History UsefulNotes / LosAngeles

* The '''Los Angeles Dodgers''' are the city's main Major League Baseball team, arriving in 1958 from Brooklyn (to the eternal dismay of many Long Islanders). They have carried on the old Brooklyn tradition of EveryYearTheyFizzleOut - the Dodgers have now lost more World Series than any other team (14), half of those to their old cross-city rivals, the New York Yankees. Their strongest rivalries are with the Yankees and the other team that they once shared New York with, the UsefulNotes/SanFrancisco Giants. The Dodgers' first decade in Los Angeles was their best as a team, earning three World Series titles in 1959, 1963, and 1965, in large part due to legendary pitcher Sandy Koufax. They were often competitive through the 1970s and early 1980s, but only managed one World Series win in the strike-shortened 1981 season. After Kirk Gibson's "One Good Swing" in 1988, it took them nearly 30 years to even get back to the World Series. Throughout the 1990s and 2000s, they performed with consistent indistinction, but a new ownership group in the early 2010s led to them consistently winning their division but no World Series championship until the COVID-shortened season of 2020, the franchise's seventh World Series championship. Their home field, Dodger Stadium, is now the third-oldest in Major League Baseball, and is isolated on top of mountainous Elysian Park, a location famous for being wonderfully central yet frustratingly inaccessible. Incidentally, Los Angeles has produced more active MLB players than any other city.
* The '''Los Angeles Angels''' ... don't actually play in Los Angeles. At least, not anymore. Founded in 1961 by Music/GeneAutry, and taking their name from a minor league team that used to play in LA until the Dodgers arrived, they initially did play in LA itself until they got their own ballpark in Anaheim, at which time they renamed themselves the California Angels, a name they used for the next 30 years. When the stadium was renovated in the mid 90s, the city of Anaheim insisted on them adopting "Anaheim" as part of their name (even though the "Angels" part is a clear reference to LA). The team, at the time owned by Disney, became the Anaheim Angels, but when current owner Artie Moreno bought them, he wanted to emphasize the team as an LA-metro area team, so he brought back the Los Angeles Angels name, with "of Anaheim" tacked on to the end (and rarely used). Eventually that was dropped. The team has largely had streaks of solid years mixed between periods of middle of the pack finishes, though they did win the 2002 World Series. Current star Mike Trout is a frequent candidate for best all-around player currently in the game, and Japanese star Shohei Ohtani has achieved perhaps greater prominence for his recent performance as a starting pitcher ''AND'' full-time designated hitter.

* Northeast L.A., consisting of Glendale and Pasadena, with its world-famous New Years' Rose Parade.

* Greater Hollywood, consisting of Hollywood, West Hollywood, and the Sunset Strip.

A nice advantage to this sprawl is that most of the city isn't especially crowded or cramped compared to many others of its size. Most houses have at least a small backyard, and the climate lends itself well to gardening. Bordered by Pacific Ocean on one side, LA has glorious weather for most of the year, is full of sunshine and trade-winds, and is also relatively insect-free. Los Angeles is also one of the United States' great food cities, with food trucks being a common form of dining for people of all neighborhoods and economic classes, a practice that the city encourages rather than trying to get rid of, and chefs such as Roy Choi being household names. Sometimes described as "the least European city in America", Los Angeles' cultural roots are overwhelmingly Latin American, Asian, and Middle Eastern. Owing to the postwar boom and its unique automobile culture, Los Angeles can be described as the home of the drive-thru. Name a fast-food chain subjected to BurgerFool style parody, and odds are it was founded somewhere in the greater L.A.-O.C.-San Diego area. A ''handful'' of such chains include UsefulNotes/McDonalds, Taco Bell, Del Taco, Jack in the Box, Wienerschnitzel, Fatburger, In-n-Out, Rubio's, El Pollo Loco, Tommy's, and Carl's Jr.

* ''VideoGame/{{D}} is initially set inside of a hospital in downtown Los Angeles where director Richter Harris murdered several people in cold blood; his daughter Laura arrives there to try and talk some sense into him. However, once inside, she is seemingly transported by a strange blob to a medieval castle, which turns out to be an alternate reality created by Richter's mind. Laura is returned to L.A. unharmed in the [[MultipleEndings good ending]].

