Freak Lab Accident

Remember, kids: if you douse yourself in chemicals in a lightning storm enough times, you too may become a superhero!

"Bitten by radioactive beebles in a freak algebra accident, young Ricky Robertson discovered he'd gained the ability to harness the awesome power of fractions!"

— Magic: The Gathering Flavor Text for Fraction Jackson

An opportune, unplanned and unrepeatable (hence "Accident") event that gives a character their superpowers. Similar to No Plans, No Prototype, No Backup, only for people instead of machines and technologies. Opinions on this are extremely subjective, and this origin isn't used as much nowadays.

Common subtypes include:

• Lab Accidents, especially involving chemicals
• Being blasted by radiation, especially from weapon fallout (this is usually a Cold War thing)
• Aliens leaving their Phlebotinum around
• Genetic Engineering
• Falling into a vat of toxic waste

Given the relatively tiny probability of being struck by lightning, it also ties in with that.

More tolerated in superheroes created decades ago. Remakes tend to either avoid these random-chance origins or eventually tie them into a grander mythos (or at least a Story Arc of some kind).

It is still used frequently, despite having very nearly become cliché, making it an Undead Horse Trope. This is probably due to the fact that superheroes don't exist in real life, and it is simply difficult to find other ways to make superheroes.

Can also be used to create a Monster of the Week, with the same caveats. This can be used to create a Science Is Bad plot if wanted when things have Gone Horribly Wrong. See also Disposable Superhero Maker, Miraculous Malfunction, Testing Range Mishap. Contrast Mass Super-Empowering Event.

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Examples

Anime and Manga

• It is during one of her father's lab-experiments that Kurau in Kurau Phantom Memory gets merged with an energy being called "Rynax".
• Neon Genesis Evangelion might count, what with the contact experiments infusing the test pilot's soul into the Eva's core. This happened twice with different circumstances: first, Yui was completely swallowed by Unit 01 and gained limited control in the form of going berserk; second, Kyoko's transition was incomplete, and a clinically insane body was left behind that eventually killed herself, making Unit 02 the most stable one. Subverted in that Yui knew what was going to happen but did it anyway; unfortunately, it just made things even worse as she hadn't bothered to tell anyone and when her peers tried to extract her, she resisted and made it look like the operation failed (when the same happened to her son, everyone believed the same because Yui was holding them back until Shinji left on his own). Considering the fans' habit of deifying Yui-sama, it's a definite subversion.

