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"Whoever after due and proper warning shall be heard to utter the abominable word 'Frisco', which has no linguistic or other warrant, shall be deemed guilty of a High Misdemeanor, and shall pay into the Imperial Treasury as penalty the sum of twenty-five dollars."note 

As a famously scenic Northern California city with a reputation for eccentricity, controversy, and singular history, San Francisco and the surrounding Bay Area pop up fairly frequently in media, particularly visual media, which just love the city's iconic hills and eclectic architecture.

In nearly any film or TV show, the cable cars will be made to seem almost everywhere, with the stock establishing shot being a cable car cresting over a hill lined with Victorian houses while the Golden Gate Bridge is framed in the background. Car chases are frequent in TV and film thanks to the hilly streets and neato views (often making a point of going down the famously-winding Lombard Street). The city is famous for its liberal politics, association with countercultural movements (particularly the Beats, and the Hippies who followed close on their heels, in the mid-20th century), prominent LGBT population, longtime history as a hub for Asian (especially Chinese) immigration, and reputation for attracting colorful eccentrics who become tolerated, or even celebrated, in a way that they probably wouldn't be anywhere else in America.

In reality, these conventions are all true, but only to a degree. The cable cars only cover a small part of the city and are favorites of tourists but few locals; the streets are much too narrow and the terrain too varying for a really awesome car chase to happen anywhere but the freeways; and while droves of liberal activists, gays, and immigrants do call San Francisco home, there are as many less visible demographic groups as any other major city.

San Francisco's reputation as a home for misfits and oddballs started with its Gold Rush roots, when it essentially became a mining town that outgrew itself and where fortune-seekers could embrace the mythos of the west and live free of the more stolid conventions of the East or whatever other country they came from. Norton I, Emperor of the United States and Protector of Mexico (whose decree about a certain much-loathed nickname graces the top of the page) is today probably the most famous of all San Francisco eccentrics, but in his time he was just one of a menagerie of strange, self-made hero kooks.

Geographically, San Francisco is rather small for a city of its prominence, since it sits on the end of a peninsula and has no room to grow. The term "Bay Area" refers to the constellation of counties surrounding the San Francisco Bay and their related cities. Oakland, the city on the eastern shore of the Bay, has always been San Francisco's unofficial sister city, these days something of a troubled, hardscrabble town that nevertheless keeps alive the blue collar heritage that the city has lost a bit. Just to the north of Oakland is Berkeley, seat of the region's radical political reputation and home to one of its two most prestigious universities (UC Berkeley). The North Bay, on the other end of the world-famous Golden Gate Bridge is characterized by the homes of the ultra-rich and the sprawling "wine country" that produces most of California's most notable vintages. And in recent years the South Bay and the Peninsula have come into their own as the seat of Silicon Valley and the engine behind the region's enormous economic boom, driven by social media and software startups of all stripes. Many of those startups were founded by alumni of the Bay Area's other ultra-prestigious university, Stanford (located on the Peninsula).

San Francisco sits right on top of the San Andreas Fault, and there are numerous smaller (but no less dangerous) faults in the surrounding area; earthquakes are inevitable, and jaded long-term residents will often wave off a smaller one as an Unusually Uninteresting Sight. The largest earthquake in city history was the Great Quake of 1906, which killed over 3,000 people, destroyed most of the city due to the shaking and subsequent uncontrollable fires, and caused changes that still reverberate today note ; each year, bells are still rung on April 18th at 5:12 am to commemorate the disaster. The most recent quake to have a significant effect on the city was the Loma Prieta earthquakenote  of October 17, 1989. Having water on three sides makes the weather wildly unpredictable and generates the famous fog that rolls across half the city at any given time (the fog even has its own Twitter account. Really). Though not as large as other major metropolitan centers, San Francisco is a city of diverse and occasionally clashing neighborhoods, from the famous gay hub in the Castro to the always-trendy Mission District to the uber-rich perched on Nob Hill or the down and dirty poor in the Tenderloin. Some neighborhoods consist of only a few blocks but manage to create their own distinct flavor within that little world. And neighborhoods are often changing: SoMa (South of Market Area, Market being the city's most prominent street) used to be a grungy skid row but in recent decades has gentrified into a trendy business district (although, intriguingly, the area's vogue for BDSM-themed bars and shops remains...).

The area also has vibrant and loyal sports fandoms. Two major professional teams currently play in San Francisco proper: MLB's San Francisco Giants and the NBA's Golden State Warriors. Both had great success in the 2010s, with the Giants winning three World Series championships in five years (2010, 2012, and 2014) and the Warriors (who played in Oakland at the time) winning three NBA championships in four years (2015, 2017, 2018). In 2019 the Warriors moved to their new home at Chase Center, just south of the Giants' field at Oracle Park in the city's Mission Bay neighborhood.