The famous Griffith Observatory (and Griffith Park itself), located 8 miles north-west of the civic center overlooking Hollywood, has been in more films than most actors have. It is the site where Arnold arrived by time warp in ''Film/TheTerminator'', where ''Film/TheRocketeer'' blasted off to fight Nazis on a blimp, where the ''Film/{{Transformers}}'' perched, where ''Series/MacGyver1985'' lived in the show's pilot, and where Creator/JamesDean had his famous knife fight and shoot-out in ''Film/RebelWithoutACause''. It also appears in ''Series/CharliesAngels'', ''Film/YesMan'', ''Franchise/{{Dragnet}}''... you get the idea. Just down the road a bit is the famous tunnel where Marty fought Biff in ''Film/BackToTheFuturePartII'', also serving as the entrance to [[Film/WhoFramedRogerRabbit Toon Town]], and down the hill a bit is the entrance to the [[Series/Batman1966 Adam West-era Batcave]].

* East L.A., a predominantly Hispanic neighborhood most renown for Creator/CheechMarin's movie ''Film/BornInEastLA''. Further east is the San Gabriel Valley (San Gabriel, Rosemead, and Alhambra), a major East Asian settlement.

Los Angeles has been described as the biggest ''small town'' in the country instead of its second-largest city due to its fairly unique urban geography. As with many cities in the American West, it experienced explosive growth after UsefulNotes/WorldWarII. With the rise of car culture at the same time, Los Angeles raced outwards in all directions, blanketing the land with {{Suburbia}}. To cope with the sheer vastness of the place, the local lexicon splits the megalopolis into a patchwork of neighborhoods, former cities that voluntarily merged to access the city's water[[note]]Hollywood is the most well known, but other examples include Venice Beach, Century City, Westwood, Encino, Van Nuys, and Sherman Oaks[[/note]], and still-independent cities completely surrounded by L.A. on all sides[[note]][[Music/StraightOuttaCompton Compton]], Inglewood, Santa Monica, East Los Angeles, [[{{Gayborhood}} West Hollywood]], Culver City, Burbank, Pasadena, and El Segundo[[/note]]. Generally, L.A. is divided into the following areas: Downtown L.A., East and Northeast L.A., South L.A. (formerly and infamously known as South Central), the Harbor Area (the area surrounding Long Beach, including San Pedro and Carson), Los Angeles International Airport (LAX, recognizable for its Space Age Theme Building), Greater Hollywood, Wilshire (including the Miracle Mile and La Brea tar pits), the Westside (including Venice, Century City, and Bel Air), and the San Fernando and Crescenta Valleys (Sunland and Tujunga). Surrounding all these unique neighborhoods is a vast region of neighboring cities often referred to as "Greater Los Angeles", a nearly continuous urban unit that stretches out into Ventura, Orange, Riverside, and San Bernardino Counties in well over 30,000 square miles of sprawl. Don't worry, it can be rather confusing even for the millions who live in this region; this article focuses on L.A. proper and its internal cities. For more information on those outlying cities, you'll have to visit the UsefulNotes/{{California}} page.[[note]]For census purposes, the Los Angeles metropolitan area comprises just L.A. and Orange Counties, with the others being their own entities that are grouped together into a "Greater Los Angeles region area". Residents disagree over where exactly "Los Angeles" ends, what sections of the "Inland Empire" in Riverside/San Bernardino (which the census counts as its own massive metro) are really part of it, and whether the whole of Southern California including San Diego is really just one big megacity. Further confusing things, people from the neighboring high desert to the north, past the San Gabriel Mountains, refer to Greater Los Angeles colloquially as "Down Below", even though vast tracts of that desert are actually part of Los Angeles County.[[/note]]

%%* ''VideoGame/VampireTheMasqueradeBloodlines'' is set in and around LA.
%%* ''VideoGame/MidnightClub LA''

%%* ''VideoGame/TrueCrimeStreetsOfLA''
%%* ''VideoGame/PoliceQuest4OpenSeason'' along with ''SWAT 1-3''
* ''[[VideoGame/TonyHawksProSkater Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3]]'' has a level set in downtown Los Angeles (recreated for ''Underground 2''), while ''American Wasteland'' is ENTIRELY set in L.A.

* ''VideoGame/DukeNukem3D'' and ''VideoGame/DukeNukemForever'' (first half) take place in Los Angeles during an AlienInvasion.
* The expansion to ''VideoGame/CommandAndConquerRedAlert2'' (''Yuri's Revenge'') has the second Allied mission in Los Angeles, where the player has to stop Yuri from using the airwaves to mind control civilians and feed them to his Grinders. ''VideoGame/CommandAndConquerRedAlert3'' has an Imperial mission based in nearby Santa Monica, also with the objective of utilizing media presence.
* L.A. appears have been converted into some sort of space colony in ''VideoGame/XenobladeChroniclesX'', and is now known as [[NewNeoCity Neo Los Angeles]].
* ''[[VideoGame/SanFranciscoRush Rush 2: Extreme Racing USA]]'' features the Los Angeles track. Unlike the other courses, which have a "Fog" setting, L.A. replaces the fog with ''smog''.
* In ''Police 911'', the Japanese version begins in Tokyo and ends in Los Angeles. In the North American version, [[CulturalTranslation it's the other way around]].
* The setting of 2014's ''Videogame/BattlefieldHardline''.

