Conan the Barbarian was filmed across Spain: the Cimmerian village at Valsaín, the Wheel of Pain near Solosancho, the witch's rocks at the Ciudad Encantada, and the deserts, dunes and salt marshes of Almería.
The Hyborian Age is invented; every stop here is a real place. The route follows the film from the raid on Conan's village to the Mountain of Power, and ends at Shepperton Studios in England, where an older King Conan speaks the closing lines.
Detective Conan is the story of a teenage detective shrunk to a child's size, and its author comes from a small coastal town in Tottori, Japan. Gosho Aoyama was born in Daiei, now part of Hokuei, and the town has turned itself into Conan Town.
The route visits the birthplace, the Conan-themed station, the bridge, the manga museum and the airport that carries Conan's name. The sources do not tie any story scene to these places, so the stops mark the town's own tributes.
Hocus Pocus is set in Salem, Massachusetts, on Halloween, and filmed at Pioneer Village, Salem Common, the Ropes Mansion and Old Town Hall.
The route follows the film from the 1693 prologue at Pioneer Village through the high school on Essex Street, Salem Common, Old Burial Hill in Marblehead, Max's house on Ocean Avenue and the Ropes Mansion, then to the town party at Old Town Hall and the Park Plaza Hotel ballroom in Los Angeles. Most Salem scenes are exteriors; the interiors were studio work in Burbank.
On the night of 18 April 1775 Paul Revere was rowed across the Charles River, got a horse in Charlestown and rode west to warn John Hancock and Samuel Adams that British troops were on the move. He left three accounts of that night, and this route follows them rather than the poem.
It runs through nine places, from his house in North Square and the lanterns at Old North Church to the pasture in Lincoln where a British patrol stopped him, and on to Concord, which Samuel Prescott reached without him. Where a spot is only traditional, the stop says so.
The Hound of the Baskervilles takes Sherlock Holmes across Dartmoor: Cabell's tomb at Buckfastleigh, the ten-thirty train from Paddington, Princetown's prison and Hound Tor. A spectral hound stalks the moor.
The route runs from the grave that may have inspired the legend and the ten-thirty train from Paddington to the convict prison at Princetown, the mire, the tors and the Stapletons' house. Baskerville Hall and Merripit House exist only in the book, so their pins mark a stand-in or nothing at all.
A chance meeting at the Criterion Bar sends an army doctor just back from Afghanistan to a laboratory at St Bartholomew's Hospital, where a stranger grips his hand and observes: "You have been in Afghanistan, I perceive." Within days Dr Watson has moved into 221B Baker Street, the address where many of the stories begin, and off runs the canon: four novels and 56 short stories, all but one set between 1880 and 1914.
This route walks Holmes's London in the order the stories appeared: the Criterion where Watson met Stamford, the hospital of the famous first deduction, the Baker Street rooms that did not exist when Doyle wrote and are now a museum, Scotland Yard's Victorian headquarters on the Embankment, a society church where a bride vanishes, a silent club on Pall Mall, and the Underground station where a body fell from a train roof.
