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Homemade Inventions
- 545 statements
- 105 feature instances
- 98 referencing feature instances
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Who says you need a billion-dollar grant to build cool inventions? As every wacky scientist knows, advanced inventions can be, in the words of Robert Zemeckis, "built in somebody's garage". Want your own spaceship? Shrink Ray? Time Machine? The spare parts lying around in your basement should be sufficient. Of course, Homemade Inventions won't be perfect. Due to being built out of various mechanical parts, they will have a "cobbled together" look. (If this occurs in a film, you can bet the art department had a lot of fun with it.) Sometimes, they'll work in a far more elaborate and convoluted manner than their purpose would seem to require; their power source may be as humble as the family pet in an exercise wheel. Still, they will nearly always work and, when they don't, they'll fail spectacularly. These inventions will probably be created by the Bungling Inventor, The Professor, or the Teen Genius. More than half the time, these inventors will neglect to make sure that they know how to reconstruct their inventions. And, of course, the inventors won't try to use their unbelievable science-defying constructions to solve the problems of the world and help mankind or exploit them to gain fame and riches. In certain settings, however, these homemade inventions are weapons. The reasons greatly differ from setting to setting, from proper firearms being a rarity in a post-societal collapse or a Gadgeteer Genius / The Engineer whipping up something to defend themselves from an opponent, dangerous and life-threatening or otherwise. The construction of these weapons, sometimes range from somewhat plausible to outright impossible. See also: Bamboo Technology, MacGyvering and Homemade Flamethrower. Compare Gadgeteer Genius and Doom It Yourself. Related to and may overlap with Improvised Weapon. For the fantasy equivalent, see Improvised Golems. |
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In Narbonic, Dave tries to fix a friend's microwave and ends up creating an interdimensional portal that causes his gaming group to be attacked by angels. (Guess what was wrong with the microwave? It was unplugged.) Guess what is wrong with Dave? He's a Mad Physicist this close to awakening. This ability shows up for most mad scientists as they "awaken". Helen Narbon (whose specialty is biology) created life - horrible, tentacled, man-eating lifeforms - from the food in an Italian restaurant's kitchen, plus hand soap (antibacterial, it had triclosan) and paper towels from their women's restroom. |
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In Zoey 101, Mad Scientist Quinn is constantly inventing something new—things she calls "Quinnventions." However, none of them ever turn out the way she wants to. In one instance, she almost blew up the school! | |
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Tony in Real Life Comics is known to do this with alarming frequency. And half of them are about 50% bubblegum. And old modems. | |
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The Haunted Carousel features Miles the Magnificent Memory Machine, a riddle-spouting robot built from an old oven, bicycle parts, and the trumpet of a gramophone. | |
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Discussed in How to Be a Superhero as a way for cash-strapped heroes to get by, whether it's with homemade equipment or self-inflicted Cyborging... | |
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Dark Chronicle: You see a belt, a milk can, and a pipe. Max sees a renewable energy pack for his personal mecha —which is also built out of a barrel (or a refrigerator,) piping, and traffic lights for eyes. | |
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| Homemade Inventions / int_1966ab8e | type |
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The Junkman, from Astro City, has this as his theme. After being forced to retire, he decided to show the world the foolishness of throwing things away. He robs a bank with toy soldiers made into miniature robots, an Etch-a-Sketch repurposed as a fluoroscope, and other equally recycled equipment. | |
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Riff's inventions in Sluggy Freelance sometimes invoke this trope. | |
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The Good Robot Usses from Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey. Despite being made out of random items from a hardware store, their quality can be justified as they were made by the smartest being in the universe. | |
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The jetcar in The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension. We actually see a mechanic working on it in Buckaroo's garage. | |
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In Jagged Alliance 2 you could make a barrel extender out of a tube, glue, and duct tape (never mind it's not rifled and somehow the perfect caliber no matter what weapon you put it on). You could also make a rod-and-spring attachment, and build a fully functional X-Ray scanner out of a Lame Boy, a Fumble Pack, wires, chewing gum, and an X-ray lamp. Worked on AA batteries. | |
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Data has many of these in The Goonies, although, most of them are carried in his jacket. | |
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Taken: In "Jacob and Jesse", Sally Clarke builds a radio transmitter in her shed in the hope of contacting John so that he will come back for her and Jacob and bring them to his planet. | |