One other team carries the name of San Francisco: the NFL's 49ers, who relocated to Santa Clara (about 45 minutes south of SF) in 2014. The Niners had a tremendous dynasty during the 1980s and early '90s, winning five Super Bowls between 1981 and 1994. Since then, they've had more sporadic success, making it to the Super Bowl in 2012 and 2019.

Other notable teams in the area include:

  • The NHL's San Jose Sharks, who have had great seasons but been unable to win the Stanley Cup.
  • MLB's Oakland Athletics, a historically strong team in the 1970s and 1980s. Since then, their payroll has been cut, but efforts to make the most of a low budget (famously described in the book and movie Moneyball) have often shown good results. However, in 2023, the A's announced their intentions to move to Las Vegas by no earlier than 2025 due to concerns over the age and serviceability of the Oakland Coliseum. Which reminds us...
  • The NFL's Las Vegas Raiders played in Oakland (in fact, in the aforementioned Oakland Coliseum for much of their history) from 1960-1981 and 1995-2019note , and the fandom for them still runs deep in some areas.
  • The San Jose Earthquakes of Major League Soccer, which picked up a couple of MLS Cups (league championships) and Supporters' Shields (best regular-season record) earlier in this century, though they haven't done much in very recent years.
  • In 2024, the National Women's Soccer League will add Bay FC, which will play in the Quakes' stadium.
  • Both Stanford and UC Berkeley are known to field excellent teams in multiple sports; Stanford holds the NCAA record for most Division I championships across all sports, while Berkeley is at #11 on the same list. The annual football game between Stanford and Berkeley is known as "The Big Game", and is one of the oldest rivalries in college sports, with the 117th having been played in 2023.

If you're thinking of moving to San Francisco, whether for work or because you really like the city, be prepared to pay out the nose for rent. San Francisco rent is infamously some of the most expensive in the country; $4,500 a month for a standard two-bedroom apartment isn't just costly, it's the average rent in the city. There's even a case of someone paying $500 a month to live in a box. Inside a living room. Not helping this is the rise of tech startups in the area that require prospective employees to move to San Francisco to work, which has become something of a meme amongst critics of Silicon Valley tech culture.

Though less frequently a trope, San Francisco is also particularly known for its large homeless population, which shows up primarily when a creator showed their work and generally has a point to make with it. Another uncomfortable and little-discussed fact is that the Golden Gate Bridge is the second-most frequent site of suicides in the world.

It's worth noting that popular candidates for the best film ever made and the worst film ever made were both set and filmed here.

If you're visiting, for God's sake, do not call the city "Frisco" or "San Fran" and please don't forget your heart (or your head) when you leave.


San Francisco in the media:

    open/close all folders 

    Anime & Manga 

    Comedy 
  • The recording of Eddie Izzard's Dress to Kill was at the Orpheum in San Francisco, and includes a good bit riffing on San Francisco, "Frisco", cable cars, the fog...basically everything in the lead section.
  • In Bill Cosby's "Driving in San Francisco", he talks about San Francisco having "the worst hills in the world to build a city around or in or on."
    You get up to the top, and the car's still going up! And you say, "Where's the land, for crying out loud?"

    Comic Books 
  • The X-Men currently call San Francisco home, and have invited the few remaining mutants to settle there.
  • Since their last revival, the Teen Titans have lived in San Francisco.
  • So does Buffy the Vampire Slayer, as it turns out. Her actions have put an end to magic, vampires are a known threat but if she or anyone else kills one that doesn't actively harm humans it will trigger a war, and she currently works for Kennedy as a bodyguard.
  • Daredevil moved to San Francisco after decades of watching over the Hell's Kitchen neighborhood of New York City.
  • Captain Marvel's first Post-Crisis origin was set in San Francisco in Roy Thomas' Shazam!: The New Beginning.
  • During the John Byrne run, Wonder Woman operated out of Gateway City, which was pretty much San Francisco in all but name.

    Films — Animation 
  • In Monsters vs. Aliens, the monsters duke it out with a giant robot on the Golden Gate Bridge, eventually toppling it.
  • Big Hero 6 takes place in San Fransokyo, a city that combines elements of San Francisco and Tokyo, complete with streetcars and a slightly altered version of the Golden Gate Bridge.
  • Inside Out takes place inside the head of a girl (Riley) who has recently moved to San Fransisco; landmarks show up occasionally but are never given a big role in the plot. E.g. the Golden Gate Bridge can be seen while Riley and her parents drive into the city the first time, and Lombard Street is used as part of an establishing shot before focusing on the emotions of a bus driver stuck in traffic (all variations on Anger, fittingly enough).

