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alt title(s): Smoke And Fire Factory; No Health And Safety Compliance
The movie ends in a stock movie location I thought had been retired: a steam and flame factory where the combatants stalk each other on catwalks and from behind steel pillars, while the otherwise deserted factory supplies vast quantities of flame and steam.
— Roger Ebert's Movie Yearbook 2005, on Ballistic: Ecks vs. Sever
Industrial complexes in which climactic battles are fought are never built with the safety of workers in mind. Thus, narrow catwalks with simple rope/cable handrails are inevitably hung by 30-pound-test fishing line over open bubbling vats of green acid, massive machinery works lack protective covers (with the switches controlling them in the furthest and most awkward of places), and other hazardous conditions so terrifying that any sane person would probably insist on a six figure danger bonus to even go near the place.
Almost every such complex includes a tower or shaft several dozen feet wide and hundreds of feet tall/deep, ringed with balconies and walkways from which one can easily slip and at least one retractable bridge that doesn't seem to care if there is anybody on it before it retracts.
High-pressure/high-temperature pipelines are made of substandard materials that easily tear or rupture in response to a thrown punch that unintentionally hits them, and the only surfaces strong enough to withstand a bullet are the ones that will ricochet a shot back at the hero or the villain. Floors and walkways have a nasty tendency to collapse, large sections just falling away as if the builders ran out of rivets halfway through and hoped no one would notice.
High above, a crane swings round errantly, just waiting to drop random objects on your head. Billows of smoke and steam belch from every other vent, and unidentified liquids drip unimpeded from somewhere high overhead to lubricate the already tenuous footing on the substandard walkways. Guardrails, if they're present at all, are flimsy and prone to breakage or collapse if anything close to a normal human's weight is put on them (but see also the Railing Kill).
In short, if the (United States or European Union) Occupational Safety and Health Administration ever saw the place, it would be shut down in seconds. The ultimate authority on such matters in entertainment is, of course, the Rule of Cool. Granted that it's always possible to put together a dramatic fight sequence in a perfectly balanced tournament-style environment (see the last segment of the first "Karate Kid" movie, or virtually any American movie where martial arts of one school or another is the foundation of the plot), these environments still exist because they are visually interesting and allow the cowardly villain more opportunities to sneak around behind the hero, or the overmatched hero to find some way to even the scales against the overpowered villain.
Naturally, instead of fighting in the parking lot like any sane person, the hero and the villain will immediately rush into the heart of such a complex to have their final battle. On the other hand, this does allow for the frequent accident of the villain falling to his doom. Any collateral damage in the battle will invariably hit a Big Red Button, cause Failsafe Failure, and No One Could Survive That resulting explosion.
These facilities are also often referred to as "Smoke and Fire Factories", in reference to the fact that the function of the building is rarely explained, with smoke and fire as its only discernible outputs.
Note that if a villain plants a few explosives in such a place, it transforms from a mundanely unsafe facility into an instant Death Course. For the videogame equivalent, see Eternal Engine and Malevolent Architecture. Homicide Machines is when a horror film does this with everyday household appliances.
Examples
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Anime and Manga
Fan Fiction
- Explicitly mocked in chapter 45 of the Firefly fanfic The Treasure of Lei Fong Wu,; Zoe and her party find such a gap. One of the team points out that it is both necessary for the operation of the ship, and presents "formidable opposition" to boarding parties. Such that it would be more or less impassable if the other side was defended, even with the flimsy, railing-less bridge up.
Film
- Reaganite Stallone crapfest Cobra's finale.
- The Arrival. Charlie Sheen pushes a disguised alien out an elevator, a villain falling to his doom. The aliens have interstellar travel, secretly build a vast network of Global warming-inducing terraforming plants on Earth, yet their elevators are totally exposed, completely lacking in rails, or even walls for that matter. Go figure.
- Worth noting that this is a literal Smoke And Fire Factory, given that its entire purpose is to emit massive amounts of greenhouse gasses to alter the Earth's climate.
- The 1989 Batman movie with Jack Nicholson drops his character Jack Napier into a giant bubbling vat full of... something to turn him into the Joker. Somewhat justified: it's established from the beginning that Axis Chemicals is merely a dummy corporation for Carl Grissom's illegal activities.
- And Gotham is pretty crapsack anyway.
- The James Bond film Casino Royale has at the beginning a long chase/fight using Le Parkour at a "construction site of adventure" in Africa.
- The Good Guy Doll factory in Childs Play 2 apparently has highly inaccessible (and locked) exits, blocked off by conveyor belts and doll assembling machines.
- Daylight which featured Sylvester Stalone as a hot shot EMS rescuing people from a blocked and weakened underwater "Hudson Tunnel" (standing in for the Lincoln Tunnel) in New York City. The ventilation facilities for said tunnels was something that has just flown under the radar of the OSHA whale for sure.
- In real life, the ventilation system costs several hundred million dollars, consume several dozen kilowatts of power, and in the event of an emergency the fans will run at 105% capacity until failure.
- And trucks like that aren't allowed to go through any tunnels for exactly this reason. Even ones that just catch on fire like they would in real life instead of producing an Independence Day-sized fireball. And even ones where the explodium barrels are actually secured.
- Enemy Mine (A Trope Namer in its own right) features a mining ship with little to no safety features in sight, resulting in plentiful deaths and mutilations. Guess OSHA didn't survive into the late 21st century...
- They might have, but you can't very well expect illegal strip-miners who employ illegal slave labor to be arsed into caring about legal safety regulations.
- In the Firefly movie Serenity, Mal needs to access a machine that's "a little hard to get to"; it's on a platform in the center of a deep shaft filled with moving and grinding machinery. The bridge controls are for some reason only on the platform itself, and even extended, the bridge is narrow and has no railing (though at least the platform does).
- Lampshaded by Galaxy Quest in a number of places, most notably when The Captain and the Bridge Bunny need to pass through a part of the ship that is essentially a Death Course for no reason other than that it was used as one in the original series the ship was based on. On seeing what they had to do to get past, the Bridge Bunny (Sigourney Weaver playing actress Gwen De Marco playing Lt. Tawny Madison) exclaims, "Well, forget it! I'm not doing it! This episode was badly written!"
