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"Time travel should only be used for important things, like taking extra classes at magic school."
The case of a writer not quite getting his own head around his invention. An invention which is capable of great things (and often, of literally anything) is used exclusively for much lesser tasks. If you find that after a trip to the fridge you see that the Phlebotinum in question could be used to obsolesce entire industries if not render the entire plot trivial then you're dealing with this trope.
Common victims of Misapplication include:
- Faster Than Light Travel:
- It's actually harder to conceive an FTL system that can't also double as a Weapon Of Mass Destruction than it is to conceive one that can.
- Teleporters And Transporters:
- The same technology that allows your crew to travel from the Cool Ship to the planet and back without using a shuttle is the same technology that can park a live warhead in the enemy captain's lap without using a missile. It also makes a nifty disintegrator beam if you skip the "rematerialization" end of the process.
- Artificial Gravity
It is, of course, possible to create rules for all these Phlebotini that prevent the above forms of misuse (and the really good writers even keep it from looking like a form of Fake Difficulty), but many writers merely take them as-is without thinking about the potential consequences.
Compare Forgotten Phlebotinum, No Transhumanism Allowed, Plot Induced Stupidity, and Coconut Superpowers. See also: Mundane Utility and Cut Lex Luthor A Check, Reed Richards Is Useless. When they do use magical abilities for these kinds of things, it's Magitek. Frequently, the cast themselves fail to even ask what the phlebotinum is capable of, resulting in a Fantastic Aesop.
Examples
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Anime & Manga
- The digital world from Digimon was created from computer programming and could subvert any laws of reality, a programmer could solve any problem plaguing humanity.
- The way Miaka from Fushigi Yuugi used up her three wishes. Seriously, for how long the series went on, you would think the writer could have thought of better requests...
Comic Books
- Basically, every superhero. Name one superhero who couldn't somehow make a fortune using his or her abilities for something other than beating up another superhuman.
- DC Comics has (had?) the Kapitalist Kouriers, a set of Russian superspeedsters who indeed used their powers for a courier business. All over the world. However: characters who do that instead of beating up on The Bad Guy of the Week don't get played in RPGs and don't get their own comic titles. So it's sorta self-defeating.
- An issue of Heroes For Hire (which is Exactly What It Says On The Tin, so at least these guys are getting paid for their work) has one of the "heroes" in a government warehouse where various captured supervillain equipment is stored. Upon seeing one piece of equipment, he notes the idiocy of inventing a gun that turns stuff into gold, then using it to rob banks. It takes him very little time to realize that he ought to steal the gun himself and use it in more intelligent ways. Unfortunately, it's broken shortly afterward in a super-brawl. He presumably was unaware of the fact that any object transmuted by the alchemy gun turns into dust after exposure to heat or after a certain amount of time. Mining and construction companies would pay a fortune for a device that could easily reduce solid material into dust regardless of what it became in the interim!
- A recent issue of Flash had him do just this. He was hired by an antique film and memorabilia collector. He hired the Flash to watch all of his movies and examine all of his antiques and catalog them. Obviously made for the plot, but ingenious none the less.
- Cut Lex Luthor A Check. The Ultimates do just that.
- Lampshaded in the first issue of the Mark Shaw incarnation of Manhunter. Over a series of panels of Dr. Alchemy using this powers to perform a robbery, Manhunter points out that he could probably make more money a dozen different ways using a stone that would allow him to transform an object into something else, even if it was temporary.
- Subverted by the GURPS supplement SuperTemps, which was filled with supers who used their powers for things like sanitation and garbage disposal, medicine, being a courier, or being a security expert.
- GURPS International Super Teams incorporated SuperTemps into its setting, and expanded upon it. And the I.S.T. chapter of GURPS Y2K had detailed passages on supers using their powers for construction and other mundane occupations.
- And not-so-mundane UN-sponsored occupations, like weather control (to divert destructive hurricanes, alleviate drought, and so forth) and famine relief ("you can make plants grow? come with me!").
- Captain Hammer in Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog is mentioned by Dr. Horrible as being "corporate"; presumably he takes sponsorships. Given the character in question (an incredibly self-absorbed jackass who takes special pleasure in beating up geeks and seducing clueless women, getting away with it all because he's labeled a "hero"), it wouldn't exactly be surprising.
- Almost subverted in DC's critically-acclaimed Starman comic of the mid-to-late-1990s. Our Hero, Jack Knight, agrees to take on his father's mantle as Starman, if his father will in turn take the amazing Cosmic Rod technology that he's used for self-indulgent heroics for half a century, and adapt it to civilian use: clean power, antigravity, force fields, and more. In the final issue, Ted makes good on the promise, and hands Jack a thick sheaf of documents detailing exactly that, just before his Crowning Momentof Awesome. It's almost subverted because, years after the end of the series, no trace of the "spin-off" technology has been seen.
