Pineapple Express: Someone Is Wrong on the Internet?

They filmed an episode of The X-Files that took place in Newark and the Pine Barrens. I was extremely disappointed when it was still filmed in Vancouver -- NJ is cheap and easy! To film in! And the Pine Barrens has a specific "look" as the oldest Old-Growth Forest on the East Coast, and the forests they filmed in did not look accurate.
 

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They filmed an episode of The X-Files that took place in Newark and the Pine Barrens. I was extremely disappointed when it was still filmed in Vancouver -- NJ is cheap and easy! To film in! And the Pine Barrens has a specific "look" as the oldest Old-Growth Forest on the East Coast, and the forests they filmed in did not look accurate.

Once you've got filming set up in a particular area, its just really easy to keep doing so. Just the expense of travelling and arranging things at a different spot--even a cheap one--is often a budget hit people don't want to take.
 

There's an episode in an early season of Supernatural that takes place in Fitchburg, Wisconsin. And it's clear they just picked the name off a map because Sam and Dean are walking through a downtown area that clearly doesn't exist in Fitchburg - which is an extremely spread out suburb of Madison with several expanses of apartments/condos, several strip malls, and no real walkable downtown. Living in an adjacent suburb and knowing Fitchburg well, we got a laugh out of it.
It seems to be a universal trope that Hollywood writers don't know the size or composition of anywhere other than LA and NYC, which blows my mind because most of them are from somewhere else. The guy from Atlanta doesn't know that statements like 'people around here don't even lock their doors at night*' don't make sense with regards to Cleveland or Minneapolis or Scranton, PA? Someone from Philly that moved to LA to become a tv writer doesn't know that Washington DC doesn't have skyscrapers?
*common phrase to reference how podunk a place is in police procedurals, the X-files/Supernatural, etc.

Mind you, the real answer is that they know that 90-95%+ (99%+ for people who don't live in that specific city) of the viewers simply do not care, and they very well may have written the episode before picking the city name off a map.
 

Once you've got filming set up in a particular area, its just really easy to keep doing so. Just the expense of travelling and arranging things at a different spot--even a cheap one--is often a budget hit people don't want to take.
Yup. Given the film credits that many places have, shooting elsewhere can be even more of a financial burden to production. "Z-Nation" was shot in Washington State and if you watch that show, you'll see that that they show everything from rain forest to desert style backdrops. Need deep woods? Olympic Peninsula. Oceanside? Thousands of miles of coastline, both developed and undeveloped. Mountains? Drive an hour. Desert? East of the mountains. When you have "close enough" and financial constraints, you don't tend to consider anything else.
 



They filmed an episode of The X-Files that took place in Newark and the Pine Barrens. I was extremely disappointed when it was still filmed in Vancouver -- NJ is cheap and easy! To film in! And the Pine Barrens has a specific "look" as the oldest Old-Growth Forest on the East Coast, and the forests they filmed in did not look accurate.
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Every once in a while a poster comes in hot out of seemingly nowhere and I am like, wait! is this a new person coming in acting jerky? So I check, and nope they've been around for at least a few years but are suddenly very active and not in a good way.
 

But the Karate Kid franchise has always had an enthusiastically loose grasp on reality. The idea that the San Fernando Valley -- population 1.5 million -- would be obsessed with a junior karate tournament is super-silly. (People don't even care about club soccer that much, despite that being a much more plausible sport for people to be obsessed with in Southern California.)

But the Karate Kid's silliness is a feature, not a bug, so none of this is a complaint.
No argument, but out of curiosity, are you referring to the modern one or the original, at the time of which Karate was much more of a cultural fad?
 


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