- Justified and averted in The Incredible Hulk (2008): the soft drink factory of the opening act is in Brazil, and thus wholly exempt from the regulations of OSHA and other first-world nations — however, it's far safer than any other example on this page, except for the belligerent co-workers, the heavily-armed covert assault team, and, of course, a certain
hungry angry scientist.
- In The Fugitive Richard Kimble, Marshall Gerard, and Dr. Charles Nichols all chase each other in a laundry room full of scalding hot pipes and a huge I beam on a chain for some someone to get hit in the head with.
- In Indiana Jones and the Temple Of Doom, the alternate mine track turns into a dangerously fast rollercoaster track that is elevated over sharp rocks, has hairpin turns and sudden drops, and at one point runs high above a magma chamber. The various junctions and equipment strewn through the path indicate that miners (children, at that) are meant to work there.
- One might argue that this was justified because the mine guys were evil and using the kids as slave labor.
- The mine chase did have Thuggee OSHA compliance in the form of a boarded-up track with a "DANGER" sign across that Indy just has to crash through.
- Wasn't the sign written in English? Let's hope the children and guards were bilingual.
- Justified since India was a British colony and has English as an official language.
- The Star Wars galaxy is filled with indoor, 500-foot-deep chasms that have no guard rails. In the Expanded Universe, it's made explicit that there is, indeed, no OSHA compliance in the Republic/Empire; most galactic governments have little regard for individual lives, and the galactic corporations that design and run the facilities are essentially sovereign states unto themselves.
- And apparently even the high-ranking officials don't care much about their own safety either, considering the Emperor's own Throne Room featured its own bottomless pit.
- Mocked mercilessly in the Starwars comic, "A Death Star is Born":
Palpatine: “What about these bottomless pits. Would it be too much to ask for some safety rails? I mean, I'm ruthless, but I gotta walk these halls too, and my balance ain't what it used to be.”
Underling: “It’s not too much to ask, as long as you don't mind an overall budget increase of 36%.”
- The same comic mentioned the trench, and the possibility of someone using it to destroy the Death Star.
- At least those pits had guard rails...which were at waist height...
- In a A New Hope, the tractor beam's power is controlled through a panel perched on a tower over a bottomless pit. Also, the catwalk to access the controls is about a foot wide.
- Double Subversion at the climax of The Empire Strikes Back — the initial site of Vader and Luke's final battle is a clean, clear (although obviously "industrial") section of Cloud City — until Vader starts ripping pieces of ductwork out of the walls to throw at Luke. And of course, the fight eventually progresses to one of those handy half-mile-deep shafts-o-danger.
- Coruscant is chock full of floating platforms, none of which have any railings.
- Mustafar. Between the unstable platforms all over and the lava, you wonder why the Trade Feds even bothered going there.
- Phantom Menace's climactic lightsaber battle maintained the franchise's proud standard of bottomless pits without safety rails around them, but also had some minor subversions. There were two bottomless pits; the first had numerous walking bridges across it, so if you fell off one, you might land on another. The other had protrusions about six feet down which could be grabbed. Both saved Obi Wan's life. Though that said, providing you the opportunity to not fall to your death if you're lucky and/or nimble is not exactly OSHA compliant either.
- Then there's the mind-numbingly overcomplicated Laser Hallway that separates the two rooms. It's uncertain whether the force fields were lethal or not, but nobody was stupid enough to test them.
- It is likely that one of the biggest problems in the Star Wars universe is death by door. Palpatine must've hired Joseph-Ignace Guillotin as his interior designer.
- One common detail brought up by nitpicking fans is the thermal exhaust port Luke uses to blow up the Death Star. However, this is Truth In Television, in that it's a THERMAL. EXHAUST. PORT. If it wasn't there, or even if the attempted to make it all twisty and turny, the Death Star would blow up on its own. Also, as mentioned before, it's next to impossible to actually pull something like that off. Luke only manages it because A. as he mentions, he's a really evil shot, and B. The Force!
- A couple of 10° kinks a couple of km in would have done the job. Inverted slightly in that this fault went unnoticed (not surprisingly given how big the station was), it wasn't really obvious-but-ignored.
- Radiators tend to look like this◊ rather than air conditioning vents.
- Every single spaceship, space station, shoot, space-anything in the Alien franchise is like this. Not to mention the obnoxious strobe lights and steam jets that have no apparent purpose other than to make life difficult once you've activated the self-destruct sequence.
- Lampshaded in I Robot when Will Smith, trying to get to the brain of the villain computer, complains about the stupidity of a design involving narrow catwalks suspended over a 100+-story shaft. Especially when trying to cross while being attacked by hundreds of Killer Robots.
- Everything in The Machinist. It's not clear what the machines are actually for, but their main goal in life seems to be to maim the workers. The off buttons are in on the conspiracy.
- The climactic battle in The One, starring Jet Li, takes place in just such a factory. A couple of isolated, detonated explosives, and suddenly the entire building is a shower of sparks and flame. But at least the walkways can handle guys leaping twenty feet into the air before landing on them.
- Quantum Of Solace: The hotel in the climax nigh-inexplicably has hydrogen canisters in the garage and in the walls of the hotel. Of course, it could have been under construction, which at least explains the garage. The walls, not so much.
- It's explicitly stated that the hotel runs on hydrogen fuel cells. How, exactly, does one recharge said fuel cells? By separating the hydrogen atoms and oxygen atoms in plain, ordinary water, which is, thanks to Quantum's activities, in *very* short supply in Bolivia. Karmic Death never tasted so good.
- Justified in the 1984 Killer Robot movie Runaway, where the reason for the lack of safety rails on a construction site is that only robots work up there. Of course, knowing that the hero suffers from vertigo, it's where the Big Bad choses to make a hostage exchange.
- In Spiderman 3, the soon-to-be Sandman falls into a sand-filled open pit that is part of some lethal-looking experiment involving mysterious radiation. Considering how many superheroes and -villains owe their powers to messed-up experiments, one would think that engineers and scientists have learned to at least put a cover on the damn pit so that enterprising kids and random rabbits don't fall in.
- Admittedly, he had to climb over a fence with a warning sign just to get onto the testing grounds.
- Apparently they never got the memo that the Insurmountable Waist Height Fence only existed in video games.
- The nature of this Open Air Particle Physics Experiment has been ridiculed repeatedly, especially here where ONE of the scientist is more security conscious.