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Heart of Darkness, featuring Andy the kid genius. Among his inventions are a cobbled-together interdimensional vessel, a plasma-gun, and a control-helmet made from a colander. | |
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Gary in TRU-Life Adventures built half a time machine in his apartment as part of a revenge scheme against the toy store. | |
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The Simpsons: In a Treehouse of Horror episode, Homer made a time machine out of his toaster. By accident. The season ten episode "The Wizard of Evergreen Terrace" note The episode where Homer becomes a Thomas Edison-esque inventor after hearing on the radio that the life expectancy of males is somewhere in the '70s, and Homer realizes that he's at the halfway point of his life and he hasn't done anything that would be considered memorable after his death was all about Homer creating homemade (and really dangerous and/or useless) inventions, such as the makeup gun and the "Everything's OK" alarm. |
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The Scifi Channel's series Eureka is about a whole town full of genius inventors, all busily cooking up amazing stuff (and amazing trouble) in their garages. One of the main characters even works out of an auto shop. | |
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However, no matter how many internet crackpots claim otherwise, you still can't build a jetpack in your garage, as the MythBusters proved. Well, at least not one that works. |
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In Ah! My Goddess, Skuld creates a de-bugger out of a rice cooker. | |
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In The Phantom Menace, Anakin Skywalker built a functioning humanoid robot with full human-like AI, and what must have been a super-sonic racer, all on a son-of-a-slave's budget before his voice broke. | |
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Meet the Robinsons: The Memory Scanner, while the Time Machine is just a jury-rigged family car. | |
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In Beauty and the Beast, Maurice's wood-chopping machine is made from various household items, including an old-fashioned wood stove, a teapot, a chair, and of course an axe. | |
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Rick and Morty: Rick's space-car is apparently one of these: | |
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In the early days of Dilbert, the title character regularly built strange-looking inventions with (occasionally) even stranger purposes, such as a trash compactor that can pack two tons of garbage into the volume of an ordinary brick or talking robot dog. | |
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Just about all of the devisers and gadgeteers in the Whateley Universe start out like this, since no one knows they have a superpower until they've built a robot out of old junk from their basement, or whatever. The deviser Knick-Knack still builds stuff that looks like this, including a capture bubble that looks like a lava lamp, and a laser hidden in a Harry Potter souvenir wand. | |
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Timmy's Dad on The Fairly Oddparents makes several of these. Most of them blow up. It hurts him when his family tries to use real technology, though not as much as his inventions hurt them. Once, after successfully assembling a personal computer out of a typewriter and a television: |
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The Cram-o-matic in Pokémon Sword and Shield, a device built by Teen Genius Hyde, consists of a rice cooker attached to a fuel tank, an upside-down blue plastic bucket, and a series of duct piping that together vaguely resemble the Pokémon Cramorant. You can feed the Cram-o-matic up to four pieces of random items, and it will synthesize a newer, usually much more powerful item, out of them. | |
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Iron Man: Tony Stark builds the first Iron Man suit out of spare weapons parts. It's much cruder than his later versions, but it gets the job done and breaks him out of captivity. Similarly, his Evil Counterpart Ivan Vanko/Whiplash seemingly just slapped an arc reactor together out of stuff in his garage. | |
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In Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers, Billy often built inventions in his garage. | |
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In the The Big Bang Theory episode "The Luminous Fish Effect", Sheldon's mother reveals that at the age of thirteen Sheldon built a nuclear reactor in a shed. Unfortunately for Sheldon, his efforts to obtain enriched uranium were discovered by the authorities, who put an end to the project.note This is Very Loosely Based on a True Story; see the Real Life section below, except Sheldon probably made less of a mess. | |
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The Astronaut Farmer builds a spacecraft on his farm, though he orders parts that aren't on hand, like fuel and a rocket. | |
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EarthBound (1994): Any broken item "fixed" by Jeff. | |
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The Twilight Zone (1985): In "The World Next Door", Barney Schlessinger spends all of his free time in his basement building impractical inventions such as a wind-up mechanical orchid and a missile used to kill mice. The mouse missile worked as it should but it left small mouse parts everywhere. | |
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Even the animated version of Gyro Gearlose in DuckTales (1987) would build all sorts of stuff as cheaply as possible. Possibly justified since his employer was such a cheapskate. | |
