When Engineers Watch Cartoons

I've got a box set of Batman: The Animated Series DVDs, and I need to get another because I'm almost done. The series has survived the test of time well; it's still a pretty fun watch most of the time.

However, as an engineer, the episode "The Clock King" had me laughing my ass off, so I am going to make a terribly geeky entry about it. (With spoilers, of course.)

First scenario, the Clock King locks Batman in a bank vault with a high speed pump that is pumping the oxygen out out of the room. Ooh, this is impressive, isn't it? Especially since the pump isn't connected to anything. It's just sitting there in a box. We even move the box, just to prove it. As near as I can tell, it's diabolically pumping air out of the bank vault and into... the bank vault. Huh.

But it gets better. Batman can't just disable the pump, because the housing is rigged with a vibration-triggered bomb!
Let me say that again. There is a vibration triggered bomb, on a pump. Pumps don't shake at all, do they? Especially not when they're pumping something compressible like air, right?

Clock King, dude, forget the revenge scheme. You need to go patent that vibration-free, connection-free pump thing!

But we're not done. The next one is common to lots of cartoons, though. So, we're in a huge gear works, and we jam up one of the gear meshes.
Now of course when you do this, you never just jam thing up, and yet you also never just destroy the obstacle, strip a gear of all of its teeth, or twist a shaft in half. There are absolutely no weak links in cartoon gear works. No, instead the entire gearworks, every little bitty piece, always rips itself apart in an incredibly catastrophic and often explosive manner.

And yet, it's still fun to watch. I love being a nerd.