Scientist 1: Here's a bright idea: Why don't you make sure it's a bird before you mutate the crap out of something because you were too lazy to safely run that night-time sand mutation experiment.
Scientist 2: Ugh... Fine... Man, that's a big bird down there... Kinda looks like a guy. Oh wait, there IS a guy down there!
- In the 2009 film StarTrek, Romulan Space Mining Corp apparently picked up ship designs plans from the Republic/Imperial Industrial Design Bureau, specifically volume 3 "Platforms, No Safety Railings, and Bottomless Chasms".
- justified in the prequel comic, the Narada was warped by Borg tech (which is why it can take down 47 kligon warships at once)
- Starfleet, on the other hand, makes this token effort to avert the trope in the transporter room: "Caution: Do not enter transporter while transport is in progress."
- Though the engineering areas of Federation ships in the movie seem to have plenty of railings and OHSA compliance (they would, since they were filmed in actual factories, like the Budweiser brewery!) No clear reason why those super-futuristic warp cores need so much smoke and fire, why exactly a warp core needs water pipes with large, thick hand-cranks on the edges of them, or why interplanetary shuttlecraft seem to emit so much steam.
- The water pipes were evidently coolant (which every machine needs, though why water specifically I can't guess), but even if it wasn't: post-Star Wars Rule Of Cool says Used Future=awesome.
- At least the engineers that designed the water pipes had the foresight to include an emergency release valve, on the off chance that some poor Scottish guy would accidentaly teleport himself inside it and risk getting sucked into that giant blender.
- You have to have a release valve on things like that just incase pressure builds up in the wrong place or you need to fix something inside there. Otherwise you'd have to start from either point A or Z when all you had to work on was points M and Q.
- The final battle in Terminator 2: Judgement Day where the chain and railing keeping you from falling into a vat of molten iron is about knee-high.
- The original’s factory at the end was hardly the paramount of safety either.
- And yet strangely averted in Terminator Salvation: Skynet's Terminator foundry, built by Skynet, for the purpose of building killer robots, and staffed entirely by killer robots — big heavy killer robots who would surely crumple safety rails like tin foil — has safety rails.
- The aversion is probably subverted in the fact that the killer robots are powered by nuclear fusion cells that are highly unstable outside of the Terminator and are in plain view of any enterprising human with a roll of det-cord.
- The Martian spaceport in Total Recall, where the windows protecting the terminal from the near-vacuum outside: a) are not bulletproof, despite the presence of armed guards and agents, b) shatter completely from a handful of bullet holes, making those small holes into one large one, and c) have emergency shutters that must be activated manually, while holding on for dear life as the room rapidly decompresses due to the aforementioned large hole in the wall.
- And the whole bay over the dome, as fragile, minus the shutter due to it size.
- Considering that many of the humans are Mars are mutants because the company doesn't protect them from cosmic rays, I would guess there is no OSHA there. And the Big Bad who rules the planet's concern for the people is, "Fuck'em". So Yeah. They also note that it's only the area they're in that is poor. The high-paying customers get the rad-shielded part of the dome.
- In Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, the giant fan blades Charlie and his grandpa nearly collide with after drinking Fizzy Lifting Drink.
- Then again, given the very obvious plate of glass that Grandpa Joe's hand bumped into, it's entirely possible that the big fan is another one of Wonka's illusions.
- Plus, depending on your character interpretation, it's possible Wonka intentionally designed an incredibly dangerous factory so that anyone who didn't follow his rules got horribly maimed.
- In both the film and comic versions of Watchmen someone thought it was a good idea to have a room with what is essentially a disintegrator run on a timer. Meaning the timer automatically closes and locks the door, before activating the machine a bit later. All of this without anyone present to make sure someone doesn't wander through the door, get locked it and vaporized. Apparently there's not even an emergency stop switch anywhere near the machine either.
- Or, call me crazy... inside the room.
- Along with several standard examples of this trope, Atomic Twister features a case where even existing OSHA compliance is ignored as a possible safety measure. Firemen with hoses are desperately trying to keep the fuel rod coolant tank full, and are dropping from heat and radiation. The open-topped tank has prominent safety railings, yet not one of the crew considers simply chaining the hoses to the railings so they'll keep flooding the tank, then getting the hell out!
- I don't know enough about nuclear physics to know what happens if the fuel rod coolant overflows. Plus, the hoses would be unsupervised, leading to a variation on Murphy's Law.
Literature
- Some parts of the titular factory in Roald Dahl's Charlie And The Chocolate Factory are pretty dangerous. However, in this case the invocation of this trope is likely quite deliberate, given Wonka's complete lack of care for the children constantly getting into horrible accidents all around him.
- In Tom Godwin's short story "The Cold Equations", the sheer lack of security or margin of safety on a spaceship is absolutely ridiculous. Main entries were guarded with a sign, and bays weren't checked, despite needing a precise amount of energy to accelerate and decelerate. They also apparently don't inform the public that the ships will crash if there is any extra weight, or that the punishment for stowaways is getting Thrown Out The Airlock.
- Not to mention the spacecraft's pilot apparently had no automated systems to monitor his craft's flight, which should have quickly detected something wrong. Of course, the story was written when computers were still quite primitive and futurologists had a tendency to underestimate how ubiquitous they'd logically be in an advanced spacefaring society, so it may be a case of Science Marches On.
- The so-so made-for-TV-movie adaptation laid the blame for these dire lapses of safety on a cash-grabbing corporation, in the process of adding a whole new subtext and a pointless frame story to the original.
- Most of the illustrations of machines and architecture in the works of Dr. Seuss are full of tall, rickety buildings as well as staircases and walkways with no guardrails.
- It is, admittedly, funny, especially to the young and totally-not-a-cliched-line-at-all that are the intended audience for the books, but it may explain why fictional building codes are so atrociously neglectful of anyone's actual safety.
- While it's not the site of a fight scene, the titular school of the Wayside School series of books exemplifies this trope. The setting is a 30-classroom school "accidentally" built thirty stories high, and missing a nineteenth story. The school can start to sway as a result of high winds (as per the second novel in the series, Wayside School is Falling Down). The main characters, a class of students on the thirtieth floor, are led onto the rooftop by their teacher. A fire drill is also taking place, and the students believe that no one will be able to rescue them. However, it's only a herd of cows that have somehow managed to get onto every floor of the building. Poor planning, at that.