Comic Books

• Batman:
  • This somewhat applies to the Joker, who gained not superpowers but his clownish appearance and Slasher Smile from falling into a vat of chemicals. Even the "no-superpowers-gained" thing is debatable, as some speculate that the Joker's insanity is actually a form of fourth wall-breaking "super-sanity" gained at the same time.
  • In a 1989 storyline, a mad Joker-wannabe hurls himself into a chemical vat in an attempt to replicate the transformation. However, as Batman unsuccessfully warns him, the industrial acids therein are much stronger than the ones that disfigured the Joker years ago, and the wannabe simply disintegrates.
  • Mr. Freeze is a more conventional playing of his trope. In the current past of the character, the attempts of his heartless bosses to get rid of him and his work to save his cryogenically frozen wife caused his equipment to go haywire, drastically altering him. Of course, this isn't so much a superpower as it is a handicap, and his resulting powers come in the form of technology he invents himself.
• Disney Ducks Comic Universe: One of the versions of Donald Duck's superhero identity Paperinik (though not the one in Paperinik New Adventures) faces a parody of the Spider-Man villain Sandman called Sandham (as he's a pig, natch). Sandham was a janitor in an oatmeal porridge factory who gained his powers when he was accidentally exposed to a procedure to "remove those nasty lumps from oatmeal porridge". Donald ends up having to dissolve him with it, and finally tosses his head, the only thing left of him, into a vat of porridge.
• Firestorm (DC Comics): The original Firestorm was created by sabotage (a bomb) in an experimental nuclear reactor, fusing the teenage Ronnie Raymond and the designer of the reactor, Professor Martin Stein into a single super-powered hero. Also affected by the explosion was Stein's evil assistant, who became the villain Multiplex. A later attempt by Multiplex to recreate the "accident" produced the heroine Firehawk.
• The Flash:
  • The classic Superhero Origin of the Flash involves lightning and a shelf full of chemicals in a police lab. The origin was so good, DC recycled it exactly for Kid Flash. However, as mentioned above, this was eventually tied into the "Speed Force".
  • The origin of the Golden Age Flash involves Jay Garrick being exposed to hard water vapors. Apparently, there was a rumor at the time the comic was written that the chemicals typically found in hard water could increase the metabolic speed of animals who ingested or inhaled them. This too was retconned to being part of the Speed Force, though during the period of time when the Speed Force disappeared, he still retained a weakened version of his powers thanks to his metagene.
  • In Flashpoint (DC Comics), Barry recreates the accident in an attempt to regain his powers. It doesn't work, and Barry instead suffers the real-life consequences of being struck by a bolt of lightning while being doused with dangerous chemicals. He has to fry himself two more times before it works.
  • Before that, Wally West (the third Flash) tried recreating the accident after losing his powers. It almost worked right... he got the Super-Speed, but not the necessary reflexes to maneuver, blasting a trail of destruction across the country in the split-second before he could stop running.
  • Professor Zoom, Barry's Evil Counterpart and Arch-Enemy, had this retconned into his origin story, only in his case he deliberately recreated the accident that gave the Flash his powers (he was an obsessive Flash fan from the far future who even went as far as to surgically reconstruct his own face to resemble Barry). Prior to this retcon, his original backstory outlined that he only had his speed whenever he wore his costume, which was a Flash costume he'd found in a time capsule and scientifically increased its residual speed energy (from Barry's constant use of it) before then dyeing it in reverse-colors.
• The Incredible Hulk:
  • Although it actually took place on a testing range, the original origin of the Hulk is for all practical purposes a Freak Lab Accident. Later versions (most notably the TV series and the first motion-picture adaptation) make it a more literal lab accident.
  • A number of the classic Hulk's foes had Freak Lab Accident origins involving nuclear power and nuclear radiation (originally, anyway). One of them, the Leader, was a janitor exposed to nuclear waste.
• Legion of Super-Heroes:
  • Comet Queen had heard that Star Boy got his powers by flying through a comet, so she intentionally flew through one despite everyone telling her how stupid it was, especially since Star Boy did it in a spaceship. It worked anyway.
  • The post-Zero Hour: Crisis in Time! comics hang a lampshade on the trope when Spark, in an effort to regain her super-power, attempts to recreate the circumstances of her freak origin — and gets herself killed as a result. (However, the rest of the Legion manages to revive her, and afterwards she does indeed have her powers back.)
• The monstrous Metal Men villain Chemo was created this way. Originally, it was a plastic vessel used by scientist Ramsey Norton to dispose of the chemical by-products from his failed experiments, built in the shape of a man to remind him of his failures. One day (ironically, the day he planned to empty it) he dumped the remnants of a failed growth formula in the vessel, accidentally causing it to double in size and coming to life. After killing Norton and destroying the lab, it lumbered forth with no purpose but to destroy.
• In She-Hulk, Daniel Jermain became "Danger Man" when a workplace accident at Roxxon Industries transformed him into an atomic superhuman. The interesting part is that he has no desire to be a superhero or villain. Daniel just wants Jennifer to help him sue Roxxon because of all of the hassle his new powers have brought into his life.
• The Simpsons: Parodied in the Bongo Comics crossover "When Bongos Collide!", in which a nuclear plant meltdown (caused by Itchy and Scratchy) grants superpowers to nearly everyone in Springfield (and somehow automatically gives most of them costumes), whereupon everyone starts pummeling each other.
• Sonic the Comic was the only spinoff that followed the original American canon of the franchise closely, while adding its own twists. In this continuity, Doctor Ivo Robotnik was originally a kind veterinarian called Ovi Kintobor who attempted to eliminate all evil from Mobius with a machine called the Retro-Orbital Chaos Compressor (ROCC) by absorbing all the negative energy on the planet. The experiment failed and he was transformed into a megalomaniac Mad Scientist bent on conquering the world. It's later revealed that this is an example of both Set Right What Once Went Wrong and Make Wrong What Once Went Right. The Brotherhood of Metallix traveled to the past and prevented the accident from happening so Kintobor never became Robotnik. As the doctor played an integral role helping Sonic and the Freedom Fighters in stopping the faction, this created a Bad Future where the Metallix conquered Mobius and renamed it "Planet Metallix". Sonic went and set things up so the accident took place, leaving us with the disturbing knowledge that it was him who was responsible for unleashing a great evil on Mobius, even if it was to prevent a greater evil from happening.
• The Spider-Girl villain Mr. Abnormal is both an expy of Plastic Man and a parody of this. His origin is that "he had an improbable accident with a chemical at a toy factory that had a unique effect with his body chemistry", as quoted from Speedball.
• Spider-Man:
  • Spider-Man was given powers by a radioactive spider bite, the spider itself being a result of the lab accident. The Amazing Spider-Man (J. Michael Straczynski) attempted to retool this by saying that the spider which bit him transferred some form of mystical totemistic power on him, which in turn explained his many animal-themed enemies. Cue Fan Discontinuity.
  • Marvel Comics in general (due to copious amounts of "Stan Lee Science") and Spider-Man in particular loves this trope. Many of Spidey's big foes (Doc Ock, Green Goblin, Lizard, Molten Man, etc.) were created by some sort of lab accident or experiment gone wrong.
  • Retooled again and made (somewhat) more plausible in the modern re-imagining, Ultimate Spider-Man. It's a genetically altered spider high on OZ instead of radiation. The Green Goblin and Dr. Octopus get their own ones in a second lab accident that attempts to repeat the circumstances of Parker's accident but goes horribly wrong.
• Superman:
  • In "How Luthor Met Superboy", it's shown that Lex Luthor turned villainous after Superboy's "interference" in a Freak Lab Accident resulted in his life being saved, his experiments being destroyed, and his hair loss. Furthermore, when Luthor tried to retaliate with grandiose tech projects to show up Superboy, they went wrong disastrously enough to force the superhero to intervene, embarrassing Luthor enough to hate him even more.
  • Inverted with Superboy (Kon-El). He was being grown and programmed in a lab to be a replacement for Superman, but a freak lab accident interrupted his maturity, leaving him as Superboy.
• The initial origin-story for Swamp Thing followed this trope with sabotage rather than an accident. Subverted when Alan Moore got ahold of the character and revised him from a formula-altered scientist to a plant elemental who thought he was a formula-altered scientist.
• In Watchmen, the apparatus that created Dr. Manhattan by "removing his intrinsic field", i.e., disintegrating his body, is for some unspecified reason impossible to use to repeat the process. It's not so much the effect of the device that gave Dr. Manhattan his powers, but the force of his will and mind maintaining their integrity afterwards and subsequently learning how to reassemble himself. That's an individual, possibly unique, factor that renders the result possibly irreproducible. And who wants to try to create a new Manhattan? One alone messes up the geopolitical situation seriously. What if the new guy would be even less stable and more detached from the human condition? The risks are way too great, even for the USSR to try to replicate. They did try at first, but stopped when they realized that forcefully disintegrating people in the hopes of turning them into gods might backfire.
  Ozymandias: You get to be a superhero by believing in the hero within you and summoning him or her forth by an act of will. Believing in yourself and your own potential is the first step to realizing that potential. Alternately, you could do as Jon did: fall into a nuclear reactor and hope for the best.

