If I was Skald I could write this up really interestingly, but at the moment I can hardly type so…
What are your favorite scenes of mad science?
From Mystery Men: We don’t see the set-up, but Captain Amazing is hooked up to the psychofrakulator. And it is cool. Like seriously bad-ass - big ol’ ray gun from the ceiling, he’s strapped into a chair, the awesome old fashioned knife switches on the wall. And then he basically instructs the heroes to fry him, by being a jackass.
I kinda lost my point there, but, yeah. Mad Science! Inspire me!
There are fun mad science moments in Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog. I love the throwaway gag about Dr. Horrible having stolen a bunch of gold from out of a locked vault via a transporter. He’s pretty pleased just for having been able to commit such a crime, but the joke is that it didn’t exactly re-assemble itself properly on his end. It left him with a big Ziploc bag full of a weird goldish liquid.
Not to mention the scene with him assembling a remote control and controller unit to hijack a van full of Wonderflonium. When he tries to use it, the girl he has a crush on talks to him during the attempt, then she nearly gets run down by the van and thinks that she was saved by the main superhero of the city (who’s also a real jerk). Cue “meet cute” moment while Dr. Horrible seethes. :smack:
The Kenneth Strickfaden machinery with added Colin Clive histrionics in the creation scene of Karloff’s FRANKENSTEIN, and again with added Ernest Theisiger goodness in BRIDE OF.
Same machinery used to good effect in YOUNG FRANKENSTEIN.
On the FRANKENSTEIN theme…
the two creation scenes in F… THE TRUE STORY (NBC-TV 1973) in which solar-powered mill-blades whir to generate the electricity for the first monster and later a vat of multi-colored chemicals brew life into the near-nekkid body of Jane Seymour (woohoo!);
and the Coppola-Branaugh creation scene where Bobby DeNiro is cooked in an electric eel, acupuncture needle, amniotic fluid stew.
The “Mariafication” scene where Rotwang’s robot is made to resemble the heroine in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis*. It’s the original “Mad Scientist’s Laboratory” scene, predating and inspiring the 1931 lab in “Frankenstein”.
(The 1910 Edison company “Frankenstein” gets a nod for its own creation scene, accomplished by destroying a dummy of the monster and running the scene backwards. But Metropolis has infinitely better effects, and blows it out of the water.)
I’m having a hard time remembering specifics because I haven’t sen the movie in quite a long time, but Jeffery Combs plays a pretty memorable mad scientist in the classic Re-animator.
There’s also an interesting movie currently in production called House of Re-Animator with Combs, William H. Macy, and George Wendt!
–Doctor Doom’s laboratory, especially as drawn by Jack Kirby
–Reed Richard’s Lab, for that matter. Also by Kirby
–Bela Lugosi’s lab in Bride of the Monster, with its painted-on stone walls, and the victim strapped down with a colander on his head, menaced by a phot-enlarger on a microphone stand (thanks to It Came From Hollywood for that description)
–Charles Laughton’s lab with its gamma-ray machine in The Island of Lost Souls.
–Any of the labs in The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai.