Without reading the caption, I assumed this was another take on the famous “View of the World from 9th Avenue” New Yorker cover. And it kind of works—who’s to say the Sacramento River delta isn’t the Mississippi? Is Catalina Island not, in fact, South Sea Islands-y? And Palos Verdes really does have a Wales quality. At least from a “The Californians”-style-of-braindead POV. (Speaking here as an Angeleno myself.)

Of course it’s also fun as an accurate map of shooting locations. I’d love to see an updated and radically more complete map, with many further decades of films. How sweet to think of these cinematic portals between real (and invented) places and their shooting locations.

The one of these I really can’t square at all is Sherwood Forest, England. That’s roughly I-10 between LA and Phoenix. Like, Palm Springs and out through Baker and Blythe. I love the desert, but there’s not a lot of forest out that way.

I grew up in the Bay Area in the 80’s and always found it amusing that Murder She Wrote, famously set on the East Coast, was partially filmed in Mendocino. And then of course, there’s the fact that everywhere else up there looked just like the forest moon of Endor.

The Alabama Hills, east of the Sierras has been in a million movies set somewhere desert-y, which is funny because it doesn’t look like anywhere but the Alabama Hills. (The rocks are pretty weird.)

I loved watching "Little House on the Prairie" when I was a kid, and it wasn't until I was much older, and had visited CA and Minnesota, that I realized "hey, that's not Walnut Grove should look like!!"