    Films — Live-Action 
  • A Trip Down Market Street is a 13-minute 1906 film that documents exactly that, a trip down Market Street on a cable car. It is notable for being photographed approximately three weeks before the earthquake and fire that wrecked every building shown in the movie.
  • Movies love San Francisco chase scenes.
    • The chase scene from the film The Rock is one of the best examples of a car pursuit in that city. This might be the best example, because it includes nearly every San Francisco and chase scene stereotype in the span of a few minutes. Obscene wealth (it's a Ferrari chasing a Hummer), the Camp Gay Hummer owner and hairstylist, a bottled water truck playing the role of a Fruit Cart, a crashing cable car, a wheelchair race, talking on a cell while driving and a hipster on a dirtbike. Yay!
      • Bonus points for the film being named after and taking place on the iconic Alcatraz Island, specifically utilizing the prison.
    • Bullitt has perhaps the archetypal example and one of the first movie chase scenes to be filmed at real speed and on-location, rather than having the film sped up and rear-projected.
    • Parodied in the Barbra Streisand comedy What's Up, Doc? With a Sheet of Glass scene (and a handful other tropes) thrown in for good measure.
    • Another comedic version climaxes the Goldie Hawn-Chevy Chase vehicle Foul Play. ("Far out!")
    • And again in Dr. Goldfoot and the Bikini Machine, with various land and sea vehicles.
    • Freebie and the Bean has a chase scene that ends with a car flying off the (now-demolished) Embarcadero Freeway and landing in the apartment bedroom of an elderly couple.
    • Parodied in the Starsky & Hutch movie, where doing this wrecks the car. This scene was probably meant as a parody of Bullitt.
    • Ant-Man and the Wasp had one of these, but with cars shrinking and resizing willy-nilly during it all... and then the chase ends down by Fisherman's Wharf with the Blue & Gold Fleet plus a "whale" in the Bay... Also in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings has its own version; not quite a car chase, but a fight on a bus damages the brakes and knocks out the driver, leading to a high-speed mess on the streets.
  • Perhaps the only thing filmmakers love to do more than a San Francisco car chase is to destroy the Golden Gate Bridge, as giant monsters, crashing spaceships, supervillains, and natural disasters frequently topple (or at least bust up) the famed span on film. It's worth noting that the 75 year old structure is remarkably sturdy in real life, still considered seismically stable even on its diamond anniversary in 2012.note 
  • The Towering Inferno is set and partially filmed here. The cablecars can be seen here, and prominent San Francisco landmarks double for the Tower's exterior and lobby.
  • The silly-ass Dr. Goldfoot and the Bikini Machine, a 1965 comedy staring Vincent Price, has possibly the longest, silliest (rear-projected) car chase ever down San Francisco's Lombard Street — part on location, part green screen, as the antagonists and protagonists switch between on cars, trollies, and even a boat on wheels. Vincent Price makes a great show of looking carsick through it.
  • The first two Herbie movies (The Love Bug and Herbie Rides Again) take place in San Francisco.
  • Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo is set in San Francisco, while The Birds has its opening scenes there. The latter almost had an ending with homicidal birds lining the Golden Gate Bridge. Family Plot had some scenes shot here, but never has an explicit setting established (and other scenes were shot in Los Angeles).
    • Because of all that, San Francisco is a popular choice for Hitchcock parodies and homages, like the aforementioned Foul Play and High Anxiety.
  • The Maltese Falcon.
  • Dirty Harry and its sequels were filmed on location in San Francisco, with many prominent landmarks visible, also including the portrayal of the SFPD.
  • SkyNet's home base in Terminator Salvation and Terminator Genisys was located in San Francisco.
  • A View to a Kill was mostly set here, with the final battle between Bond and Zorin taking place on the Golden Gate Bridge.
  • The Presidio is set in here and the film opens with a car chase, complete with cars hurtling through the air down that hill.
  • The Conversation, with the opening scene taking place in Union Square.
  • The first remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978).
  • Zodiac is set in San Francisco and its outlying communities.
  • Big Trouble in Little China is set in Chinatown.
  • The Pursuit of Happyness
  • Although most of Interview with the Vampire features flashbacks set in New Orleans and Paris, the Frame Story is set in San Francisco. The Scenery Porn is a little more creative than most, if for no other reason that that it emphasizes the less famous (but far more widely used) Bay Bridge rather than the Golden Gate.
  • Mike Myers' So I Married an Axe Murderer is set largely in San Francisco. They even manage to fit in a tour of Alcatraz.
  • Frank has to travel to San Francisco where he'd been poisoned in D.O.A.. Lots of running through crowded streets and traffic, of course.
  • Mrs. Doubtfire was set and mostly filmed here. After Robin Williams' death in 2014, the house that served as the Hillard's home became an impromptu memorial to him.
  • Jagged Edge, Basic Instinct and Jade, all written by Joe Ezterhaus.
  • Two of The Thin Man movies: After the Thin Man and Shadow of the Thin Man. After the Thin Man includes a view of the city from Telegraph Hill and Shadow of the Thin Man has Nick and Nora driving across the then-new Bay Bridge.
  • Milk, the 2008 biopic, and The Times of Harvey Milk, the 1984 documentary, both about gay rights activist and San Francisco politician Harvey Milk, and also about how Castro Street turned into the first Gayborhood.
  • Guess Who's Coming to Dinner.
  • 48 Hrs. and the sequel Another 48 Hrs.
  • The last parts of The Book of Eli.
  • The Room (2003). We know it's set here because we're shown Stock Footage of San Francisco every 5 minutes.
  • Electric Dreams.
  • The second half of The Social Network.
  • Pirates of Silicon Valley
  • Sneakers
  • Star Trek:
  • Flubber - filmed largely in San Jose.
  • Dark Passage
  • Decades before the disaster films of the 70s, the 1936 film San Francisco film tells the story of rival saloon owners, a singer and the 1906 earthquake. The scenes during and after the earthquake are still terrifying to watch today. The song "San Francisco", written for the movie and performed by Jeanette MacDonald ("San Francisco, open your golden gate/Don't make a stranger wait/Outside your door") has become an unofficial theme song of the city.
  • The Cheap Detective
  • The Princess Diaries
  • The Lady from Shanghai
  • The Game (1997)
  • The middle third of George of the Jungle is set here, as Ursula is a member of the city's upper class. George rescues a parasailor who had gotten entangled in the Bay Bridge.
  • Days of Wine and Roses is set here and in nearby San Mateo.
  • In the 2014 version of Godzilla the big guy comes ashore in San Francisco, destroys most of the city, and of course wrecks the bridge. The unmade Volcano Monsters cannibalization of Godzilla Raids Again was to be set in SF.
    • This is in continuing a fine tradition of monsters destroying San Francisco and especially the Golden Gate Bridge, starting with It Came from Beneath the Sea in 1955, in which a giant octopus crushes the Golden Gate in its clutches.
    • The Natals destroy the Golden Gate in Battle in Outer Space with a "space torpedo" in a rather impressive effects shot.
    • A much less prestigious giant monster film, Mega Shark vs. Giant Octopus, features a scene in which the shark leaps up and takes a bit out of the bridge. Because sharks love eating metal, apparently.
    • San Francisco was one of the first sites of a Kaiju attack in Pacific Rim, with the bridge being destroyed. In the Expanded Universe, Oakland's bay becomes a dumping ground for Kaiju skeletons.
    • Rise of the Planet of the Apes is largely set in the city and features the obligatory disaster scene as the apes rampage across the bridge in an attempt to escape into the wilds of Marin beyond. There's relatively little damage to the structure, though.
    • Non-monster movies get in on the action too: in The Core, the bridge melts under the intense heat of super sunlight (don't ask). The original Superman: The Movie sees the bridge heavily damaged, but not destroyed, by the climactic earthquake; Superman saves a school bus from falling into the water. In X-Men: The Last Stand, Magneto levitates the bridge over to Alcatraz (dick move). In the Star Trek franchise, the Federation has always been headquartered in San Francisco, so the 2009 and 2013 films feature a bit of future SF urban destruction (though the first film is refreshingly light on it, and both movies pass up the opportunity to destroy the iconic span).
  • Homeward Bound II: Lost in San Francisco, as the title indicates.
  • Resident Evil: Afterlife: Alice mentions that her plane would fly above San Francisco. Although we do not get to see it, she did mention she spotted no signs of life in all the cities in the North American West Coast she passed.
    • The original script was supposed to feature a Scenery Gorn of San Francisco.