- Seriously subverted in Watchmen. Dr. Manhattan's unique physiology and abilities are used to derive a massive amount of technologies, including electric cars. Fancy.
- At the time of the story, Ozymandias is running a mega-conglomerate, selling, among many other items, perfume and action figures based on himself and his colleagues.
- The original Silk Spectre also made a living as a model. She went on to marry her agent.
- To be fair, most heroes fight supervillains not to make a good living, but because they want to save people from being killed by supervillains. And because if nobody fought the supervillains, they wouldn't have an intact society left to make a good living in. Not that Spidey shouldn't be given a good hard smack for not, oh, patenting the gorram web fluid and making a hojillion bucks selling tangleguns to the police, or something.
- He actually tried to profit off his web fluid in one of the early comics, but then they discovered the whole "it degrades in one hour like a real spider's" thing and the chemical firm turned him down.
- Deadpool (at various times, Cable and the Six Pack also qualify) use their abilities for mercenary work, drawing a paycheck for using their powers and skills to hurt and kill people. It may not be particularly nice money, but hey, it's a living.
- Phil Seleski (aka Solar) from Valiant Comics universe has the power to manipulate matter and energy any way he wants. Most of the time, he uses them to stop criminals that, even if powerful, were much weaker then him. Justified because first time he tried to use his powers to the fullest, the entire universe collapsed into a black hole, forcing him to re-create it as the Valiant Universe (a combination of the real world and stories from his favorite comic books).
- Subverted in the Marvel Universe in that it's implied that most of the big brains (Reed Richards, Hank Pym, Tony Stark) do make money patenting and licensing their creations. (It's canon that most of the Fantastic Four's funding comes from Reed's various patents, most notably unstable molecules).
- Also a Marvel subversion: Simon "Wonder Man" Williams made his money as an actor before he gained super powers. Afterwards he made even more in action movies, performing the kinds of stunts most crash test dummies wouldn't survive.
- Which doesn't help in that Simon dislikes showing his rear for the camera.
- Alan Moore's Tom Strong. His recurring enemy has 'liquid sun' as his main weapon (being an evil genius also helps). Much misery results. An alternate universe Tom convinces said bad guy to sell his Phlebotinum as an energy source. Much happiness results. Until it all goes to pot.
Film
- The Prestige's matter duplicator. You can duplicate anything, even living beings. Best use in story: a magic trick. Better idea: Have anything you want. This is somewhat justified by the fact that the main character is too crazy and vengeance-focused to use it for anything but his convoluted magic trick plot. The inventor, Tesla, on the other hand, really doesn't have an excuse, besides being, well, you know — Tesla.
- The idea is used a bit more in the book: Angier puts gold coins in his pockets every time he uses the machine and becomes incredibly rich.
- In the Projected Man, the scientists lement the fact that their matter converter is having trouble becoming a matter transporter, when in a matter converter in itself would be damn useful to dispose of radioactive waster.
- In the various Blade movies, Blade is the only (Half) vampire with the ability to go about in the daylight. Best use in movie: None, he just moves around and talks to humans during the day. Better use: Use it to attack other vampires in their homes or offices during the day when they can't run away. In the comics and The Series, he does actually spend much of his time trying to track down the daytime hiding places of vamps. Not always an easy task, since the vamps know that's when they're vulnerable, so they tend to make hiding well a priority.
- Blade seems to act like a Blood Knight or loose interpretation of a samurai in the movies, so maybe he doesn't want an easy or "dishonorable" fight or something.
- In The Matrix Reloaded, Neo almost never uses the full extent of his powers. Example: Neo stops a ton of machine gun bullets from a half dozen mooks, lets them fall to the floor, and then fights them in a big wire fight. Better idea: Send the bullets back at full speed, shredding the mooks without any real effort at all.
- Charlie And The Chocolate Factory is full of this, but it's lampshaded by Mike Teevee being outraged that Willy Wonka only wants to use his shrinking/teleportation ray for something as "pointless" as candy, when he could be using it on more interesting things, like breakfast cereal and people.
- Shortly thereafter, he learns the teleporter's limitations the hard way.
- Subverted in Bill And Teds Excellent Adventure, when the title characters have a Genius Ditz moment and figure out how to use Time Travel to its full potential. Namely, they use it to get themselves out of bad situations by agreeing to have their future selves (once the crisis is over) go back in time to arrange situations and manipulate objects to their present selves' advantage during the crisis. (Although they have to take care and remember all of the things that their future selves have done so that when ''they'' become the future selves, they'll know what things to change when they go back to the time of the crisis.)
