You would not believe what they had to go through before the homeowners' association gave them a permit for this.
"I start tinkering with things around the house, trying to make them more efficient. I start by making sketches of devices I'd dreamed up in an off moment-some practical, some not so much."
How do you quickly communicate to your audience how smart the Gadgeteer Genius, Mad Scientist, or Bungling Inventor is? By filling their house with time-saving devices of their own creation, of course.
Consider Bob. Bob has a bathroom with a machine that helps him brush his teeth. He also has a machine that automatically styles his hair for him. Bob also has a foot-activated door-opener. His lamps also have built-in gadgets that assist in the maintenance of the house and also gives Bob materials he will need for the day.
A sub-trope of Cool House. Contrast with Mad Scientist Laboratory, though there may be one of those in the basement as well. In television or film, expect some of the gadgets to be Cow Tools — even the authors and/or set designers don't know what they are supposed to be for. Compare Rube Goldberg Device.
Examples
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Film — Animation
- Despicable Me: Gru and Vector's houses are filled with gadgets that improve their lifestyles.
Film — Live-Action
- Back to the Future begins inside Dr. Emmet Brown's house, where his alarm clock triggers a machine to automatically prepare breakfast for him and for his dog, Einstein. Since Doc Brown's been missing for a few days, his kitchen is a mess of uneaten breakfasts.
- The home of the Potts family in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang is littered with the Homemade Inventions of father Caractus Potts, including the automated breakfast maker in the kitchen and the music box in the children's room.
- At the start of Doc Savage: The Man of Bronze, the title character is shown in his arctic Fortress of Solitude laboring on inventions that (the Narrator declares) may one day be useful to Mankind! After gazing at the stars through a telescope, Doc appears to be building a Retro Rocket to take him there, but it turns out to be a Rube Goldberg Device for ice fishing.
- Professor Brainard's kitchen in Flubber has a similar auto-breakfast setup to Doc Brown's, if slightly more modernized. (A Mac Plus automatically runs all the machines around the house.) His two robot assistants, Weebo and Weber, don't necessarily qualify.
- Wayne Szalinski from the Honey, I Shrunk the Kids franchise has filled his houses with gadgets. It's particularly noticeable in the second film Honey, I Blew Up the Kid (which was set in the early 1990s when it was filmed) where the house has an elaborate electronic mailbox that the family dog Quark can activate, a PA system that can be activated from a control in the kitchen to every other room in the house, a robot duster/vacuum cleaner, a toaster that can deposit spread onto the bread itself and a special multistory playpen for his infant sonnote .
Literature
- In Tantei Team KZ Jiken Note, the local Techno Wizard Nanaki uses his skills to transform his house that he's forced to stay before majority into this. Specifically, it is pretty much managed by artificial intelligence, including driverless cars, robotic servants, and large numbers of sensors that report literally everything in the house (to the point of enabling precision agriculture and horticulture). It's also self-sufficient in terms of food production, involving a fish farm and what the novel refers to as miniature farm animals.
Live-Action TV
- One of A Prince Among Men's sources of comedy comes from the range of devices that Gary has installed into his house going wrong in one way or another.
- Eccentric as it already was in Pee-wee's Playhouse, Pee Wee Herman's home gets an upgrade in Pee-wee's Big Adventure with a fully automated breakfast-making machine.
Video Games
- In Dishonored 2, Kirin Jindosh's Clockwork Mansion is a tribute to his mechanical engineering genius and rearranges itself on the fly to better fit his current mood and desire to impress the guests.
Western Animation
- In The Adventures of Jimmy Neutron, Boy Genius, Jimmy's bathroom has a machine that changes his hairstyle for him. He has a few in his room as well.
- The home shared by bumbling inventor Wallace and his faithful canine companion Gromit in Wallace & Gromit has all sorts of inventions built in. Examples include a hinged bed arranged next to a trap door so that Wallace can go straight from bed to the breakfast table, and a toy train that carries mail and other goods around the house.