    Literature 
  • San Francisco is the primary setting for the first and third books of William Gibson's Bridge Trilogy, Virtual Light and All Tomorrow's Parties (the second book, Idoru, takes place mostly in Tokyo). The city is depicted as struggling to recover from a massive earthquake (a lot like it was in real life in the early 90s, when the first book was being written), and much of the action takes place in a shantytown constructed on the ruins of the Bay Bridge (from which the trilogy gets its name).
  • San Francisco and the nearby area is the primary setting for The Fire Rose by Mercedes Lackey, the climax of which occurs during the morning of the 1906 earthquake.
  • Little Brother is set in San Francisco after a hypothetical terrorist attack on the Bay Bridge.
  • In The Secrets of the Immortal Nicholas Flamel, most of the characters live in San Francisco. It later turns out that the Dark Elders have turned Alcatraz into a prison for monsters that they plan to release on the city as the first step in their campaign to take over the world.
  • The city and its surrounding Bay Area feature a lot in Percy Jackson and the Olympians and The Heroes of Olympus as the home of various main characters and villains.
    • Annabeth has her home here, though she prefers to live in Camp Half-Blood as she dislikes her adoptive mother.
    • Mount Orthys' (the home of the Titans) American counterpart is Mount Tamalpais, which is not quite in SF, but still within the Bay Area.
    • Kampê holds her prisoners in Alcatraz.
    • Camp Jupiter is located behind a hillside. Considering how the camp is even larger than its Greek counterpart (complete with a river that simply vanishes into the mortal territory, and a town populated by retired demigods/legacies), it must take quite a lot of Mist to cover it. Meanwhile, new recruits are initially held in the Wolf House, located a bit to the north in Sonoma.
    • Enceladus holds Piper's dad hostage in Mount Diablo, e.g. "Mount Devil".
  • San Francisco is the setting of The Maltese Falcon.
  • Marcia Muller's series of private-eye stories about Sharon McCone is mainly set in San Francisco, although some individual novels head out to other parts of California or the USA.
  • The novel Flower Drum Song (and its better-known Broadway and movie adaptations) is about Chinese-Americans in San Francisco.
  • Child of the Owl is set in San Francisco's Chinatown.
  • The novelization of Resident Evil: Extinction written by Keith R.A. DeCandido has San Francisco the ground zero for the Global T-Virus Pandemic after Umbrella fails to eradicate the small number of infected there.
  • James Patterson's Women's Murder Club series is set here.
  • White Wolf's Mage: The Ascension anthology, Truth Until Paradox takes place immediately after the earthquake that hit San Francisco in January of 1994.
  • Christopher Moore's Bloodsucking Fiends, A Dirty Job, Noir and their sequels, are set in and around San Francisco. An Expy of Emperor Norton appears as a recurring character in both series.
  • Last Night at the Telegraph Club is set in San Francisco's Chinatown during the Red Scare of the 1950s.
  • One-Third Nerd is set in the Bay Area. Moses's parents both work for Google.
  • Parts of Timeline-191 are set in San Francisco, notably in the first book, How Few Remain, where Samuel Langhorne Clemens is a viewpoint character living there.
  • October Daye lives in San Francisco and most of her stories are set in the Bay Area.

