Science Cocktail

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.

Science as we know involves lots of interesting glassware filled with bubbling fluids, condensing, perculating, spinning and being pushed through tubes. A pan across such equipment establishes that we're in a laboratory. When the pan ends with a scientist pouring the final product into a martini glass, adding an olive and drinking it, this is a Science Cocktail. There can be the magical version of this trope, replacing the scientist with a wizard or witch. The Technicolor Science becomes Technicolor Magic, but looks remarkably similar.

Examples of Science Cocktail include:

Anime and Manga

  • In Gundam SEED, The desert tiger has many scenes where he makes coffee out of tubes and bubbling pots and whatnot.

Film - Animated

  • In Corpse Bride, Elder Gutknecht creates a sorcerous variant.

Film - Live-Action

  • In Back to the Future: Part III, Doc Brown has this elaborate machine in his Old West blacksmith shop. Takes up most of the room its in. When he activates it, the thing huffs and puffs and shakes and finally, after all this ostentatious display, spits out two ice cubes.

Marty: "It's... a refrigerator?"

    • Effective for the implied humor, but also fairly realistic as creating a refrigeration unit in that time with limited materials and technology would result in a large machine.
  • In the new Green Hornet movie, Kato makes apparently extremely good coffee with this big scientific industrial looking machine that he made and only he knows how to use.

Literature

  • Jake Stonebender, from Spider Robinson's Callahan series, owns a Rube Goldberg Device that looks a bit like a 50s movie doomsday device. Its sole purpose is to make the perfect cup of coffee.
  • Magical version: Potion class in Harry Potter. Blending exotic things in a caldron and make a drinkable mixture.
  • The machine that makes the Everlasting Gobstopper in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.
    • Also the machine that makes the Amazing Three-Course Meal Chewing Gum.

Live-Action TV

  • On M*A*S*H the still in the Swamp was originally this when it was first built.
  • In one episode of NCIS, after spending hours manually distilling blood samples during a power outage, Abby uses the same apparatus to brew herself a shot of nonalcoholic whiskey.

Web Comics

Western Animation

  • On the Looney Tunes short "Hot Crossed Bunny", Bugs Bunny threatens to blow up a Mad Doctor with a mixture of chemicals, but the scientist points out that all he did was prepare a chocolate malt. Bugs drinks it and declares, "I'm a better scientist than I thought."
  • The introduction to the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cartoon has Donatello fiddling with a complex machine that makes him a drink.

Real Life