Merging Machine

A device that fuses multiple objects together, kind of like Fusion Dance. Works by either shooting a beam or placing the objects into a machine. May also work in reverse. Sometimes, the effect is unintentional and probably not the main purpose of the device; Teleporter Accidents are particularly prone to turning the devices into Merging Machines, especially in cases such as Tele-Frag.

May be involved in Item Crafting. This may be the source of Mix-and-Match Critters, Mix-and-Match Man, and (sometimes) Ninja Pirate Zombie Robot.

Not to be confused with Combining Mecha.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• In JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: JoJolion, the Wall Eyes are a geological phenomenon that have this effect on objects buried in the ground near them. One character demonstrates this by burying a lemon and an orange, then digging them up and cutting them to reveal that they've swapped segments. Later it's revealed that this has nothing to do with the Wall Eyes, and the ground has had this property for generations. It's also responsible for the creation of protagonist Josuke Higashikata, who's the merger of two men, Yoshikage Kira and Josefumi Kujo.
• Wapol of One Piece had this as one of his sub-powers. While the Munch-Munch Devil Fruit gave him the power to fuse himself with anything he ate, he could also fuse eaten objects with each other, creating an entirely new object. This trope is then exploited as he ends up profiting by promoting the fused objects as toys and selling them.

Comic Books

• A case where the "merging machine" is a person: In the thirteenth issue of Grant Morrison's Animal Man series, the B'wana Beast is infected with anthrax, which drives him a bit crazy, to the point that he uses his powers to merge random animals and turn the resulting chimeras into killing machines.
• A strip in Whizzer and Chips called "Minnie's Mixer" plays this for laughs. The eponymous device looks like an electric food mixer, but when pointed at two objects in close proximity can fuse them together. It's most often used to mix people or pets with objects. Fortunately, the process is reversible.

Film — Animation

• Inverted near the start of the Gumby movie, when after Prickle, Goo, and Pokey accidentally fuse themselves into a ball of clay, they get taken to a hospital where a machine is used to separate them. Notably, this entire scene was removed in the Director's Cut version.

Film — Live-Action

• The Fly (1958) and its 1986 remake are arguably based around an accidental version, merging a man with a fly (and later the man-fly with the teleporter itself). Many parodies and homages tend to fall into this trope by having multiple "mixings" take place.

Literature

• Captain Underpants has the Combine-o-tron 2000, which can bond things like humans and robots together at the cellular level. Its effects can be reversed by putting the batteries in backwards.
• In the Forgotten Realms book Tymora's Luck, tinker gnomes and two gods make a "fusion chamber".
• One of the Gamebooks based off of Super Mario Bros. called Monster Mix-Up uses this as its primary gimmick. Bowser has a device called the Monster Mixer, which looks like a giant flying egg-beater◊, that he uses to fuse his minions together into more dangerous troops. The ending has Princess Peach consider unfusing them with a device based upon a soup strainer.
• That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime: Shizue Izawa possesses the Unique Skill [Degenerate], which allows her to combine and disassemble items or even abilities in her possession at will. However, Shizue was never able to draw out this Skill's full potential before her passing. After absorbing her per her dying request, Rimuru gains the Skill for himself and is able to start making full usage of it with [Great Sage's] help to, among other things, break down weapons and items into natural resources in order to harvest those same resources to make new items, combine minor Spirits into new Spirits that he then fuses with other people, and create new Skills on the fly from existing ones in his possession. [Great Sage] eventually merges with [Degenerate] in order to complete her evolution to the Ultimate Skill [Raphael, Lord of Wisdom], keeping the latter Skill's effects and boosting them even further.