- You can also fall out of the window if you're too close to it and fall asleep. Luckily, the school is so tall that there's plenty of time for Louis the yard teacher to run up and catch you.
- Lampshaded in Terry Pratchett's Only You Can Save Mankind. When Johnny enters an alien ship in his dream, it is initially clean and neat. But when his friend (a fan of the Aliens series) joins him, her subconscious expectations cause grime and steam to appear in the corridors.
- Also lampshaded, and justified, in Carpe Jugulum, where the old Count's castle is chock full of vampire-unsafe features — piles of dowels ready for sharpening, easily-torn curtains on south-facing windows, etc — because he's a sportsman who enjoys giving the vampire-hunters a fighting chance.
- Averted delightfully when the man about to step through a Star Gate for the first time in John Ringo and Travis Taylor's Into The Looking Glass receives this safety briefing:
"Okay, Seaman Sanson, this is your safety briefing," the rep said, grinning again. "Be aware that the platform you are using for entry is poorly constructed and may collapse. Be aware that on the far side of the gate you may experience reduced air quality. Be aware that on the far side of the gate you may experience increased or decreased gravitational field. The far side of the gate may not be at ground level and you may experience vertical movement on exit. Upon returning you may find that you do not hit the platform in which case you will experience an approximately twenty-meter fall to ground level. The gate may not return to this same location at all in which case you may find yourself in any location in this universe or in any other universe. The environment suit that you are using is not warranted by the manufacturer for use in any nonterrestrial environment and, therefore, you are using it at your own risk. Do you understand this warning?"
- JK Rowling's Hogwarts.
- But death is just the next great adventure — and they're providing adequate opportunities to go on that adventure...
- Subversion of the inversion of the "No Seat Belts in Star Trek" issue below, in a Deep Space Nine novel: despite shoddy production standards in the future's future (as the Federation is falling apart and the universe is about to end), the new Phoenix features safety restraints on all the bridge chairs. Captain Nog then uses them to restrain the entire bridge crew in preparation to betray them to the Romulans. It's a time-paradox-enabled Xanatos Gambit.
- Moria in JRR Tolkien's Lord Of The Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring.
- Considering they haven't maintained the place for like a thousand years, that's hardly the dwarves' fault.
- And ''the bridge'' is actually intended as the other kind of safety feature.
- More specifically, the enemy could only cross single file, allowing Dwarf archers and pikemen to hold it indefinitely, though this is still the only way canonically attested for the Dwarves to move from and to the "main entrance" of Moria, which implies they did not suffer from vertigo. Or not for long.
- Also from LotR: the Sammath Naur, Sauron's chamber inside Mount Doom. If he'd had a guard rail in there, he'd be ruling Middle-earth right now.
- Death Star the novel by James Luceno. Bueracratic incompetence and -slave labor- combines to create a really unsafe Death Star. Are you going to make your evil master's starbase safe?
- Star Trek: New Frontier. The first Excaliber goes blooey, with only one fatallity due to the fact that escape pods can only be launched from the inside (cosmic powers helped save lives). Naturally, the Captain is the one who decides to stay behind. It's stated in the sequel book that all starships are being refitted so those inside can launch the pod.
Live Action TV
Newspaper Comics
Tabletop Games
- Paranoia tabletop roleplaying game: Life in the dystopian Alpha Complex is a daily struggle against insane regulations, faulty or untested equipment and impossible odds for most clones. (Not to mention against their fellow clones.) Especially if they happen to fall into the food vats. Remember, citizen, happiness is mandatory. The Computer is your friend.
- Not only justified but actively encouraged in Paranoia. Since The Computer is responsible for everything, questioning safety measures means you are questioning The Computer. Which is treason.
- And treason is punishable by summary execution. But you knew that.
- Warhammer 40000 utterly embraces this trope. When the average workplace is a continent sized factory forge, your starships manned by slave gangs physically hauling torpedos into place, your place of worship is an atmosphere scraping gothic cathedral on steroids, and even the basic city is a thousands stories tall human ant-hive, safety is just not a concern.
- The Imperium is pretty much the most brutal regime imaginable. This is even noted in early game material, along the lines of "There are trillions of humans in the galaxy...you will not be missed."
- Of course, in 40K, if you die from falling too far, you're one of the lucky ones.
- Averted with the Adeptus Mechanicus (most of the time) who do follow safety instructions.
- Of course, they only follow the safety instructions because they believe that the machine spirits will get annoyed if they don't, thus causing the machine to stop functioning.
- Spelljammer setting has "Accelerator" Magitek gun, that pulls into barrel and shoots anything placed into its reception cup. Which specifically included a hand of any poor sod who failed to drop ammo accurately, or just stumbled and accidentally grabbed the cup.
Video Games
- The freeware RPG Ara Fell takes place on a floating continent, and there are sheer drop-offs EVERYWHERE, all waithout guard-rails, to the distant land below, including in the starting village. Even some houses have huge holes in their floors dropping off to the world below.
- In the classic adventure platformer Another World, AKA Out of This World, not only Lester obviously pulled off all safeguards from his particle accelerator when he decided to work with it during a thunderstorm. The aliens in the world where he got teleported as a result seem to never have even heard the word "safety". But then, the game is self-acknowledgingly Nintendo Hard...
- The "Grunty Industries" level of Banjo-Tooie is a giant five-story factory full of dangerous exposed machinery such as giant crushers, frayed wires, exposed griders, entire floors covered with acid, and air vents full of slime creatures that fart toxic gas. It wouldn't look so bad outside if it weren't surrounded by a moat of purple slime full of hungry mutants.
- "Donkey Kong 64" had Frantic Factory, which seemed to be a toy factory, complete with wind-up crocodile robots, killer dominoes, dice, blocks and rulers.
- The Factory area of Beyond Good And Evil, though inhabited by the Evil Army, would be decidedly unsafe without them. Among other things, it contains rows of grills that do nothing but spew flames, unrailed catwalks several stories above pools of water, substantial rat infestations, and more than a few platforms over pits that would certainly be death if not for Edge Gravity. The Slaughterhouse area, set inside a similar factory area, is equally non-OSHA-compliant.