Fan Works

• Not a lab accident as such, but an unpredicted side effect of a new and highly experimental procedure. In the Discworld fiction There's nothing like a fresh pair of eyes, is there?, the Igors of Ankh-Morpork replace the shattered eyes of a wounded student Assassin. (One of those regrettable little accidents that happen at the Assassins' School). The donor, of corneal cells that Igor carefully nurtures into bio-artificed new eyeballs, is Quirmian Assassin Emmanuelle les Deux-Epées. Over the following few months, the pupil becomes very like Emmanuelle. In all ways.
• Ebott's Wake: Joe Stanton tries to make a proof of concept for using crystals to read human Soul colors. It literally blows up in his face (and destroys the room he's working in, too), but hey, he gets magic powers from it. It's actually Subverted later; it becomes clear that the explosion was caused by Wave/Force Collapse, an effect already known in-universe, and he manages to build a new version of the machine that doesn't create this reaction. It still came entirely out of left field, though, since he had no intention of making it do any of that.
• In Empathy, there's a full-on accident, in the sense that nobody involved really saw what would be coming due to a genetic issue. In this case, Riley puts on the Neurotransmitter, but since Oh finished it according to Boov brainwaves rather than human brainwaves, the transmitter bounced Riley's brainwaves back on themselves. This scientifically sent her into a kind of REM, but it also transported her consciousness into Headquarters. And when she came out, she became The Empath as a side effect.
• A popular Harry Potter fanfic cliché is for a transformation plot to be launched by a potions accident in Snape's class. Usually, they make you younger or change your gender.
• In Movie Magic, Twilight Sparkle makes the mistake of looking at a rogue rainbow-powered rocket through a magitek camera when the rocket explodes, searing her right eye with magical energy and giving it superpowers.
• Spider-Ninja might take place in a distant part of the Spiderverse, but this trope is still how Petra Parker gets the spider powers and becomes her dimension's version of Spider-Man.
• The Secret Return of Alex Mack: This is the origin of both Tsurara (who was doused with a mixture of chemicals as a result of Gojira's attack) and Ultraman (whose neighbour was a biophysics professor performing unauthorised experiments).
• Tarkin's Fist: One of these is the cause of the Tarkin's Fist armada being hurtled to the Milky Way. Kuantus Kuat engages in an experiment with a Gravitic Polarization Beam that tears open a wormhole in space and time just as the slaverigged computer systems sends the armada into hyperspace. Said wormhole sends them to the Sol System.