Live-Action TV

• Chikyuu Sentai Fiveman introduces one of these as a Mid-Season Upgrade for the villains. Specifically, they combine two monsters with phonetically similar names into a Combined Galaxy Warrior with the powers of both. The machine itself only appears twice, with Take Our Word for It applying elsewhere.
• Mystery Science Theater 3000: In the episode ""Manos: The Hands of Fate", Joel's invention exchange is the Cartuner, a device that takes two newspaper comic strips and combines them into something funnier than the source material.
  "Ziggy had Garfield neutered? Now that's funny!"
• Similar to the Star Trek example, in the Red Dwarf episode "Demons and Angels", an experiment with a teleportation device causes the ship and crew to be split into "High" and "Low" versions. Eventually, the crew manage to recombine them.
• Star Trek:
  • Inverted and then played straight in the Star Trek: The Original Series episode "The Enemy Within", in which a transporter malfunction splits Captain Kirk into two people, one with all his more aggressive traits and the other with his more passive traits. Eventually, the crew figures out what caused the malfunction and successfully uses the transporter to reunify him.
  • In the Star Trek: Voyager episode "Tuvix", a Teleporter Accident fuses Tuvok and Neelix together, forming the title character. They eventually work out how to reverse the process, leading to an existential plea from him equating it to murder.

Toys

• BIONICLE: The Spear of Fusion, which can also be used in reverse. The results can be a bit unpredictable and can only be undone with the spear. When it was accidentally used to split a skakdi in two, the result was one being with the same appearance and abilities as the original but with reduced intelligence and self-control and another being that looked completely different and was smarter than the other half but powerless and rather crazy. It has also been used to split a flying creature into two animals that each had only one wing so couldn't fly, fuse together two toa into a creature with reduced intelligence and very different powers than its components, and fuse two skakdi together to form a being that immediately turned on its teammates because it now had twice as much hatred for its team.

Video Games

• ANNO: Mutationem: The various shops hold a function to manually combine collected material into Socketed Equipment to boost Ann's weapons.
• Played with in Day of the Tentacle. At the end, the three Player Characters have to use a single Chron-O-John to travel through time, chasing the Purple Tentacle. They come out apparently fused into a single monstrosity with three heads. Later, Dr. Fred uses an X-ray machine to scan them, revealing that they're all separate people stuck in a single shirt. Embarrassed, they separate.
• In The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, the Fuse ability allows Link to select any item from his surroundings to be attached onto his weapons, such as a Keese's eyeball will turn his arrows into a Homing Projectile.
• Mario + Rabbids Kingdom Battle have The Supa-Merge. A piece of headgear that targets two objects in close proximity and fuses them, resulting in something new. One unfortunate Rabbid ends up fused with it and can't control its ability to fuse things, which results in a lot of the enemies you fight in the game.
• Parodied in No Time to Explain for the final level. One of the Yous suggests wielding both the beam cannon and the shotgun at the same time to enable a Double Jump, and this is somehow taken by one of the other Yous to fuse that You and Stunt Man You into one being who wields both. The fused character's profile page is even him screaming in agony.
• In Psychonauts in the Rhombus of Ruin, Raz encounters a device in a crashed alien spaceship that can split and merge objects.
• The Scribblenauts series has the Create-A-Tron, an unsummonable object that only appears in "Create" levels in Super Scribblenauts and Scribblenauts Remix. Goal of these levels is to put the correct items, animals, people, etc. in the create-a-tron to create the required new object.
• Jakyou Manors/The Velvet Room/Demon Fusion Program-enhanced tech in most of the Shin Megami Tensei games, including the Persona series, function this way for combining demons, personae, swords, spell/tarot cards, and any number of other compatible things. There have been cases in which accepted parts for fusions have included humans (twice) and a dog. Most of the time, they remember their pasts. On the other hand, aggression level is raised and there is the question of getting a severe case of violent madness and eventual breakdown; so far, there has not been a single recorded case of a successful demon/human fusion in which the results did not present a form of sanity degeneration, either through obsessive devotion to all laws or complete and utter contempt for all of them, both reaching sociopathic degrees later on. Evil Is Not a Toy, kiddies!
• Xenoblade Chronicles 3 takes this to its logical extreme with Origin. Origin was designed by Melia Antiqua and Nia to fuse together the World of the Titans and Alrest, as the worlds were about to collide following Klaus' death and obliterate each other. Origin makes it so that the worlds properly merge instead of completely annihilating each other, but because the fusion ended up being improper, Annihilation Events still plague the resulting world of Aionios.
• Xenogears: As part of his experiments, Krelian utilizes a method that allows him to fully integrate a person with a Gear. The process itself is never shown; however, the ramifications of the procedure aren't too gratifying.