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The inventions of Gyro Gearloose in the Disney Ducks Comic Universe comic books. This is especially intriguing in Don Rosa's version of Duckburg which has a distinct timeline where all the adventures take place in the 1960s, but thanks to Gyro Gearloose, all modern technology (and indeed, technology yet to be) can be represented. However, Rosa has made some specifications to what Gyro can't do: he can make a functional time machine, but not an interstellar spaceship. So far he hasn't created a computer with a display, either, although he completely accidentally created a functional AI (Little Helper). He did create an interstellar spaceship, but not every story is Barks-Rosa canon... Well, the talk was about Barks-Rosa canon - most writers apart from Rosa set the stories in pseudo-present day, in any case. If Duck-stories in general are a subject, then Gyro can do anything that the current writer wants from him. |
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Fallout 3 allows you to collect various "schematics" for weapons, which you can then build from the junk that clutters the environment. The results resemble this trope. Good examples include the shishkebab (basically a lawnmower rotor blade connected to the petrol tank of a motorbike to form a flaming sword), the Rock-It-Launcher, which is built from a vacuum cleaner (amongst other things) and can fire pretty much anything you find lying around, a rifle that shoots railroad spikes, a landmine (made out of a lunchbox, a cherry bomb, a sensor, and a few bottle caps) that's about five times stronger than ordinary landmines and has roughly the same firepower of a mini nuke as well as, of course, the Nuka-Cola Grenade that's made with turpentine, Abraxo cleaner and the radioactive variant of Nuka-Cola in a tin can. When thrown, it explodes in a giant blue fireball, with lingering radioactive damage afterward. There's also the series-wide pipe gun weapons, which are cobbled together out of various scavenged piping, lumber, bolts, and springs. | |
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Jimmy Neutron does this all the time. | |
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The prototype in The First Run was made from Scraps from junkyards, trucks, telecom stations, old fighter jets, all recycled. | |
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How the main characters make their living in Each Little Universe. Some are more 'homemade' than others, such as the Bedsheet-Tablecloth-Whiteboard (really just a laminated sheet), and they've had varying degrees of financial success. Most of the items mentioned in the early story are Played for Laughs, although some of them do reappear much later. Notably, the Enchi-Ladder, a throwaway pun from near the start of the story, comes in handy, while the Octobike - an insistently indefinite contraption first mentioned in the very first line of the novel and never taken seriously - comes back in a big way when it's needed. | |
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Well, there's Commander Keen's Bean-With-Bacon Megarocket, which is capable of interstellar travel (at well above lightspeed, obviously). It was made from, among other things, his mom's vacuum cleaner, a Nintendo controller, and his dad's lawnmower. | |
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In The Sims 3 add-on "Ambitions" the new skill and career choice allows Sims to invent a time machine with nothing a single work table and some scrap metal. | |
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Stargate SG-1: In one episode, an alien takes refuge in Carter's house. While there he managed to grow an emerald the size of a tennis ball using Carter's microwave and then later borrows her toaster for parts to make a stargate. Well, that and several thousand dollars' worth of specially ordered parts that he got over the Internet, but hey... Due to the lack of available DHD on hand, the SGC spent fifteen years and millions of dollars cobbling together their own dialing computer, while a large part of the base contains the necessary equipment to maintain the gate's extensive power requirements. All to replace something that does both and is the size of a small table. |
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Gilligan's Island, of course. As has often been remarked, the Professor can make a radio out of baling wire and coconuts but can't fix a two-foot hole in a boat. | |
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Erwin the sentient AI in User Friendly, especially considering he was programmed in COBOL by a sentient life form born from lint and dust accumulated in a server casing. Some of the various bodies he builds for himself may also count - Lego Mindstorms battlemech, anyone? | |
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The spaceship from Explorers, which was built from a Tilt-a-Whirl and an Apple IIc. | |
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The A-Team lived and breathed this trope. The team, with B.A. in the lead, would put together whatever into an improvised weapon to use against the slimeballs of the week. | |
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Monster Warriors is probably the worst offender. Not only Tabby can make laser weapons out of plastic bottles and a blender in a matter of seconds, but she is always able to find a huge pile of trash everywhere. Mainly because Luke's hobby is to collect it inside his house and car. | |
