...it's like TV Tropes, but LINKED DATA!
Inventional Wisdom
- 566 statements
- 106 feature instances
- 64 referencing feature instances
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When the Mad Scientist or Gadgeteer Genius creates a machine of diabolical nature, some function gets thrown into the mix that wasn't quite planned, doesn't really serve any practical purpose, and may even be an Achilles' Heel— a lever for flooding the cockpit of the Humongous Mecha with its fuel reserves, for instance. A variant has additions made which do serve a practical use... just not ones which make logical sense for the machine to have. A jetpack that makes martinis and plays the complete works of Marvin Gaye, for instance. Expect Lampshade Hanging to ensue. See also Fridge Logic. Compare Oven Logic, where the oven dial goes up to thousands of degrees. One has to wonder why the oven had a dial that could go up that high if it wasn't meant to be used that way. Compare with Cow Tools, where nothing about the device makes sense. Contrast with Mundane Utility, where simply being what it is lets the device do something useful — cooking popcorn with your Death Ray, for instance. Frequently overlaps with Self-Destruct Mechanism and Morality Dial. See also Caps Lock, Num Lock, Missiles Lock and Outlandish Device Setting. Also compare with Murphy's Law. Contrast with Myopic Architecture, where a builder's or inventor's attempts to avoid this trope may result in a supposedly "foolproof" security feature being defeated by something so simple it was completely overlooked in the design phase. The name, for the record, is a play on conventional wisdom, in reference to the fact that any inventor holding the Sanity Ball would never install such things to begin with. |
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| Inventional Wisdom / int_12ffd3e9 | type |
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| Inventional Wisdom / int_12ffd3e9 | comment |
Megas XLR: Sometimes Coop can't even make sense of his own designs. Some examples: Megas has 3 buttons labeled "Destroy the world", "Smite the world" and "Destroy the world, worse", and one button labeled "Save the world". Guess which button is needed? Guess which one is missing from the control panel? Megas is low on oil in one episode, so Coop literally wrings the grease out of several cheesesteak sandwiches directly into a small tube that refills the tank. The gauge goes from "Empty" —> "Need a little" —> "Almost There" —> "Enough" —> "No really, I'm fine" —> and "PLEASE STOP!" Similarly, one of Megas' temperature gauges goes all the way up to "GOOD CRIPES!" |
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| Inventional Wisdom / int_14f9297e | type |
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Some examples from The Far Side: A plane passenger is fumbling around with his seat controls, one of which is a switch marked "Wings Stay On"/"Wings Fall Off". A tech's soundboard at a concert had a dial labeled "Suck" which he was gleefully adjusting. |
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| Inventional Wisdom / int_15c6ea11 | type |
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Wonder Woman (1942): Hephaestus created android Golden Girls, only for them to instantly turn against him so he turned on external components that subjugated them to his will and muted their emotions. These are very easy to remove and disable. | |
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| Inventional Wisdom / int_20191a57 | type |
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Bleak Expectations: When he builds a supervillain lair on a volcanic island, Mr. Benevolent also puts in a self-destruct button. He's not quite sure why, beyond that it seemed like the thing to do, but adding to this he didn't even bother to cover it to stop it being pressed by accident, which inevitably happens after a mishap with a brain-swapping machine and a dinosaur. | |
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| Inventional Wisdom / int_222c2051 | type |
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Chuck Versus the Mask, the museum's computer room has a big red readout that says system failure. Talk about a complete lack of faith in your system. Shouldn't they have hired a curator who knew how to use a computer? | |
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| Inventional Wisdom / int_261c8d3f | type |
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The Simpsons: The "Treehouse of Horror III" segment "Clown Without Pity" features a murderous Krusty doll: "Yep, there's your problem. Somebody set this thing to evil." The "Treehouse of Horror XV" segment "The Ned Zone" features Ned desperately trying to stop Homer from pressing a button in the nuclear plant that makes it explode and destroy Springfield. Ned is given no other choice than to kill Homer, but even that doesn't stop him from pressing the button. In "Double, Double, Boy in Trouble", Bart sets a bunch of Roombas from "off" to "malevolent sentience". They promptly go on a mini-rampage. |
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In Dual! Parallel Trouble Adventure, Mr. Sanada frequently designs machines with large buttons that you think would activate them, he even coaxes the person to press the button/presses the button himself, before revealing that it doesn't actually do anything. 'It's actually' *Mitsuki sits down on a lever* 'that lever..' | |
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| Inventional Wisdom / int_26ef902d | type |
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In Home (2015), Oh complains about the wisdom of an e-mail system in which "send" and "send all" are two giant buttons on the same screen. One also wonders why a personal communication device has the means to transmit a galaxy-wide message. | |
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| Inventional Wisdom / int_28ccdd97 | type |
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Blake and Mortimer: In S.O.S. Meteors, the command console of the bad guys' weather control device features a large, conspicuous unlabelled button that immediately attracts Mortimer's attention. It of course turns out to be a self-destruct mechanism. While it does make some sense that they would need one, being located in a hidden base in enemy territory, the fact that all it takes is a simple press of a button with no reversal possible eventually contributes heavily to their downfall. | |
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iCarly: In "iBattle Chip", Gibby's modified Phaser suddenly overloads and explodes when Gibby sets it to "overload". | |
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The trapdoor in Red Sonja. | |
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Meanwhile: The Killitron is a doomsday device built by a mild-mannered inventor with no Omnicidal Maniac tendencies whatsoever. However, it turns out that it can be used to manipulate entropy, allowing for such miracles as reversing the aging process and transmuting food and water. | |
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| Inventional Wisdom / int_2f3b6238 | comment |
