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Just don't ask what one of these bad boys runs on.
"Good thing they made everything out of balsa wood back then."
Bamboo Technology, named for the unlikely devices that the Professor came up with on Gilligans Island, is the use of mechanisms with a level of technology closer to the Stone Age to achieve feats usually achieved with Industrial or even Modern Age technology. In general they are not necessarily made of bamboo — the ones on The Flintstones were often made out of wood, stone and dinosaurs. What characterizes all of them is the self-evident unlikelihood that they actually work. Most likely to be seen in the more farcical sitcoms.
Bamboo Technology includes the Robinson Goldberg Contraption, but not anything that relies on magic to work. Those devices are Magitek. Pretty much sure to crop up in past-based Punk Punk settings.
To be fair, bamboo is an incredible versatile material, light, strong yet flexible, and the plant grows very quickly. But they have yet to find a way to make electronics out of it... (other than as filaments for light bulbs ).
Examples
Advertising
- This new ad for Emerald Nuts features a man who who has things built on him by the Swiss Family Robinson. They appear to have gotten into his living room through a trans-dimensional portal... made from bamboo.
Comic Books
- Possible variation/subversion: When he and the rest of the Fearsome Four (Zombie Fantastic Four) were locked in a vault so the Ultimate Fantastic Four could save the day, Zombie Reed Richards bragged to the guards that using highly improbable materials ("Did you know you can make a keyboard out of hair?"), he and the rest of the Fearsome Four had now built a functional teleporter and would be leaving now for Central Park where they'd gobble up whoever they came across, thank you very much and goodbye. The Fearsome Four joins hands and disappears, the guards rush in... and then Zombie Reed Richards tells Zombie Sue Storm she can turn off their invisibility.
- You would really think the guards would know that.
- The weakest arc in the X Wing Series comics, Requiem For A Rogue, had TIE fighters and TIE Interceptors made largely of wood. Small spaceships, firing lasers. Made out of wood. Piloted by nonsentient beasts being controlled by evil Sith music. Gaah!
Film
Literature
Live Action TV
- Bamboo Technology was applied for humor effect in an episode of the Alton Brown cooking/science show Good Eats, in which Brown is "stranded on a deserted island" but has managed to put together a suspiciously well-equipped kitchen out of found objects, wherein he demonstrates the techniques and science behind several forms of tropical cooking. (The show abounds with similar framing devices, ranging from Alton playing his own Evil Twin in an episode about kimchi to a Courtroom Antics trial of butter.)
- In The Mighty Boosh episode "Milky Joe", Howard and Vince flee from the coconut-police in a bamboo car. They also construct houses, fashion items, and the coconut men from bamboo, palm leaves, etc.
- One prominent example is The A Team, where the titular team regularly cobbled together weapons and vehicles from random ingredients, such as twenty-four feet of PVC piping, a metal dune-buggy frame and household chemicals.
- Even better is MacGyver, where the entire plot revolves on the hero saving the day by fabricating something ridiculously clever from a piece of gum, a toothpick and a hairdryer (or whatever).
- One memorable sequence (perhaps the definitive one) from the opening of Legend of the Holy Rose Part 1 involves literally bamboo technology. The title character, with only a few hours, manages to design and build a whole gyroplane out of bamboo, tarps, and an old airplane engine. He and the prisoner he was rescuing then proceed to fly out of the base through heavy gunfire and have the plane work perfectly without any apparent flaws in spite of both the lack of rigidity of the materials used in it and the fact that it had to have taken at least some hits. Not exactly Willing Suspension Of Disbelief's finest hour. Also lampshaded by his copilot saying "It really flies!" and Mac replying "Of course it does!".
- Mythbusters tested out Mac Gyver's bamboo glider. It didn't work — primarily because the motor (which in the Mac Gyver episode actually came from a cement mixer, not an aircraft) wasn't strong enough. It also took them a lot longer to build.
- This is why Mac Gyver is frequently called the "Patron Saint of Mythbusters".