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Bioshock: Some of the weapons have this about them. The grenade launcher, for instance, looks like a wooden gunstock with part of a stovepipe, some wires, and a 9-volt battery attached. You can even craft these at U-Invent machines, provided you've picked up enough leftover parts along the way. | |
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One playable character in Resident Evil: Outbreak can assemble a stun rod from a car battery and a metal pipe. Of course, since there's a Zombie Apocalypse going on, improvisation is key. | |
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This is usually what Phineas and Ferb are going to do today. Phineas and Ferb are actually a brilliant subversion because while they make stuff at home, and often use rather unusual components, they are constantly having (usually industrial-grade) supplies delivered and as a result, their inventions tend to be more reliable and less Rube Goldbergian than most examples. |
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Kat's anti-gravity device in Gunnerkrigg Court, which she somehow made out of a thermos and coat hangers. | |
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Our Miss Brooks: It happens a few times on the series: "In Living Statues", Walter Denton creates a paint to buffer up worn and scratched wallpapers and walls. Unfortunately, he adds "Jeffrey's Marine" (aka rubber cement) to the mixture. "Dying Easter Eggs" has Walter create a 24-hour delayed-action Easter Egg dye. Hilarity ensues when Stretch Snodgrass accidentally fills the soap dispenser at Mrs. Davis' with the invention. In "Transition Show", Mr. Munsee is shown to have many childish, cobbled-together inventions. One of them is a robot that only sharpens pencils. |
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The title character of The Red Green Show devoted an entire segment of each episode (and later multiple segments of each episode) to homemade inventions that could be built with a pile of junk and some duct tape. A choice example is Red's showing the audience how to make their own backhoe using a luxury car, a Thighmaster, a folding ladder, a trash can, some clothesline pulleys, and a lot of duct tape. | |
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Fred Flintstone occasionally delved into this. They work... just as well as one would expectnote Including his wife Wilma... | |
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Homemade Inventions | |
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Star Trek: Faster-Than-Light Travel is invented this way, according to Star Trek: First Contact. Well, sort of. The main body of the ship is an old missile, which is pretty much beyond the realm of your average homemade invention, but Lily mentions that "it took me six months to scrounge up enough titanium just to build a four-meter cockpit." In Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, Khan and his followers had to fashion protective gear from what they had when Ceti Alpha VI exploded and their planet turned into a desert with constant lethal dust storms. (The mask Khan wears appear to be off-center, made from some other piece of gear with a view slit punched through it.) |
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Homemade Inventions | |
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In Wario: Master of Disguise, Wario invents a device in his back room that lets him warp into his TV so he can appear on a Show Within a Show and become a Phantom Thief. | |
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Homemade Inventions | |
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Most of the BOYZZ bots of The Bots Master look like they were welded together from spare parts from a junkyard. Justified because Teen Genius protagonist ZZ initially designed them as robot buddies using only his personal resources. But after being refitted for combat, these walking scrapheaps can go toe-to-toe with the industrial-built Mecha-Mooks of the evil RM corporation. | |
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In Honey, I Shrunk the Kids, Wayne invents a Shrink Ray in his attic. It takes massive providence to get it working, but still, shrink ray. Averted in the sequel, though: his achievement has gotten him work at a massive tech conglomerate and he continues to improve the device there. | |
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This is a staple ability of Sparks (mad scientists) in Girl Genius, especially Agatha. | |
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The Back to the Future trilogy, of course. In addition to the functional DeLorean time machine. In fact in the DVD Commentary, Bob Gale and Bob Zemeckis pointed out this Trope's role in history and decided that having Doc build it in his garage was the best way to go. If the government built one it wouldn't work, and if a corporation built one, that would be too scary. Doc Brown's other inventions are also obviously made in his house. While perhaps not technically an invention, the ice maker Doc in Back to the Future Part III makes while in the Wild West is probably a good example. He presumably already knew how to make such a thing, but it was far larger and more convoluted than it needed to be, due to some of the necessary parts not having been invented yet. |
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Padma Maharassa of Friendly Hostility uses a variation on this. Despite being a genuine engineering genius who has worked for the government before (for obscene amounts of money), all of his inventions, homemade or not, have a disquieting tendency to, well... eject toast. Why this is so is open to speculation, although it has been suggested that Padma simply really likes toast. | |