- Chrono Trigger: To save Lucca's mother from a dangerous machine, you have to input a password (LARA) to shut it down, rather than press a big, red emergency stop button.
- Justified in the Crusader series of games, as an evil Mega Corp rules the world and in order to maximize profit there is no OSHA. Or worker's rights, or minimum wage laws, or...
- Most areas, particularly industrial areas, in the Crusader games fall under this trope, but seeing as how safety precautions would cut into profits, the WEC naturally aren't interested in them.
- In Day Of The Tentacle Dr. Fred has a machine that does nothing except produce toxic waste, because other mad scientists would laugh at him for running clean experiments. This ends up setting off the entire plot.
- In Donkey Kong, a construction site could be transformed into a maze of death traps by one escaped gorilla jumping up and down on the girders.
- Doom: Barrels of toxic waste strewn all over the place.
- Not to mention the pits of toxic waste, later lava, and even blood. The Radiation Suit entry in the Doom II strategy guide calls this trope out almost word-for-word: "OSHA may not like it, but to get the job done, you're going to have to handle a little toxic waste."
- Subverted slightly in that Hell and the real world are supposed to be merging.
- Mocked(?) by the [[Comicbook/Doom Doom comic]], when the Marine falls into a vat of toxic waste. He then climbs out and gives an out-of-nowhere full panel monologue about the world we're leaving for our children.
- Battlefield 2 and 2142:Similarly, don't take cover behind anything orange.
- Deconstructed in Doom 3. Even during the friendly introduction to the facility, numerous people complain about the dangerous conditions and complete lack of safety standards in their working environment. It may have been deliberate on Betruger's part, as the numerous work-accident deaths and injuries provided a completely believable cover for quite literally sending people to hell.
- Dwarf Fortress tends to end up this way, particularly in Let's Play succession games. When one ruler builds a Death Trap, and the next either breaks it, breaks the off switch, or forgets about it entirely, it can only lead to disaster. The words "Why do we even have that lever?" would not be out of place here, either — legendary fortress Boatmurdered had one switch that flooded a siege workshop, for no apparent reason. Of course, the real Death Trap was used Exactly As Planned — to cover the world with magma.
- The Black Mesa facility in Half Life would never have passed a safety inspection, even before the aliens invaded. In fact, the opening of the game features a cinematic sequence wherein protagonist Gordon Freeman passes by an open pool of spilled toxic waste on his way to work in the morning, and only one person is working to clean it up. This is somewhat Lampshaded however, as during this part the player hears a public announcement which ironically reminds personnel to beware of toxic waste.
- Parodied in Iji, where logbooks contain reports of lifts causing its users being thrown through the ceiling, as well as various life-threatening sports games.
- Most of the Jak And Daxter games succumb to this eventually, but the biggest example has to be the Fortress in Jak II, which includes such things as an Awesome But Impractical security tank, an insane array of turrets, lightning doors, half-pipes with lightning arcs moving along them, and (of course) deep pits with absolutely no railings, anywhere. Including those you have to jump over in order to reach the door.
- This is pretty much why force push is so good in the Jedi Knight games. Why spend time sabering each stormy when you can just push them all down a bottomless pit?
- Which can be done to other players in multiplayer mode as well, although they can use force pull to drag you along with them.
- In Jedi Outcast there are two levels (one on a space station, another on a spaceship) where the player can deactivate the energy shields which keep hangars pressurised. The result? All enemies in the hangar immediately go flying out to meet their swift, unexpected, horrific and honestly quite amusing deaths. But in retrospect, you'd think there would be some kind of deliberate delay time between the pushing of the button and the dropping of the shields, allowing time for people to evacuate the hangar, preventing exactly this sort of thing from happening.
- Also there is a level where the player has to reprogram the communications system. For that 3 Glyphs have to be set. You would think that this involves pressing buttons on a console. Actually, no. On imperial ships it involves jumping, using force jump, over a bottomless pit, from bridge without rails to bridge without rails. One wonders how imperial com techs go about reprogramming the com system, or is force jump a prerequisite of manning the com room.
- And again in Star Wars: Battlefront, this is one of the few ways to kill an unkillable Jedi (or enemy, or yourself if you aren't careful). Many battlefields have pits or platforms with no railings, and it only takes one grenade or missile to send scores of hapless foes (and a pesky Jedi) flying off to their dooms.
- The spaceship in Marathon was supposed to hold settlers for a period of a good 200 odd years on a voyage to Tau Ceti and it was made from one of Mars' moons, so it's not like they were desperate for space. For example, the craft features a shaft of multiple elevators... that crush you on the ceiling if you are too slow to jump to the next one... and it is the only way up. Narrow, rail-less bridges over deep pits. A series of platforms that must be lined up in the right order, with the switches a long trek away from the room. And a trash compactor with a secret door that must be negotiated.
- In Marathon's defence we only see it after it comes under attack which includes attacks on the ship's computer systems and AI's. One AI mentions that they are having trouble controlling the doors as a result of the attack so it's not surprising the elevators are playing up as well. It doesn't help that one of the AI's has gone Ax Crazy. Having said that, it still does need a lot of guard rails, and the crew tried to get some, but all of the requests were denied.
- Open vats and rivers of plasma/lava/molten metal, anyone?
- In In Mega Man Zero 1, you have to restore power to your base so that the Red Shirts can take the elevator to the shuttle bay so they can evacuate the base because, apparently, there are no stairs, ramps, or ladders.
- The original 2D Ninja Gaiden games were full of this, featuring temples, castles, fortresses, and sometimes parts of New York City that could only be traversed by ninjas or people with wings. No wonder most of the enemies just pace back and forth in the same spot.
- Lampshaded by Nintendo Power in their Ninja Gaiden II strategy guide. The guide specifically states that the Tower of Lahja wasn't built for humans to get anywhere past the entrance.
- Oddworld. In approximate order: meat saws, live high-voltage open electrical arcs, trapdoors, trigger-happy guards, live explosives sitting on the floor, grenade dispensers, falling carcasses, more live explosives, snipers, hungry livestock, flying live explosives, horrendously aggressive guard dogs, more (dormant) explosives with 2 second timers and oversized arming buttons, kennels full of dozens of the aforementioned guard dogs, more guards with grenades, brew machines that give you explosive gas, drills running across passageways, crazed guards with motion detectors and lethal tasers. And no railings, no safety guards, no stairs, no ramps (climbing up ledges is required), and bottomless pits everywhere, natch.
