The 14 Dumbest Things In Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home

11. Bullitt Time In San Francisco

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Paramount Pictures

Movies routinely play fast and loose with geography when on location. The famous Bullitt car chase and the What’s Up Doc? parody of it both have the vehicles popping from one side of San Francisco to the other and back.

Kirk and company do the same when they walk from their illegally parked inviso-ship purportedly in Golden Gate Park and the next thing you know they are at the intersection of Columbus and Pacific, where Chinatown meets the Italian-American neighborhood of North Beach (the musical cue here is titled “Market Street” but it isn’t). This is nowhere near Golden Gate Park.

In fact, most open fields in that park are anywhere from 7 to 11 km (4.2 to 7 mi) from the corner where Kirk finally realizes “They’re still using money.” It’d take anywhere from an hour and a half to two hours to cover that distance on foot, and involve crossing major streets and passing dozens of newspaper boxes, That “double dumbass” action would have happened a dozen times before they got near the spot it actually happens.

Cute, but dumb.

But that’s not the only dumb geographic move in the movie…

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Maurice is one of the founders of FACT TREK (www.facttrek.com), a project dedicated to untangling 50+ years of mythology about the original Star Trek and its place in TV history. He's also a screenwriter, writer, and videogame industry vet with scars to show for it. In that latter capacity he game designer/writer on the Sega Genesis/SNES "Star Trek: Deep Space Nine — Crossroads of Time" game, as well as Dreamcast "Ecco the Dolphin, Defender of the Future" where Tom Baker performed words he wrote.