Shoe Phone: Difference between revisions

{{trope}}

[[File:shoephone.jpg|link=Get Smart|frame|Hello? Dr. Scholl?]]

 

{{quote|''His watch is really a radio / His gun, a pen...''

 

A collection of seemingly mundane items that can be [[IKEA Weaponry|assembled into a functional weapon]] is called a [[Scaramanga Special]].

{{examples}}

== Anime and Manga ==

* ''[[Johnny Sokko and His Flying Robot]] / [[Giant Robo]]'' had a neat little gadget with Unicorn: a little and ''very'' powerful emergency communicator hidden in the heel of their standard uniform boot. All the agents has to do is flip open the heel, pull out the device and use it.

* ''L/R'' is notable for having just about every one of the titular spies' gadgets built into ''cigarettes''.

** Ah, the old communicator cigarette trick!

* Tatsunoko hero Gold Lightan is called such because it's a giant robot whose [[Sleep Mode Size]] is a gold cigarette lighter.

* Not a [[Spy Drama]] example, but Conan from [[Case Closed]] does a lot of this. Pretty much the only part of his uniform that ''isn't'' some kind of gadget is the suit he wears. (And even that had a tracking device disguised as a button.)

 

== Comic Books ==

* The series ''[[Mortadelo Y Filemon|Mortadelo y Filemón, agencia de información]]'' (German: Clever & Smart, French: Mortadel et Filemón or Futt et Fil, Dutch: Paling & Ko) by Spanish artist Francisco Ibáñez, which started in 1958 provides an early example, and heavily parodies the [[James Bond]] spy genre. The series is a bizarre slapstick comedy with even more bizarre gadgets in which the two titular agents are constantly surrounded by idiots, explosions and mad scientists and plagued by bad luck and their own semi-competence, not to mention their choleric superior. The series was never translated into English, though.

* The first issue of the ''[[G.I. Joe]]'' comic books had Cobra operatives disguise cameras as gun parts.

 

== Film ==

* Was subverted in ''[[Austin Powers]]: International Man of Mystery''. When the government supplies Austin with a toothbrush, toothpaste and floss, he figures the paste is a plastic explosive, the brush its detonator, and the floss is garrote wire. Actually, they just want him to do something about his [[British Teeth|woeful teeth]].

** [[Double Subversion]]—Austin actually manages to use all three items in a spy-gadget-like fashion in the course of the film.

* Subverted in, of all things, a [[James Bond (film)|James Bond]] movie (''[[Never Say Never Again]]''). Bond drags a goon into a cupboard and put a device that that looks like a cigarette case in his hand. He tell him it's a gyroscopically triggered bomb that will go off if he tilts it at all. Later, he returns to the cupboard, where the goon has made agonising attempts to keep it level. Bond takes it off him, opens it and takes out a cigarette. It was just a cigarette case.

** Missed the explosion by THIS much!

** In ''[[Never Say Never Again]]'', Bond picks up a device that looks like an old-fashioned nasal inhaler and asks the Q (for that movie only) how it works. Q puts it up his nose and sniffs in, and explains how good it is for his asthma.

** Size 22? That's the second biggest pair of shoes I've seen!

** The old 'big cellphone hidden in the size 22 shoe' trick. That's the fifth time I've fallen for it this week!

 

== Literature ==

* ''[[Doc Savage]]'', the pulp hero of the 1930's and 40's, was famous for his gadgets (which he usually invented himself).

* Late in the ''[[Dark Tower]]'' series by [[Stephen King]], a town full of people under watch develop plate weapons. They look like dinner plates, can be stored in the cabinet, but thrown just right they can take someone's head right off. Don't grab the wrong side.

* Subverted in the ''Game, Set & Match'' trilogy by Len Deighton. A [[Double Agent]]'s house is searched and found to have various spy gadgets disguised as household items. The protagonist says that the KGB gives these gadgets to their agents simply to give their treachery a glamorous [[James Bond]] aura, rather than because they're useful.

 

* [[Mock the Week|Now watch carefully, 007, this may look like an ordinary suitcase, but if you push this button a handle comes out and you can wheel it...]]

** It's not just a baseball bat, Bond, It's a baseball bat with a nail through it!

** We can't forget the ''Car'' Phone, which had Max accidentally dialing the operator every time he turned the steering wheel. <!-- Is that the exploding paint episode?%% -->

* ''[[The Wild Wild West (TV series)|The Wild Wild West]]'' did it during the Reconstruction era.

* ''[[The Man from U.N.C.L.E.]]'' was one of earliest instances of this trope on television, with many (though not all) of their gadgets disguised as mundane items.

* Such tools were a major part of Joel Hodgson's prop comedy stand-up routine, and therefore made their way into many of the Invention Exchange segments on ''[[Mystery Science Theater 3000]]'' The most outlandish was a submachine gun hidden inside a casserole dish, complete with casserole.

* The game song styles on ''[[Whose Line Is It Anyway?|Whose Line Is It Anyway]]'' gives us the aptly titled [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FpVd_IRTRug&t=2m51s My Shoe Is A Phone].

 

 

* The Bond-esque ''[[No One Lives Forever]]'' gives Cate Archer a wide array of girly themed destructive items (Mascara laser, hairspray flamethrower, and the like) one could conceal in one's purse.