Films — Live-Action

• The Amazing Spider-Man Series uses this for every villain except Rhino, who's just a crook in a mech suit: Lizard was created by a botched formula designed for limb regrowth, Electro fell into a vat of genetically modified eels, and Green Goblin was created by another botched formula intended to cure his terminal disease.
• This is the origin of Big Bad Ava Starr/Ghost in Ant-Man and the Wasp. Her father, Elhias Starr, created an unstable Quantum energy machine that exploded, killing Ava's parents and turning her into a ghost. Ava seeks to cure her condition and believes that killing Janet is the key.
• Both The Fly (1958) and The Fly (1986) involve a Teleporter Accident which merges a fly with the scientist who used himself as a guinea pig. In the 1958 version, the scientist changes heads and one hand with the fly. In the 1986 version, he slowly mutates into a sickened man-fly hybrid.
• Howard the Duck pulls this one twice: the first Freak Lab Accident drags Howard to Earth, the second pulls down the alien demon that possesses Dr. Jenning.
• This is the origin of Spider-Man in the Spider-Man Trilogy, along with all the villains save Venom, who is the result of an alien symbiote.
• In Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: The Secret of the Ooze, it is learned that one of these resulted in the formation of the Mutagenic Goo that resulted in the Turtles coming into being — namely, an unknown mixture of discarded chemicals being accidentally exposed to radiative waves.
• Happens in Watchmen; for details, see under Comic Books.

Literature

• In The Accidental Superheroine, Orlov claims to have engineered their empowering event at the LHC, but he also seems completely ignorant of how it works.
• Played with in Animorphs. This was how the Ellimist became a godlike being. Having his consciousness spread across multiple advanced bodies, some remaining in space and some in Z-space while the rest was sucked into a black hole, allowed his consciousness to integrate with the fabric of the universe. However, his Evil Counterpart Crayak was unfortunately watching when this happened (being the guy who pushed the Ellimist into said black hole), and was thus able to replicate the feat and become god-like himself.
  Ellimist: The odds of it happening once were astronomical. The odds of it happening twice were inevitable.
• Discworld: Not a superhero, but Cheery Littlebottom's career change from alchemist to forensics officer with the Ankh-Morpork City Watch took place after she left her previous workplace through the roof. Explosions at the Alchemists' Guild are hardly freakish; blowing up the entire Guild council, however, causes comment.
• In Dream Park, a small girl who'd accidentally wandered into the theme park's R&D division managed to combine an anatomical model with pieces of model roller coaster, and the result so intrigued the staff that it spawned a "Mr. Digestion" themed attraction. The kid got a spanking and a college scholarship.
• Carl Castanaveras, in Emerald Eyes by Daniel Keys Moran, was the first in a series of telepaths created by Project Superman by gene manipulation. Played straight because at the time he was created, the scientists admitted that the technology to create him didn't work yet, and only the inexplicable (at least to the scientists working on him) radiation at the moment of his conception, made the fetus viable. Averted because the source of the radiation was the time traveler Named Storyteller deliberately showing up at that moment to perform the gene manipulation that the scientists were incapable of performing, in order to make sure that Carl (his distant ancestor) existed at all.
• A variation appears in "Lenny". A small child (lost on a guided tour) plays around on an unlocked keyboard in a robot factory. This results in a robot which has no superpowers — indeed, it has roughly the intelligence of a human infant — but is a scientific gold-mine, programmed with the Three Laws but lacking the knowledge to act upon them properly, and having the ability to learn rather than simply be programmed.
• Parodied in Life, the Universe and Everything. At the beginning, we are introduced briefly to Wowbagger the Infinitely-Prolonged, an alien who was granted immortality in a freak office accident with "an irrational particle accelerator, a liquid lunch, and a pair of rubber bands". All attempts to recreate it "have left people looking very silly, dead, or both". Wowbagger deals with the growing tedium of immortality by seeking to insult everyone in the universe — individually, personally, and in alphabetical order.
• Kilowatt from Seekers of Truth got her start this way. Her end would have closely followed her start if not for the intervention of the Wizard.
• Soon I Will Be Invincible:
  • CoreFire and Dr. Impossible got their respective superpowers in separate lab accidents, though both accidents involved Dr. Impossible's research.
    I saw the misadjusted dials and the whirling gauges and the bubbling green fluid and the electricity arcing around, and a story laid out for me... I was going to declare war on the world, and I was going to lose.
  • So did Erica Lowenstein, the Lois Lane to CoreFire's Superman and Dr. Impossible's Lex Luthor, who followed a lead on some villains and ended up falling into a vat of chemicals and becoming virtually indestructible and transparent.
• Done rather subtly in The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Dr. Jekyll's elixir only worked because of an unidentified impurity, something he only discovered after running out of the contaminated batch. At which point Hyde had become his "default form" and he needed the elixir to be Jekyll.
• In Virals, Tory is a teenage girl who, along with her friends, accidentally contracts a genetically engineered parvovirus (a virus that normally only affects dogs) and is turned into a sort of hairless werewolf.
• Wars of the Realm: Drew Carter and his friend Ben are trying to replicate an experiment that let Ben's professor see into another dimension. Then everything goes horribly wrong...and Drew gains the ability to see into the dimension without the machine.