- A man trying to flee East Germany built an airplane out of a trabant... and succeeded. You can see the airplane in the Museum of the Wall in Checkpoint Charlie, Berlin.
- Locke's Bamboo Trebuchet in Lost stretched credibility in my eyes, seeing as how his engineering knowledge was limited to working in a toy store and a box factory.
- ...which is probably why it didn't work.
- Why he would even think it would work against a metal hatch is what I want to know.
- Michael's raft did, and the pontoons were indeed made of bamboo.
- The Frozen Donkey Wheel: It is a donkey wheel in a frozen chamber underneath the Orchid station which, when pushed, moves the island through space and time .
- Subverted in that the intelligence behind the island can make stuff not work if it so chooses.
- In the Star Trek The Original Series episode "The City on the Edge of Forever'' Spock manages to make a processor interface for his tricorder out of, as he puts it, "stone knives and bearskins". Although this is Handwaved as due to his genius and future knowledge, it is completely impossible to construct such a thing out of the few vacuum tubes and other items they have.
- Good thing a 23rd Century tricorder was part of the device, then. Given that its parts were the main components he used.
- Irrelevant. You can't do anything with those parts, not even add 2+2.
- Subverted in an episode of Star Trek Voyager; Janeway and a holographic version of Leonardo da Vinci managed to escape some ruthless aliens using a Renaissance-era glider they had previously failed to successfully launch. The subversion: the new glider was improved upon using future materials, and the aforementioned aliens had already pressed the hologram into creating future tech for them for a while by then, giving a bit more credibility to how it managed to work.
- Shroud Of The Thwacker by Chris Elliott, a historical fiction spoof set in the 19th century, features wooden mobile phones that run on kerosene.
- The British television show "Rough Science" is essentially this trope applied to reality TV. Five scientists are dropped off in the middle of the wilderness and must use natural materials and a small amount of scrap material to make advanced devices within a time limit. They've constructed everything from radio transmitters and receivers, weather stations and clocks, to a wide variety of medicines and even microscopes and bacterial cultures, all using scrap and natural materials.
Video Games
- Bioshock, in a Steam Punk setting with no computers in the vein of modern technology, has intelligent defense turrets. To steal a joke from the online game reviewer Yahtzee, this editor was unaware that boiled water could form allegiances.
- Of course, Underwater-Objectivist-Art-Deco-City-1960 is not quite as Bamboo Technology as most steampunk
- And boiled water can form allegiances in the same way that electricity do.
- In an almost perfect example of this trope, Princess Kaguya in Okami returns to the moon on a space shuttle made of bamboo while wearing an ancient Japanese spacesuit.
- In Donkey Kong 64 (and also Super Smash Bros. Brawl), Diddy Kong has rocket boosters and a gun, made out of wood. How the rocket doesn't ignite the wood is ignored.
- Not to mention the fact that the frigging gun shoots peanuts.
- Really, all of the Kongs' bullets can be included. Other than peanuts, we also see coconuts, grapes, pineapples, and feathers used as ammunition.
- If Masahiro Sakurai helmed TV Tropes, this trope would have been called "Jungle Technology" as per the Smash Dojo (In other news, Sakurai lampshaded this trope with those two words while showing Diddy's moves on the Dojo during the long lead-up to Brawl's release).
- The dwarves in Dwarf Fortress are able to raise huge steel bridges using nothing more than three rocks. One for the lever, and two to connect the lever to the bridge.
- It is actually possible to build a primitive computer in Dwarf Fortress. This is a game in which "gears made from rock" are advanced technology. Slight subversion, because it's the player, not the dorfs, who can perform the computations.
- Although, ironically, they can't perform the literature-alluded reference above of going from raw materials to full smelting operations because the anvil can only be created by a metalsmith forge which requires, you guessed it, an anvil. Cue much squabbling over the forums about the possibilities of a crude rock-based anvil to bootstrap their way up. (Which logically must have been done at some point, because where did the very first dwarfish anvil come from?)
