Local Reference

Every once in awhile, someone manages to overcome Creator Provincialism and make a show that takes place in a foreign country or other exotic locale and focuses on foreign characters. However, they often can't resist making some reference or connection to their home country. This can be as small as an offhand reference or as large as arbitrarily including a character from that area.

Basically, this is about stories that take place in other countries and focus on characters from other countries, but still mention the author or audience's home country in a non plot essential way. Basically a Shout-Out to the home country.

Related to But Not Too Foreign.

Examples of Local Reference include:

Anime and Manga

• The first Fullmetal Alchemist anime had one single offhand reference to an "eastern island" from which Shogi was imported.
• In JoJo's Bizarre Adventure, Hirohiko Araki always includes references to Japan or Japanese characters in every storyarc from Episode 3 on, whether the story is set in Japan or not. Some can be pretty sneaky references only people with knowledge of Japanese culture might get (Example: Guido Mista's belief in Four Is Death).

Film

• In the 2009 Sherlock Holmes movie, the villain mentions during his Evil Gloating that he has plans to take over America as well as Britain.
• The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. At the request of studio executives, the League included an American (Secret Service Agent Sawyer) so American audiences would have someone to identify with.
• Finding Nemo director Andrew Stanton is from Rockport, Massachussets, so he included several references to it, including lamp replicas of two lighthouses in nearby Thacher Island and a photograph of "Motif Number One", a local landmark, as well as lobsters with thick "Bahston" accents.
• In The Matrix the Wachowski brothers (who hail from Chicago) make reference to "the Loop" and various other downtown Chicago place names including Balbo Drive - Chicago is the only major city in the world with a street named Balbo. (Named after Mussolini's heir apparant during the 1933 "Century of Progress" Worlds Fair, on the occasion of his transatlantic flight from Rome to Chicago.)

Literature

• Jules Verne was a French author who wrote in French. Many of his stories had minor (at least non-protagonist) French characters alongside protagonists of other nationalities. Examples are Michel Ardan in From the Earth to the Moon and Jean Passepartout in Around the World in Eighty Days.
  • Averted in another Verne work, The Voyages and Adventures of Captain Hatteras. Verne's editor wanted him to include a French sailor in the crew, but Verne was determined to make it an entirely "English" story. (However, translator and editor William Butcher notes that Captain Hatteras himself displays traditionally "French" characteristics in his temperament, etc.)
• Author Patrick O'Brian's Irish ancestry and his move to a Catalan town in his youth show up in the character of Stephen Maturin, as part of the Aubrey-Maturin series.
• The Horatio Hornblower series of books and movies largely went out of their way to avoid referencing conflict between the United States of America and the British Empire, due to CS Forester's biggest market being the United States. It was also important for a variety of political reasons, given that the books were published during World War II and the early parts of the Cold War. The end result is that we largely never see the Americans, save for a number of cameos in various books, the most important such cameo being the USS Constitution in Hornblower And The Hotspur (changed to USS Liberty in the televised adaptation, Hornblower: Duty.)

Live Action TV

• Rome, despite being a BBC co-production with an almost full British cast and using different British accents to denote class differences between the characters, was notoriously devoid of references to the British Isles... except for one. When Agrippa declares his love for Octavia, he says that he would willingly travel to Hell, or even worse, Britannia, for her.

Pro Wrestling

• See: Cheap Heat.

Theatre

• In Fiddler on the Roof, America was mentioned several times.
• In Gilbert and Sullivan's The Mikado:

Ko-Ko: The fact is, he's gone abroad.
The Mikado: Gone abroad? His address!
Ko-Ko: Knightsbridge!

• • Knightsbridge is a district in London, which at the time of The Mikado's premiere was the site of a "Japanese village" exhibit. Newer productions generally substitute some local neighborhood for the reference.
  • Gilbert also has the daughters of the King in Utopia, Ltd. educated in England as an excuse for introducing English characters into the fictional South Sea island.
  • In an ironic subversion, Julia Jellicoe, the English actress working in the mythical Teutonic Grand Duchy of Pfennig-Halfpfennig in The Grand Duke, was played by a German actress!
• Shakespeare did this all the time. For example, in Hamlet, the king decides to send Hamlet to England because he is insane. The rationale is that Hamlet can recover there, and if he doesn't, nobody will notice since Englishmen are all mad anyway.
• The main character in David Mitchell's number9dream (set in Tokyo) lives above and works part-time at a video store that seems to specialize in foreign movies, allowing lots of references to Western pop culture.

Video Games

• The later Sakura Wars games, which are set in France (3, 4) and New York (V, Kimi Aru ga Tame), always include one Japanese party member (besides the PC, who is always Japanese; the player is supposed to identify with him, after all).

Western Animation

• Around the World with Willy Fog, a Spanish Animated Adaptation of Around the World in Eighty Days, adds a Spanish character, Tico, to the adventurers' party. At one point the heroes also encounter a Spanish balloonist, whom Tico enthusiastically greets as a compatriot.
• Animaniacs: When Rita and Runt go to Iraq, Rita sings that it doesn't look like Burbank, more like Van Nuys. (Both are suburbs of Los Angeles. You can guess which one has higher property values.)
• Beavis and Butthead at one point, encounters a VERY obscure, head-scratching example of this that left many viewers completely baffled and unaware of the meaning behind a single line for years. During one of their Music Video commentary segments, Beavis and Butt-Head watch a scene with elderly people. Beavis quips the line "I've got the V-C-Arrrrrr!!!" (VCR) in an extremely sarcastic voice. Butt-Head responds more or less with "Uhh What the hell are you talking about?". Beavis insists that it came from those old people "from that commercial.". Butt-Head insists that Beavis is making things up and he has no idea what he's talking about, he's never heard it before, and to shut up. Most viewers for the longest time had no idea what he meant by "I've Got The VCR". Especially anybody outside of a specific county in Albuquerque, Texas where a certain mercilessly overplayed amateurish local electronics store commercial from the early 90's, originated from.
• Ren and Stimpy character "George Liquor", (who only showed up in a handful of episodes, and whose actual name was never completely said to the audience due to some Executive Meddling by Nickelodeon censors) has a very strange name. The origin of the name, however, was the creator, John Kricfalusi, having seen the street sign for a local liquor store in Van Nuys, California (Where Kricfalusi lived at the time while pre-developing the series) that read "GEORGE LIQUOR". John K was astounded, and immensely amused by the liquor store owner not even bothering to have so much as a contraction in the title to declare ownership of the liquor store as "George's Liquor" and the name stuck.