Live-Action TV

• Best Friends Whenever starts with the titular best friends — Shelby Marcus and Cyd Ripley — accidentally getting blasted by a laser in Barry's lab, which gives them the power to time-travel through physical contact. This gets a Call-Back in season 1 finale.
• The Big Bang Theory:
  • Referenced jokingly to warn one character away from escalating vengeance against an Insufferable Genius:
    Leonard: Penny, you don't want to get into it with Sheldon. The guy is one lab accident away from becoming a supervillain.
  • In another episode, a rat injected with radioactive isotopes bit a lab tech. Raj became incredibly disappointed to find that the lab tech didn't get superpowers.
• In The Flash (2014), a particle accelerator malfunction at S.T.A.R. Labs results in the release of dark energy into the city which creates a number of "meta-humans", including the Flash. Subverted when it's revealed that the "accident" was nothing of the sort. He would have gotten his powers this way eventually, but a time-travelling Eobard Thawne deliberately engineered it to turn Barry into the Flash "ahead of schedule" due to losing his speed after doing what he came there to do.
• Peter Brady (no, not that one), The Invisible Man from the 1958 TV series, fits this trope and subverts it: While he became invisible in a lab accident, he is perfectly able to reproduce it and make anyone invisible (of course, reversing the process is another story). At one point, he was even able to detect when a rabbit had been invisible for a short period of time.
• In The Secret World of Alex Mack, the title character gets her powers after being doused by chemicals that fell off a truck in the first episode.
• Referenced humorously in an episode of Shake it Up. Child Prodigy Henry Dylan shows up at Flynn's house after being beat up by a bully. Flynn, however, assumes Henry's battered and bruised appearance was the result of this trope.
  Flynn: [excitedly] Was there an explosion in your lab? Did you get superpowers? Jump on the wall, let's see if you stick!
• Stranger Things: It's implied that Eleven's psychic powers were caused by drug experiments done on her mother during her pregnancy.
• Appears in the French Gender Bender series Vice Versa.
• In Zoey's Extraordinary Playlist, the title character gains the ability to hear people's feelings in the form of song and dance routines that only she can see after a freak accident involving being inside an MRI machine when an earthquake strikes.

Music

• Daft Punk claims that their onstage robot personae were created in "an accident in our studio. We were working on our sampler, and at exactly 9:09 a.m. on September 9, 1999, it exploded."

Tabletop Games

• Deviant: The Renegades: Pathologicals are Deviants who received their powers in accidents. Many were once researchers, scientists or lab techs who were working one some delicate project — a high-energy physics experiment, incautious bioengineering, an attempt to contact noncorporeal entities — that went horribly wrong. When the dust clears and the hazmat crews arrive, the survivors find that this exposure permanently and traumatically altered them, turning them into something inhuman.

Video Games

• City of Heroes: Every other Science origin NPC or Player Character gains their powers this way (the rest are unwilling test subjects). This game loves its tropes and knows it. For Professor Backfire, gaining superpowers was an inevitability.
• Digital Devil Saga 2: Late in the game, it's revealed that the first carriers of the Demon Virus were infected after an experiment where a psychic child (Sera) communicated with God went horribly wrong. However, one subject was killed (Serph Sheffield as Varuna), and the other was imprisoned (an unknown individual as Meganada). While the virus was reproducible, the incident itself was not.
• Mega Man 2: The Power Fighters: During Bass' ending, Dr. Wily yells to Bass that he regrets making him, and Bass retorts that if Wily created Bass, it must have been a mistake. Dr. Wily reveals that it is actually true, revealing that before the events of Mega Man 7, Wily was making a robot to be similar to Mega Man, accidentally developing Bassnium, which then led to the creation of Bass. Dr. Wily then reveals that he plans to make a robot stronger than Bass and Mega Man combined.
• Overwatch: Two of the playable characters owe their superhuman abilities to accidents.
  • Lena Oxton, call sign "Tracer", was a test pilot flying an experimental fighter jet capable of teleportation. The teleportation matrix malfunctioned, dislocating Tracer from time. She would appear and disappear at random, unable to interact with the world like a ghost until Winston invented the Chronal Accelerator. The device not only stabilized Lena but granted her a limited control over her place in time, letting her travel forward and back in time for a few seconds.
  • Dr. Siebren de Kuiper was an astrophysicist studying gravity. After decades of research, he conducted an experiment to harness the power of a black hole. A containment breach exposed Kuiper to a singularity, driving him insane and giving him power over gravity, turning him into "Sigma".
• Sonic the Hedgehog: In the original American canon, Big Bad Doctor Ivo "Eggman" Robotnik was a kind veterinarian called Ovi Kintobor whose attempt to purge Mobius from evil using the Chaos Emeralds to power up a machine ended in an accident that transformed him into a cruel, megalomaniac Evil Genius. Of all the spinoffs in the franchise, Sonic the Comic was the only one that followed this backstory closely (see the Comic Book folder above).
• Played with in TRON 2.0 — emails in the game indicate Lora Baines-Bradley suffered one with her Shiva laser misfiring. It apparently killed her, but there was enough of her mind left behind in Cyberspace to compile her into the Benevolent A.I. Ma3a.

