Super Wheelchair

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    In real life, being a wheelchair user can range from inconvenient to extremely limiting. However, in fiction, this need not be the case! Thanks to Trope Co (tm) you can be the proud owner of one state of the art super chair! Features include

    A subtrope of Disability Superpower and Cool Chair together.

    Examples of Super Wheelchair include:

    Anime & Manga

    • The wheelchair in the last episode of Samurai Champloo is revealed to be a cool chair because it contains a hidden gun in one arm, a stick of dynamite in the other, and more dynamite stashed under the seat, all in place to lay a last resort final blow on a weakened Mugen. It still isn't enough to kill him.
    • The Agency head from Ga-Rei Zero tools around in a wheelchair for most of the series and seems smart but not very threatening. Turns out it has miniguns, blades and sacred wheels that engrave protective runes on the street. And that she's very proficient with the use of all three.
    • The Gundam franchise has several machines that combine this with Humongous Mecha, consisting of a humanoid torso on top of a tank or hovertank base. The best-known is the Guntank from the original series, but examples exist in several universes, including Gundam Wing (the Tragos) and Mobile Suit Gundam 00 (the Union Realdo Hovertank).
    • Riehlvelt in Hunter X Hunter can apply rocket thrusts to his wheelchair, which is also equipped with electric whips. He is apparently in the top 1% of the world population in combat capability.


    Comic Books

    • X-Men: Charles Xavier's chair bounces back and forth between this and more conservative varieties Depending on the Artist.
    • Acutely (and deliberately) averted when The DCU's Barbara Gordon became Oracle, actually preferring "normality" to show she does not want special attention. Gail Simone even explicitly forbid things like hidden missile launchers when taking suggestions for a new chair.
      • Also because she's still as physical and active as she can be. Sadly played straight in the Birds of Prey TV series, which (to the dismay of actress Dina Meyer) gave Barbara a power chair rather than a manual one.
      • It's been explicitly stated a few times that she doesn't even have handles on her chair, as she'd rather get where she's going by herself than be pushed. Though this depends on who's drawing it.
    • Lampshaded in the first Largo Winch: Nerio, a very old and even richer man stuck in a wheelchair is talking to the man who asked to come kill him (Makes Sense in Context). The gunman tells him to turn around slowly, to which Nerio responds "What, are you afraid I keep machine guns in the armrests? You go to the movies too often."
    • Doom Patrol: Niles Caulder's chair bounces as an example.
    • In Marvel's The Tomb of Dracula, Quincy Harker(great-grandson of John and Mina Harker) had his wheelchair rigged with stake-firing rocket-launchers.
    • A minor villain in some Marvel Comics was Franz Cadavus, "Master of the Murder Chair!" with machine guns and possibly rocket launchers.


    Film

    • Wild Wild West. Dr. Loveless' wheelchair had a built-in rear-firing gun, and could deploy legs that allowed it to move like a 4 legged animal and stamp down on opponents. It was steam-powered.
    • Alien Resurrection: the wheelchair in question also disguises a small arsenal.
    • Steel features one of these in the climax for its best character.
    • In Once Upon a Spy, Christopher Lee's Mad Scientist had a rocket launcher concealed within his wheelchair.
    • In the German kids' film Vorstadtkrokodile, Kai adds miniature rockets to his wheelchair, giving him quite a boost when he's chased by bikers. He also adds loudspeakers controlled by his cell phone, which causes his friend Hannes to comment, "Were you on Pimp-my-wheelchair?"
    • In Zombrex: Dead Rising Sun, George tricks out his wheelchair with a bunch of stuff found in a maintenance room in order to take down psychopath Takahashi.
    • Marty from Silver Bullet has a pretty badass wheelchair built by his uncle.
    • The kids' grandpa in the Spy Kids films has a wheelchair that can hover. Actor Ricardo Montalbán actually was confined to a wheelchair by that point in his life.


    Literature

    • Pisces, resident Genius Cripple of the Zodiac Girls uses one.
    • There's a number of Discworld novels where Windle Poons' wheelchair has any number of outrageous attachments and functions. It serves as a chariot at some point in Moving Pictures.
    • In Snow Crash, Ng uses a heavily-modified airport firetruck as his 'wheelchair'.
    • In one of the "Bedlam's Bard" novels by Mercedes Lackey, a secondary character is left a paraplegic by events in the book. In the epilogue, we learn that she was given an elvensteed in the form of a wheelchair to help her get around. When there's no mundanes around, the "chair" can pretty much substitute for a full handicap-accessibility remodel of her home.
    • Inquisitor Gideon Ravenor's "chair" is barely a chair at all - it's an all-enclosing life support system on wheels with psycannons and psychic amplifiers built into it.
    • Kohler's wheelchair in Angels & Demons contains all sorts of gadgets. Granted, it's not as cool a collection as many on this list, but it still counts as a Super Wheelchair in that setting.
    • Percy Jackson and The Olympians: When Chiron goes among mortals, he conceals his horse legs in a Hammerspace wheelchair.
    • In The Four Constables, (set in Ancient China), Emotionless' wheelchair can launch a barrage of deadly mini-rockets.
    • Zoom by Robert Munsch
    • A Song of Ice and Fire: This is basically Hodor's job description.
    • Subverted in World War Z. A disabled man in a perfectly ordinary wheelchair nonetheless has one advantage: any crawling zombies that attack him from behind get the wheels instead of his legs. He mentions that this has saved him from infection more than once.


