But today, that depiction is as divorced from reality as the plot of Iron Fist is divorced from entertainment.

Over the years, Hell's Kitchen has really gotten its act together. Crime is down 64 percent compared to 40 years ago. Murder is down 75 percent, burglaries 85 percent, and car thefts have fallen a whopping 92 percent. Honestly, the employment opportunities for evil ninjas in the area are pretty dismal.

Roger Rowlett/Wikimedia Commons

With crime down so low, the property values in Hell's Kitchen have skyrocketed, a process helped by the wide range of cultural amenities available in the area, including easy access to Broadway, nightclubs, and LGBT-friendly businesses. A studio apartment costs about $300,000 to own, though the median price is three times that, and rents start at $1,600/month. Family homes are all in the $3-4 million range. That's why most of the criminal acts committed in Hell's Kitchen today (which the residents prefer to call "Clinton") are property crime. Basically, Hell's Kitchen doesn't need Daredevil. It needs ADT.

Say, how many people live in Appalachia anyway? Ten, twenty thousand? Can't be more than 50,000 inbred bumpkins ... right? A 2011 census puts the population at over 25 million hillbilly souls, approximately 13 percent of the U.S. population. Oh, and about 1,000,000 of them are Hispanic/Latino. So yes, there are almost certainly more than seven last names in Appalachia.

Now, it is true that the Appalachian region has seen an increase in violence and property crimes over the years, but even so, those rates are still well below the national average. What Hollywood has gotten right: the poverty. While around 21 percent of Appalachian dwellers have bachelor's or master's degrees, education and job training in the area is still directed towards failing industries, like logging or coal mining. Google and other companies have been trying to bring tech jobs to the region, but the progress there has been slow. Not because of mountain cannibals, but because infrastructure is tough to build. The hillfolk's struggle to run fiber optics through their rusty fucksheds in order to bring tech jobs to Pig Knuckle, Alabama makes for a less dramatic movie, though.

The building has become an iconic symbol of Eastern European Imperialism, which is really weird, because the actual Kremlin is about 100 times more imposing than the quaint and colorful church you see above:

Alexandergusev/Wikimedia Commons

The thing we most associate with the cold fist of the Russian government is, in fact, not the Kremlin at all. It's Saint Basil's Cathedral, and while it overlooks the Kremlin, it's not part of it. The modern Kremlin is essentially a city within a city, surrounded by the ornate Kremlin Wall, which houses gardens, cathedrals, and palaces like the Grand Kremlin Palace, the official residence of the President of Russia.

Ed Yourdon/Wikimedia Commons

In reality, the nearby overlooked cathedral is way more interesting, and without it there would never have been a need for a bell tower, leaning or otherwise, but it rarely shows up in pop culture. And all because it didn't suck and fall over.

While no longer surrounded by the Mexican army, the Alamo is besieged by a collection of fast food restaurants, tourist traps, and a Ripley's Believe It or Not. The modern surroundings of the Alamo are reportedly pretty jarring to most new visitors, though it shouldn't really be a surprise that the world around the site has moved on. Well, maybe the word "around" is incorrect, because much of the town has actually been built on top of the original Alamo Mission.

The iconic Alamo building we picture from the movies is, in reality, just the mission chapel. It was central to the defense of the settlement, but the compound that it served was much larger than what you see today. It's just that huge parts of it were deemed "less iconic" than the stone church, and have since been paved over and forgotten in the name of progress. But even the chapel doesn't look as it did during the actual battle of the Alamo. Since 1836, there have been numerous revisions to the building: a roof was added, facades were put up and then torn down, buildings were added and removed -- even the iconic curved parapet at the top wasn't added until the 1850s.

Via Wikimedia Commons

Jacob Lewis is the sole writer at It's All Clown Shoes, the co-creator of the hit television series Alias and Lost, and the defendant in no less than 36 Intellectual Property related lawsuits brought by J. J. Abrams and Bad Robot... for unknown reasons.

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