Do people not appreciate your paper mâché volcano using real lava? Need to replace your lousy, hand-me-down tesla coils at an affordable price? Want to trend in the latest, fashionable hunchback assistant? Visit your local Mad Science Fair! Purchase a raffle ticket on the way in and earn the chance to win your very own Neiman Marcus-brand Mad Scientist Laboratory!
Mad Science Fairs are like regular Science Fairs, but on a more exaggerated scale, with Mad Scientists showcasing their various creatures, doomsdays devices and various other miscellaneous contributions to Fringology. The Arms Fair is basically this with military focus where the scientists show off military gadgets. In more techy settings, expect Tech Bros to show up showing their coolest gadgets.
Should the scientists that regularly attend possess intentions of world conquest or genocidal aspirations, the Mad Science Fair may be just a part of a Criminal Convention.
Examples:
open/close all folders
Comic Strips
- In Foxtrot, a summer camp Jason and Marcus go to has a science fair with projects like cold fusion and a synthetic tadpole brain. They themselves make a miniature warp engine, but due to accidental sabotage, there's no indication if it would have worked.
Fan Works
- The Krang Science Expo in Ladybug in a Half Shell is a convention displaying technology left behind by the Krang after their failed invasion of New York.
Film — Animation
- The Evil Science Fair in Igor is designed like a gladiatorial contest. Mad scientists from the Kingdom of Malaria create doomsday devices of various shapes and sizes and pit them against one another. The winner wins first place, the invention used to threaten the world with ransom to fuel Malaria's economy.
Literature
- Whateley Universe: There's the Whateley Weapons Fair, a mix of a Mad Science Fair and a Bazaar of the Bizarre where the Gadgeteers and Devisors to showcase their inventions and offer them for sale. Furthermore, there are plenty of non-mutant Teen Geniuses outside of Whateley Academy, so otherwise mundane science fairs tend to have at least one bit of Mad Science on hand which inevitably either 'goes Westworld' and has to be stopped, or else attracts thieves and/or some Corrupt Corporate Executive out to grab it.
Live-Action TV
- Doctor Who: In "Spyfall", the Doctor finds herself pulled out of an alien dimension into the Adelaide Gallery in the late 1800s, where various engineers are promoting their inventions — in particular, Charles Babbage's Difference Engine. The Doctor passes off her sudden arrival as the Marvellous Apparating Man (...Lady); shortly thereafter the Master arrives to threaten the crowd with his Tissue Compressor Eliminator. While he's preoccupied intimidating the Doctor, Ada Lovelace gets the drop on him by commandeering another inventor's machine gun.
- The kids at Tesla High in Eureka are just as much of mad scientists as their parents; experience has taught Deputy Jo Lupo to attend the science fair in full SWAT gear.
- Saturday Night Live: The "World's Most Evil Invention"
sketch has Dwayne Johnson's character entering such a fair with the "Robo Chomo", a child-molesting robot. The other mad scientists, who clearly had a very different idea of "evil", are horrified and order him to leave.
Webcomics
- Girl Genius:
- The Cinderella holiday short replaces the grand ball with a Glorious Science Faire, the winner of which will get to marry one of the princes — or both of them. Agatha's stepmother sets the stepsisters up with Agatha's potato clock, ant farm, and model volcano (after rejecting her other inventions, including a talking fish and a machine for getting parallel lines to meet) and ordering her to stay home. Agatha shows up to the science fair anyways, with her own project: an army of giant robots.
- In the actual main storyline of the comic, one such science fair is mentioned in passing. Apparently, before the Other did all the Civilization Destroyer and Zombie Apocalypse stuff, she had (gasp!) stolen Francisia's work for a project at university's Midwinter Abominations Festival.
- Most entries in the Gunnerkrigg Court science fair in "Two Strange Girls" are fairly normal, but there are exceptions. We don't see much of Annie's, but it appeared to involve medical impliments and blood, and the audience reaction was "Ewwww!" We see even less of Zimmy and Gamma's, except that it's microscopic, Annie considers it an abomination, and we later see it being removed by a Hazmat team while Zimmy insists it isn't dangerous. And Kat created an antigravity chamber ... to study how proteins form in zero-gravity, and is very confused that nobody seems to be interested in that bit.
- The "Professor Madblood and the Lovelace Affair" chapter of Narbonic takes place at one of these, and among other wacky hijinks involves Dave joining a henchmen's union and Artie being recruited by a think-tank that turns out to have a sinister agenda. Also reveals The Big Secret to the reader and some characters, but not the one about whom the secter is.
Western Animation
- In the Marvel's Spider-Man episode "Bring on the Bad Guys Part 4", Horizon High's open house is like this, with various Teen Geniuses submitting Stark-level technology — and Flash Thompson, with utterly unwarranted confidence, entering a baking soda volcano. After Spidey combines several of the inventions to defeat Electro, and most of the others get destroyed in the fight, Flash gets a Disqualification-Induced Victory.
- In the Mary Shelley's Frankenhole episode "H.G. Wells' Scary Monster Contest", mad scientists all over travel to Somewhere in Eastern Europe for the Scary Monster Contest, where they showcase their terrifying creations to a panel of judges.
- The Tick: The episode "Tick vs. Science" features a Mad Science Fair where Carmelita's father presents his new mind-switching device.
- The Venture Bros.: The series pilot, "The Terrible Secret of Turtle Bay" features an outwardly innocuous example as the world's greatest scientists are called together at the United Nations HQ to display their inventions at the "Peaceful Scientific Advancement Symposium". Given the series' For Science! attitude and sheer number of Mad Scientists in attendance, it devolves rather quickly. Dr. Venture himself shows off the "Ooo-Ray", believing it to have peaceful applications (but unable to state what any of them are), but then immediately melts the scale model of a city. Prof. Impossible unveils an environmentally friendly car that emits ozone to repair the ozone layer. While apparently peaceful, there are a few issues with that — Pure ozone is toxic and breaks down so quickly at ground level that it would never reach the upper atmosphere. It would poison everyone around it while failing in its "peaceful" application.