- In most Time Travel stories, the technology to move through time seems woefully underused —with characters that have time machines (that have no constraints limiting when and where they can travel) frequently rushing against deadlines, forgetting that they have all the time in the world to do what they want.
The Doctor: I'm no time travel expert, but can't we just call Voyager again? The past isn't going anywhere.
- Turned around in DC Comics One Million. It takes the all-too human Huntress to realize they have centuries upon centuries to get the various pieces into place to rescue the future and stabilize their own time. Having some immortals in your camp helps.
- Marty McFly realizes this.
Marty:I've got all the time in the world, I'm in a time machine!
- Too bad he only gives himself ten extra minutes.
- Star Wars: The battle droids' artificial intelligence. We've been trying for decades to create artificial intelligence so that robots can adapt quickly to changing situations. In Star Wars, artificial intelligence is used to give robots human-like reaction times and indecisiveness, turning a killer robot army into comic relief.
- Later, more advanced models are actually worse for this. In Episode One they had verbal orders and could be confused, by Three they had little chats while they worked.
Literature
- None of the characters in the series Animorphs ever considered that the morphing technology handed to them in the very first book, if given to the series big bad, might solve the species-wide problem that drove them to Alien Invasion in the first place? Even after they offered it to the Extreme Omnivore Taxxons in a bid to get them to switch sides? When you consider that they're constantly up against Vissor Three, though, no wonder it took them ages to think of it.
- There's no guarantee the Yeerks would do a massive Heel Face Turn and leave Earth alone. Besides, the kids thought that the Yeerks were Always Chaotic Evil, and weren't very interested in cutting deals.
- The Alfred Bester short story "Star Light, Star Bright" is about the pursuit of a cabal of supergenius children who have developed fantastic technology in order to deal with kid-type issues (e.g. producing sprouts that are strawberry-flavour on the inside).
- The short story "The Proud Robot", by Henry Kuttner, is about a down on his luck but brilliant inventor who invented an unbelievably sophisticated singing robot with a highly intelligent (and vain) AI. The inventor couldn't get the robot to do anything he wanted because he forgot why he built it in the first place (he was drunk). In the climax, he remembers that he built it because he had trouble opening a can of beer. He swore to build a bigger and better can opener; said robot is able to open beer cans with absolutely no fizz or a single drop of spilled beer. The ending has the inventor becoming depressed because beer cans are being phased out in favor of plastic bulbs, meaning his "can opener" robot will be "useless".
- That story is one of a number of stories about a man who becomes a Bunny Ears Lawyer genius inventor when drunk but can't remember when he sobers up. Since it is generally played for laughs and his drunk self is a Cloudcuckoolander, that kind of explains it.
Live Action TV
- Subverted in Supernatural. When a character is discovered to have mind control abilities, he is asked why he is only using it to live a lower middle class life and to obtain some weed and a couple cool things like a rare car. He replies by claiming that he has everything he would ever want.
- Speaking of mentalistic powers, Buffy Summers acquired the ability to read minds. Giles suggested using it for gathering intelligence against her enemies... but Buffy's response was "Way better than that," and she used it to investigate the petty personal questions of how people think about her. Of course, like most magic in Sunnydale, it goes horribly bad.
- Sylar's power of "studying something and figuring out exactly how it works" in Heroes. In-story use: fixing watches, stealing supernatural powers. Better use: churning out Nobel Prizes. In anything. Studying just the human body opens up fields like medicine (cure diseases, extend lifespans), neurology/psychology (figure out how the non-superpower parts of the brain work—consciousness anyone?), and genetics (genotype interaction). Of course, this may result from the fact that Sylar is insane.
- Furthermore, the second episode established that Sylar was incredibly well-read; his apartment was filled with nothing but books on a wide array of topics (sorta like an eerily tidy version of Yomiko Readman's pad), suggesting that Sylar had spent the vast majority of his life absorbing information about pretty much everything.
- The writers seem to have caught on that Sylar's power is good for more than stealing brains. In Season 3, Peter takes Sylar's power in order to understand the show's plot. Unfortunately, it also comes with an uncontrollable craving for brains.
- In New Amsterdam, in the 1600s, a Native American tribe has a spell that makes people immortal. In-story use: reward some random white guy who saved the life of one of the tribe's women. Better use: make all of the tribe's warriors immortal, then easily defeat the white guys that are taking their land.
- In The Flash, Max Mercury was revealed to be a white scout who had been given speed powers by a dying shaman...except his were to prevent a massacre.
