When you are a kid and especially if you are a boy (kudos to all the girls who shared this sentiment), one of the most important things in every movie are the gadgets. Until you reach around 14, if you are a boy, a movie without cool gadgets is wasted movie role as far as you are concerned. And the people who make movies know this and they use this to get kids to love their movies and to keep them in their hearts forever. In this article, I will be looking at some of the coolest gadgets that have ever appeared on the big screen – some more popular than others, but all of them really, really cool.

The coolest gadget of them all, and I am not entirely sure that it can really be called a gadget is the Delorean from the Back to the Future movies. Any kid that has seen any of the Back to the Future movies will tell you that their biggest wish was to take a ride in that ultra-cool gadget of a car. Sure, there have been innumerable time-traveling machines and gadgets in the movie history, but none of them have ever been cooler than the Delorean Michael J. Fox and his crazy professor buddy use to get to the past or the future, depending on their needs. It’s not just its ability to travel in time, but also the flux capacitor of course, as well as the car itself, the cool 80s car and there haven’t been that many really. The ultimate movie gadget.

Of course, one other gadget that I simply cannot forget to mention, once again fretting that it may not entirely fall into the category of gadgets are the lightsabers from the Star Wars movies and all other media outputs that have been bombarding us since times immemorial. When I said that it is possible lightsabers do not fall into the category of gadgets, I thought about the fact that they are actually weapons. However, if we are being lax with our categorization, lightsabers are really gadgets, as in that every kid that has ever seen a Star Wars movie has copied that sound waving a stick around, or something a bit more advanced than a stick, depending on how much they nagged their parents to get them some lightsaber replicas.

Batman movies have always been a source of innumerable gadgets, from the subdued but very cool gadgets in the first two and the last two movies to the over-the-top and outright silly gadgets from the movies in the middle that we would all like to forget – Batman has always been a source for a real gadget aficionado. The formula is quite simple. Think of any sort of a weapon or a gadget that might come in handy, but the prefix Bat- in front of it and you have a Batman gadget. Really simple and somehow really attractive.

Another movie franchise that has been very rich in gadgets is also the James Bond franchise. From the very beginnings to the newest Bond movies, you could always rely on Her Majesty’s favorite secret agent to introduce some new and insanely cool gadgets, such as jet packs, knives in boots and all kinds of gadgets for the Aston Martin that Bond always drove around. In fact, there is even a character called Q who came up with the gadgets in every movie and who became the part of the Bond franchise as much as martinis and Walter PPKs.

I would also like to mention a few gadgets from one of my favorite movies of all times – Blade Runner. First, there is that machine which is able to analyze photographs in a way that you can discover new stuff about the scene that surrounded the actual situation that was photographed. With Harrison Ford drinking Johnnie Walker and using it to analyze some pics, it was one of the coolest things ever. There is also the Voight-Kampff machine that Ford used to seek out replicants. I cannot really think of a use for it in today’s world, but the look was just spot on, incredible combination of believability and enough sci-fi to get your mind rolling.

Of course, these are just some of the cool movie gadgets that we had the pleasure of seeing in some of the finest pieces of American cinema and if I really wanted, I could have gone for pages and pages of text, but that would just be too much. This is just enough to remind you of some of the finest gadgets Hollywood has ever come up with.