    Live Action Television

    • The short-lived series MANTIS dealt with a paraplegic inventor who developed an exoskeleton that granted him full mobility. Since it also happened to bestow super-strength and enhanced resilience, he decided to use it to fight crime.
    • A villain in Black Scorpion called Slapshot has a similar suit of Powered Armor for a similar reason. Only his was provided by a Mad Scientist.
    • The mobile life-support chair of Davros, the creator of the Daleks, in Doctor Who.


    Tabletop Games

    • William Albacastle / Willy Pete, authorial character of the White Wolf Mage: The Ascension supplement Iteration X and a major character in the novel Judgement Day by Bruce Baugh has a damn cool chair. His motorized wheelchair houses treads, robotic arms, and Hades knows what else.
    • TSR's Top Secret: Dragon magazine #56, module "Mad Merc". The title character is an Evil Cripple used a wheelchair with a built-in jetpack, which allowed him (and up to 100 lb. extra) to fly up to 500 yards. It could travel at up to 30 m.p.h. for up to 1 minute, and was capable of hovering.
    • Warhammer 40,000 has Space Marine Dreadnoughts, Walking Tanks crewed by mortally wounded but Not Quite Dead veteran Space Marines.


    Video Games

    • The Overseer in the first Fallout game has guns in his chair, though it's not clear whether it's mobile.
      • Overseer chairs are not mobile. The guns are a common feature in many vaults (The Master employs his if you resort to hostility) as a last line of defense.
    • Flipper Burns in The Longest Journey has a hoverchair; a Fetch Quest in the game involves getting a new antigravity module for it.
    • Bentley's wheelchair in Sly Cooper 3.
    • In No One Lives Forever 2, Volkov's wheelchair (in which Cate personally put him in the first game) is equipped with rocket launchers and jet engines.
    • Professor Ching from the obscure arcade brawler The Outfoxies rides for no reason other than its super, at least in the Japanese version.
    • In Rise of the Triad, Sebastian Krist's wheelchair fires rockets and mines.
    • In Quake 2 Superheroes, Cripple with a Big Gun was a class with 40 HP and no strafing ability but the capacity to make an invulnerable ramming shield on a cooldown and unlimited chaingun ammo.
    • In De Blob, Prof has a hoverchair with a number of technological attachments. In the sequel, the Big Bad steals it and uses it for the rest of the game. In the last level he discovers it has a cannon as well.
    • Yagrum Bagarn from The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind has a variant. The Corprus Disease has left him bloated and unable to use his legs, so he gets around on a steam powered set of mechanical spider legs.


    Webcomics


    Web Original

    • In the Global Guardians PBEM Universe, the controversial superhero Slave is a super-strong, weapon-encrusted powerful robot remotely operated by the brain of a quadrapelegic genius. The operator gets sensory input from the robot, and while hooked up to it the robot is functionally the operator's body. The designer of Slave intended it to be a way for paralyzed people to regain their mobility, after a fashion. One wonders why he isn't hooked up to the robot 24/7.


    Western Animation

    • Alistair Smythe uses one in the 1990s Spider-Man the Animated Series. His father only agreed to create Spider-Slayers for the Kingpin in exchange for the funds to build it - unfortunately, he didn't live long enough to see Alistar in it.
    • Stephen Hawking appeared on The Simpsons (as an animated character, of course) in "They Saved Lisa's Brain". Hawking saves Lisa from the power-hungry Springfield chapter of Mensa in a special wheelchair, complete with an Inspector Gadget style retractable helicopter attachment and a spring-loaded boxing glove. He also appeared in several other episodes.
    • Teo's wheelchair with hang glider attachment in Avatar: The Last Airbender
    • Recurring Kim Possible character Felix has a Super Wheel chair, with hover tech and Videogame integrable AI.
    • One that may have been: The proposed re-versioning of Sailor Moon had one of its scouts in a wheelchair. She would have had one of these in the animated sequences.
    • Gargoyles has Halcyon Renard, the aged CEO of Cyber-Biotics and father-in-law of David Xanatos, in a wheelchair that has weapons built into its arms and a retractable Pope-Mobile-style bubble to protect the rider. Justified, in that this man has made his fortune in the robotics industry and had no reason not to use his skills and wealth for his own benefit. Also, flashbacks reveal he was once able to walk. Since businesspeople in this universe have no issue with sending mercenaries after each other, the weaponized chair may have started as a basic safety precaution.
    • The Batman the Brave And The Bold version of The Chief gets around in a wheelchair that can fly and shoot lasers, among other things.
      • The future Joker's combination wheelchair/dodgem car in "The Knights of Tomorrow!".
    • Mayor Tortoise John in the 2011 film Rango has a wheelchair with mechanical grabbers, mechanized self-moving wheels (like an electric wheelchair without electricity), and a golf club.
    • The Magic School Bus had a kid with a wheelchair as magic as the bus.
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