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* A made-for-TV movie version of ''Swiss Family Robinson'' featured a fake gun made of bamboo that was used to scare away the wildlife.
** A simple gun might have made the Suspension of Disbelief (barely) possible, but the producers went balls-to-the-walls improbable with a ''[[Gatling Good|Gatling gun]]'' design that fired several fruits per second. Never mind that it was never explained HOW that gun generated the pressure to propel them down the spinning barrels.
* Spoofed in ''[[Galaxy Quest]]'', when [[The Captain]] is stranded on a planet with nothing but rocks in sight, and another crew member asks, "Can you construct a rudimentary lathe?" Which in itself is a spoof of the ''[[Star Trek: The
* ''[[Raiders of the Lost Ark]]''. Ancient South American Indians develop a trap with a trigger that uses a beam of sunlight as an electric eye: when anything interrupts the beam, the trap activates. Question: does the trap work when the light isn't shining through at that exact spot, which would be, I don't know, most of the day and all night?
* The 1971 film by Dennis Hopper ''The Last Movie'' concerns a western being shot in a small Peruvian village. The Peruvian natives are "filming" their own movie with "cameras" made of sticks, and acting out real western movie violence, as they don't understand movie fakery.
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* One prominent example is ''[[The A-Team]]'', where the titular team regularly cobbled together weapons and vehicles from random ingredients, such as twenty-four feet of PVC piping, a metal dune-buggy frame and household chemicals.
* ''[[MacGyver]]'': the plot revolves on the hero saving the day by fabricating something ridiculously clever from a piece of gum, a toothpick and a hairdryer (or whatever). One memorable sequence (perhaps the definitive one) from the opening of Legend of the Holy Rose Part 1 involves bamboo technology. The title character, with only a few hours, manages to design and build a whole gyroplane out of bamboo, tarps, and an old airplane engine. He and the prisoner he was rescuing then proceed to fly out of the base through heavy gunfire and have the plane work perfectly without any apparent flaws in spite of both the lack of rigidity of the materials used in it and the fact that it had to have taken at least some hits. Not exactly [[Willing Suspension of Disbelief]]'s finest hour. Also lampshaded by his copilot saying "It really flies!" and Mac replying "Of course it does!".
* ''[[
* In a [[Christmas Episode]] of ''[[Saturday Night Live]],'' a couple who are [[Deserted Island|stranded on a desert island]] are exchanging holiday gifts. He gives her a potholder of woven palm fronds and two conch shells; she gives him a spectacular, fully functional telescope, wristwatch, and motorcycle that she made from some stuff she found around the island. You know, if you're bored, you might just pan some gold, smelt some iron ore, kill a rhino for its whiskers.
* ''[[Star Trek: The
* The British television show ''Rough Science'' is essentially this trope applied to reality TV. Five scientists are dropped off in the middle of the wilderness and must use natural materials and a small amount of scrap material to make advanced devices within a time limit. They've constructed everything from radio transmitters and receivers, weather stations and clocks, to a wide variety of medicines and microscopes and bacterial cultures, all using scrap and natural materials.
* ''[[Hercules: The Legendary Journeys]]'' featured a [[Humongous Mecha]] in this style.
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== Tabletop Games ==
* [[Image Boards|/tg/]] had a field day when it discovered that since zombies in [[Dungeons
* One NPC in ''[[Genius: The Transgression]]'', Mr. Shark is a 17th-century Maori navigator who built a time-travelling ''canoe''. It can travel in time to any year between 1623 and 2223, but you still have to row it if you want to get anywhere.
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* ''[[Futurama]]'': [[Robot Buddy|Bender]] gets a downgrade so that he is made out of wood. Naturally, it turns out that it was [[All Just a Dream]]. Along with that, he and the other inhabitants of the Island of Obsolete Robots build a submarine entirely out of wood. In a nod to realism, it isn't terribly water-tight.
* Parodied in ''[[The Simpsons]]'' episode "Das Bus" (which was essentially ''[[Lord of the Flies]]'' meets ''[[Gilligan's Island]]'') where Bart instructs Martin to work on building "some coconut walky-talkies. And, if possible, a coconut Nintendo system". He also envisions the children building a society based on Bamboo Technology and [[Everything's Better with Monkeys|monkey butlers]]. Needless to say, it doesn't ''quite'' work out (not least because the island lacks any bamboo).
* ''[[Freakazoid!]]'' had a good laugh at this when Freakazoid was trapped in a bamboo cage...but he couldn't break through it with his super-strength because it was "''molecular'' bamboo."
* The young rodents in ''[[Once Upon a Forest]]'' build a flying machine called the "Flapper-wingamathing" out of mainly sticks and leaves and such.
* Kowalski from ''[[The Penguins of Madagascar]]'' has inventions made from household items, including [[Stat-O-Vision]] binoculars made from paper cups, a mind-switching machine powered by a 17-speed blender, and an interstellar spacecraft out of trashcans. Amazingly, they seem to work properly half of the time.
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[[Category:This Index Is Highly Improbable]]
[[Category:Applied Phlebotinum]]
[[Category:Bamboo Technology]]▼
[[Category:Tropes of Nature]]
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