In what must rate as once of the world’s worst staged fights, in the Star Trek episode “Arena”, Captain James T. Kirk fights for his life with the Gorn warrior on the strange alien planet. Turns out this alien planet is really just a part of the San Andreas fault in southern California.

Named after a renown stagecoach robber called Tiburcio Vasquez, who hid out there in the 1870s; Vasquez rocks is now municipal park owned by LA and has become a kind of visual in-joke for science fiction.

The second you see it poking up next to the freeway, you realize you have seen it a million times in nearly every movie and TV show ever made.

Used in the original Star Trek, The Next Generation, and the newest movie, as well as Austin Powers, Short Circuit, Army of Darkness and Bill and Ted’s Bogus Journey and tons more. It has become such an extremely popular filming location in part due to it being within the Thirty Mile Zone, or the TMZ, basically a 30 mile radius from the intersection of La Cienega Blvd and West Beverly Blvd. Production companies don’t have to pay extra travel costs to crew as long a it is within the TMZ.