Webcomics

• Parodied in Antihero for Hire, where one character got super-powers in a freak skateboard accident.
• A lab technician in Biter Comics tries to recreate the accident that gave his coworker superpowers, with less that satisfactory results.
• In El Goonish Shive, this is what the Goo originally was before a Cerebus Retcon turned it into an attempt by Lord Tedd to kill this universe's Tedd.
• Girl Genius:
  • The world of Girl Genius is populated by Mad Scientists. If your lab work doesn't involve freak accidents of some kind (most likely deadly instead of empowering, but still), you're probably doing it wrong.
  • It's implied that some sort of lab accident caused Othar to come to his "Great Truth" that all Sparks have to die (or to become suicidally insane, as anyone else who knows about this "Truth" would consider it). The exact details are left as a Noodle Incident for the readers, but it may have involved the Great Wall of Oslo. (It's also all but stated by Word of God in the first adventure on Othar's Twitter that Othar was always just one freak accident away from becoming a suicidal maniac anyways — every single version of himself had realized this "truth" through various accidents. One involved waffles. It's unknown right now, however, how canon the Twitter is.) The man is also surprisingly resilient, even for a Spark; this may be a side-effect of the accident.
• Hero by Night has these as origin stories of Saul Simian and (sort of) Steel Phantom. Alchemy is not a toy, people.
• In The Inexplicable Adventures of Bob!, Molly the Peanut Butter Monster is described as a fuzzy pink lab accident.
• In Jenny and the Multiverse, Jenny gets her powers when she suffers a blast of energy from Laura's experimental Dimensional Bisector after it was damaged by Grallyx coming through it. Laura is shocked that she's even alive.
• Subverted in M9 Girls!: The Freak Lab Accident makes the eponymous M9 Girls terminally ill by radiation exposure. Their mentor then proceeds to cure them with LEGO Genetics.
• Parodied by Man-Man, who was bitten by a radioactive man, and so gains the powers of... a man. Apart from a mutant head on top of his own, these "powers" merely make him invisible to women.
• Peter Parker: Foreign Exchange Student:
  • Peter got his Quirk from the radioactive spider bite, a secret he keeps under wraps out of fear of being treated like a freak of nature.
  • The Fantastic Four's powers, which they received after being bombarded with cosmic radiation, are also classified as Quirks.
• Ruby's World heroine Ruby gains her enhanced size, strength, and power from a freak lab accident that was actually engineered post-mortem by her late mother, as a means to give her the capabilities to fight the Big Bad.
• In Second League, a rat gains superpowers from being bitten by a mutant superhero.
• Heather Brown in Spinnerette gains spider-powers in a freak genetic engineering accident in a more or less Affectionate Parody of Spider-Man. The reader is even led to believe that she'd obtained her powers from a spider-bite, just like Spider-Man. However, she only developed her extra limbs after falling into a vat of chemicals.
• In Tales of Schlock, Roux uses her powers to become the super heroine "Queen 'B'" while Fukumi gets brain damage and becomes the diabolical "Double D".
• Parodied in Terror Island; Ned Sorcerer, DDS got his superpower (which is causing everyone around him to know he's a dentist) from a freak epistemological lab accident.
• Parodied in a Fourth-Wall Mail Slot from VG Cats. Dr. Hobo is asked how he became a hobo, and recounts his origin:
  Dr. Hobo: A bright young docshtor wash working in hish lab... when shuddenly! I did crack!

Web Original

• Frances "Pythos" Graye of AJCO participated in an experiment involving the magical, regenerating blood of a Hydra and ended up with rather more than she bargained for. She didn't end up with the regenerating abilities of the original creature, but she did get freakish teeth and a forked tongue that she likes to freak people out with.
• Lightning Dust's Klaus Melfton becomes the eponymous character via a strange invention of his father. After getting his powers stolen, he successfully repeats the accident to regain them.
• Most of the supers in the Whateley Universe are mutants, but Sam Everheart got his powers this way. It wouldn't have been a Freak Lab Accident if bad guys weren't trying to steal the nanomachines that Sam was guarding. The resulting explosion ended up with Sam getting a body reconstructed by the nanites.
• This was how Yogscast's Duncan caused Kim to become "fluxed" in their Minecraft series, although she didn't get superpowers, she just turned kinda purple.