- In Stargate SG-1, we were told that wormholes only function one way and that anything entering the wrong side is instantly destroyed. So even though the Stargate program didn't bring back interesting technology all the time, one has to wonder why nobody ever pitched the idea of having someone dial in off world and solving all the world's garbage and nuclear waste problems by dumping them into oblivion.
- Star Trek Voyager DID do that with an alien race that discovered a wormhole to a seemingly empty bit of space. Unfortunately it wasn't completely empty.
- Similarly, a TNG novel focused on a planet which was being massively polluted from seemingly nowhere because its alternate universe counterpart had stumbled upon a device that made things vanish.
- The Asgard had a sudden attack of Genre Savvy about this and only gave humans teleporters that were run by their own people. Until the humans found Atlantis and its storehouse of Lost Technology, after which (no causative relation implied) the Asgard just threw their hands up, committed suicide as an entire culture, and handed over all of their knowledge to the Tau'ri. With a talking manual Thor thrown in for free. Of course, the vote to hand over everything to the humans was less than unanimous, but after the whole lot of you offed yourselves...
- Despite possessing an incredibly versatile technology that could be used for any number of things, the Dollhouse applies their phlebotinum in about the most frivolous (and morally dubious) manner conceivable. There have been a couple of hints at some sort of vague "higher purpose," so this may be addressed in future seasons
if now the show is renewed.
- Weird Science (series).
Student: So how come you're not the richest man in the world living on an island with Cindy Crawford and Naomi Campbell?
Wyatt Donnelly: Uh... we never really wished for that.
Student: Oh, so what did you wish for?
Wyatt Donnelly: I wished to be president of the chess club once. It didn't work out.
Tabletop Games
- Most magicians in Unknown Armies behave this way, one major reason why some of the most powerful canon NP Cs are almost completely mundane. The rulebooks frequently mention adepts using their earth-shattering powers and ancient mystic rituals to beat up ex-boyfriends or acquire Star Trek paraphernalia.
Video Games
- Portal: Aperture Science, a military company that is contractually obligated to create shower curtains for the Army, patented their portal gun technology as "man-sized ad-hoc quantum tunnel through physical space with possible applications as a shower curtain." Then again, what better shower curtain would there be than a solid tile wall on all four sides?
- Subverted in that the guy that ordered the creation of the gun for that purpose was completely insane.
- Steambot Chronicles: The Killer Elephants have a large organization with extensive industrial production, able to mass-produce the mecha they use, and even a giant mecha. What do they do with all these resources? They rob passing travelers.
- The Weavers in Loom can manipulate the fabric of time and space. They mostly use this power for...spinning and dying clothing.
- Two main exclusions to the FTL system are seen in Elite: jump-drive with inherent "somewhere in star system" level of precision and hypervelocity drive which is blocked utterly around anything with a mass of escape pod, let alone ship.
Webcomics
- Fracture: As pointed out in this Penny Arcade strip: http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2008/9/19/
 . And when you start to think about how the terrain deformation might work and other applications for its principles, it becomes even sillier.
- All the technology Tony invents in Real Life Comics is used by Greg for disturbingly mundane purposes. This pretty much tells you all you need to know. This is deliberate, and played for comedy, though.
- Mad inventor Riff (well, he's more of a "Meh" inventor) in Sluggy Freelance has ended up playing this trope for laughs by using such things as his dimensional portal for cheap magic tricks, and generally using his prodigious intellect on ray guns and toaster cannons. Is it any wonder his Catch Phrase is "Let me check my notes"?
- Subverted by the fact that his inventions are being applied to better effect (well, slightly better at least) by the evil corporation that employs him.
- Doc of The Whiteboard uses a teleporter to get pizzas delivered instantly. He also once invented a device that could launch paintballs backwards through time (presumably by breaking the light barrier).
- Played for laughs on this page of The Adventures Of Dr McNinja: "James! The leader of our group. He invented jet boots, and he used them to kick people."
- And then there's Martin, who is basically the Hulk, who uses his ability to...advertise his chain of super-markets. Oh, and do work for the mafia.
- Heroically averted in Schlock Mercenary with the Teraport. Originally designed to make money by allowing rich bastards to take their space-yachts between stars without queuing-up to the Wormgate with the rest of the plebs it didn't take long for people to figure-out it made a dandy Superweapon.
- The Wormgates themselves can be considered an evil aversion of this trope as well: after all as long as people are seen going in one place and coming out the other, there's nothing to worry about what goes on in between...right?
- And even before the introduction of the Teraport there was the ubiquitous gravitic technology, if you have true Artificial Gravity on your ship then you already have forcefields, tractor-beams and a reactionless drive as well.
