San Angeles
Encyclopedia
Southern California
Southern California is a megaregion, or megapolitan area, in the southern area of the U.S. state of California. Large urban areas include Greater Los Angeles and Greater San Diego. The urban area stretches along the coast from Ventura through the Southland and Inland Empire to San Diego...
, United States
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
, typically configured by commentators and films producers to include the areas of Los Angeles
Los Ángeles
Los Ángeles is the capital of the province of Biobío, in the commune of the same name, in Region VIII , in the center-south of Chile. It is located between the Laja and Biobío rivers. The population is 123,445 inhabitants...
to San Diego and sometimes even San Bernardino
San Bernardino
San Bernardino, California is a large city in the Inland Empire Metropolitan Area of Southern California.San Bernardino may also refer to:-Landforms:*San Bernardino , a torrent that flows through the Italian province of Verbano-Cusio-Ossola...
to Riverside. Although Los Angeles and the West Coast
West Coast of the United States
West Coast or Pacific Coast are terms for the westernmost coastal states of the United States. The term most often refers to the states of California, Oregon, and Washington. Although not part of the contiguous United States, Alaska and Hawaii do border the Pacific Ocean but can't be included in...
have been treated as a futuristic concept geographic region by different names in other works — "Los Andiegoles" in the novel A Friend of the Earth
A Friend of the Earth
T. Coraghessan Boyle's novel A Friend of the Earth is a story of environmental destruction. The novel is set in 2025; as a result of global warming and the greenhouse effect, the climate has drastically changed, and, accordingly, biodiversity is a thing of the past.-America in 2025:Due to habitat...
, "Rattown" in the novel Dr. Adder
K. W. Jeter
Kevin Wayne Jeter is an American science fiction and horror author known for his literary writing style, dark themes, and paranoid, unsympathetic characters...
, and "Mega City 2" in the movie Judge Dredd
Judge Dredd (film)
Judge Dredd is a 1995 American science fiction action film directed by Danny Cannon, and starring Sylvester Stallone, Diane Lane, Rob Schneider, Armand Assante, and Max von Sydow. The film is based on the strip of the same name in the British comic 2000 AD...
— San Angeles remains the more popular identifying description.
Fiction
San Angeles was first conceived as a setting for the 1982 movie Blade RunnerBlade Runner
Blade Runner is a 1982 American science fiction film directed by Ridley Scott and starring Harrison Ford, Rutger Hauer, and Sean Young. The screenplay, written by Hampton Fancher and David Peoples, is loosely based on the novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K...
in an early script. Ten years later, the 1993 script for the 1994 movie Double Dragon
Double Dragon (film)
Double Dragon is a 1994 live-action film loosely based on the Double Dragon video game series. This film was directed by James Yukich and stars Mark Dacascos and Scott Wolf as brothers Jimmy and Billy Lee, along with Alyssa Milano as Marian Delario and Robert Patrick as antagonist Koga Shuko...
, post-earthquake California merged Los Angeles and San Diego into one megalopolis
Megalopolis (city type)
A megalopolis is typically defined as a chain of roughly adjacent metropolitan areas. The term was used by Oswald Spengler in his 1918 book, The Decline of the West, and Lewis Mumford in his 1938 book, The Culture of Cities, which described it as the first stage in urban overdevelopment and...
called San Angeles, half of which was under water. At about the same time, the San Angeles concept city also was used in the 1993 movie Demolition Man
Demolition Man (film)
Demolition Man is a 1993 American, science fiction action film directed by Marco Brambilla, and starring Sylvester Stallone and Wesley Snipes. Sandra Bullock, Nigel Hawthorne, and Denis Leary co-star....
, where the earthquake-destroyed Los Angeles of 2010 was replaced by the city San Angeles that stretched from San Diego to Santa Barbara. The Demolition Man/San Angeles, a modified Irvine, California
Irvine, California
Irvine is a suburban incorporated city in Orange County, California, United States. It is a planned city, mainly developed by the Irvine Company since the 1960s. Formally incorporated on December 28, 1971, the city has a population of 212,375 as of the 2010 census. However, the California...
set in the year 2032, maintained a police force called "SaPD" (for San Angeles Police Department), which used black and white, gull-winged cars having SaPD emblazoned on them. The 1993 Demolition Man movie also set the fictional Arnold Schwarzenegger Presidential Museum in San Angeles, even though Arnold Schwarzenegger's
Arnold Schwarzenegger
Arnold Alois Schwarzenegger is an Austrian-American former professional bodybuilder, actor, businessman, investor, and politician. Schwarzenegger served as the 38th Governor of California from 2003 until 2011....
first run for political office would not be for another ten years.