Western Animation

• Lampshaded in the Aqua Teen Hunger Force episode "Super Hero" when Shake tries to gain superpowers using barrels of toxic waste. First, he tries to get some worms to eat the waste before biting him. This doesn't work, so he dumps a spoonful of the waste over his head, shouting, "Oh, no! A horrible accident!". This doesn't work, either.
• The Batman Beyond episode "Heroes" presents a dark Deconstruction of the concept. Three scientists are accidentally irradiated and become "The Terrific Trio" (with obvious parallels to the Fantastic Four). Then it turns out that their transformations are slowly killing them and driving them insane, and were caused by a colleague's scheme to Murder the Hypotenuse.
• In the Batman: The Animated Series episode "Beware the Creeper", Jack Ryder is a talk show host doing a set piece on the Joker's origin. Joker barges in and decides to have some fun by dosing Ryder with Joker Venom and throwing him into a vat of chemicals similar to the one that transformed the Joker. This backfires on the Joker when the combination of the Joker Venom and the chemicals gives Ryder a Superpowered Evil Side that calls himself Creeper. The Creeper then proceeds to scare the crap out of the Joker. By the end of the episode, the Joker is begging Batman to save him from the lunatic.
• Danny Phantom
  • Danny got his powers from an ectoplasmic form of nuclear blast when he accidentally activated his parents' experimental Ghost Portal while standing inside it. The resulting blast altered his DNA, thus making him half-ghost.
  • Likewise, Vlad Plasmius got his powers from a college accident involving an early version of the Ghost Portal, by being blasted in the face.
• Darkwing Duck:
  • Darkwing tries to give himself superpowers in one episode by deliberately standing in front of a Transformation Ray, claiming that it works in the movies all the time. His sidekick Launchpad doubts the plan, specifically pointing out that you can only gain superpowers from a lab accident, and not on purpose. Darkwing brushes off the advice, fires the ray, and is reduced to cartoon ashes.
  • Incidentally, many members of Darkwing's Rogues Gallery had their origins in a Freak Lab Accident; Megavolt, Bushroot, and the Liquidator are the most notable instances.
• Dexter's Laboratory
  • Dexter spends an episode trying to gain superpowers through experimentation, and runs into the same it-doesn't-work-if-you-do-it-on-purpose problem. In the end, he gives up in frustration. Then Dee Dee waltzes into the lab, spills chemicals on herself, and gains super powers.
  • Subverted by Monkey; Dexter deliberately experimented on him, which gave Monkey his superpowers. The subversion comes from Dexter never figuring out that he succeeded.
• Parodied in The Fairly OddParents! with the origin of The Crimson Chin (voiced by Jay Leno). Before he was a crime fighter, the Chin was a talk show host, much like the guy who voiced him. He got bit on the chin by a radioactive handsome actor, and that is how he became The Crimson Chin! At least it was, until the comic story "Untold Tales from the Big Superhero Wish!" reveals that this origin story caused a lawsuit, and as a result, The Chin was given a new origin all too similar to Superman.
• Parodied in the Family Guy episode "Family Guy Viewer Mail #1", in the segment "Super Griffins". After the entire Griffin family gain superpowers and start causing trouble, Mayor Adam West tries to give himself superpowers by rolling around in toxic waste. The result? He gives himself lymphoma. His doctor berates him for the stupidity of such an action. He does at least stop the Griffins' rampage, since they feel guilty about his cancer.
• In Freakazoid!, a computer chip with a computer bug is somehow able to suck a person into cyberspace, instantly granting them all of the information on the Internet, but also turning them into a Freakazoid, if the person hits a specific sequence of keys ("@[=g3,8d]\&fbb=-q]/hk%fg") followed by Delete. Dexter gained his powers when his cat pawed across his keyboard chasing a butterfly (inadvertently typing said sequence) and he tried to delete the resulting gibberish.
• Stinkor, one of Skeletor's henchmen in He-Man and the Masters of the Universe (2002), gains the power of stench after ruining one of Triclops' experiments.
• Tom of T.H.U.M.B., a segment of the 1966 King Kong cartoon on ABC, was a janitor in a secret agent office lab who took a spill while cleaning. His friend, Smilin' Jack, helped him up, only to trigger a ray that reduced both to thumb size. Together, Tom and Smilin' Jack tackle assignments that the regular agents couldn't take conspicuously.
• Martha Speaks is a mild example. It's pointed out several times throughout the show that the alphabet soup gave only Martha the ability to speak, and that she ate it by accident. This is most likely put into place to dissuade kids from giving their pets alphabet soup in the hopes of having a talking pet. (Of course, the show is also aware that it's a cartoon...)
• In The Mask, a couple comic book fans try to replicate the accident that created their favorite superhero Insector the Bugman by breaking into a nuclear power plant and getting bitten by a bug after they become radioactive. Unfortunately, they forget to bring a bug with them to the power plant and succumb to radiation poisoning. Then their ambulance crashes en route to the hospital. One guy crashes into a putty shop and is mutated into the Clayface expy Putty Thing. The other guy crashes into an aquarium and becomes Fish Guy, who has the awesome power of being a fish... but still can't swim.