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Kim Possible: Wade does it. The Tweebs do it. Evil!Ron does it. | |
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The Incredible Worlds Of Wally Mc Doogle: Wally McDoogle]uses a time machine made out of a toaster, a vacuum cleaner, and a TV remote. He received this gadget from his future self, who had created it accidentally by trying to fix all three devices at the same time. Granted, he's supposed to be insanely klutzy. Enough so that it's surprising that he, his family, and his friends are even still alive after five minutes. | |
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The Tommyknockers: After being exposed to the effect of an alien spacecraft, the people in the small town of Haven build all kinds of futuristic devices made out of household appliances and largely powered by batteries, occasionally supplemented by the odd Forsaken Child. | |
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Primer. A couple of engineers accidentally build a time machine in their garage! | |
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The robots from Mystery Science Theater 3000. As the theme song from the early seasons explained: Not only are the characters themselves built out of spare stuff lying around in-universe, but show creator Joel Hodgson built the puppet props the same way in his garage in about two days. |
|
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Homemade Inventions | |
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While perhaps not technically an invention, the ice maker Doc in Back to the Future Part III makes while in the Wild West is probably a good example. He presumably already knew how to make such a thing, but it was far larger and more convoluted than it needed to be, due to some of the necessary parts not having been invented yet. | |
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In Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, Khan and his followers had to fashion protective gear from what they had when Ceti Alpha VI exploded and their planet turned into a desert with constant lethal dust storms. (The mask Khan wears appear to be off-center, made from some other piece of gear with a view slit punched through it.) | |
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That is the way most technology in Arcanum: Of Steamworks & Magick Obscura works. Half of the parts used in making technology items can be found in a garbage bin. Some others must be bought, though. And all of the recipes can be assembled in a complete wilderness without access to anything like a workshop. | |
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Huey of The Boondocks created the Black Power Fist, basically a taser built into a glove, at home. Justified in that he did not invent it but found instructions on the Internet, and that it was specifically designed to be built from cheap and readily-available materials. Still impressive given his age and lack of any previously-mentioned mechanical background. | |
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Star Trek: The Original Series: In "The City at the Ege of Forever", when Kirk and Spock are stuck in the 1930s without computer equipment because the Enterprise was erased from history, Spock builds a "mnemonic memory circuit" using "stone knives and bearskins". Naturally, it works just long enough for them to determine what changed the timeline before exploding spectacularly. | |
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Quinn Mallory, hero of Sliders, built a cross-dimensional portal in his mother's basement. | |
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In Despicable Me, Gru has to resort to this to build his rocket after he fails to get funding from the Bank of Evil. | |
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These were Joe's stock in trade on NewsRadio. The gag with Joe was that he would build absolutely everything himself, even gadgets that could be easily and cheaply obtained from a store. | |
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Rugrats: Stu Pickles attempts this many times. Almost all of them fail with hilarious results. | |
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Chitty Chitty Bang Bang: Caractacus' works exhibit this, such as his automated breakfast maker. | |
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Niea from Niea_7 tries to build UFOs from scrap parts. In the end, she makes one that actually works. Almost, anyway. | |
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Homemade Inventions / int_a269abe2 | |
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Homemade Inventions | |
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Homemade Inventions are Donatello's brain and butter in the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cartoons. It grows to particularly ridiculous levels in some of the animated adaptations, where he is able to build submarines, hovercraft, and drill tanks with homemade materials and the occasional bit of salvaged alien technology. | |
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Homemade Inventions | |
| Homemade Inventions / int_ac58f5fa | comment |
"The Dead Past": Foster engaged in illegal research by applying his knowledge of light in artificially generated gravity fields to neutrinos, and conducted a few experiments. When he was done, he was able to design a past-viewing device from equipment that everyone has access to. A design that his uncle shared with almost everyone he knew. | |
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Homemade Inventions / int_ac58f5fa | |
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Homemade Inventions | |