* The final course of ''R4: VideoGame/RidgeRacer Type 4'', Shooting Hoops, is hosted in Los Angeles.
* The English translation of the Franchise/AceAttorney series takes place in Los Angeles - only implied at first, but made explicit in ''Spirit of Justice''. (The Japanese version, on the other hand, takes place in an unnamed Japanese city).

* In 2020, a track based on Los Angeles called Los Angeles Laps was added to ''VideoGame/MarioKartTour''.

Los Angeles, the City of Angels, Tinseltown, La La Land, or simply L.A.-- or, its original name, [[OverlyLongName El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Angeles del Rio de Porciúncula]] [[note]]The City of our Lady, the Queen of the Angels, of the River of Porciúncula[[/note]]. Regardless of what you call it, Los Angeles is one of the world's most famous cities and home to the heart of the UsefulNotes/UnitedStates' film and television industry. It is the second largest city in the country behind only UsefulNotes/NewYorkCity, though it gets bonus points for being the largest metropolitan area in the US contained entirely within a [[UsefulNotes/{{California}} single state]].[[note]]Greater New York is spread over '''four''' states ([[UsefulNotes/NewYorkState New York]], Connecticut, UsefulNotes/NewJersey, and UsefulNotes/{{Pennsylvania}}).[[/note]] Los Angeles County is the most-populous county in the US, with almost twice as many people as #2, [[UsefulNotes/{{Chicago}} Cook County, IL]].[[note]]Los Angeles County contains 87 other cities, 15 of which have over a hundred thousand people each - Los Angeles itself is less than half of the county's population. Even if all five NYC counties combined into one, LA County would be larger[[/note]]

* ''ComicBook/{{Hawkeye}}'': [[Characters/HawkeyeKateBishop Kate Bishop]], the second Hawkeye, starts operating out of LA near the beginning of her solo career, eventually getting [[ComicBook/Hawkeye2016 her own book.]] This leads into ''ComicBook/WestCoastAvengers2018''.

* Los Angeles is an important spot in the ''TabletopGame/DemonTheFallen'' fluff, being the city where the ex-ArchangelLucifer himself has resided since its foundation (the city name is the clue).
* Los Angeles is depicted as a haven for demonic influence in ''TabletopGame/InNomine'', with no angelic tethers and few (if any) angels stationed there. (The angelic equivalent is San Francisco.)

* ''VideoGame/VampireTheMasqueradeBloodlines'' is set in and around LA.
* ''VideoGame/MidnightClub LA''
* In ''VideoGame/CallOfDutyBlackOpsII'', the city was invaded by Cordis Die forces after [[BigBad Raul Menendez]] took control of the US military drone network.
* In ''VideoGame/{{Fallout|1}}'', the city was devastated by nukes during the Great War, and is known as the "Boneyard" among the survivors.

* In ''VideoGame/GrandTheftAutoSanAndreas'', one of the game's three cities is a FictionalCounterpart called Los Santos, mostly consisting of Downtown, the beaches, and the violent ghettos Carl "CJ" Johnson calls home. It's pretty accurate as most of the major landmarks are there and accounted for, even if they are under a different name.

* ''VideoGame/TrueCrimeStreetsOfLA''
* ''VideoGame/PoliceQuest4OpenSeason'' along with ''SWAT 1-3''

* ''VideoGame/PoliceQuest IV: Open Season'' along with ''SWAT 1-3''

Los Angeles, the City of Angels, Tinseltown, La La Land, or simply L.A.-- or, its original name, [[OverlyLongName El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Angeles del Rio de Porciúncula]] [[note]]The City of our Lady, the Queen of the Angels, of the River of Porciúncula[[/note]]. Regardless of what you call it, Los Angeles is one of the world's most famous cities and home to the heart of the United States' film and television industry. It is the second largest city in the country behind only UsefulNotes/NewYorkCity, though it gets bonus points for being the largest metropolitan area in the US contained entirely within a [[UsefulNotes/{{California}} single state]].[[note]]Greater New York is spread over '''four''' states ([[UsefulNotes/NewYorkState New York]], Connecticut, UsefulNotes/NewJersey, and UsefulNotes/{{Pennsylvania}}).[[/note]] Los Angeles County is the most-populous county in the US, with almost twice as many people as #2, [[UsefulNotes/{{Chicago}} Cook County, IL]].[[note]]Los Angeles County contains 87 other cities, 15 of which have over a hundred thousand people each - Los Angeles itself is less than half of the county's population. Even if all five NYC counties combined into one, LA County would be larger[[/note]]