- The future in which Oni takes place seems to have plenty of factories with catwalks above vats of corrosive chemicals, air treatment facilities in which a wrong step results in a thousand-feet drop (picture thin, extremely long metal planks with no railings whatsoever suspended over an endless black void), power plants with electrified floors...
- This seems to be justified, though. For example, several of the stages are in a Technological Crimes Task Force base, and it is therefore implied that no one would be stupid enough to run around near a biological waste disposer. Also, running across electricity cables and through generators is stupid for normal people. The third level, which takes place in a biological research plant, has a clearly typed data console stating "Work hard, but work safe!" right before the vats of corrosive liquid. The level on the rooftops..."Rooftops are not meant for safe navigation." In fact the only reasons it's easy to fall down and die is because 1) There are enemies all around you, trying to kill you, and 2) Sometimes you have to do reckless things.
- Portal's Aperture Science Enrichment Center is mostly an intentional Death Course, but even the behind-the-scenes parts seem out for blood.
- Prey is based almost entirely in an enemy Death Star-like planetoid. This place is actually inhabited by the aliens, so they would have an interest in making it at least somewhat safe. Instead it's full of high drops, deadly machinery, gravity-altering devices that have no regard over the height someone will suddenly find himself when they're activated, and more.
- Justified in some levels of Psychonauts, because it all represents the fractured state of the minds that Raz enters.
- Although Ed Teglee's mental architects are pretty good about installing and maintaining railings, in places where people are meant to go (the really high ledges, you're still on your own).
- Resident Evil series, especially The Very Definitely Final Dungeon areas. The people who designed these labs or factories were obviously out of their gourds. Passage to laboratory guarded by boulder death traps? Check. Flimsy library balcony? Check. Security door requiring four hidden chess pieces? Check. Open vat of molten iron? Check. Lower laboratory floor that can only reached by a long ladder next to a giant plant? Check. Gauntlet of leaking steam pipes? Check. Waste treatment room that locks employees in? Check. Then again, Spencer was an insane aristocrat, so it might make sense.
- The most bizarre example yet has to go to Resident Evil 0 and the Ecliptic Express' emergency braking system: You need to have one person run all the way from the locomotive to the caboose and key in an arithmetic puzzle, then have the other person stay behind and wait for a signal from the first, then key in another arithmetic puzzle in order to stop the train. This is required to activate the emergency brake. You know, For use in emergencies.
- Lampshaded in Return to Castle Wolfenstein. A memo in an airbase brags about the installation of railings around ladders, and the subsequent decrease in accidents (note that these were probably installed only because RtCWs ladders, like those in nearly every FPS, would be practically unusable without them).
- Only some of the game's ladders have such railings, most do not, and are indeed nearly unusable, adding much Fake Difficulty to the game.
- Shadows Of The Empire for the N64 asks us to believe the Rebels forgot to install safety railings for much of the basement level of their Hoth base. And it's just one bar where there are railings. Cue Stormtroopers falling to a hideous death when blasted...
- Justified in System Shock 2: The Von Braun is awfully badly secured and dangerous for a "state of the art prototype", even considering the horrible mutant infestation, because Tri Optimum rushed construction to beat the other companies to the FTL punch. You find logs complaining about it.
- The White Chamber. Okay, who in the right mind would install doors that directly open to space without some sort or airlock, especially one that is installed in dormitory? Granted, the station is also nightmare-induced.
- You forgot about the normal station's perfectly accessible rotating fan that only has a railing to keep people from falling in, which couldn't prevent Sarah from killing Dr. Goodwin with it in a rather... Messy manner. Who designed this space station?
- To be fair, the doors to outerspace are made by reality warping itself, so it isn't like they were part of the original design. Also, the fan appears to be in an area where people normally wouldn't go unless they were doing maintenance on, say, the giant fan, which would mean that they would have to shut down the fan anyways. Combined with the fact that there are railings there, despite it appearing to be a place that you would ONLY go to perform maintenance, and, well... Yeah
- In World Of Warcraft, the Blackrock Depths dungeon is built inside a volcano, and is populated by evil dwarves. What makes them evil? The handrail-less bridges and walkways that are nothing but giant chains built over pools of lava. Even the capital cities feature these.
- Aldor Rise features small open air elevators that go up a huge sheer cliff.
- The dwarven city has pools of lava all over, some of which have grates to stop you falling in.
- The undead city has pools of green glowing liquid all over-not dangerous to players but animals dipped in a similar substance have grown huge and attacked people.
- The Blood Elven Seat of Government is suspended over a bottomless pit that is thankfully guarded by Invisible Walls, though there's a lot of other Malevolent Architecture, with lots of Floating Platforms and no guard rails.
- But the most extreme example has to be Dalaran Underbelly. A tunnel that leads to a 500+ foot drop, strange potions lying everywhere, and a lovely shark swimming around by some shops, waiting to much on anyone who gets too close.
- The gnomish city Gnomeregan is a partial subversion, abandoned due to having been flooded with radiation... except that there is not only a lack of rails in most places, but an elevator entrance to the subterranean city featuring a heavy lid slamming over the elevator shaft as the platform descends (don't stand too close).
- Tauren capital Thunder Bluff is another offender, with the whole city built on a mesa hundreds of feet tall. The only safety is afforded by fences that are low by human standards, let alone the Tauren who are quite a bit taller. The plains at the foot of Thunder Bluff are frequently littered with the corpses of players who fell or jumped off.
- Blackrock Spire is pretty bad in this respect too. The dungeon - supposedly a city inhabited mostly by orcs and dragons - is full of narrow bridges and easily-accessible ledges with no handrails whatsoever. While the bridges may be defensive structures a la Khazad-Dum, where they aren't over lava they're over drops that you need a parachute to survive.
- Which can become frustrating, since it's possible to be knocked off these bridges (or just plain misstep and fall - yay lag!) down into the instance below; from Upper Blackrock Spire down into Lower Blackrock Spire.
- Justified in Bioshock, where something like OSHA would be considered a statist plot to infringe on free enterprise. Andrew Ryan specifically built Rapture to get away from pesky things like employee safety laws.