    Live-Action TV 
  • The series Crazy Like a Fox was set here, the better for the show's trademark car chases.
  • The hero of the TV western Have Gun – Will Travel lives in Gold Rush-era San Francisco, between trips to Adventure Towns.
  • The MythBusters call this city home.
  • An episode of The Evidence had a murderer attempt to kill someone by sabotaging their brakes so they would fail on one of San Francisco's steep hills. The sabotaged car ends up ploughing into the detectives' car.
  • Monk lives here. But when he goes outside it's usually in Los Angeles.
  • The city's Presidio district is the future site of Starfleet Command HQ, Starfleet Academy, and many other Starfleet things. (Hence the moment in the 2009 film where a falling Romulan machine almost wipes out the Golden Gate Bridge.)
    • During The '60s, the Presidio was still a working military base (though so low security you could drive through it). It's since become a park managed by a national trust, making it almost impossible that Starfleet could ever build there now.
    • In a stroke of irony, there is one famous company that owns a significant amount of property there today: Lucasfilm.
  • The '70s police series The Streets of San Francisco was set and filmed in the city.
  • Charmed is set, but clearly not filmed, in San Francisco. Almost every episode begins with Scenery Porn of the city. The manor exteriors are in LA.
  • Nash Bridges also took extensive advantage of filming in San Francisco, including museums, piers, and enough landmarks to deeply satisfy viewers who live in the city. The show's production was headquartered on Treasure Island and brought $2 million of business to San Francisco per episode.
  • In the final episode of Frasier, Frasier is offered a TV gig in San Francisco, but is at first hesitant. His agent tries to persuade him by implying the advantage of being a straight man in a city where, supposedly, so many men are... not interested in women.
  • Full House is based here in the area surrounding Alamo Square Park.
    • As is That's So Raven (coincidentally created by two Full House producers).
  • Another Disney Channel original series, A.N.T. Farm, which, like That's So Raven, has a black teen girl as the main character, also takes place in San Francisco.
  • The final episode of Stargate Atlantis lands Atlantis in the ocean just off San Francisco; the series ends with the cast relaxing on a balcony with a view of the Golden Gate Bridge.
  • The third season of MTV's The Real World was set in San Francisco. The season is best known for featuring the late AIDS activist Pedro Zamora, who was not only the first gay man of color with HIV to appear on television, but the show also covered his same-sex wedding, another TV first. The season also featured aspiring comic book artist Judd Winick, who would go on to become an award-winning artist for DC Comics.
  • The first season of Top Chef was set in San Francisco.
  • Trauma was set and filmed in San Francisco.
  • Phyllis, a Spin-Off of The Mary Tyler Moore Show.
  • Too Close for Comfort.
  • Eli Stone called The City home.
  • Sliders.
  • Kindred: The Embraced.
  • Ironside (1967).
  • Aaron Spelling's '80s drama Hotel was set in San Francisco, a change from the New Orleans setting of the novel and film it was adapted from.
  • A Late-Arrival Spoiler in How I Met Your Mother is the time Lily broke her and Marshall's engagement in a panic and ran off to San Francisco for three months. References to San Francisco in this context occur from time-to-time in the show, for example: Lily (who is notoriously lustful) mentions that it was the longest stretch of time she had ever gone without sex, driving her crazy to the point where, when one of San Francisco's famously frequent earthquakes occurred, she got off on the vibrations.
  • McMillan & Wife
  • Midnight Caller
  • The HBO series Silicon Valley takes place in well, Silicon Valley, specifically Palo Alto.
  • The Man in the High Castle: San Francisco is the capital of the Japanese Pacific States, a country carved out of the former western U.S. and Canada after the Axis won World War II. The city has seen an influx of Japanese citizens and culture in the alternate 1962 it is set in.
  • Altered Carbon (as well as the first book of the Takeshi Kovacs Trilogy that it adapts) takes place in "Bay City", San Francisco a very long time in the future. The opening scenes of the series (after we see Kovacs being given terminal "organic damage" and his Cortical Stack taken in by the police in another planet 300 years prior) involves Kovacs being re-sleeved in a reactivated Alcatraz.
  • Shows set in San Francisco but filmed in Vancouver include Human Target, Alcatraz, and the Doctor Who TV movie.
  • Sense8: Nomi Marks and Amanita Caplan are both from San Francisco and part of the LGBT community. Their scenes were all shot on location, including a sequence shot during the annual Pride Parade.
  • In a subversion of what most people would expect, RuPaul's Drag Race has not featured many drag queens from San Francisco. In 13 seasons as of 2021, only two have competed on the show: Honey Mahogany in Season 5 and Rock M. Sakura in Season 12. The show has had more queens from Milwaukee of all places (3) than the cultural home of the LGBT community.
  • Wu Assassins is set in San Francisco's famous Chinatown.
  • Monarch: Legacy of Monsters has its female lead being from San Francisco, and the city itself is revisited again. A huge part of the city is Urban Ruins in the show.