Also comes up in the third book, where Penny builds a machine that makes a horde of rampaging giant robots. She actually admits that she has no particular reason to want a horde of rampaging giant robots, but still leaves the machine intact. And sure enough, at the book's climax the machine is activated and we get a rampaging horde of giant robots. | |
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| Inventional Wisdom / int_36ee2abe | comment |
In Paranoia, pretty much anything that comes out of Alpha Complex's R&D labs for testing during a Troubleshooter mission will have buttons for useless or detrimental features located right next to what would be actually helpful functions with a different mission profile, none of them labelled. The manual is, of course, above your security clearance, and quite possibly the security clearance of the guy who wrote it. | |
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| Inventional Wisdom / int_390a0da6 | type |
Inventional Wisdom | |
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In Steel Battalion: Heavy Armor, the Self-Destruct Mechanism is located next to the switch for the headlights. Which would be a problem even if the controls weren't complete garbage. | |
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| Inventional Wisdom / int_3a322a82 | comment |
Yellow Submarine: The submarine has an easily-accessed ejector-seat button. Captain Fred even points it out to Ringo, who then presses it and finds himself discharged into the Sea of Monsters. | |
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Mickey Mouse Works: One Mickey to the Rescue segment features Mickey trying to untie Minnie from some railroad tracks before she gets run over by Pete's locomotive. After his attempts to free her end up getting them both tied, Mickey ends up using his tail to pull a nearby switch that diverts the train just when it was about to hit them. Another short from House of Mouse had a portable carwash that for some unknowable reason included a switch with the settings "wash car" and "destroy car." You can guess what Goofy accidentally does at exactly the wrong time. |
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Avengers Assemble In "Mojoworld", Mojo's hoverchair is disabled when Hawkeye hits a completely unprotected circuitboard on its underside. Hawkeye immediately lampshades the poor design. | |
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In Hopkins FBI, the title character must find and disarm a bomb in a bank. The bomb he uncovers has four indicator lights labeled "Powered", "Armed", "Halted", and "Explode". The last one, of course, lights up just before the bomb explodes. By then, there's not much of a point to it, is there? | |
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Austin Powers: Practically everything Dr. Evil owns. | |
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Inventional Wisdom | |
| Inventional Wisdom / int_42c05590 | comment |
In one episode of Rocko's Modern Life, Rocko and his friends are trying to fix his car, but are unable to despite trying everything. Until Filbert notices the car has a "fixed/broken" switch on the under the hood that's currently set to "broken". | |
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In Anderson Quest: Killing Vampires and Werewolves and Leprechauns, Anderson gets very cross when he realizes the horrid Bizarrchitecture properties of Yharnam. A bit of investigating leads him on the trail of the utter incompetent who designed half the city, and among other things, introduced elevators, pressure plates, strange balconies and similar questionable choices. To nobody's surprise, it's Bergholt Stuttley Johnson, a.k.a. Bloody Stupid Johnson. Among other idiotic enterprises, he created a reality-defying bust whose gaze keeps following you around the room despite not moving, which reacted adversely to Ebrietas, got declared "the opposite of enlightenment" by the Choir and was the architect who remodeled Cainhurst Castle. Annalise's still kicking herself over the last one. | |
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Inventional Wisdom | |
| Inventional Wisdom / int_46518682 | comment |
Sesame Street: An episode involves a high-powered air conditioning system being installed in the Furry Arms Hotel. Humphrey specifically states that it's only meant to be turned up to 10. If the knob is turned up to 14, it will break. Those are literally his exact words. Guess what the resident penguins end up doing. During the "Slimey to the Moon" arc one episode involves a crisis aboard the spaceship where the worms cannot get along after weeks of confinement. An incident leads to a button inside the ship being pressed that is specifically designed to put the ship off course if pressed. A bit of research reveals that there is a button to reverse the effect of the first button, but it is on the tip top of the ship's exterior—so that it cannot be pressed by accident! |
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Discworld has Bungling Inventor "Bloody Stupid" Johnson, who has added quite a number of useless and dangerous things to his inventions: In Hogfather he added some things to the bathroom in Unseen University that Archchancellor Ridcully would come to regret. He also designed a nice, upper-class neighbourhood that just happened to break the laws of space and time. You can just throw the trash out of the window into the yard, since it's probably not your yard, anyway. Front doors have a habit of opening into the bedrooms of a different home. It also has a very low crime rate, as thieves generally prefer to break into one house at a time. Or the post office sorting machine, which included a wheel with a circumference-to-diameter ratio of exactly 3 (rather than the usual three-and-a-bit, which he thought was untidy), and which soon started sorting letters before they were written. Nobody complained. Then it started receiving mail that was never written in the first place. And then the alternate universe mail started pouring in. And his pipe organs usually include special sound effects such as thunder or animal noises, with at least one example also being connected to the building's plumbing system. The UU organ, located in the middle of a city with a million inhabitants, also includes one pipe that plays a Brown Note so loud that it causes earthquakes. |
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In the The Wubbulous World of Dr. Seuss episode, "The Muckster", Jane Kangaroo orders the titular invention to help her clean her messy house for her appearance on The House and Home Show, with specific instructions from the Cat in the Hat and the Little Cats never to turn the dial to 6. When Jane is tempted to turn the dial to 6, Junior reminds her not to do so, to which Jane questions why the Cats would put a 6 on the machine to begin with. | |
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Far Out Space Nuts: "I said lunch, not launch!" Maybe those two buttons shouldn't be right next to each other? | |
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The trope image comes from The Transformers episode "B.O.T.", which is about the Decepticons trying to rebuild Bruticus because he is supposedly the only one big enough to use their gigantic superweapon (even though they still have both Devastator and Menasor). Despite the Decepticons' success, the Autobots manage to foil their plans and destroy it. How do they do this? The B.O.T. presses a button on a human-level control panel clearly marked "OVER LOAD" [sic]. True to its label, it overloads the superweapon and makes it explode. | |
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In The Spongebob Squarepants Movie, Neptune freezes Mr. Krabs solid when he believes he was the one who stole his crown. At the end of the movie, after learning Mr. Krabs was innocent, Neptune attempts to unfreeze him-only to accidentally turn him into a human boy. Neptune realizes that his trident was set to "Real Boy" instead of "Unfreeze". | |
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The Adventures of Dr. McNinja give us this gem: "You just cut the elevator?! What are you doing?! Why is there even a button for that?" | |
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Inverted in one episode of The Suite Life of Zack & Cody, Arwin creates two machines (a letter sorting machine and a pair of robot arms), when either machine malfunctions he tells the person he's with to push the red button only for them to point out there is no red button. | |
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Inverted in Atomic Robo, when Robo's shocked at the lack of extra options: | |
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| Inventional Wisdom / int_55c5a085 | comment |
In one of the versions of Mazinger Z, there was one lever on Hell Island served to launch the island spacewards and detonate it. Big Bad Dr. Hell uses it to try to take Mazinger Z with him when he realizes the battle is lost. It happens in Gosaku Ota's manga version. | |
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| Inventional Wisdom / int_56dce3c1 | type |
Inventional Wisdom | |
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In Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2, Rocket Raccoon, for some reason, included an instant detonation button on the bomb built to kill Ego the Living Planet alongside the Magic Countdown button that would give them time to escape. This became a real issue when the Guardians had to depend on Baby Groot to plant the bomb, with Rocket expressively telling him not to push that particular button, without much success. It got to the point where Rocket even asked if anyone had any tape so he could cover the button. | |
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Inventional Wisdom | |
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In The Order of the Stick, upon learning that the gate in Dorukan's dungeon that Elan destroyed was one of five seals on an Eldritch Abomination's prison, Vaarsuvius questions the logic of having a Self-Destruct Mechanism. (There is a reason, namely to create a No MacGuffin, No Winner scenario rather than risk allowing the forces of evil control of said abomination.) | |
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The final level of Sonic Heroes, Final Fortress, is set on the flagship of Eggman's giant flying armada. For some reason, it has a bunch of giant self-destruct buttons lying around that destroy sections of the ship when pressed. The first time Team Sonic press one, Tails openly wonders why Eggman would build all these self-destruct switches in the first place (in the English dub, this is butchered into "Wonder why it self-destructed?"). | |
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xkcd: The "high-pitched hum generator", apparently the source of that humming noise some people can hear in what would otherwise be a silent room. The Alt Text lampshades this. Email Settings has settings such as auto-replying to emails even when you are not on vacation, using only non-ASCII characters, or hiding important mails. |
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In American Dad! Stan dies and goes to Heaven, and tries to use his gun to threaten people into sending him back to Earth. Everyone laughs at the idea that they could be harmed in Heaven...until Stan steals an Angel's "Heaven Gun" which CAN kill anyone. As he runs out, one guy questions why they have those. | |
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In one episode of Eek! The Cat, a professor built a rocket ship to Jupiter, and he told the astronauts that before launch they must make sure the absurdly huge switch is set for Jupiter and not the sun. One character asked, "Why is that even there?" | |
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Iron Man: Armored Adventures: Killer Shrike's flight tech is directly linked to his wrist blasters. After Iron Man smashes the blasters, he points out to the plummeting villain what a bad idea that was. | |
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Inventional Wisdom | |
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The Big Finish Doctor Who story Davros gives a justification for this, as it was put there by the doctors who saved him as an option for him to kill himself if the pain ever became too much. He never took it. | |
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Inventional Wisdom | |
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In Bob and George, it's revealed that several of Dr. Light's robots have Good/Evil switches for no obvious reason. Bass, not having been created by Dr. Light, instead has an Evil/Stupid switch (which is firmly in the "Stupid" position almost all the time.) | |
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Inventional Wisdom | |
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Dwarf Fortress lets you build complicated mechanism without any kind of labelling system. Players often end up with levers that serve no purpose but to flood parts of their own fortress with lava. This is particularly pronounced in games when players swap out between years so that no-one knows what the lever actually does and building around it. For example, Boatmurdered had a lever that, when pulled, flooded a siege workshop. It turned out it had originally been put in to irrigate the farms and became hilariously useless later when someone built a siege workshop on them. | |
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In SpongeBob SquarePants: Battle for Bikini Bottom, Plankton builds a machine to create himself an army of robots. Unfortunately, they end up turning against him because he had the machine set to "Don't Obey" instead of "Obey". It then turns out the machine made a robot in his image which becomes part of the final boss fight. | |
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Inventional Wisdom | |
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Rise of the Minisukas: Jet Alone Kai can apparently feel pain. Upon discovering this, it immediately wonders both why it can feel pain and why it doesn't have the option to turn it off. | |
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Inventional Wisdom | |
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Spy Kids 3-D: Game Over: The switch that shuts down the game was right next to the switch that releases the Toymaker from his prison. Mrs. Giggles asks "Who was the idiot that designed that?" The Toymaker ends up escaping from his prison, although Grandpa admits that he released the Toymaker on purpose. The Humongous Mecha that the Toymaker pilots in the climax of the film also has giant off switch, which ends up being pulled by the Toymaker himself. | |