| Homemade Inventions / int_b4963c9f | comment |
Alton Brown of Good Eats can apparently build a time machine just as well as he can MacGyver useful kitchen devices. He uses it to get blueberries in season. | |
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Homemade Inventions / int_b4963c9f | |
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Homemade Inventions | |
| Homemade Inventions / int_b72e7136 | comment |
Adoption Nightmare has the Fenton Ghost Glue Gun, which fires anti-ghost glue at ghosts, trapping them. Like some of the canonical Fenton inventions, it is reminiscent of an everyday object (i.e. the Fenton Utility Weapon, which is a tube of lipstick that shoots anti-ghost energy). | |
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Homemade Inventions | |
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Wallace & Gromit: In the very first film, Wallace constructed a working spaceship out of, presumably, equipment you can pick up at the hardware store. It gets crazier from there. In a particularly bizarre inversion (especially given the above fact), Wallace's Techno Trousers were apparently made by NASA. |
|
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Homemade Inventions / int_b94ae31e | |
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Homemade Inventions | |
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Tedd in El Goonish Shive built a belt that could transform the wearer into a cat-person, tweaked a Wii Fit balance board so it could measure the weight distribution of someone as they transformed and built a series of devices that can transform the wearer under certain conditions out of toy gadget watches. | |
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Homemade Inventions | |
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Gnoblar scrappers in Warhammer tend to build things out of old rubbish and whatever they've scavenged, such as scraplauncher catapults. Ork Mekboyz in Warhammer 40,000 take this to truly extreme levels, cobbling together anything from a chainsword to a building-sized gargant out of scrap metal and interesting shiny things. | |
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Homemade Inventions / int_bff01809 | |
| Homemade Inventions / int_c0d295c4 | type |
Homemade Inventions | |
| Homemade Inventions / int_c0d295c4 | comment |
Team Fortress 2: The Pyro's flamethrower is a more subtle example of this, with a propane tank being used as ammunition and a gas station pump serving as a hand grip and trigger. The Degreaser takes this even further, incorporating a fire extinguisher as the tank, a stovetop burner as a pilot light, and a car muffler as part of the pipe. It shares its set with the Powerjack, which is a makeshift hammer made from a jack strapped to a car battery. According to the Bazaar Bargain's publicity blurb, the Sniper created it from an old bolt-action rifle, a long piece of metal, some bolts, one half of a binocular and a military-grade laser sight, all bought for just under three dinars. The Beggar's Bazooka is a handmade rocket launcher created by Soldier from random garbage, including pipes, cans, a funnel, and part of a flashlight. Typically for a homemade weapon, it's known to malfunction, with a noticeably off-center trend on its projectiles and a mechanic where it can "overload" with rockets and explode. |
|
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Homemade Inventions / int_c0d295c4 | |
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Homemade Inventions | |
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Word Processor Of The Gods: A man inherits a bodged-together word processor with Reality Warper powers, which his nephew constructed from several mismatched brands of computer components, wires from Radio Shack, the motor from an Erector Set and an old model-train transformer. | |
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| Skeleton Crew | hasFeature |
Homemade Inventions / int_c1e861db | |
| Homemade Inventions / int_c2c9499c | type |
Homemade Inventions | |
| Homemade Inventions / int_c2c9499c | comment |
In the films, expect Ernest to have one or more of these lying around. Given what a Lethally Stupid klutz he is, it's a given that these may more likely or not backfire on him. | |
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Homemade Inventions | |
| Homemade Inventions / int_c43df4d8 | comment |
Doctor Who: Depending on the incarnation, the Doctor has taken this to an art form, most notably the Third, Fourth, Seventh, Tenth, and Eleventh Doctors. Exaggerated with the Ninth/Tenth Doctor's and the Eleventh Doctor's first console rooms. "Daleks in Manhattan" has the Doctor jury-rig a DNA scanner out of items found in the stock room of a New York theatre in 1930, most prominently a small radio. "Blink": When the Doctor and Martha find themselves in 1960s Britain without the TARDIS, the Doctor builds a device to detect other inadvertent time travellers out of what looks like an old-fashioned tape recorder, a telephone handset, a postcard, and other... stuff. It works quite well for what he needs, but not without some unintended side effects: |
|
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Homemade Inventions / int_c43df4d8 | |
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Homemade Inventions | |
| Homemade Inventions / int_d14c3aa1 | comment |
Some of the equipment in Ghostbusters (1984) is supposed to have this feel. The boys certainly didn't have much of an operating budget. | |
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Homemade Inventions / int_d14c3aa1 | |
| Homemade Inventions / int_d46cc708 | type |
Homemade Inventions | |
| Homemade Inventions / int_d46cc708 | comment |