    Music 
  • Arctic Monkeys' song "Fake Tales of San Francisco" from their debut Whatever People Say I Am, That's What I'm Not is about a Sheffield guy pretending to be from San Francisco to impress his friends at a bar, while the narrator looks at him with disdain.
  • Train has an album called Save Me, San Francisco and its Title Track is an ode to the city.
    Every day so caffeinated,
    I wish they were Golden Gated.
    Fillmore couldn't feel more miles away.
    So wrap me up, return to sender.
    Let's forget this five-year bender.
    Take me to my City by the Bay!
    I never knew all that I had,
    Now Alcatraz don't sound so bad,
    At least they have a hella fine merlot.
    If I could wish upon a star,
    I would hitch a cable car,
    To the place that I can always call my own.
  • Scott McKenzie's "San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Flowers in Your Hair)" has been described as "the unofficial anthem of the counterculture movement of the 1960s" and is credited with a large number of people moving to the city in that decade.

    Music Videos 
  • The music video for "I Disappear" by Metallica (who live in the Bay Area) includes a scene of James Hetfield fleeing a large shockwave in a black muscle car.
  • And who could forget Tony Bennett's "I Left My Heart in San Francisco" music video with the local hula group performing a hula they made specifically for the song.
  • The Cab Calloway song "San Francisco Fan", a song about a dancer named Fan who takes a bullet for her gambling boyfriend, set in San Francisco during the Gold Rush.

    Pinballs 

    Poetry 
  • Allen Ginsberg's "Howl (1955)" has bits of San Francisco in the setting, and the city was home to Howl's famous first performance.