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Inventional Wisdom | |
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All of the vehicles in Wacky Races have features that no sane person would ever include in a car, such as the Compact Pussycat's automatic personal grooming facilities. But, then again, no one ever accused the Wacky Racers of being sane. | |
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Inventional Wisdom | |
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Phineas and Ferb: Most of Dr. Doofenshmirtz's inventions have some sort of reverse, or self-destruct function, especially when this would make no sense. Some examples: In "The Monster of Phineas-n-Ferb-enstein", Dr. Doofenshmirtz's ancestor builds a device to make a potion that will make a person "Evil-Er". For some reason it also has a "Fairy Princess" setting. In "Hail Doofania!", the Role Swap Plot episode, the Rainbow Generator features a Self-Destruct Mechanism. In Across the 2nd Dimension Doofenshmirtz mentions he once deployed an army of robots and hid the self-destruct buttons on their feet. Guess how the robots were defeated. To contrast this, the alternate Doofenshmirtz never put anything like that on his machines which has led to his success in taking over the Tri-State Area and is unpleasantly surprised to find out his alternate self would add something so dumb as a self-destruct button to the inventions themselves (he did have a self-destruct button for his army of robots but it was on a remote control). According to Phineas, the reason the Other Dimension-inator didn't work the first time was that the self-destruct button was causing the machine to stop working just by being installed. In "Finding Mary MacGuffin", Doofenshmirtz spends an entire episode looking for an on-off switch so he can activate his latest -inator. It turns out that all the -inator does is open the cage that he had trapped Perry in. In "Candace Gets Busted" Doofenshmirtz builds a Go-Away-Inator which spins a wheel of locations and sends whatever it's pointed at away. Near the end of the episode it sends a group of people into Doof's pants. It turns out that that "My Pants" setting was there because he confused the -inator's wheel with his dry-cleaning wheel. In "Phineas and Ferb Hawaiian Vacation", Doofenshmirtz puts a molecular-scale control panel on his De-Evolution-Inator, which comes in handy when he needs to use it on himself after turning himself into an amoeba. In "A Hard Day's Knight", Doofenshmirtz and Perry fight each other in giant robots. Doof's is a dragon which can breath fire...but the cockpit is in the dragon's mouth. |
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Inventional Wisdom | |
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Awesomemod (a mod for The Sims 3) has a configuration setting called "ExplodeInBFBVFS", which allegedly causes your game to explode in "a big fiery ball visible from space". All it really does is display a funny message when you try to run the game, and then immediately quits. | |
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Inventional Wisdom | |
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Galaxy Quest The unavoidable chompers in a starship passageway. Gwen lampshades how ridiculous it is that there is a Death Course in the middle of the ship. The Thermians are technologically advanced enough to build a working starship based on "data" gathered from "documentary footage", namely a hoky sci fi TV show and the fan materials surrounding it. As a result it has some features even they don't understand, such as a very limited time travel device. |
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Inventional Wisdom | |
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In Final Fantasy IV, if the boss battle with Mad Scientist Dr. Lugae and his Killer Robot Barnab/Balnabas goes on too long without either/both being defeated, Lugae will notice something on his creation and go "What Does This Button Do?" Again, note that he made the dang thing. Not surprisingly, it activates the Self-Destruct Mechanism, which can take out the party if they're low on health. | |
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Inventional Wisdom | |
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Monsters vs. Aliens: The latte dispenser is operated by a Big Red Button that is identical and right next to the button that launches all of the US's nuclear missiles. | |
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Inventional Wisdom | |
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Double Dragon Neon: During the Giant Tank boss, Skullmageddon tells his goons to keep the Lees away from the tank's weak point, before realizing... | |
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Inventional Wisdom | |
| Inventional Wisdom / int_9004922f | comment |
In Hogfather he added some things to the bathroom in Unseen University that Archchancellor Ridcully would come to regret. | |
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Kim Possible: The Lorwardian Motherships' engines have an "off" switch. | |
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Inventional Wisdom | |
| Inventional Wisdom / int_90e2f673 | comment |
BattleTech has this problem with certain mechs. For example, the Charger is an Assault-class mech (putting it between 80 and 100 tons, making it the largest class of generally available mech) that was originally built for scouting duties, usually left to mechs less than half its weight. The designers also actively discouraged non-scouting duties for it, removing most of its weapon hardpoints. Other mechs have less glaring but still present issues, such as a mech that only shoots 10 long range missiles a turn having two tons of ammo, or 240 missiles, while their main armament only has one ton of ammo despite doing considerably more damage. And this is in a game where unused ammo can explode, taking the limb and everything attached to it out as well. | |
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Inventional Wisdom | |
| Inventional Wisdom / int_94566e52 | comment |
In crossover Superman vs. Shazam!, Karmang's space-warping machine, which was built to force two parallel Earths into collide with each other, has a large, eye-catching black button located prominently in the operating panel. It serves to send all people standing in Karmang's castle into Limbo for some unexplained reason. | |
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Inventional Wisdom | |
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Please Don't Tell My Parents I'm a Supervillain: Repeatedly Lampshaded, where it is apparently a fundamental rule of Mad Science powers that anything they make will include a Self-Destruct Mechanism, whether or not there is any logical reason for one or the inventor intended to put one in. Also comes up in the third book, where Penny builds a machine that makes a horde of rampaging giant robots. She actually admits that she has no particular reason to want a horde of rampaging giant robots, but still leaves the machine intact. And sure enough, at the book's climax the machine is activated and we get a rampaging horde of giant robots. |
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Inventional Wisdom | |