* The Spy in ''[[Team Fortress 2]]'' has, fittingly enough, a disguise kit built into his cigarette case and a cloaking device for a wristwatch.

* In ''[[Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater]]'' you can pickup a knockout-gas cigarette case, one of the only weapons that can be used when Snake is disguised as an enemy soldier or scientist. It's also strangely effective against two immune-to-bullets bosses near the end of the game.

** Also lampshaded during a discussion between Snake and Major Zero about James Bond, in which Snake comments that (for example) a gun-pen would make him look stupid in the jungle, at which point Zero insists they could build him a gun shaped like a snake, that "folds up into an attache case." In which Snake then replied that it was even sillier (then Zero gets upset at Snake for "Bashing" Bond).

* ''007: Agent Under Fire'' has a cell phone that also comes with a [[Frickin' Laser Beams|laser]], a password cracker, a switch activator, and a grapple hook that can somehow extend for 10 meters or more. In ''Goldeneye'', Bond's wristwatch serves as the game menu and health/armor indicator and contains a built-in magnet and laser that are used to get out of certain level-specific [[Death Trap|death traps]] in a [[Shout-Out]] to the movies.

* ''[[Splinter Cell]]'' has Sam's wristwatch. Dear God, what '''can't''' it do? It can hack computers, disarm bombs, pick locks, scan eyeballs, get fingerprints from a surface, playback voices for getting into voice-locks, show a map with the locations of bad guys, and operate as a standalone computer for storing files and the like. ''In a goddamn watch.'' Granted, you ''are'' the [[The Ace|best spy the NSA has.]]

* These compose [[Ratchet and Clank|Clank's]] armaments in ''[[Secret Agent Clank]]'', including shuriken bowties, an umbrella that shoots electricity, and a briefcase/flamethrower, to name a few.

 

* The [[Gender Bender|T-Girls]] of ''[[Jet Dream (webcomic)|Jet Dream]]'', the [[Remix Comic]], play this trope even harder than [[Jet Dream (Comic Book)|their original comic book counterparts]].

 

== Western Animation ==

* ''[[Kim Possible]]'' has a number of recurring devices, notably her [[Grappling Hook Pistol]]/hair dryer. There are briefing scenes in many episodes, but not all. In her case, it's a stylistic thing; she isn't really trying to [[Secret Identity|hide anything]].

** They also tend to have cutesy names like [[Incredibly Lame Pun|Stuntan Lotion]].

** Items for Male Agents seem to exist as well. Instead of a compact, Jerry (the Girls' boss) has a communicator disguised as a wallet. A humorous example was a fake beard designed to hold items, that the girls had to test once. (It didn't pass. Heavy objects made them fall over and it looked goofy on them)

 

== Real Life ==

* [[Truth in Television]]: Several gadgets used by [[World War II]] spies. A camera hidden in a match box, playing cards that had hidden maps, an actual pen gun (good for one shot), and shoes that looked like feet (when landing on beaches, foot prints with toes were less conspicuous than combat boots, which would draw attention). When in the business of being a spy, you don't want to draw attention to yourself, and these toys did just that. All saw action with a moderate reported success rate.

** This technique was also used to smuggle supplies to POWs to aid in escapes, with things like hacksaw blades hidden in pencils, radio components in chess pieces, and [http://www.truthorfiction.com/rumors/m/monopoly-game.htm Monopoly sets with secret maps, compasses, files, and (real) money].

* Also back in the 60s, the CIA reportedly went to elaborate lengths to fit a microphone and a radio inside a... [[wikipedia:Acoustic Kitty|cat]]. A live one. It got run over by a taxi almost immediately after it was first deployed in the field. The program was scrapped shortly after that.

* While it will probably become mainstream pretty quickly, for now most people will assume you are insane when they say you talking to your watch, and will be amazed to realize [http://www.samsunghub.com/2009/07/22/samsung-unveils-worlds-thinnest-watchphone-s9110/ it's actually] [http://www.engadget.com/2009/10/16/lg-gd910-watch-phone-review/ a phone].

* Eff-in Science showed a hand-phone. Well, actually a glove phone. They disassembled a Bluetooth earpiece, attached the speaker portion to the tip of the thumb of a glove and the microphone to the tip of the pinky. The demonstrator could hold his hand up with his thumb near his ear and his pinky near his mouth and talk over the cell-phone. "Add voice dialing," they said, "and you'd have a fully functional hand phone."

** Alternatively, they could just use the pad from the watch-phone above to the same effect. A glove and a watch are very inconspicuous, while [[Incredibly Lame Pun|going hand-in-hand]] with each other.

* The International Spy Museum in Washington DC has all sorts of obsolete spy devices such as lipstick guns. Some of these devices make one wonder what modern intelligence agencies really have.

* A partial subversion is the gun knife that was used by the KGB. It looks like a combat knife and it is one, but it also able to fire the knife portion using gunpowder hidden in the base. As you can imagine, it has very limited uses unless you are not able to shoot someone who might shoot a hostile or you somehow lost all your guns. That's not saying it won't [[Crazy Prepared|save your life.]]

 

{{reflist}}

[[Category:Espionage Tropes]]

[[Category:Applied Phlebotinum]]

[[Category:Phone Tropes]]