    Tabletop Games 
  • Chaosium expanded its Call of Cthulhu setting to this city with a sourcebook, Secrets of San Francisco.
  • The main setting for R. Talsorian's Cyberpunk is Night City, a thinly-veiled pastiche of San Francisco with a little bit of Los Angeles thrown in and a generous helping of Blade Runner visual imagery.
    • Iron Crown's Cyberspace is set in a futurized version of actual San Francisco circa 2090.
  • In Paranoia, Alpha Complex is a post-apocalyptic San Francisco with a dome over it. (There are lots of other similar Complexes, but the others usually only get an occasional passing mention.)
  • Changeling: The Dreaming uses San Francisco as a sample city, drawing on its bohemian history. Likewise, a number of books for The World of Darkness make note that San Francisco's city father looks a hell of a lot like Emperor Norton.
    • Mage: The Ascension also used San Francisco as their signature city. This was only really nominally, though; the outline of the city was featured in the first edition of the core rulebook, and they published only one module for the city, Loom of Fate. Beyond that, it was mostly associated with Changeling aside from an anthology book published featuring the city. (See above).

    Video Games 
  • A large number of racing games feature San Francisco as well, though in those games, it usually makes sense that the streets are empty, since they've been closed off for a race.
  • Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas features a parody of San Francisco called San Fierro (the mission that brings you there alongside Crazy is Cool hippie The Truth is titled "If You're Going To San Fierro"). Although there are examples of the famous stairway streets, the whole city is quite small, and they are few and far between. Other famous parts of San Francisco, including the thick fog and the twisting road on the steep hill, are thrown in for good measure. Lombard Street makes an appearance as "Windy Windy Windy Windy Street," and the Transamerica Building (the tallest in the city) as the "Big Pointy Building" — both decent enough descriptions.
    • The city is quite small in real-life as well; it's only about seven miles on each side...and many parts of that are generally considered to be "the middle of nowhere".
  • A disproportionate number of Sega Dreamcast videogames featured San Francisco (or locations heavily based on it):
    • Crazy Taxi
    • Metropolis Street Racer
    • San Francisco Rush 2049
    • Sonic Adventure 2 - Mainly the "City Escape" "Radical Highway" and "Mission Street" levels. The developers were Sonic Team USA (later Sega Studio USA), who were based in San Francisco at that time.
      • Interestingly, the two driving stages in the game are "Highway 101" and "Highway 280". Although these are actual highway namesnote , the stages themselves don't resemble the highways they're named after.
    • Super Runabout: San Francisco
  • The San Francisco Rush series of Driving Games is two-thirds Exactly What It Says on the Tin. It also has spectators. Who scream in terror when a racer careens out of control at them, and it's possible to jump the entire length of Lombard Street.
  • This is one of the cities available for destruction in Crush, Crumble, and Chomp!.
  • Driver: San Francisco, obviously, takes place across San Francisco and Marin County.
  • Need for Speed: The Run starts out in San Francisco, complete with high-speed hijinks down the hills in a 500hp car.
  • The Visual Novel Cause of Death is set primarily in San Francisco.
  • Call of Duty: Black Ops II: The zombies mode map called "Mob of the Dead" takes place in Alcatraz Island and the Golden Gate Bridge in 1933.
  • One of the second Destroy All Humans! game's locales is "Bay City", which is essentially an Expy of this city. As the game is set in 1969, the area is full of hippies and hippie culture.
  • Toad Harbor, one of the tracks in Mario Kart 8 is a combination of San Francisco and New York City, complete with steep streets and cable cars.
  • The Nancy Drew PC game Message In A Haunted Mansion took place in San Francisco. Though it didn't make much use of the scenery (being something of a Bottle Episode that only took place in one location,) it did involve the infamous 1906 earthquake in part of the backstory.
  • The finale of Ingress's #13MAGNUS arc was set in San Francisco, at the Cupid's Span. Not just San Francisco on the in-game maps, real-life San Francisco as well.
  • The first mission of the Command & Conquer: Red Alert 2 expansion Yuri's Revenge takes place in a post-World War III San Francisco, both for the Allies and Soviets. The time machine to be used to stop Yuri's Psychic Dominator catastrophe is just south of the already-destroyed Golden Gate Bridge, and it is used to go back in time to the start of the war depicted in the original Red Alert 2, just in time to see the Soviets destroy it.
  • Jaleco's Arcade Game Cisco Heat is a Racing Game set on the streets of San Francisco and surrounding areas.
  • In Pepsiman, part of the first stage has Pepsiman is skateboarding downhill on what looks like Hyde Street. (Yes, it's possible to jump over the cable cars.)
  • Top Landing has the San Francisco International Airport, also known as SFO, as one of the eight available landing stages. It should be noted that SFO is not actually on San Francisco soil, but rather about five miles south of city limits. (Specifically, it lies in the neighboring San Mateo County on unincorporated land near Millbrae.)
  • Homefront: The final level has the American Resistance and the might of the U.S. military: Army, Navy, Marines, and Air Force working together to assault the Korean People's Army headquarters there - which they made the city the capital of the New Korean Federation of Occupied America.
  • Skate and its sequel are set in the city of "San Vanelona" that combines influences from San Francisco alongside Vancouver and Barcelona.
  • TargetTerror has a level that takes place in the Golden Gate Bridge that has been taken over by terrorists.
  • The original Tony Hawk's Pro Skater, Pro Skater 4,and Downhill Jam all have levels based on the city, and incorporating recreations of several famous real-world skate spots. Pro Skater 4 goes especially overboard, with the first three levels taking place at skater-friendly versions of UC Berkeley, downtown San Francisco, and Alcatraz, respectively.
  • Watch_Dogs 2 takes place in the Bay Area, and the plot is heavily focused on the area's tech companies.
  • Horizon Forbidden West is set on a post-apocalyptic West Coast and prominently features the ruins of San Francisco, now partially flooded and covered by a jungle.

