Castle title card
Today I’m going to be talking about the ABC television program Castle, starring favorite Nathan Fillion. No spoilers will follow, since I haven’t watched the show yet. (I’ve been aware of it since he mentioned it in an interview a while back when he said his mom had a Google Alert for the show (Hi Mrs. Fillion!), and it’s been on my to-watch list.)
While glancing at the show’s Wikipedia entry last night, I noticed the title card for the show. It immediately struck me as odd for a number of reasons.
Two landmarks are easily identifiable, the Brooklyn Bridge and the Empire State Building. So first, I think “Okay, Empire State Building, this is a view of the Manhattan skyline from the Brooklyn side of the bridge.” However, that doesn’t work because a picture taken from around Empire Fulton Ferry State Park (which is where it would likely need to be taken from to get that angle of the bridge) wouldn’t have the Empire State Building in the background, since that’s way up at 5th Avenue and West 34th Street. It would also have all of the tall downtown buildings in the background, which it doesn’t.
At this point, I also notice that the East River is wrong, as we can see the reflection of the first bridge pillar in the water, but if we were really on the Brooklyn side that pillar closest to us is on land, so we couldn’t see a reflection. So if that pillar closest to us is reflected in the water, the image of the bridge must be from the Manhattan side.
CC-by-nc-sa-2.0 photo by FromTheNorth
The Brooklyn skyline from that area doesn’t look like the one in the title card either, and I still haven’t figured out where that’s from.
So basically, what we have is 1) an image of the south side of the Brooklyn Bridge taken from the Manhattan side of the East River with a skyline in the background that doesn’t jive with the actual background of that area and 2) the Empire State Building plopped in.
What I can say though, after all this research, is that they fixed issue 2 in the second season’s title card.
That’s progress. Though I do wonder what precipitated the change.