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What is the meaning of Cow Tools? What is the meaning of life?
Newspaper reader, The Prehistory of the Far Side
Many places in an exotic location such as the Mad Scientist Laboratory, the Wizard's Cave, Darkest Africa or The Future, there will be a lot of odd bits of mysterious... stuff... lying about. What is it? What does it do? Why is it there?
Well, chances are it isn't anything. While some of it may be a genuine bit of Applied Phlebotinum put there as foreshadowing, much of the time it's just Cow Tools: props or artwork that the designer of the scene threw in to add to the color or atmosphere of the place. This doesn't stop the fans for wildly speculating about them, though. Noodle Implements are similar in regards to a Noodle Incident.
Named for a notorious The Far Side cartoon of the same name, showing a set of primitive-looking but vaguely familiar tools which a bipedal cow is showing off. Gary Larson would later say that it was the strip he'd gotten the most inquiries about, as people tried in vain to figure out what the hell they were for, when in fact Larson hadn't meant them to be anything but strange. Larson later said that he regretted having made one of the tools look vaguely like a saw, thus implying the rest had real-world counterparts. He got the idea from the ( now discredited) anthropology theory that what separated humans from other animals was using tools, and then wondered what it would be like if cows did have tools. He thinks his biggest mistake was thinking this was funny.
On the other hand, the fact that there is No Such Thing as Bad Publicity no doubt attracted more readers to the strip and boosted Larson's circulation. Go figure.
One thing about Cow Tools is that it can be useful for hiding a clever Chekhovs Gun among them. Everything else has no purpose in the story, except for that one thing...
Examples
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Film
- There is a scene in Tim Burton's Sleepy Hollow where Ichabod is doing an autopsy; there is a tray full of strange, complex looking surgical tools next to him. What they're for and how they work is anybody's guess, but they do resemble some of the more esoteric medical devices from the Victorian era.
- Of note considering the film takes place in 1799, 20 years before Victoria was born, let alone Queen of England.
- It was a major plot point that Ichabod was exploring forensic studies earlier than anyone else. It was the very reason why he went to Sleepy Hollow in the first place.
- Tia Dalma's hut in Pirates Of The Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest is stuffed full of voodoo-related Cow Tools. There's so many that the one Chekhovs Gun among them (Barbossa's boots) is easily missed.
- Also of note was Calypso's locket lying on her table.
- Dr. Orin Scrivello's rather painful-looking dentist's tools in Little Shop Of Horrors certainly qualify for this.
- They made a reappearance in Tim Burton's Batman as the plastic surgeon's equipment, too.
- And were lampshaded with his forlorn "You see what I have to work with..."
- Tony Stark's machine shop in Iron Man exemplifies this trope. At some points it seems like there's more stuff in there than you could possibly logically need to build a super suit, regardless of how complex that might be. Things like a pillar drill are necessary for any well-funded chronic tinkerer.
- Famously lampshaded in Buckaroo Banzai, where the labs are full of Cow Tools. "What's that watermelon doing there?" [in a hydraulic press of some sort]. "I'll explain later."
- Itself lampshaded in an early BattleTech novel, with the setup being recreated by a clear Captain Ersatz of Dr. Banzai. (It's later revealed to be simply an object lesson to any idle curious who disturb the setup — mess with the watermelon and an alarm goes off, complete with a message about the hazards of interfering with things you do not understand. This actually becomes useful during a raid on the institute when a stray laser shot vaporizes the watermelon and the alarm distracts an armed intruder just long enough to be dealt with.
- In universe, it was experiment by the Banzai Institute on how to treat food so as to be easily airdropped into famine-starved countries without damaging the food (by making it bounce or resistent to crushing). Behind The Scenes, it was explicitly an attempt at Getting Crap Past The Radar on a production which had been beseiged by meaningless Executive Meddling (including a screaming Flame War over whether Buckaroo would be allowed to wear red-framed glasses onscreen). The director and staff put the watermelon in, with no attempt to explain it, to see if they had finally fatigued the executives' supervision.
- In David Cronenberg's Dead Ringers, the less mentally stable of the twin gynecologists has invented a ghastly-looking array of bizarre surgical instruments, which we see in a brief, rather chilling scene.
- The Live Action Adaptation of Inspector Gadget had Tinkertoys, a dead fish, garden hose and many other strange things alongside traditional operating tools.