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Star Trek: The Original Series: "Court Martial" has Kirk being court-martialed under suspicion of accidentally ejecting an "ion pod" with a crew member still inside it. The prime evidence is (falsified) footage of the bridge during the incident, which includes a closeup of the arm of Kirk's captain's chair, which has three buttons on it - presumably the three things it was determined a Starfleet captain needed to be able to do at any time: "Red Alert," "Yellow Alert," and "Eject Pod." | |
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In Red Planet the heroes bring a helper robot that was originally built by the military and is equipped with pretty sophisticated, combat-oriented AI. Unfortunately for everyone, a bit too sophisticated. It has a physical switch for whether or not to be in a combat mode. Justified, as the mission was assembled in great hurry, with no spare "civilian" model, while the switch was pre-set on "no". It wasn't until the astronauts plan to disable the robot (essentially killing it) when it self-switches to combat mode in self-defense, spending the rest of the film fighting for its own survival. | |
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Randy Cunningham: 9th Grade Ninja Jerry Driscoll built a death ray with an adjustable blast radius as part of a contest. He was disqualified because no one was willing to test if the "universe" setting worked. Viceroy designed the Robo-Apes with a "Strike Mode" and an "Ape Mode". |
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Inventional Wisdom | |
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The Good Place: The titular Good Place has Janets, omniscient living databases who cheerfully answer any and all questions and help everyone they meet. The Bad Place has Bad Janets, who are endlessly rude and surly. The first time one appears, Tahani even asks what their purpose even is. | |
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Inventional Wisdom | |
| Inventional Wisdom / int_9e2f90f4 | comment |
One Piece's "Thriller Bark" arc: when Brook finds a massive store of salt in the kitchen (salt being the only weakness of the countless Mooks on the island), he wonders why the Big Bad even keeps it…albeit in a room secured with lock, key, and chains. | |
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Inventional Wisdom | |
| Inventional Wisdom / int_a183d57f | comment |
Futurama had Professor Farnsworth's glow-in-the-dark nose making machine. About halfway through the episode, he prepares to insert a note from Leela's parents into it to analyze it and hopefully translate it. This exchange took place: | |
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Inventional Wisdom / int_a183d57f | |
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Inventional Wisdom | |
| Inventional Wisdom / int_a495544e | comment |
In one episode of Buzz Lightyear of Star Command where Buzz was being hunted by the Shape Stealer, a creature that could possess anyone, Commander Nebula had him hide in the Master Escape Pod. Unfortunately, the creature had taken control of Buzz, and used the pod's Manual Override to lockdown Star Command and cause it to self destruct. The look that Mira gave Nebula when he explained the pod had master control over the station was priceless. | |
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Inventional Wisdom | |
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The Emperor's New Groove: The entrance to Yzma's secret lab has a lever that opens a Trap Door to a Croc Pool. It's right next to the lever that opens the door. While it could be used as a trap, Yzma doesn't seem to intend for it to be used that way (given that the crocodiles are about as vicious as golden retriever puppies and can be sent away whimpering with just a slap), and she and Kronk can never remember which lever is which. | |
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Inventional Wisdom / int_a535581a | |
| Inventional Wisdom / int_a77de360 | type |
Inventional Wisdom | |
| Inventional Wisdom / int_a77de360 | comment |
A few examples from the Dilbert cartoon: Lena's Depruner prototype happens to have "decapitate" button on it. This ends up going badly for her when Alice traps her inside the Depruner and presses the button to do exactly that. Zigzagged with a voice-operated temperature changer Dilbert installed in his shower. While he calibrated it to respond only to his voice so that Dogbert cannot mess with it while he's in there, it reacts to any number he says, regardless of context, which Dogbert takes advantage of by commenting that the device's voice sounds like "the computer from that stupid movie", and trying to remember its name, tricking Dilbert into say "It was 2001: A Space Odyssey", with expected results. |
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Inventional Wisdom | |
| Inventional Wisdom / int_a8729c90 | comment |
The Fairly OddParents!: In the episode "Action Packed", Timmy wishes his life were more like an action movie, and finds himself thrust into a Troperiffic adventure to stop Jorgen von Strangle from draining the magic of other fairies (including his fairies, for that matter) to make himself stronger. Naturally, the machine he uses to do this has a "reverse" settings that sucks the magic back out of him and restores the fairies he drained. | |
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Inventional Wisdom / int_a8729c90 | |
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Inventional Wisdom | |
| Inventional Wisdom / int_ab42c63a | comment |
Get Smart. Professor Carlson, the Mad Scientist that CONTROL uses to create the Shoe Phone gadgets, is a bit like this. In one episode he invents a gadget that he admits does nothing at all. "But in the event you are captured by the enemy, they'll be so intrigued by the way it works, you'll have time to escape." Then there's the time he creates a camera that's secretly a recorder and a tape recorder with a hidden camera. When asked why he doesn't just hand them a tape recorder and camera, he replies that his mind just doesn't work that way. | |
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Inventional Wisdom | |
| Inventional Wisdom / int_ac28c019 | comment |
In Across the 2nd Dimension Doofenshmirtz mentions he once deployed an army of robots and hid the self-destruct buttons on their feet. Guess how the robots were defeated. To contrast this, the alternate Doofenshmirtz never put anything like that on his machines which has led to his success in taking over the Tri-State Area and is unpleasantly surprised to find out his alternate self would add something so dumb as a self-destruct button to the inventions themselves (he did have a self-destruct button for his army of robots but it was on a remote control). | |
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Inventional Wisdom | |
| Inventional Wisdom / int_ae0356e0 | comment |
In the episode of Courage the Cowardly Dog where the three-headed son of the chicken from outer space appears to take revenge on Courage, one of the attempts was a complex Rube Goldberg booby trap that lead to Courage being Chained to a Railway while the three-headed son came at him on a train. Courage managed to save himself by throwing a track switch, after which the three heads looked over the plans and wondered why in the world that was included in the trap. | |