    Visual Novels 

    Webcomics 

    Web Original 

    Web Video 
  • Gymkhana Five (stylized in all caps), probably the most famous of Ken Block's Gymkhana series, showed him driving a high-powered rally car at ridiculous speeds around the city.note 
  • Zero Punctuation (2016-2023)

    Western Animation 
  • Parodied on The Simpsons in the form of a Troy McClure movie entitled Goodtime Slim, Uncle Doobie, and the Great Frisco Freakout.
    • "There's more than one way to get high!"
    • Also on The Simpsons: when they're escaping from Alcatraz by swimming, Lisa says "Swim to San Francisco!" Homer responds with the classic line: "I'm not made of money! We'll swim for Oakland!" From the episode "Bart-Mangled Banner", written by John Frink; No evidence so far to suggest he lived in the Bay Area, though.
  • Jackie Chan Adventures, is based in the Chinatown neighborhood and the city gets front row seats to some of the magical activities of the main characters and vilians. It almost gets destroyed in a couple of episodes.
  • Mummies Alive!: Super-powered mummies with Magitek equipment fight evil in San Francisco. The Expository Theme Tune even notes that they're "hanging by the 'Frisco bay."
  • Monsters vs. Aliens features a big battle in San Francisco, complete with car chase (sort of; Ginormica uses cars to skate down the streets) and a Monumental Battle on the Golden Gate bridge.
  • In one episode of Kim Possible, Shego and Senor Senior, Junior go to San Francisco to steal the last intact copy of the Tome of Treachery. Shego ends up fighting Kim, and both Junior and Ron have trouble finding a parking space. (Locals can assure you that parking is truly miserable. Bike, if you're up for the hills, or use the public transportation.)
  • While animated series are usually set to fictional cities or towns, The Mighty B! and Robotboy both take place in San Francisco.
  • The town of Elmore, the main setting of The Amazing World of Gumball, is based on Vallejo, a town in the Bay Area. Some town buildings are based on SF as well: for example, Elmore Junior High is based on SF's Abraham Lincoln High School.
  • The South Park episode "Smug Alert!" ripped into the city for its obsession with hybrid cars. The reduction of smog from their cars was causing a massive cloud of smug to ravage the western U.S.
  • Inhumanoids: San Fran is about to be destroyed.
  • The Donald Duck cartoon "Donald's Diary" is set in a '50s-modern style SF.
  • LooneyTunes: A castaway Yosemite Sam, while being chased by a shark, passes by a sign that says "San Francisco, 500 miles".
  • The Tom and Jerry cartoon "Cruise Cat" begins in San Francisco, which is where the cruise ship departs from. As the ship heads out to sea, it is clearly seen passing below the Golden Gate Bridge.
  • In one episode of 2 Stupid Dogs, San Francisco and the entire California sink into the Pacific Ocean.
  • The Looney Tunes cartoon "Barbary Coast Bunny", with Bugs Bunny, is set in Gold Rush-era SF.
  • The Scooby-Doo franchise had several episodes taking place in San Francisco.
  • We Bare Bears is set in the Bay Area while the eponymous three bears live in one of the forests east of Oakland.
  • Phantom Investigators is set in San Francisco, with several real areas and landmarks showing up in the series or referenced in promotional material. Notably, it was also produced in San Francisco, which is where its' studio was based in at the time (it has since moved operations to Los Angeles).

During the Mexican-American War, San Francisco was peacefully captured with no fighting, struggling or casualties. Then everyone went out for beer to celebrate.

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