"Smallville" Isn't In Kansas

I'm going to catch up on all the "Smallville" comments, but I have got to make this point:
SMALLVILLE ISN'T IN KANSAS for the following reasons:
1. There are no pine trees in Kansas unless someone planted them as decoration in Kansas City. The overhead shot of the farmland with pine trees everywhere, give me a break!!!
2. There are no rolling hills in Kansas (except the far west toward Colorado where it is dry as a bone and brown. Kansas is flat, flat, flat.
3. The city of 45,000 has been mentioned by Zoom before and that is what sent me here to make these other points.
BUT - that nit venting aside, we are now converted fans. Who needs Mutant X when all the mutants are in Smallville for Clark to deal with?
At least Pa Kent seemed to thaw out a little in the later eps.
So yep, it's on our recording cycle.

Artemis

I admit, I'm no expert on Kansas, but having been there a few times....

-There ARE some nice hills on the far eastern part of the state. They have trees and everything. You get too far away from the Missouri River, tho, and it's flat as flat can be. I remember driving along and thinking, "OOOH! A hill!"
-We're a few degrees of latitude north of Kansas, but you still have the scattered pine trees on farmsteads. I don't find that too far fetched.

But I agree - there's no way Smallville is 45,000. If they want realistic plots, they need to have one or two on the weather. Some of the storms that blow through there in the summer time are incredible.

-Cindy (who's waiting for the spoof of the Wizard of Oz....)

Cindy:
Yes, there are a few pine trees, but usually ones planted in towns. What Hubby and I were laughing over was the fly-over shot in the Bugboy ep I think, that shows these rich stands of pine trees on the property lines, like the farms had to have been cleared of pine trees. I swear that must have been shot in Canada. Kansas does not look like that from the air!!! Also, you are probably familiar with the fact there are no straight roads but the interstates. All the surface roads follow property lines and unexpectedly make right angles.

BTW the geographical center of the US is in Kansas. All property surveys (NAD 27) are relative to that point.

Artemis
Who is now in search of the realSmallville.

Well, again, I'm seeing the world perspective from a state that's caddy-corner from Kansas, but....after years of working for the DOT and staring at highway maps, the flatter portions of this rural midwestern state are laid out in a perfect grid, with roads general following the section lines (in the township-range-section system). Most of those are gravel roads, tho a few are randomly paved.

You want to know what my biggest beef was with Smallville, besides the size being wrong and the corn being wrong? It's lacking something that I'll call a "midwestern sensibility." Supposedly everyone knows everyone else (another inconsistency - in a town of 40K, there's no way everyone could know everyone else, but in a town of 10K or so, they would) - Martha always seems to know about the freak of the week's mom or dad or what happened to them when they were little. Yet nobody seems to question the weird things that they seem to be able to do (except Chloe). Wouldn't somebody have noticed a long time ago that something in this town wasn't right?

Side note: I know the girl who plays Lana is Canadian, and Tom Welling is from Michigan (land o lots of tall pines).... In any case, this version of Kansas is better than the one on Lois and Clark (with the mountains looming in the background).

-Cindy

Artemis wrote:



Actually, Kansas has that distinction only if you ignore our two newest states. Castle Rock, South Dakota is the geographic center of the 50 states.

zimmo, you're right. I really meant the "lower 48" or the "continguous 48" states. (If any of our foreign friends are reading this, that means Hawaii and Alaska shifted the center of the US).
Cindy said
Right on. Because that was filmed outside LA in California on the western side of the Sierra Nevada. I've seen "Shuster's Field" on the "A-Team" and a bunch of other TV series.
And I sure agree about the ambiance of the town of Smallville not being midwestern.

Artemis

How about the fact that Clark and Lana could take a limo to Metropolis for the evening?!?! Which means that either Metropolis is in Kansas
or that Smallville isn't in Kansas.

oh...I forgot to sign my name

-Breanna

I think that *Smallville* is in Vancouver, BC Canada...