- Older games in the Wipeout anti-gravity racing series had some off the wall environments including a supposed modern industrial complex with broken pipes spewing flames everywhere. Interestingly, its reimagining in a more recent Wipeout game looks exactly like the original but without the fire and damage. The non-canon spinoff Wipeout 64 for the Nintendo console has a track on an active volcano, built there to provide 'serious background action', but don't worry, there have been no fatalities among racing crew or paying spectators.
- Fire Field in F Zero GX is basically this.
- Pretty much every single mako reactor in Final Fantasy VII. All of them have giant glowing pools of mako at the bottom, thin walkways above said pools of mako (sometimes without guardrails), built in such a way that someone needs to walk on pipes to get to the main valve, holes in the walkways that you need to jump over, and Cloud needs to rescue Jessie when she gets her foot stuck in the walkway grating. Not to mention when one blows up it goes off like an atomic bomb. It's not surprising that the Big Bad falls to his (supposed) doom into a pool of mako just by using the powers of leverage.
- A deleted area of Soul Reaver was a literal smoke and fire factory; it's purpose, as explained in the backstory in the manual, was to belch out smoke to blot out the sun. Which makes sense considering sunlight is lethal to younger vampires.
- Silent Hill, given what it is, can kill you even without any monsters.
- The Legend Of Zelda does this. You have to wonder why the worshipers would build their Temple in an active volcano in the first place, forget the deadly, sprawling dungeon they built in it. There are no places that even so much as hint at serving the purpose of worship, other than the Temple of Time, which has an altar and the Triforce symbol. Apparently the natives just wanted to build a deadly place, because that's what all the architecture seems to work toward.
- In The Godfather game, you gain the Watch Your Step Execution Style by pushing an opponent off a railing to a minimum one-story drop, whether it's by physically pushing them over or by making them stumble back from a shot.
- 50 Cent: Blood on the Sand actually has one of the G-Unit mention this trope, right down to mentioning OSHA.
- The Kanto Power Plant in Generations 1 and 3 of Pokemon is a maze-like abandoned factory with random generators around the place, explosive Pokémon all over and just a single path. The problem is, even if we admit that it is abandoned, it still doesn't explain why they built it in such a nonsensical way, specially seeing how there are no torn down walls anywhere to explain the maze structure and there is only one emergency exit◊ (so if there is a fire when you are in the south-east zone, you are screwed). That would explain why the place was completely rebuilt when the plant was made functional in Generations 2 and 4.
- Duke Nukem comments on the villian Morphix's lack of safety twice in the first factory level in Duke Nukem: Manhattan Project.
- Early in the level: "Looks like Morphix puts worker safety first. Right after everything else."
- Near the end of the level: "Something tells me this won't pass any safety inspections..."
- The Punisher; many 'special kills' sections involves jamming people into hideously dangerous 'normal' contrations. License plate machines with head-crushing devices just inches away from the hands. Knife-holding racks that drop knives like rain when you shake them. Even Tony Stark's HQ has laser etching machines people can trip into. Oh and doors that somehow end up open when enemies attack.
- Area 51 subverts this. Many of the puzzles you have to solve are all about subverting safety regulations so you can advances to the next area. Or defeat an enemy. Thank goodness random explosions manage to smash through the safety railings in efficent ways. And bonus content the player can collect describes how to safely handle various devices so you don't accidentally destroy your fingers/the continent.
- How has Halo not made it onto this list? Everyone seems guilty of it.
Web Comics
- Subverted in Antihero For Hire when Dragon and Crossroad fight on a walkway over vats of acid that turn out to be empty.
- Eight Bit Theater gives us the most dangerous thing in the dungeon.
- In Gunnerkrigg Court, the first-year students' dorm rooms are stacked directly atop each other like bunks — 30 stories high. Of course, they can only be reached by ladder, and there is neither wall nor railing on the side with the drop. The unlined bridge over the Annan Waters, on the other hand, is actually justified: any railing would cast a shadow, which would allow the Glass-Eyed Men to cross.
- The proto-webcomic Henchmen introduces the concept of the Health and Danger Department, working on the logic that the best possible fighting force is one in peak physical condition and constant mortal danger. Hence deliberately moving walkways over vats of toxic waste and whacking the poor henchmen about the head with a cricket bat while they fill in a "Risk-Awareness Test" form.
- Irregular Webcomic spoofs lack of railings and Tolkien in this comic.
- Invoked in Minions At Work here — the minion had said it needed handrails.
- Penny Arcade plays with it.
- The classic short webcomic series The Repository of Dangerous Things has a hilariously OSHA-noncompliant workspace as its chief element. See, for example, the pantry.
- Schlock Mercenary plays this straight by killing off athletes.
- Like any trope that's appeared in Star Wars, Darths And Droids lampshades it.
- "Handrail technology, guys. Look into it."
Web Original
- The SCP Foundation averts this one hard. The containment procedures are almost always designed to minimize overall danger, injury, and loss of life, even of the totally expendable D-Class personnel. At least, so far as possible with any given SCP.
Western Animation
- Although it predates the OSHA, the Popeye cartoon Lost And Foundry fits this Trope perfectly.
- Batman The Animated Series had most of its fights in places like this, and the animated version of Two-Face can trace his origin to such an encounter. (Also, in the 1989 Batman movie, the origin of the Joker hinges on such a place).
- Gotham's power plant, for instance, seems to be composed entirely of ledges over a Bottomless Pit with a control center at the top.
- Even The Creeper got his origin this way. Ironically it was the same place where the Joker had fallen to the vat of chemical waste, yet they never bothered to change the places of the vats or at least make the rails higher.
- In The Emperors New Groove, the entrance to villain Yzma's secret lab has two unmarked levers: one forcibly flips you into the lab, the other drops you into a crocodile-infested pool.
- Lampshaded when Yzma's henchman pulls the wrong lever. Returning from her trip to the pool, the alligator-encumbered Yzma demands of no one in particular, "Why do we even have that lever?" Kuzco would also like to know.
- This is also played with in the TV series. Every time Yzma goes to her lair in the school, she orders "Pull the lever, Kronk!" followed by something DIFFERENT happening to her each episode. Even Kuzco does this in a secret bunker that he had hidden in the jungle for some reason.
- Lampshaded in the Family Guy Star Wars parody Blue Harvest. One scene has a pair of Death Star crewmen complaining about the lack of guard rails and their attempts to get some installed.
