Only in television shows and movies.?ÿ Episode today on MeTV for Gunsmoke had both near Spearville, Kansas which is relatively close to Dodge City.
To see the flat, treeless terrain around Spearville, go to Google maps, home in on the highway intersection at the west side of town and go to street view.?ÿ Power poles and industrial wind turbines but no mountains or saguaro cactus to be seen.
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Tidy little hamlet I must say. From my armchair GE tour I noticed that heading west out of town there's a "Lake Road". I had to zoom out a bit but found a close to 70 ac. "lake" out there. A local attraction no doubt.
And seeing as used to make a living surveying WWTPs for similar sized towns I had to search and find their "poop ponds". They're there, but hard to spot. Just make sure you don't fall short in an aerial final approach to RW36 at Knoeber's place.
I had to chuckle at the name of the auto parts store in town...D&R. Maybe just me, or maybe a stab at humor. 😉
Wind turbines seem to be the going thing there for sure.
PS - I've seen hundreds of old westerns on TV supposedly set in Oklahoma...with tall peaked mountains in the background. I've been all over this state and never gotten a glimpse of those mountains.
My late father loved Gunsmoke, but would often make comments like "no place in Kansas looks like that."
It always amazed me how so much of the American West (based on TV and Movies) looked like the foothills of Southern California, Monument Valley, or Old Tucson!
There was a recently released movie filmed in my rural pinelands area called Knock on the Cabil Door. The Cabin scenes were filmed in the immediate neighboring town of Tabernacle, NJ on a property located immediately adjacent to the gun club that I used to be a long time member and President of.
The Cabin facade was built in a matter of days and the landscape around the cabin was nowhere near what the actual natural vegetation is like. A few days to build a fake cabin, a few days of filming, then poof! Cabin gone!
They then moved filming moved on to another local location, a diner along a State highway that was built about 75 years ago. The diner closed on a Thursday morning, it's appearance was modified with vinyl sinage and a fake facade, they filmed around the clock there for the weekend and when the diner reopened on Tuesday you would never have known anything out of the ordinary happened if you weren't a local.
I am from Wichita, I always tell people I am from "the mountains of central Kansas"
I remember the hunting scene in the mountains from Deer Hunter, supposedly in PA, but definitely not from the vistas. It was actually Mount Baker in WA. Great movie, supposedly takes place in Clairton, PA (and Vietnam) near where I live, filmed when the steel mills were still thriving.
I am too critical about movies and TV scenery not matching reality, according to Mrs. Cow. You may be watching a scene set in suburban New Jersey but all the cars have California license plates, for example. In some old western, the train pulls out of Town A with an engine, coal/wood car for fuel and four cars. Without ever stopping, you see it roll into the next town with five or three or seven cars. The lettering on the locomotive might also change from yellow to red or vice versa.
The movie makers have (had?) a job position called Continuity, and that person was supposed to catch those discrepancies.
In our writers group I tend to be the one who catches continuity errors.
What annoys me is when they miss how New England differs from the rest of the country. For instance, the sheriff's department does not patrol traffic, investigate crimes, or any other of the general law-enforcement activities. Those are done by the town/city police, or state police. The sheriff's office administers the county jail, and serves various duties for the courts.
Also, government. Hollywood doesn't get who the town Selectmen are. They think that the Select Board is a legislative body. It is not. It is an administrative body. You can't have a Mayor (city government) in the same municipality as Selectmen (town government). They are mutually exclusive.
Andy Taylor was the Sheriff of Mayberry. Not in my world. He would have to be the Sheriff of Whatever County, in which the city of Mayberry would have it's own Chief of Police.
All, please refrain from destroying my world!
The X-Files is really good at putting mountains where they shouldn't be!
I don't know much about geography, but I love to watch El Dorado where Robert Mitchum supports the wrong leg with a crutch in the final shootout scenes.
@cyril-turner saw the movie in a theater, and the whole place roared with laughter when mulder told whoever on the other end of the phone that they were in Dallas, as he stood with, like, the Tetons in the background.