* '''Chivas USA''' was established in 2004, sharing the Galaxy's home field, but folded ten years later due to poor performance and lack of interest. The owner was the also the owner of the Mexican league team in Guadalajara, and assumed fans of that team in LA would flock to the MLS team (even the name "Chivas" is the nickname of the Guadalajara team). But between there not being nearly as many fans in LA as he thought, failing to understand that fans of other Mexican teams would actively shun a team with ties to a rival club, and advertising that was divisive in pushing away non-Mexican Angelenos, the club quickly turned into an embarrassment for the league and the owner was bought out.

!!! Major League Baseball

!!! National Football League

!!! National Basketball Association

!!! National Hockey League

!!! Major League Soccer

** As for #1 in men's championships? That'd be the '''USC Trojans''', best known for their football team, which has been strong for much of the 21st century, notably during a stretch in the mid-2000s that got vacated due to improper benefits given to a star player.

* ''Comicbook/CaptainCarrotAndHisAmazingZooCrew'' often featured Los Antelopes, Califurnia, Earth-C's Los Angeles. Los Antelopes' various neighborhoods and suburbs were often featured in stories, including Saint Bernardino (San Bernardino), Bel-Airedale (Bel-Air), Beaverly Hills (Beverly Hills) and Follywood (Hollywood), the latter where the Zoo Crew's headquarters were located.
* The ''[[Franchise/TheAvengers West Coast Avengers]]'' from the mid-1980s to mid-1990s, as well as ''ComicBook/IronMan'' and ''ComicBook/WonderMan'' in that period, as both title characters were members of the team, though Iron Man had moved to California before the formation of the "Wackos", with Tony Stark building a new company from scratch in LA.
** A RunningGag early on in ''Wonder Man'' had Simon's showbiz and civilian friends asking him how he could survive in LA without a car. He ''could'' just use his jet belt to fly anywhere, of course, but the thought of being able to drive ''others'' around town had never occurred to him.
* Marvel's ''ComicBook/{{Runaways}}'', where one of the major plot points is the fact that the kids are in LA and not NYC. It turns out that the city's relative dearth of superhuman activity is due to the Pride secretly controlling the whole city, and their defeat is followed by an EvilPowerVacuum.
* ''ComicBook/AvengersAcademy'' is likewise based out of LA, and sees a crossover with the Runaways.
* ComicBook/KateBishop, the second Hawkeye, starts operating out of LA near the beginning of her solo career, eventually getting [[ComicBook/HawkeyeKateBishop her own book.]] This leads into ''ComicBook/WestCoastAvengers2018''.
* Creator/DCComics' series ''Comicbook/{{Manhunter}}'' follows Federal Prosecutor Kate Spencer, who is based out of LA.

** '''Angel City FC''' was announced in 2020 as California's first entry in the National Women's Soccer League, with a start date of 2022. It's sharing BMO Stadium with LAFC, though its home matches in the early-season NWSL Challenge Cup are instead at Titan Stadium on the Cal State Fullerton campus. Right now, the club is best known for its literal army of owners, quite a few of whom have pages on This Very Wiki. The lead investors include Creator/NataliePortman and Internet billionaire Alexis Ohanian, husband of tennis great Serena Williams (who has a smaller ownership stake of her own). Other members of the ownership group include Creator/UzoAduba, Creator/SophiaBush, Creator/JessicaChastain, Creator/JamesCorden, Creator/AmericaFerrera, Creator/JenniferGarner, Creator/EvaLongoria, other celebrities who don't have pages yet, and a large cast of prominent sports figures.

[[folder:Film]]

* ''WesternAnimation/Cars1'': The final race is at their {{Expy}} of the Los Angeles Coliseum.
* ''WesternAnimation/CatsDontDance''

* ''WesternAnimation/{{Turbo}}'': First half takes place in Van Nuys.

** Music/TheDecemberists have "Los Angeles, I'm Yours", a delightfully snarky attack on the lifestyle of certain Angelinos. The song was penned while lead singer/songwriter/[[FaceOfTheBand etc]]. Colin Meloy was visiting his sister, who lives there. Hmm....

[[[[caption-width-right:350:''"[[Recap/TalesFromTheCryptS2E7TheSacrifice What you're looking at is the money, pussy, and bullshit capital of the Western world.]]"'']]