- Tedd of El Goonish Shive uses his ultrapowerful transformation gun to throw a party for his girlfriend and switch genders so that he can cook.
Web Original
- The titular object in Erika's New Perfume never really does more but take up space in Erika's bedroom after Sarah uses it, despite having at least two of its three demonstrated functions with a definite audience for them and having even more All There In The Manual. This might partially be because the characters themselves don't have the manual, though.
Western Animation
- The premise behind Chaotic is that it can create an identical duplicate you to live out a real world version of a Trading Card Game. You can 'port out' and the duplicate's memories are reabsorbed into you. While the show managed to surprise me by showing a wheelchair bound player walking inside the simulation, they ignored a more obvious application of their technology: Immortality.
- Parodied to no end in Invader Zim. The title character once created an orbital satellite station that sucked out all the water from the city, gathered it into a giant balloon, and dropped it for no other reason than to win a water balloon fight.
- Well, Zim might not be making the best use of the technology, but aren't the rest of the Irkens using it to conquer the universe? Seems like some well applied Phlebotinum to me.
- A few other examples:
- A massive robot obviously capable of obliterating everything in its path is used by Zim to get revenge on Dib for a few off-hand comments made earlier in the episode.
- Zim tries to get revenge on Dib for throwing a muffin at him. Zim gets Dib trapped—there's no escape, Dib's got a massive laser cannon aimed straight at his head—and what does Zim do? He has the cannon fire another muffin—not even a massive muffin, just a normal muffin roughly equivelent to the one Dib threw at him. And then lets Dib go on his merry way.
- Zim has a device that can take out human organs and subsitute them with...stuff...and what does he do with it? He uses it to stuff himself full of human organs in case the
school skool nurse decides to do an x-ray. Never mind sucking the brains out of the entire human populous, what if Zim needs to see a doctor?
- Why would he want to suck everyone's brains out? It's not like they could get much dumber anyway.
- Yeah, but people are dead without brains. What resistance could you possibly face trying to conquer the Earth? Who's going to stop you?
- Perhaps the most bizarre by far—Zim has a device that can submit humans to the most painful mental torture possible, and uses it to hypontize the town's populous into helping him win a
school skool fundraiser.
- Lampshaded in the episode "Jail Bird" of Darkwing Duck; Negaduck is continually frustrated that Megavolt, Bushroot and the Liquidator are too stupid to make full use of their superpowers. (Although, thanks to a power-stealing emerald, Negaduck ultimately doesn't fare much better.)
- Well, his main problem was that he also gained three new sets of weaknesses and a compulsion to act goofy at inopportune moments in addition to the powers. You have to admit, before he got taken down, he was much more of a threat then Bushroot, Megavolt, and Liquidator ever could have been.
- In one of The Simpsons Halloween episodes, Homer buys a teleporter from Prof. Frink and uses it to get food from the fridge without leaving the couch. Marge draws the line at using the teleporter as a shortcut to the toilet.
- Another Halloween episode has Lisa and Bart develop superpowers. Bart vows to uses his powers (stretching) "only to annoy", and procedes to pull a prank on Skinner.
Other
- Santa Claus has, amongst other things, access to a vast manufacturing complex run by magical elves, a sack that can hold near limitless contents and still be carried, the power to make reindeer fly and some kind of time dilation ability. Best use in story: making illegal copies of copyrighted/trademarked/patented toys and giving them to children. Better idea: world domination.
- Santa has every and any material possession he wants, a happy and stable marriage, a small army of faithful and happy slaves, no neighbors, a 100% approval rating virtually everywhere on the planet, and 100% job security. And he's also immortal. And he only has to work one day a year.
- So why do rich kids get nicer present than poor kids? He easily has the power to end poverty in third-world countries, but he's too busy conquering the Martians and turning into Tim Allen, apparently.
- Any one who actually has psychic powers could make tons of cash at Las Vegas instead of appearing on talk shows. As Jay Leno once said, "Why do you never see the headline 'Psychic Wins Lottery'?" Answer: Because when a psychic wins, he doesn't tell he's psychic. 'Cause, you know, some people might dare accuse him of cheating.
- The Computer, a machine capable of performing incredibly complex arithmetic and decision logic, primarily sees use doing a workless infinite loop and managing resources that may one day be used. Even in the case of people who actually use computers for things, most of the time it's the same old boring stuff over and over again. They want to do their accounts, or write a letter, when the machine may be capable of creating sapient or sentient thought, or just comparing your personal data to millions of other people and trying to figure out what kind of beer you'd want.
- And porn. Can't forget the porn.
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