• Pinky and the Brain: One of Brain's plans hinges on this concept. He poses as a human and gets a job at a big corporation, which he plans to sue for the money to fund his latest world-domination scheme by staging a freak accident involving a microwave and non-dairy creamer, reasoning that no one understands either well enough to argue against the claim.
• The Powerpuff Girls (1998):
  • The whole premise revolves around a freak accident that occurred while the girls were being created: Professor Utonium's pet chimp Jojo accidentally shoved the Professor while he was trying to create the perfect little girl, effectively causing the Chemical X spill that created the Powerpuff Girls (the blast from the spill also gave Jojo super-intelligence, and his jealousy of the girls eventually drove him to become their arch-enemy Mojo Jojo). Why the Professor had that Chemical X located where someone could break it and cause it to spill inside the pot is anyone's guess.
  • Hilariously lampshaded when, in an attempt to create a fourth Powerpuff Girl, the sisters recreate the circumstances of their origin by elaborately pretending that they're adding the Chemical X to the pot by sheer accident. Takes a tragic turn since the new Powerpuff Girl has problems, physical and mental, because of the substitutes the girls used for "sugar, spice, and everything nice" in the concoction.
• The Simpsons:
  • The episode "Three Men and a Comic Book" affectionately parodies The Incredible Hulk with Radioactive Man's origin: he gains his powers when trapped at the site of a nuclear detonation.
    Martin: I would've thought that being hit by an atomic bomb would've killed him.
    Bart: Now you know better.
  • In the Bongo comic series, a pre-nuclear Golden Age version of Radioactive Man ('Radio Man') is hinted at, who looks a bit like the Golden Age Flash. God knows what his origin is.
• In South Park, Jack Brolin a.k.a. Captain Hindsight was a former news reporter who gained the power of extraordinary hindsight through a freak accident involving a retroactive spider.
• The Spectacular Spider-Man is stuffed with these. There's Peter Parker's radioactive spider-bite, but supervillains have them too:
  • While doing repair work at a genetics lab, electrician Max Dillon is first electrocuted by machinery, then by bioelectric shock from genetically modified eels swimming in extra-conductive Applied Phlebotinum. He becomes Electro, a Power Incontinent human generator of bioelectricity, and subsequently freaks out and goes on a rampage.
  • Thief and low-level thug Flint Marko is recruited as an experimental subject for a procedure designed to give him subdermal silicon armor, but the machinery overloads and bombards him with silicon particles until he explodes. He then rematerializes as the Sandman, a being of living sand, and is unusually happy with the results.
  • When reluctant Punch-Clock Villain Doctor Otto Octavius is deliberately trapped in the chamber where his experiment is running, he suffers from radiation that fuses his harness to his spine, triggers a Freak Out and an accompanying extreme personality change, creating Doctor Octopus.
• Spider-Man: The Animated Series:
  • Spidey, of course, has his classic backstory. In this case, the spider that bit him was mutated by passing through the energy beam of a prototype "neogenic recombinator", part of an experimental new science that uses specific radiation wavelengths to selectively manipulate DNA. The process is more or less replicated to recreate his iconic foes the Lizard and the Scorpion.
  • Tombstone has the very Joker-esque origin of falling into a vat of chemicals during a bungled factory robbery. Spider-Man even lampshades it later.
    Spider-Man: You better stay still, another swim in that chemical soup and your hair might turn green!
  • Morbius gets his powers when he is bitten by a vampire bat that was exposed to a neogenic recombinator's beam whilst he was trying to use it to break down the genetic code of a sample of Spider-Man's blood — it got zapped feeding on the blood sample, and when Morbius tried to shoo it away, it bit him on the hand, which mutated him into a "living vampire". He then gets zapped with the same recombinator beam in a Taking the Bullet fashion, transforming him into a humanoid bat-creature.
  • The Green Goblin gains Super-Strength and a villainous split personality after being exposed to toxic chemicals in an explosive leak at his factory. The costume is a spare Hobgoblin suit he has on hand whose colors change as a result of exposure to the chemicals.
  • The Spot is a scientist who became a living portal network after being accidentally sucked into the interstitial dimension by a malfunctioning portal generator.
• Meltdown in Transformers: Animated gets his powers by angrily knocking over the beakers of chemicals he was working on, after his funding gets cut.
• The Venture Bros. lampshades this. When Phantom Limb is creating the Secret Society, one of the people taking up the offer explains he got his powers from a freak lab accident, to which they immediately say they understand, as they themselves have had a freak lab accident that changed them into what they were.
• Ogrest from Wakfu was created when a piece of candy accidentally fell into the alchemist Otomai's Ogrine mixture. Otomai instantly takes a liking to the baby and adopts him as his son.
• The origin of Dr. Two Brains in WordGirl. Obviously, you don't get a rat brain stuck to your head playing golf.

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