/Europa_2000 was much worse.]] The link is to a [[Website/TFWikiDotNet 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.
* In the ''WesternAnimation/XMenTheAnimatedSeries'' episode "Days of Future Past, Part 2," Gambit travels to UsefulNotes/WashingtonDC But the monitor shows the ''state'' of UsefulNotes/{{Washington}} (with Washington, D.C. captioned right below).
[[/folder]]

* As for the conference that the Catholic 7 left behind, which became the American Athletic Conference, they played with the trope for a few years. With [[MilitaryAcademy 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 [[SemperFi Marine]] officers it trains, geography isn't as big a factor as it is for most other schools.) The divisional setup ended in 2020 after [=UConn=], a founding member of the original Big East, pulled its own "Screw This!" and bolted for the current Big East, parking its football team as an FBS independent.

** In lacrosse, a primarily east-coast sport, Denver plays in the Big East Conference while fellow Colorado school Air Force and another western team, the University of Utah, play in the ASUN Conference, which officially stands for nothing but used to stand for Atlantic Sun and still consists primarily of southeastern teams. ASUN men's lacrosse features several other schools outside the conference's core region—Cleveland State, Detroit Mercy, Lindenwood (out of the St. Louis area, and also an ASUN women's lacrosse member), and Robert Morris (suburban Pittsburgh).
** Bryant University, which is located in Smithfield, Rhode Island and has most of its sports in the America East which accurately reflects its northeastern location, moved its football team into the Big South Conference in 2022, as the AEC does not sponsor football. Bryant will play the 2023 football season in an alliance between the Big South and the (also geographically inappropriate) Ohio Valley Conference, but will avert this trope in 2024. The football team will move to the very geographically appropriate CAA Football (the legally separate football arm of the Coastal Athletic Association), which features teams in East Coast states stretching from Maine to North Carolina.[[note]]Of the CAA Football states, Pennsylvania is the only one that doesn't touch the Atlantic, and it's close enough to the ocean that it's generally treated as an East Coast state.[[/note]]

* 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 at that point and the Mavs and Jazz were in the same division at the time.

* The Creator/JohnRitter film from the '70s ''Film/{{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?

* ''Film/BirdOnAWire'' 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 RealLife, 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 (UsefulNotes/{{Vancouver}}) to Swartz Bay (Victoria).

* 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 on the wrong side of the Appalachians from that coast. Adding to the madness are the more recent ACC additions Louisville and Notre Dame. Even if one stretched the definitions of Atlantic and coastal, neither school's location (central Kentucky and Indiana, respectively) in the conference makes sense geographically.

** In field hockey, three California teams (UC Berkeley [aka "California"], Stanford, and UC Davis) are in the America East Conference because there are no other West Coast schools that sponsor the sport. The University of the Pacific[[note]]the one in California; there's also a "Pacific University" in Oregon, but it's NCAA Division III[[/note]] used to be as well before they dropped the sport citing travel challenges.