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| Inventional Wisdom / int_b1c4a380 | comment |
Kitty Cat Kill Sat: Lily spends a lot of time complaining about the control designs for her space station. Long story short, half the station was built by an extremely progressive pan-species collective, and the other half was built piecemeal by the many racist states that followed after them. That means that Lily has to deal with oddities such as the fact that the station is fully capable of accepting written commands, but refuses to do so unless the crewmember is explicitly logged as disabled. Lily, being a housecat, lacks the means to speak human languages, but she's perfectly healthy for her species, so the system won't accept written commands. Not to mention her critical lack of thumbs; pretty much every single human-descended species or animal-uplift or genetic engineering project was designed with thumbs and hands, so none of the controls were designed for someone with only paws to work with. And, again, large parts of the station were built by racists from multiple different species, so they were intentionally designed to be impossible for anyone besides their specific species. Lily finds it impossible to even code up a speech synthesizer to translate her self-created Cat language into a human language that will allow for easier voice commands, because her programming software is racist and refuses to do any translations. | |
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Inventional Wisdom | |
| Inventional Wisdom / int_b36952af | comment |
In the original Cube, somebody speculates that the only reason they were put into the cube was because it had been built as some government pork barrel project, and not using it would be to admit it was pointless. | |
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Inventional Wisdom | |
| Inventional Wisdom / int_b5efd918 | comment |
From the Harley Quinn (2019) episode "Dye Hard", during a fight in Wayne Tower, Harley finds a gun and doesn't realize what it is until she fires it at a mook. For some unfathomable reason, it turns out it's a "Cancer Ray". A gun that causes cancer. | |
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Inventional Wisdom | |
| Inventional Wisdom / int_b8d8ef94 | comment |
The Emperor's New School naturally has taken the infamous "wrong lever" from the movie the show spun off from and turned it into a Running Gag, the results of which are different almost every time, ranging from Yzma being crushed by falling objects, to pulling the school's fire alarm, to absolutely nothing (which prompts Yzma and Kronk to take the stairs to the secret lab instead). | |
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Inventional Wisdom | |
| Inventional Wisdom / int_bb3fde3d | comment |
Danny Phantom: The opening credits show the Freak Lab Accident which gave Danny his powers occurred because the Fenton Portal has an "On" button inside the portal. Pandora guards her box so no idiot can release its evil contents, so why does she have a release switch? |
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Inventional Wisdom | |
| Inventional Wisdom / int_bc848d30 | comment |
SpongeBob SquarePants: Plankton equips his Robot Mr. Krabs with a Penny-Powered Self-Destruct Mechanism. | |
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Inventional Wisdom | |
| Inventional Wisdom / int_bd310eaa | comment |
In El Goonish Shive, a No Fourth Wall strip reveals that the cartoonist has a button to turn himself and anyone nearby into busty cheerleaders. His minion is unclear on why that button exists. Also, it seems cartooning is more exciting than one might expect. | |
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Inventional Wisdom | |
| Inventional Wisdom / int_c0c57462 | comment |
Chrono Trigger: In Ozzie's boss battles, you win once the correct switch behind him is hit. The fact that he always has at least one switch that opens a trap door under him is what qualifies him for the trope. | |
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Inventional Wisdom | |
| Inventional Wisdom / int_c34ab4c | comment |
In This Bites!, after a near-miss with a self-destruct lever whilst trying to show off the now-operational weather control system to the denizens of Karakuri Island, Franky demands to know what Vegapunk's deal was when it came to just randomly scattering self-destruct switches all over the place, proclaiming this to be the third he's found since moving in. | |
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Inventional Wisdom | |
| Inventional Wisdom / int_c43df4d8 | comment |
Doctor Who: Davros, the Mad Scientist who created the Daleks, decided that it would be a good idea for his mobile life support system to have a clearly marked on/off switch on the panel in front of it. The Big Finish Doctor Who story Davros gives a justification for this, as it was put there by the doctors who saved him as an option for him to kill himself if the pain ever became too much. He never took it. The episode "42" has a sequence where Martha is trapped in an escape pod falling into a sun. The recall button for said pod is located on the outside of the spacecraft. Warriors' Gate: Apparently the TARDIS console has a switch that can take the ship out of the Space/Time Vortex — to press it while in flight would be suicide. Naturally, the Doctor almost pressed it, but Romana stopped him just in time. A very early episode has the First Doctor explain that the lock of the TARDIS' doors can only be opened with a special key, and if forced would destruct and render the TARDIS permanently inaccessible. It was never mentioned again. If it worked, it would give any villain a sure-fire way to end the Doctor's adventures completely, even without getting inside - just mess with the lock until it broke. |
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Inventional Wisdom | |
| Inventional Wisdom / int_d1de855a | comment |
Homestuck: Beyond Canon opens on a ship that has, among other things, a shooting range and a large number of fully stocked drinks cabinets...but no landing gear. Dirk is rather disgruntled to learn that the only way to land the thing is a controlled crash. (For bonus points, their most qualified pilot is Terezi, who's completely blind but can "see" through scent.) | |
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Inventional Wisdom | |
| Inventional Wisdom / int_d27c007d | comment |
When Takarada of Kill la Kill tries to fight using crab-like Powered Armor, Sanegayama beats him by shoving his shinai up a hole on the back that seems to not only go straight to the unprotected cockpit, but straight up Takarada's ass. What purpose such a structure could have served is never asked. | |
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Inventional Wisdom | |
| Inventional Wisdom / int_d69208d2 | comment |
Codename: Kids Next Door: When Sector V infiltrate an ice cream factory, Numbuh Three gets cold and cranks the first thermostat she can find as high as possible. This heats up not just the working spaces but the entire factory so much that a giant monster made of ice cream melts after a few minutes. Recurring teenage villain Cree explained that the only reason she escaped from a prison spaceship was because one of the pilots accidentally pressed the "Blow Up the Engines" button during a fight over trading cards. |