- Subverted in the case of Huitzil/Phobos of Darkstalkers/Vampire fame, who appears to belong to some Mayan Temple Of Doom, but was actually created by Big Bad Pyron to destroy all life on Earth (starting with the dinosaurs).
- Touhou: while it's not really technology, the inhabitants of Gensokyo recently constructed a moon rocket to visit the Lunar Capital in the Silent Sinner in Blue official manga. It had normal windows that could be opened from the inside while in-flight, a chimney, artificial gravity and air, somehow, and was constructed mostly of wood.
- Super Mario Brothers 3. Bowser had a whole tank division, a navy and an air fleet all made of wood.
- Taz-Mania's Francis X. Bushman had a "tree trunk tank".
- In Katamari Damashi the Prince must make stars out of eclectic junk.
Webcomics
Western Animation
- Kids Next Door has its own self-parodying version, 2x4 technology, where scrap lumber and household/everyday items are cobbled together into everything from firearms to spaceships.
- In a Veggie Tales parody of Gilligan's Island called "Larry's Lagoon", the professor gets everyone off the island by building a helicopter out of bamboo and coconuts.
- The titular characters of Ed Edd N Eddy, but mainly Edd, manage to work wonders with cardboard, scrap metal, and other byproducts of suburban living. By the end of the episode, they are usually revealed to be completely unworkable or to possess some fatal flaw in their design.
- In Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius, Jimmy manages to build rocket ships out of rides in an amusement park. There are probably a lot of his inventions that would fit this.
- He actually builds two treehouses with functioning plumbing systems out of bamboo at one point.
- Heck, once when stranded in the past he built a time machine out of nuts, berries, rocks and wood.
- In a cave, with A BOX OF SCRAPS.
- Gadget, the inventor mousette from Chip 'n Dale Rescue Rangers constructs her inventions, ranging from weapons to vehicles (even a starship of sorts) to home appliances, exclusively from garbage found in dumpsters or even right on site.
- Ogg, the boy genius inventor from Cartoon Network's Mike, Lu, & Ogg, can build just about any invention from the materials he finds on the show's no-tech Pacific island setting, including on one memorable occasion a television set. (Of course it doesn't work because there are no stations on the island, but all the islanders become addicted to watching static...)
- This was parodied several times in Dave The Barbarian ("and then, Dave made an improvised megaphone by using a squirrel, some strings and a megaphone!")
- On an episode of Futurama, Bender gets a downgrade so that he is made out of wood. Naturally, it turns out that it was All Just A Dream.
- In "Stratosphere", the Storm Hawks build space suits, transform the Condor into a rocket ship that can fly to the Stratosphere and modify Aerrow's skimmer so that it can fly to the Exosphere, where no one has ever gone before. How exactly they manage to do all that remains a mystery.
- How have The Flintstones not been mentioned yet?
- They have. In the page intro, no less.
- Parodied in The Simpsons episode "Das Bus" (which was essentially Lord Of The Flies meets Gilligans Island) where Bart instructs Martin to work on building "some coconut walky-talkys. And, if possible, a coconut Nintendo system". He also envisions the children building a society based on Bamboo Technology and monkey butlers.Needless to say, it doesn't quite work out (not least because the island lacks any bamboo).
Real Life
- Real Life example: The Las Piñas Bamboo Organ in Las Piñas City, The Philippines.
- Real Life example: A bike made of bamboo.
- Not exactly bamboo, but knowing that the De Havilland Mosquito fighter plane is actually made of wood was pretty surprising to this troper. Mostly because by World War II, nearly all planes of that level of effectiveness and production were made of metal.
- Even more famously, Howard Hughes' "Spruce Goose", which was actually made of birch.
- See Cargo Cults. Though in this case, the technology didn't actually work.
- Several Asian countries use bamboo plumbing.
- It is well known that several Asian countries also use bamboo in place of steel rebar for construction of large buildings
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