Harmon Pet Care from “Fuller House”

Well, my fellow stalkers, I am finally home from my trip back east. Over the course of twelve days, the Grim Cheaper and I hit up Washington D.C., Baltimore and Philadelphia and stalked a myriad of locations in the process (I took close to 3,000 pictures! I’m shocked my computer didn’t crash when I uploaded them all!). Those posts will be coming soon. In the meantime, though, we had to scoot off on another quick trip (I swear I think I have traveled more this year than any year prior), so my friend, fellow stalker Michael, of countless The Brady Bunch posts fame (you can read them here, here, here and here) has graciously stepped in yet again with a slew of fabulous guest columns that I will be publishing over the course of this week. Thank you, Michael! So without further ado . . .

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I’m back for my fifth guest post. And brace yourself, it’s not about The Brady Bunch—what ever happened to predictability? I’ve flipped the calendar from the 70s to 2016 to cover a contemporary comedy, Fuller House, created and produced by the same folks that brought us Full House and starring most of the cast from the 90s classic.

I had anxiously awaited the release of the new series since it was first announced, even visiting Warner Bros. last winter (and again this summer, but that’s a story for another day) to get a better look at a backlot facade they’d built to stand in for the San Francisco-located home used on the original sitcom. I was looking forward to seeing how they’d incorporate the new facade into the program and how they’d redo the iconic opening titles.

Although I was pleased enough with the new show, I’ll admit I was a little disappointed that Fuller House didn’t go all out and create a multi-location opening title a la Full House, and instead went with a more modern opening without any on-site filming. The tenth episode, “A Giant Leap,” was filmed partly on location at AT&T Park in San Francisco, but even those scenes were limited to the ball park. The new series didn’t offer many new establishing shots to track down, and even the facade that had been built on the Warner Bros. backlot went mysteriously unused, while vintage footage of the San Francisco home was dusted off to establish scenes set in the iconic house.

Something new did catch my eye, though—an establishing shot used throughout the first season. D.J. Tanner—not to be confused with her sister Stephanie who’s now a D.J. spinning under the name D.J. Tanner—is a veterinarian working at Harmon Pet Care. And while all of the interior scenes were shot at Warner Bros. in Burbank, the establishing shot of the clinic was filmed in San Francisco’s Chinatown. Admittedly, it wasn’t much work to pin down this location. Paper lanterns, ornamental street lights, and a sign that reads “Welcome to Chinatown” left little doubt.

On my last visit to San Francisco, I headed to the Dragon’s Gate—the formal entrance to Chinatown, and the beginning of a major shopping artery. The Dragon’s Gate actually appeared in the unaired original pilot episode of Full House. Rather than send the cast to Northern California, production had body doubles for the actors filmed at quintessential San Francisco landmarks. These clips were then used extensively in the closing titles of the pilot, and some also reappeared in the first season opening and closing titles.

Continuing my walk, I quickly came upon the intersection shown in Fuller House—Grant Avenue and Sacramento Street, looking south.

As I started to line up the shot, I noticed something that I hadn’t at home. The Harmon Pet Care sign is mounted to an entirely different building than the building with the Harmon Pet Care awning. Because of the angle of the shot used on Fuller House, you can’t see much of the facade behind the sign. I imagined that the pet clinic signs were digitally added to to a piece of stock footage in post-production. My suspicions about the digital manipulation were confirmed when I noticed that among other changes, an awning at the end of the street in the clip is brown in the Fuller House clip, but is currently red, and has been for at least a couple of years before the production of the new show.

The Harmon Pet Care sign is superimposed over Old Shanghai, a home decor and fashion retailer.

And the awning is that of the Far East Café.

I didn’t dine at the Far East Café, so I can’t attest to their menu offerings, however I’ve read that it’s a particularly vintage restaurant and has some unique architecture. The building dates back to the early 1900s, while the restaurant opened in the 20s and some of the original decoration is even older having been imported from China.

The rest of the block and signage looks very similar to the Fuller House establishing shot.

The eighth episode, “Secrets, Lies and Firetrucks,” contains the only evening establishing shot of the pet clinic. For this footage, the camera was moved to the opposite end of the block.

It wasn’t until I was writing this post that I noticed an entirely different building was shown in an establishing shot for the season’s last episode, “Love Is in the Air.” Nearly all of the business names were digitally removed, but thankfully they left a visible address that allowed me to home in on the alternate location. For this clip, B & C Laundromat on Waverly Place stands in for Harmon Pet Care. The awning from the Far East Café footage was digitally reversed and placed above its entrance.

Editor’s Note – A big THANK YOU to Michael for sharing this fabulous post with us (especially the uh-ma-zing graphic below, which I’m enthralled with)!  I’m already looking forward to the rest of this week’s offerings! 

Stalk Them: Far East Café and Old Shanghai, aka Harmon Pet Care from Fuller House, are located at 631 and 645 Grant Avenue in San Francisco, respectively. B&C Laundromat, aka Harmon Pet Care from the “Love Is in the Air” episode, is located at 115 Waverly Place in San Francisco.