- The 'autopsy' sequence showed that he was full of apparently useless and unrelated Cow Tools.
- Parodied in Airplane II: The Sequel (see the quote at the top of the page) where two officers on a space station puzzle over what a particular Cow Tool is for.
- In Ghostbusters, Venkman enters Dana's flat operating a strange device with a long tube and a rubber bulb that appears to pump air through the tube. When she asks what it does, he replies vaguely "It's... technical. One of our little toys." (Actually the device does have a purpose, Venkman just has no idea what he's doing.)
- MontyPython's Meaning of Life. "This is the machine that goes 'Ping'."
- The interior of the Seaview in Voyage To The Bottom Of The Sea and its TV follow-up is full of random flashing lights, switches, screens, boxes, and wires that don't serve any apparent purpose. The lights are so prominent a character actually says "it's always Christmas on a submarine."
- The film The Shape of Things to Come, fondly remembered by B-movie fans as "Blinky Blinky" due to the tons of weird machines with blinking lights in almost every scene.
Literature
- Several Discworld books note that every proper wizard has a stuffed alligator hanging from the ceiling of his laboratory, even if there aren't any alligators naturally in the area. No one,
including especially the wizards, is sure why.
- This is a reference to a similar situation in Mary Norton's Bed-Knob and Broomstick from 1943, which itself probably originates with the stuffed alligator in the apothecary's shop in Romeo & Juliet (Act V, scene 1) making this sub-trope Older Than Steam.
- Referenced in Neverwhere when the Marquis and Door visit her father's study.
- Inspired by early museums, "cabinet of curiosities"? See this picture
 ◊ from 1655. Admittedly the alligator (or, more likely, crocodile) is hanging on the wall (at the right), but ceiling is well filled with specimens. Note that alligators are only found in the Americas and China.
- Perhaps most relevant to this trope, The Light Fantastic describes a wizard's workshop as looking as though a taxidermist had dropped his stock in a foundry then had a fight with a maddened glassblower, braining a passing alligator in the process.
- Also lampshaded a few times: Archchancellor Ridcully performs the ominous Rite of Ash-Kente to summon and bind Death with two candles, an egg and some string in a pinch, but wizards like all the ornamentation, and besides, difficult rituals mean people are less likely to try them.
- The Department of
Necromancy Post-Mortem Communications is full of dribbly candles, cobwebs, skeletons and assorted Cow Tools, because if a spirit is going to make the effort of piercing the veil and returning to the living world, a wizard ought to make the effort to see that things look right.
- Lewis Carroll's famous riddle, "How is a raven like a writing desk?" sort of qualifies as a verbal Cow Tool, as Carroll never intended for it to have an answer; it was literally supposed to be complete nonsense. However, reader pressure for an answer finally forced him to make one up — "They both produce flat notes," turning the question into a joke.
- And here I thought it was because they both had inky quills.
- There's an N in neither and a B in both, I thought.
- That, and Poe wrote on both of them.
- They were both involved in the production of My Immortal?
- The "offog" from Eric Frank Russells' science fiction short story "Allamagoosa." Many purposes, as well as descriptions, are put forward for this essential item of a starship's inventory....unfortunately, all of them are wrong.
Live Action TV
- Every Mad Scientist has to have a plasma lamp, to evidently show his technological prowess, regardless of the fact that every Spencer Gifts and Circuit City in the world sells them for about $25 each. Also, some piece of machinery topped with a "Jacob's ladder" spark gap, plus flasks of colored (optionally foaming) liquid, as all mad scientists apparently dabble in chemistry by default.
- A standard gag on many "bad movie" review sites: "Beakers of strangely colored fluids? There must be SCIENCE going on here!"
- Many of the tubes, conduits, and access panels of the dressing the original Star Trek sets were labeled with the cryptic acronym GNDN to remind the stage crew that this or that prop machinery was merely for show and that it "Goes Nowhere, Does Nothing".
- Lampshaded by a joke in Airplane II, where William Shatner's character is annoyed by a big fancy machine looking like something out of Star Trek that doesn't actually do anything.
- Subverted with the Shelves of Honor on The Colbert Report. The shelves full of apparently random junk that line one wall of the set might be expected to be Cow Tools, but just about everything on there has some significance. See Wikiality's detailed analysis.
