I've been catching some of the shows on the Retro channel and two stand out for their laughably poor portrayal of overseas locations. "I Spy" actually does a better job of the two. They seem to have a simple formula: Shoot a lot at night, or make it look like night, so viewers don't get a good view of the surroundings. Robert Culp was running around in one episode in what's supposed to be a southeast Asia jungle but it reminded me a lot of that park I used to drive by on Los Feliz on my way from the Burbank airport to my friend's West Hollywood home. I don't know what it looked like on 1960s TV screens, but one episode showed Cosby and Culp at a Tet parade. They did an especially poor job of blending stock New Year's footage on a street with what was obviously a group of people sitting on a stage in Burbank or Studio City or some place like that. It just stuck out on my high def screen. The other one is "It takes a Thief." I've only seen a few episodes of it. Two of them though, used the same warehouse for a setting. In one, it's set somewhere in Asia -- I think Hong Kong -- and there's writing on the outside of the building in both the supposed local language and in English. But the English writing was something stupid, like "Dock warehouse." Like people in real life would need the sign to show it was a warehouse and near a dock. The other episode with the same warehouse is set in England. One scene has someone kidnapped being driven around in a delivery van. Except the steering wheel is on the left, not the right. So I'm trying to think of how they do foreign locations for TV now. "The Unit" would obviously have a lot of foreign locations. I don't know how authentic they look, since I don't watch the show. Any other current shows have poor replicas of foreign locations?
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