Instant Mass, Just Add Water: Difference between revisions

Perhaps writers used to have a lot of those expansive sponges or they're very familiar with the factoid that a person is 70% water (a house is seventy percent bricks but try throwing some bricks at some concrete, metal poles and some roofing tiles). However the origin seems to be connected to [[Food Pills]] and the idea of astronaut food. Sailors, soldiers and astronauts have needed easily transportable, highly nutritious and long lasting ways of cooking and storing food (and in the case of astronauts, something you can eat in zero gravity), when trying to think of what might be useful for life {{smallcaps|In Space!}}, something like this trope turns up.

 

 

{{examples}}

** They also appear in the ''[[Back to The Future]]'' animated series, where Verne would would be bullied for lunch money, admit that he only had the pills, which the bullies then knocked out of his hand and when they hid the wet ground they popped into a full turkey dinner.

* The instant food in ''[[The Fifth Element]]'', which has to be parodying this trope - Leloo takes about a handful of pellets, sticks them in a bowl, and after a few seconds in a food processor, the pellets have become an entire roast chicken with vegetables.

** The 60's Batman series also featured "instant costume capsules" in one episode. Drop the capsule into a cup of hot water, and it expands into a full sized Bat suit.

 

 

== Literature ==

 

 

== Western Animation ==

* Played straight in an episode of ''[[What's New Scooby Doo]]'' where melons and other foods are dehydrated to tiny sized, and spring back to normal in a pool.

* In ''[[Family Guy]]'', when Peter eats a huge amount of dehydrated meals, he initially comments that he's still hungry. Then he takes a drink of water and nearly explodes. ([[Fridge Logic]]- wouldn't the meals have reacted to his saliva and other bodily fluids?)

* In ''[[Ren and Stimpy]]'' Ren ingests a pack of dehydrated horse meat. It rehydrates inside him as a whole horse.

** The episode "House of Next Thursday" features a dehydrated bed. Then Stimpy pees on it...

* An episode of ''[[Secret Squirrel]]'' had him defeat the [[Little Red Riding Hood|Big Bad Wolf]] by trapping him in a dehydrated grandma's house (which [[Amusing Injuries|shrunk when the sun dried it out again]]).

* The ''[[Looney Tunes]]'' short "Hare-way to the Stars", where Marvin deploys Instant Martians from a gumball dispenser. Bugs later takes it with him to Earth and it accidentally falls down a sewer.

{{quote| Head for the hills, folks, or you'll be up to your armpits in Martians!}}

* Another ''[[Looney Tunes]]'' short: "Scrambled Aches," with Wile E. Coyote carrying a box of dehydrated boulders to the edge of a cliff. One drop of [[H 2 O]] from an eye-dropper, lift boulder high above head, and [[Hilarity Ensues]].

* One episode of ''[[Lilo and Stitch]]'' has a device sold on TV Shop that does this. Oh, and all the water activated capsules the [[Mons]] come in. That said device manages to recreate perfectly.

* Parodied in ''[[Futurama]]'' when [[Too Dumb to Live|Fry]] choked on a dehydrated tent by eating it in pill form and drinking some water.

** A pool is filled with ''Dehydrated Water'' (Dead leaves and chlorine included). Just throw a cup of water and the pool fills up!

 

{{reflist}}