- Sam's lab in Stargate SG-1 includes some things that are supposedly alien technology she's analyzing. Some of it has an obvious purpose, some of it is from previous episodes, but most of it is completely random.
- Turned around in one episode where an alien, who's lost his memory, is working on a TV show and one of his actual alien devices is being used as a Cow Tools prop in the show.
- Discussed in the DVD commentary for the Doctor Who serial "The Caves of Androzani", when a man gets his head shoved in between two parts of a futuristic machine thing which immediately starts glowing. The serial's director notes that "we don't know what it does, but it's killing him".
- From the newer episode, "Blink": "Tracked you down with this. This is my timey-wimey detector. Goes ding when there's stuff. Also, it can boil an egg at 30 paces. Whether you want it to or not, actually, so I've learned to stay away from hens. It's not pretty when they blow."
- In Babylon 5, maintenance extras regularly walk around pointing vaguely cleaner-like or metal-detector-like gadgets at the floor. In A View From The Gallery two of them even speculate on what they are for.
- Mythbusters has the real special effects studio M-5 as their base of operations, with all sorts of equipment that comes in handy for testing myths. The shop itself is constantly cluttered with devices, tools and a wall of cubby shelfs. At one point trying to do a scale test, they needed an action figure and after a minute Jaime produced one from one of the cubbies. At other points devices from past and upcoming episodes can be seen in the background.
- In The Red Green Show, junk-store owner Dalton Humphrey finds an odd looking device in his garage, and has to resist the male urge to keep it until he figures out what it's for.
Music
Videogames
- These are all over the place in Baten Kaitos.
- The alien bases in the X-COM games are stuffed with these. Seizing said bases (or sufficiently equipped alien craft) even nets you research angles revolving around the insidious uses of the devices, (useless as they may be to humans). Heck, some of them are even literal Cow Tools (either for use on cows, or made out of cows).
- Both Dr. Kleiner's and Dr. Vance's labs in Half Life 2. The former has a working mini-teleporter among the other seemingly random devices. The latter has a strange machine that sends visible rays through an object (possibly another Xen sample) which can be rotated with the controls on the panel, although nothing really happens. This is made even more strange by the fact that, during the lengthy break in action where you're expected to explore the lab, Dr. Vance specifically invites you to have a look at it, as if it were something important.
- It's a miniature of the "Resonance Cascade" effect from the first game. Since Gordon was actually in the test chamber when it happened, it makes sense to expect him to be interested.
- Fallout's Mothership Zeta. The shelves of the interior corridors of the titular ship from Fallout 3's final expansion are adorned with all varieties of Cow Tools.
Webcomics
Western Animation
- Danny Phantom where a couple of Jack Fenton's invented ghost weaponry are so oddly shaped or out of place that one wonders what the blinding hell they do exactly. His wife pointed out a similar reason in one episode.
- Dexters Laboratory is the king of this trope, featuring an enormous variety of technological inventions in Dexter's lab that are never explained and their use is never revealed. Many times, Dexter will be seen working on a particular gizmo (almost always by simply tweaking it with a wrench) that very, very rarely has any importance in the plot.
- Lampshaded by one commercial for the show, that showed a loop of Dexter using his wrench on said gizmo for several seconds before the narrator says "Y'know, eventually, he's got to overtighten that thing."
- Dr. Drakken and Dementor have multiple lairs filled with random crap for Kim Possible to destroy.
- Another good example is Merlin's cottage in Disney's The Sword In The Stone. It's full of little gizmos and gadgets Merlin is said to have acquired from the future. Some, like a globe, a model of the solar system, and vehicles like trains and biplanes, can be recognized. The rest are simply eye candy.
- Basil of Baker Street has a lot of these lying around his flat in The Great Mouse Detective.
- Most have a fairly easily discernible purpose, though - for example devices for producing cigarette ash and footprints for analysis.
Comic Books
- Jack Kirby covered everything in Cow Tools. He was incapable of drawing a simple box; every device had innumerable chrome tubes, knobs, discs, and zigzags to no apparent purpose. Guess he wanted his machines to complement the dots they generated.
- Parodies like Twisted Toyfare Theater have a ball with this. "Help me lift this giant piece of Kirby-esque machinery!"
- Watchmen anyone? Nite Owl's Powered Armor, seen in his lab and discussed several times... never gets used.
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