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Inventional Wisdom | |
| Inventional Wisdom / int_d7765410 | comment |
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy features the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation, a company built entirely around this concept. In the words of the Guide itself, their corporate strategy is based on building devices whose "superficial design flaws completely mask their fundamental design flaws". In other words, you get so involved in getting the thing to work at all that you completely fail to realize that it's incapable of doing what it was made to do in the first place. From the first book alone, examples include a superintelligent robot with a suicidally depressed personality and an intelligent drink dispenser "perfectly tailored to your individual tastes" which, no matter what you ask for, always gives you exactly the same horrid concoction almost but not quite entirely unlike tea. | |
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Inventional Wisdom | |
| Inventional Wisdom / int_d86bfc7e | comment |
Wabbit: A Looney Tunes Production: After some failed attempts to remove skunk stink off himself, Wile E. Coyote invents a machine to suck all the stink molecules off his body. While the machine initially works as intended, Wile E. finds out too late that he forgot to install an off switch. We see that the later stages of the machine involve tearing apart and reassembling the user. To add insult to injury, the released stink attracts a group of skunks that climb in through the top (implying that other small animals can sneak in as well), before the malfunctioning machine overloads and explodes. | |
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Inventional Wisdom / int_d86bfc7e | |
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Inventional Wisdom | |
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South Park: Chef gets a new TV with a "Human Eradication Mode" which, if selected, causes the TV to grow limbs and laser guns, and attempt to wipe out the human race. | |
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Inventional Wisdom | |
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Between the two Portal games, there are several examples, all designed by Aperture Science's Cloudcuckoolander founder. The fuel system de-icer is also a sentient, malevolent A.I. that can slowly flood the facility with massive amounts of "deadly neurotoxin" stored in a large tank. Their attempts to tame said AI largely consisted of bolting on new personality cores, including one that specifically made her angrier. A portal gun capable of warping space was originally designed for use as a shower curtain. Turrets that are sapient, and capable of feeling pain. Empathy Generators on the turrets, because apparently someone thought that turrets should feel sad for shooting people. To keep them able to shoot people anyway, they also installed an Empathy Suppressor. Aerial Faith Plates are basically catapults that can propel the player vast distances. Their intended use was to load cargo onto trucks, despite the fact that the cargo is thrown with such force that it breaks and/or bounces back out. Thermal Discouragement Beams, giant lasers that were apparently installed to keep office workers from leaving their desks. Propulsion and Repulsion Gels, which were originally conceived as dietary aids despite the latter containing an element that "does not like the human skeleton." And finally Conversion Gel, which literally just paints surfaces white so portals can be put on them. Any old white paint would have sufficed, but no, Aperture Science felt the need to make the white pigment out of crushed moonrocks, complete with implications that not only did the obviously enormous cost of procuring said rocks bankrupt the company, but also that a major character developed terminal pneumoconiosis as a result of it. Basically, it can all be summed up with a quote from Aperture founder Cave Johnson: |
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Inventional Wisdom | |
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In one episode of Care Bears: Adventures in Care-a-Lot, Grizzle takes over Care-a-Lot using the Caretaker II, a belly-badge-stealing ray that can turn invisible. Naturally, it gets lost while invisible, and while looking for it, Grizzle warns his minions not to press the blue button that releases all the belly badges, complaining that he never should have installed that button. | |
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Inventional Wisdom | |
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He-Man and She-Ra's Christmas Special shows Orko launching a rocket that's manipulated by one easily breakable lever. | |
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Inventional Wisdom / int_e23ff2b1 | |
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Inventional Wisdom | |
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A Homestar Runner cartoon reveals that the "Multi-function dragon" has a number of scales that, when hit, cause the dragon to do a number of tasks. And there's one labeled "instant death" that simply kills the dragon (which the King of Town's Knight hits by accident). True, it's a living creature and not a machine, but the end result is more-or-less the same. | |
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Inventional Wisdom / int_e25322af | |
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Inventional Wisdom | |
| Inventional Wisdom / int_e270b7e1 | comment |
Genius: The Transgression has quite a few instances of these in the player character's Wonders, which often have flaws attached (like a time machine that needs a wall outlet, for example). | |
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Inventional Wisdom | |
| Inventional Wisdom / int_e365af07 | comment |
In Dino Attack RPG, neither the Brickspider Bot v1.0 nor Cyber-Bully were quite sure why Evil Ogel's Elaborate Underground Base came with a doorbell. | |
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| Inventional Wisdom / int_e3a1067 | type |
Inventional Wisdom | |
| Inventional Wisdom / int_e3a1067 | comment |
Panty & Stocking with Garterbelt: G-string, a limousine, inexplicably has a self-destruct button that's easy to hit accidentally, has no countdown, and doesn't require any confirmation. Even Kneesock has no idea why it's there or why anyone would use it. | |
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Inventional Wisdom | |
| Inventional Wisdom / int_e885c808 | comment |
In Spaceballs: Spaceball-1 can go to "Ludicrous Speed", which everybody except Dark Helmet realizes is something they shouldn't do. Fortunately the ship is also equipped with a hand-operated "Emergency Brake" which is labeled "Never Use". The Spaceball-1 also has a self destruct button, hidden away in a remote, yet easy to access corridor, with only a few guards on hand. The cancel self-destruct is located in the main control panel, but is out of order. The ship's main radar system is located directly next to an identical machine that makes coffee. Downplayed in that they are helpfully labelled "MR. RADAR" and "MR. COFFEE", though they still end up confusing Lord Helmet. |
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Inventional Wisdom | |
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The Egg Dealer from Shadow the Hedgehog is a prime example of this. It's essentially a slot machine on wheels that attacks by rolling the slots to cause various effects (dropping bombs, summoning Mecha-Mooks, etc.). But Shadow can use his homing attack on the slot buttons to trigger them manually and cause effects that benefit himself, like causing Dr. Eggman to target himself with a missile barrage, fall on his own bombs, or trigger Shadow's Super Mode. | |
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Inventional Wisdom | |
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The Librarians: In the season 2 opener, Flynn is opening various doors around the Library, and encounters a room containing a hive of giant bees. | |
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Inventional Wisdom / int_ecee4546 | |
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Inventional Wisdom | |
| Inventional Wisdom / int_f120845f | comment |
In Kingdom of Loathing, the clan VIP room's shower temperature can be set so low that it makes shards of ice rain down on the user. When you use it, your character questions why someone would even make something like this. | |
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| Inventional Wisdom / int_f349915b | type |
Inventional Wisdom | |
| Inventional Wisdom / int_f349915b | comment |
The gnomes of Dragonlance. Their inventions seem to start with an idea, then modify as they go to fix perceived problems in ways that seem reasonable until you look at the whole. Some examples: Falling into water while wearing heavy plate armor tends to be inconvenient. Wouldn't it be nice to take the armor off in a hurry when you need to? So it's set up to be removed quickly. If you fall into water, you might be a little panicked, so the way to remove it should be easily accessible, right? Bright red painted crash bar on the front. And plate armor — especially gnome-modified plate armor — is going to be expensive, so you want a way to retrieve all the pieces if you do need to remove it like that, so... all the pieces are attached to the belt with wires so you can easily find them.... A gnomic effort to light their caverns involved piping magma through them. When this made the average corridor hot enough to flash-fry gnomes, they poured water on the pipes. The net result was that it was still impossible to see because when you pour water on a tube of magma, you get huge quantities of steam. And it was still hot enough that you wouldn't want to spend too long in the corridors unless you were literally a fire elemental. But by the gods, it was lit! |
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Inventional Wisdom / int_f349915b | |
| Inventional Wisdom / int_f4824ee8 | type |
Inventional Wisdom | |
| Inventional Wisdom / int_f4824ee8 | comment |
Kuukiyomi 3: Consider It More and More!!: In the 69th situation, the player character is in the toilet and there are three buttons available (from right to left): big flush, little flush and "?". The third one creates a "hee..." sound when pushed. | |
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Inventional Wisdom | |
| Inventional Wisdom / int_f785a2f9 | comment |
Team Neighborhood: The main plot of Cable Calamity is kicked off when a drunk JC Denton, on a mission to destroy the internet, mistakenly hits the button labelled "Destroy Only The BLU Team’s Internet". | |
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Inventional Wisdom / int_f785a2f9 | |
| Inventional Wisdom / int_f97ee457 | type |
Inventional Wisdom | |
| Inventional Wisdom / int_f97ee457 | comment |
Vacation: Rusty Griswold's plan to get to Wally World via car trip like his father did many years before runs into a great many complications, one of them being the car he rented for the trip, the "Prancer" (an Albanian knock-off van) is an absurdly idiosyncratic piece of crap loaded with unsafe and stupid gizmos with no label. One of the many unlabeled buttons in the van's key fob, which Rusty eventually presses, is a self-destruct. The van instantly turns into a gigantic fireball. | |
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| Vacation | hasFeature |
Inventional Wisdom / int_f97ee457 | |
| Inventional Wisdom / int_fa026a25 | type |
Inventional Wisdom | |
| Inventional Wisdom / int_fa026a25 | comment |
At the end of Bride of Frankenstein, the enraged Monster is rampaging through the lab. As he approaches a very large wooden lever Dr. Pretorius shouts, "Don't touch that lever! You'll blow us all to atoms!" The question must be asked: if you were collecting all the supplies and fixtures you'd need to build your super high-tech lab, how far down the list would "a lever that will blow us all to atoms" be? | |
| Inventional Wisdom / int_fa026a25 | featureApplicability |
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| Inventional Wisdom / int_fbf8acc | type |
Inventional Wisdom | |
| Inventional Wisdom / int_fbf8acc | comment |
In The Cabin in the Woods, the agency has a big red button that releases all of the monsters they have stored up and no safeguards at all, other than a plastic covering. The ludicrousness of this is lampshaded in the DVD Commentary. | |
| Inventional Wisdom / int_fbf8acc | featureApplicability |
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| Inventional Wisdom / int_fd275a9c | type |
Inventional Wisdom | |
| Inventional Wisdom / int_fd275a9c | comment |
In Garfield: The Movie, Garfield hits a big red button that immediately stops all the trains at a station. Signalling control centres actually have these, sometimes in actual big red button form, to be used in the event of a derailment or collision. | |
| Inventional Wisdom / int_fd275a9c | featureApplicability |
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Inventional Wisdom / int_fd275a9c | |
| Inventional Wisdom / int_fd49dcff | type |
Inventional Wisdom | |
| Inventional Wisdom / int_fd49dcff | comment |
In Die Another Day the villain has a suit that he can use to shock people. For reasons that are not entirely clear, but possibly related to the guy who built it not entirely trusting his boss (with good reason), there's a button on the front that causes it to electrocute the wearer. | |
| Inventional Wisdom / int_fd49dcff | featureApplicability |
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| Inventional Wisdom / int_fd49dcff | featureConfidence |
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| Inventional Wisdom / int_fed72154 | type |
Inventional Wisdom | |
| Inventional Wisdom / int_fed72154 | comment |
In Barbie: Life in the Dreamhouse, Barbie's Master Computer, Closet, has a button that can change it from a helpful servant, to a power-hungry tormentor. No-one among Barbie's gang can remember why Closet has such a button, not even its inventor, Ken. | |
| Inventional Wisdom / int_fed72154 | featureApplicability |
1.0 | |
| Inventional Wisdom / int_fed72154 | featureConfidence |
1.0 | |
| Barbie: Life in the Dreamhouse (Web Animation) | hasFeature |
Inventional Wisdom / int_fed72154 |
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