The various devices built by the Eds, especially Edd, in Ed, Edd n Eddy. | |
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Homemade Inventions / int_d46cc708 | |
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Homemade Inventions | |
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Junkers in Deadlands: HellOnEarth cheat by asking tech spirits to make their cobbled-together inventions work. | |
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Homemade Inventions / int_d4d8ce5f | |
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Homemade Inventions | |
| Homemade Inventions / int_d68df17d | comment |
Most of the modifications done to the cars on Top Gear are done in a standard garage by the presenters (with a little help). Top marks have to be awarded when they attempted to create their own space-shuttle Reliant Robin, even if the task of assembling the rocket motors themselves had to be outsourced... to a tiny engineering firm that was only a small step up from A Half-Dozen Guys in a Basement, and thus probably count as a straight example themselves. | |
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Homemade Inventions / int_d68df17d | |
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Homemade Inventions | |
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The 2×4 technology in Codename: Kids Next Door. | |
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Homemade Inventions / int_d69208d2 | |
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Homemade Inventions | |
| Homemade Inventions / int_d8520b74 | comment |
Several of Bosco's Boscotech creations in the Sam and Max games from Telltale Games. They're surprisingly effective (even the tear gas grenade launcher that's just a salad shooter loaded with onions), but all of them are overpriced (like a hundred million dollars for a "truth serum" that consists of a bottle of vodka). | |
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Homemade Inventions / int_d8520b74 | |
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Homemade Inventions | |
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Building super-tech out of random junk is an important part of Molly's shtick in The Inexplicable Adventures of Bob!. | |
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Homemade Inventions / int_e081af79 | |
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Homemade Inventions | |
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Calvin & Hobbes: The Series has this, the most notable being Sherman's (short-lived) time-traveling washing machine. | |
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Homemade Inventions / int_e179ec3a | |
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Homemade Inventions | |
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Strong Bad's alternate universe portal in Homestar Runner is simply a blender with a Game Boy floating in some strange green liquid. | |
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Homemade Inventions / int_e25322af | |
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Homemade Inventions | |
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The Dumpster Diver merit in Genius: The Transgression. | |
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Homemade Inventions / int_e270b7e1 | |
| Homemade Inventions / int_e5c5bc22 | type |
Homemade Inventions | |
| Homemade Inventions / int_e5c5bc22 | comment |
The Quick Gadgeteer advantage in GURPS is all about this. | |
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Homemade Inventions / int_e5c5bc22 | |
| Homemade Inventions / int_e951212 | type |
Homemade Inventions | |
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Ivy's superpower in Dawn of a New Age: Oldport Blues allows her to make a host of inventions with whatever she has on hand. For example, she once turned her phone into a specialised magnet that wiped the data from all other mobiles in her vicinity. It wasn't pretty to look at, but it got the job done. | |
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Homemade Inventions | |
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LazyTown: Pixel built all of his inventions by himself. | |
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Homemade Inventions | |
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In Captain Underpants and the Wrath of the Wicked Wedgie Woman, the title villainess uses parts from common household appliances to build robotic duplicates of the two elementary school-age protagonists. Not only can the robots expand to four times their original size, they also have Super-Strength, can fly, have rocket-punching arms, and wield hidden starch sprayers. | |
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Homemade Inventions | |
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"Robot AL-76 Goes Astray" is about a robot who accidentally arrives at a junkyard and builds a powerful mining tool from the junk, powered by 2 D-cell batteries. No one could figure out how it did it and it didn't know, because when the robot demonstrated his new tool, the top 2/3rds of a nearby mountain were atomized, causing the junkyard owner to panic and tell it to "forget what happened." | |
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Homemade Inventions / int_f6d6745 | |
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Homemade Inventions | |
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Pee-wee's Big Adventure has Pee-Wee's breakfast machine. | |
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Homemade Inventions | |
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Anything built by Gadget Hackwrench on Chip 'n Dale: Rescue Rangers. | |
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