Scrooge McDuck’s money pit and 9 other on-screen home amenities we still want

Pee-wee’s breakfast contraption

Who wouldn’t want Abraham Lincoln to flip their morning pancakes? The statue of the 16th president is only one in an elaborate series of awesome steps Pee-wee’s famous breakfast machine takes to whip up a morning meal. The device appears early on in the 1985 classic Pee-wee’s Big Adventure, and it really sets the tone for the whole movie. Between Danny Elfman’s wacky score and the cartoon-like sequence of events, you instantly get the movie’s absurd fun with an underlying shade of darkness vibe (the movie was directed by Tim Burton after all).

As far as setting up a contraption like this one in someone’s actual house, it probably wouldn’t go nearly as well as it did for Pee-wee and Speck. This kind of elaborate mechanism is referred to as a Rube Goldberg machine, named for a cartoonist who had engineering training and was famous for drawing these kinds of crazy chain reaction devices. It reminds me of the old board game of Mouse Trap in that I’m fairly certain no one who ever played that game was ever able to actually set it up properly so it worked. I fear a real-life version of Pee-wee’s ingenious breakfast maker would run into similar sticking points.

But since we’re talking movie magic, let’s say it did work. A pterodactyl skeleton for dropping your toast in the toaster? A drinking bird to crack the eggs? A tipping bucket that fills your dog bowl, too? And Mr. T cereal? Something like that could seriously bump up the value of the house, leaving plenty of funds left over to invest in Scotch tape for funny face-making.

And while we’re at it, we’ll take that faux window fish tank, too.