The virtual Culver City of Laurel and Hardy

That clip I posted a while back of Laurel and Hardy kicking out the jams to the accompaniment of the Gap Band led me to this interesting little oddity. In 1999, Piet Schreuders presented the Dutch TV documentary The Shortest Main Street in the World. In it he journeyed to America to visit the section of Culver City where Laurel and Hardy shot a lot of their movies. Taking his fannish enthusiam to impressive extremes, he even created a detailed, 3D model of the neighborhood as it would have appeared in Laurel and Hardy's day. I live in a part of LA not too far from Culver City, and it's a strange thrill to see the True Value store and other perfectly humdrum local buildings rendered in digital form and obsessed over like this.

A lot of outsiders knock Los Angeles, and even the people who live here make a lot of bad jokes to the effect that this town is full of Paris Hiltons. But those jokes have nothing to do with the LA I know, and I wouldn't live anywhere else, not for nothin'.

I go to some random corner to mail my electric bill, and I'm standing on the spot where Laurel and Hardy got chased by a goat. Beat that, you smug San Francisco so-and-so's.



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