Die Hard, the 1988 action classic, doesn't scream L.A. when you first think of it. A tough-as-nails Bruce Willis goes about wrecking the plans of a nefarious outfit of German terrorists who have taken over a shiny but unremarkable office building (Fox Plaza, standing in for the fictional Nakatomi Plaza) over the Christmas holiday. The action and suspense is all indoors, with the hapless LAPD milling around outside. But perhaps there's a larger truth here about a city, which, as is oft said, isn't really a city as much as an endless stretch of suburbs threaded together by numbing highways. Maybe Los Angeles really is like a faceless structure, filled with a few leather-clad Europeans carrying some incendiary baggage. Besides, Willis' character, officer John McClane, is like a lot of other L.A. residents: from New York City, and on holiday.
Top 10 Cities That Need Statues from '80s Movies
A tongue-in-cheek online campaign to get a statue of RoboCop erected in Detroit has turned into a citywide debate. But if the title character from the 1987 dystopian movie is honored, maybe other characters should be immortalized too. TIME takes a look at other towns that could use a new pop-culture statue