- In Transformers Animated episode "Autoboot Camp", they have simulated weapons that can be turned deadly with the flip of a switch. While there might be a legitimate reason to have some live ammo in a simulation training, there are none for having the things to be turned lethal at the flip of a switch (either through debris, cyber-fauna, or actual sabotage).
- The Simpsons Nuclear Power Plant is a safety nightmare. There are repeated scenes of Burns doing things to try and circumvent getting shut down, from running for governor or bribing officials.
- If only it stopped at Mr. Burns. His employees seem to be the most incompetent gaggle of nitwits ever created. I mean — they hired Homer Simpson for crying out loud, and have not fired him after numerous accidents that came within a hair's breadth of looking like the sordid offspring of a threesome between Chernobyl, Three-Mile Island and the Love Canal... Then there's Lenny, who refitted the soda machines in Sector 7G to dispense beer if one asked for club soda... The Only Sane Man in the whole plant was driven suicidally insane in short order, let's just leave it at that.
Real Life
- The real facility commonly known as Area 51 was sued for its OSHA/EPA noncompliance and open-air burning of toxic materials and other poisonous/radioactive substances. The suit was thrown out citing national security issues, which kept virtually all the (classified) evidence from being seen by the judge or jury.
- Dangerous factories that existed before OSHA came into existence, when corporations could get away with basically anything.
- The Hanford Nuclear Research Facility, by all accounts, is a mass of random radioactive chemical dumps, some of which are uncatalogued and all of which contain unknown dangers. A friend of a friend from there tells of a giant pit full of unknown radioactive chemicals that was sealed by a 500-ton concrete "lid". Every so often, on a semi-predictable basis, the pit "burps" a huge cloud of toxic gas that actually lifts the lid.
- Formerly the "mass production" site for the Manhattan Project's nuclear material, these days Hanford is essentially a massive government project to clean up everything. Recently they found the second-oldest known (artifical) plutonium in a glass jar buried in a safe. In a normal waste dump. Groundwater contamination is the more serious issue right now, because at the current rate, the contamination will reach the Columbia River before the cleanup can stop it.
- To be fair, the contractors hired to perform the cleanup are currently focusing almost entirely on the groundwater issue, and are making some headway. Just not enough, and the regular government interference only serves to bog the work down further. There's a fair number of folks in Benton, Franklin, Columbia and Walla Walla counties who are getting exasperated at the whole affair.
- The Semiconductor industry had this issue for years. Fairchild Semiconductor Superfund site is infamous for this. Use of toxic gases in large volumes is needed, and there's a heck of a lot of power being used. The industry had a massive crackdown by the EPA and OSHA causing it to be cleaned up quite a bit. Some companies have overseas plants though without such regulation leading to sulfuric acid and some other nasty stuff being pumped out of the building causing all grass to die outside.
- In theatre, we call this making the OSHA whale cry, or in severe cases killing the OSHA whale. Usually seen in non-union houses, and university settings. Refers to cases where people do ridiculously stupid/dangerous things to get their job done faster, such as climbing a tree 30 feet in the air without a harness, or wandering around on catwalks without a harness, etc.
- Flawed design, among several spectacularly irresponsible and reckless things (like using the thing for an unauthorised experiment), was one of the major reasons for the Chernobyl nuclear disaster. True, it was in the USSR and thus not subject to OSHA regulations. But even with Soviet safety regulations it was still guilty of some heinous design flaws. Likely because the lead engineer building the plant had no experience or training in building nuclear reactors, and had previously only built dams. Among said flaws:
- To reduce costs, and because of its large size, the reactor had been constructed with only partial containment. This allowed the radioactive contaminants to escape into the atmosphere after the steam explosion burst the primary pressure vessel.
- The reactor also had been running for over one year, and was storing fission byproducts; these byproducts pushed the reactor towards disaster.
- As the reactor heated up, inadequate material construction caused the reactor vessel to warp and break up, making further insertion of control rods impossible as the heat deformed them.
- The graphite-tipped control rods and their insertion system was designed in such a way that, when inserted, temporarily displaced some coolant. This greatly increased the rate of the fission reaction temporarily, since graphite is a more potent neutron moderator (a material that enables a nuclear reaction) and also absorbed far fewer neutrons than the boiling light water. Thus for the first few seconds of control rod activation, reactor power output was actually increased, rather than reduced as desired.
- Even with all these design flaws and the Chernobyl accident as a precedent for catastrophic failure, there are still at least 12 reactors of the same design still operating in Russia and Lithuania.
- Given that an overheating mode was reached from another abnormal mode (at the end of experiment), reactor itself needs only pair of extra failsafe conditions preventing automatics from kicking in more rods at once than is safe and from going into any state when it may need to cool down too quickly. That is, allowing only normal usage it was designed for.
- While the design flaws certainly contributed, a major cause was the under trained personnel ignoring several warnings from the plants computers.
- Narrowly averted at an air-cooled reactor Windscale. When the graphite core of the reactor caught fire, a colossal release of airborne radiation was prevented only by hastily added filters that Sir John Cockcroft had insisted be installed, which the government deemed unnecessary.
- If you read Fast Food Nation you'll find out just how much crap the meat and fast food industry get away with.
- If we're going to mention that, we'll have to mention The Jungle by Upton Sinclair. Written in 1906 and showed what the meatpacking industry got away with. Yikes.
- The Jungle is an interesting case, in that Sinclar wrote it specifically to complain about the risks to the workers, but all anyone cared about was the quality of the meat itself.
- China: where electronic equipment waste goes to die, be dismantled, and burned, exposing workers to loads of horrible toxic materials.
- In the United States there is little OSHA or similar regulation of student laboratories, because only those receiving their funding from the university would be considered an employee and subject to safety regulation. This is becoming a serious cause for concern following some publicised deaths in which students were not using the correct protective equipment or were otherwise exposed to unacceptable risks.
- Pretty much any lack of OSHA compliance can be handwaved with two simple words: Kick. Back. Also, in the future, it's quite possible OSHA's been dissolved by whatever corporation's running things, simply for being a pain in their pampered asses.
- Then again, even a greedy and evil coporation may take note at losing a billion-dollar plant. Quite a few examples in the above list are from government-run facilities...
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