Webcomics

• Homestuck's punch-card alchemy process lets you convert objects into punch-card codes and back, and by merging the codes, you can create merged objects.
• Kid Radd has the Chimera program, which, among other things, can merge individual sprites together. You have to be extremely careful when you set the parameters, however, or things will get ugly.
• Sequential Art: In strip #1151, British Prime Minister Johnson announces contagion restrictions that include a ban on gatherings of more than two people. The four squirrel girls panic at the thought of being separated, so they create the "Huddle-On Collider" to fuse themselves into a single entity. The result of this daffy device is the multi-limbed abomination that pursues Kat through the basement tunnels in strip #1157.

Web Original

• The SCP Foundation has SCP-914, "The Clockworks". Putting two items in the input booth and running the machine on "fine" (the setting for turning things up a notch) or "very fine" (typically produces something that goes even higher to the input) tends to yield outputs that combine aspects from both inputs; in one of the side-stories, 914 was fed a D-class and a 64-core supercomputer multiple times, with outputs including sixty-four small robot spiders with human faces and a human with a supercomputing brain (which was the desired output). In addition, one of its other settings, "coarse", often functions as an inversion, separating objects into their component parts.

Western Animation

• Ace Ventura: Pet Detective has an episode based around a scientist whose teleporter combines him with a fly. Later in the episode, Ace is combined with Spike.
• In one episode of The Adventures of Jimmy Neutron, Boy Genius, Jimmy and Carl's hamster Mr. Wuggles accidentally swap heads after a teleportation experiment gone wrong.
• DuckTales (2017): The Stone of What Was is seemingly meant to fuse together two living beings, but also works best with non-sapient animals, as the results with the anthropomorphic characters are mixed and more than a little horrific.
• In one episode of The Fairly OddParents! Timmy celebrates a half-day from school by wishing up a machine that combines any distinct objects put inside. He has a lot of fun making himself half-kid and half-skateboard, but it goes wrong when Crocker combines himself with cheese and gains cheese-based powers. Timmy has to combine himself with a lot of objects to stop Crocker.
• In Grojband, DJ Fusion possesses a device called a “fusion mixer” that combines objects put on it, and with it opens up a restaurant that serves fusion foods created by the machine. However trouble brews when Grojband and their Gender Flip doppelgängers, the Newmans, fall onto it, causing them all to fuse into two-headed freaks.
• Alpha from Men in Black: The Series uses an alien device called the Cosmic Integrator to grant him the power to fuse alien body parts to himself.
• Mixels has Cubits, a special ore collected by the Mixels, which allows them to create their Mixes, Maxes, and Murps in the first place. All it takes is at least two Mixels that share the color scheme of the Cubit (or a Rainbow Cubit, which can be used by any tribe in any way), and a single touch from each, and they'll become a new combination. The game Calling All Mixels reveals that Cubits can be used to merge items together as well, mainly to create new Cubit collectors or defense stations for the collectors.
• The Phineas and Ferb episode "Canderemy" has Dr. Doofenshmirtz build one of these called the Combine-inator so he could combine his two childhood loves: his pet giant cockroach and garlic ice cream. They go together about as well as it sounds. He then weaponizes it to combine himself with his robot Norm to stand a better fighting chance against Perry. A stray shot of the inator ends up fusing Candace and Jeremy together, and when the machine goes haywire, Perry also ends up fused with equipment from Doof's lab. Eventually Phineas and Ferb undo all the fusions with a recreation of their invention the Molecular Separator, but the episode ends with one last shot from the inator fusing Phineas and Ferb, with rather uncanny results.
• In one episode of ReBoot, a corrupted game fuses Megabyte with a containment unit filled with liquid energy. It turns him into a Megatruck, and the game just happens to be a pastiche of Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior.
• In one episode of The Secret Saturdays, the Saturdays get tricked by a faked message from a ghost into helping some evil scientists complete a machine that can merge living things together, who then test the machine on Zack, Fisk, and Komodo.
• The Simpsons: In "Treehouse of Horror VIII", after Homer buys a matter transporter from Professor Frink (and uses it around the house to save him from walking from one room to another... though it takes more effort to move the transporter booths), Bart uses it to fuse with a fly, hoping it will give him superpowers. However, instead of Brundlefly, he gets the 1958 Fly treatment (Bart with a fly head, the fly with Bart's).

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