In 2000, the Icebox.com live-action Web series "The Hanged Man" positioned fictional detective Hugo Manes as being from the San Angeles Police Department. In 2001, American printmaker
Printmaking
Printmaking is the process of making artworks by printing, normally on paper. Printmaking normally covers only the process of creating prints with an element of originality, rather than just being a photographic reproduction of a painting. Except in the case of monotyping, the process is capable...
Edward Ruscha
Edward Ruscha
Edward Joseph Ruscha IV is an American artist associated with the Pop art movement. He has worked in the media of painting, printmaking, drawing, photography, and film. Ruscha lives and works in Culver City, California...
released a series of seven postcard-size color etchings that he entitled "Los Francisco San Angeles" to reflect how the etchings made light of the cultural distance between Northern California and Southern California. Ruscha's concept Los Francisco San Angeles was analyzed in 2004 for Arts & Activities Magazine http://www.artsandactivities.com/ by Tara Cady Sartorius, Curator of Education at the Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts
Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts
The Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts is a museum located in Montgomery, Alabama, USA, featuring several art collections. For seventy years, the Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts has been a showcase for the visual arts in Central Alabama...
.
San Angeles is also the fictional home town of Power Rangers: Operation Overdrive
Power Rangers: Operation Overdrive
Power Rangers Operation Overdrive is an American television program, the fifteenth installment in the Power Rangers franchise based on the Super Sentai series GoGo Sentai Boukenger, which is also the thirtieth entry and anniversary of that franchise. It premiered on February 26, 2007...
.
Non-fiction
In addition to uses of San Angeles by the entertainment industry, political causes and businesses alike have adopted the concept. For example, in April 1989, Camp Pendleton was viewed as the last remaining open-space barrier against a future "San Angeles" composed of Southern California boom and sprawl from Santa Barbara to the Mexican border. In 2002, environmentalist and commentator Tershia d'Elgin described a then-recent federal district court ruling on the Endangered Species Act of 1973Endangered Species Act
The Endangered Species Act of 1973 is one of the dozens of United States environmental laws passed in the 1970s. Signed into law by President Richard Nixon on December 28, 1973, it was designed to protect critically imperiled species from extinction as a "consequence of economic growth and...
related to paving over land as promising "to transform our county into El Toro too. Everything that has made San Diego worth living in will be gone. It will become San Angeles." That same year, the 2002 political movement to have San Fernando Valley seceded from Los Angeles to become an independent incorporated city of its own suggested San Angeles as the potential new name for the proposed incorporated city. However, "San Angeles" ranked ninth in popularity behind the name "San Fernando Valley" in a field of eleven potential names. Along with the proposed "Los Fernando", "San Angeles" was viewed as an absurd juxtaposition which made no sense at all in Spanish.
In 2006, Marissa Mayer
Marissa Mayer
Marissa Ann Mayer is Vice President of Location and Local Services at the search engine company Google. She has become one of the public faces of Google, providing a number of press interviews and appearing at events frequently to speak on behalf of the company.-Education and career :After...
Google
Google Inc. is an American multinational public corporation invested in Internet search, cloud computing, and advertising technologies. Google hosts and develops a number of Internet-based services and products, and generates profit primarily from advertising through its AdWords program...
's then 31-year-old product-launch czar, seized on the San Angeles concept to describe how Google might modify its home page:
We're still not ready to make really fundamental changes and blast all of our products on our home page. [But] there are a few key concepts I've been thinking about in terms of how we can change navigation on our site. One is what I would call the San Angeles or Los Diego strategy. You take large product and merge them together into the biggest possible nucleus. So if you took San Diego and Los Angeles together and merged them into one mega-city, that's even bigger and more memorable than the two cities independently... It is hard for people to remember more than 5 or 10 products from a particular company. If we can take each of the products we have and make them even larger and more meaningful to people, I think there’s a lot of benefit that could be had by both the users, because they don’t have to remember quite as much.