Dexter's Laboratory.
“Welcome and be amazed at the world of Dexter's Laboratory!”
—Dexter, Dexter's Rival
Dexter's Laboratory (also referred to as The Laboratory, Dex's Lab, or simply The Lab) is the eponymous scientific facility that serves as the central recurring location of Dexter's Laboratory, where Dexter creates his many inventions. The lab is Dexter's most heavily guarded secret and does his best to keep his family ignorant of its existence, with the exception of his goofball older sister Dee Dee who is always messing around the lab and causing havoc for her own amusement.
Description[]
“Enter at your own peril, past the bolted door where impossible things may happen that the world has never seen before!”
—Ending Song
Dexter gazing at the immensity of his lab in Ultrajerk 2000.
Dexter's Laboratory is an immense blue maze of shining tiled floors, starry ceiling lights, and near-endless rows of gigantic reinforced steel walls, massive high-end supercomputers, vast pipelines, titanic factories and other scientific machines that seem to go on forever. Most of the laboratory's functions are managed by the Quadraplex T-3000 Computer.
Dexter's lab in Old Flame.
The lab is primarily built underneath Dexter's House and seems to cover much of the underground of Dexter's neighborhood, however its main entrance, a secret doorway behind a bookcase in Dexter's room on the second floor, seems to show that the lab defies the conventional understanding of dimensional space as well, since despite the entrance being placed on the flat wall, much of the lab can be viewed from it, a spatial abnormality which could either be due to Dexter's own advanced knowledge of altering space or a natural anomaly that also seems to be alluded to in LABretto.
Entrances[]
Dexter has a vast number of secret entrances and exits in and out of his lab for either convenience or emergency and does his best to keep them secret from his family. Despite his best attempts at secrecy though, Dee Dee knows all of them and all his attempts to keep her out have been in vain, with the exception of the events in the episode "The Continuum of Cartoon Fools," where Dexter finally locked Dee Dee out of his lab, but at the cost of his own ability to access it, leaving him dumbfounded and in misery.
The most recurrently used entrances are the secret bookcase entrance and the secret rug entrance, but aside from these there are dozens of other entrances which are listed below:
- Bookcase Entrance: A large bookcase located in Dexter's room which can be opened either by pulling out a book, scanning Dexter's size or eyes, or verbally via Dexter's secret password "Star Wars".
- Rug Tube: A small green circular rug in Dexter's room that conceals a chute that leads into a long winding tube that takes him directly to anywhere he needs to be in the lab.
- Dexpole: A fireman's pole hidden behind Dexter's wall and in his bookcase which also has the function to instantly outfit Dexter with his lab uniform. Dexter finds it quite uncomfortable.
- Transporter Remote: A small remote that can transport Dexter and Dee Dee out of the lab instantly.
- Secret Refrigerator Back: A small entrance located inside the kitchen fridge's back wall.
- 2-Dimensional Facial Filter: A bizarre flat tube like entrance that flattens its user into a paper thin form and whisks them away.
- Molecular Disconfiguration Access Port: An instant transporter that moves its target in and out of the lab by disassembling and then reassembling them on a molecular level.
- Sky Port: A large cylindrical tube containing several fans that's manned by a single pigeon named Cassius that carries users in and out of the lab.
- Carbon Exhaust Thermal Expectorator: A secret entrance located in the living room chimney.
- Aquatic Waste Disposer: An unhygienic secret entrance located inside the bathroom toilet.
- Postal Transfer Unit: A secret entrance located inside the mailbox.
Sectors[]
The lab's great size requires that Dexter divide it into many sections which either house only a single large invention or are each dedicated to a different scientific pursuit, although these usually go unnamed beyond a few exceptions or simply being referred to as Sectors with a numeral attachment, and the older sectors of the lab are abandoned. Due to constant renovations, destruction at the hands of Dee Dee and Dexter's habit of moving onto newer projects, the lab's layout is never consistent.
- Old Part of the Lab: The original section of the lab which has fallen to ruin and decay. Dexter's Computer has no means of accessing this area of the lab.
- Sector 1 & Sector 2: Some of the larger portions of the lab that weren't fully shown.
- Sector 3: A large portion of the lab that was used as a hiding place by the Caveman who invented fire.
- Sector 726a: A large area of the lab that houses a nuclear power plant which was destroyed by the Dog.
- Wildlife Sector: A sector where Dexter keeps many wild animals for research purposes.
- Jurassic Sector II: A sector used to house many dinosaurs that Dexter has presumably cloned or brought back from the past.
- Underwater Sector: An underwater portion of the lab located 30,000 leagues below sea level that Dexter accesses through a private submarine.
- Space Sector: An area used for space exploration located 10,000 meters above the planet that Dexter accesses through a private skyhook.
- Vehicle Storage: An area where Dexter houses many of his vehicles and mobile mechas.
- Scribbles Storage: An area where Dexter stores his scribbles for science fairs.
- Broken Dreams Vault: A secret vault where Dexter houses all of his past failed inventions and those destroyed by Dee Dee as reminders of his broken dreams.
- Katka's Base: A remote location in a cave at the outskirts of town where Dexter houses his spy car which is managed by his personal driver Katka.
In the game Dexter's Laboratory: Deesaster Strikes!, the lab is divided into a central hub where the Quadraplex T-3000 Computer is located, as well as 8 sectors with 4 sub-sectors each, amounting to a total of 32 sub-sectors.
Inventions[]
The lab has served as the birthplace for all of Dexter's creations, ranging from robots, to machines, to vehicles, to weapons and even artificially grown creatures, just to name a few.
- See: Dexter's Inventions
- See: Dexter's Robots
Dexter's robotic workforce in particular makes up the vast majority of the lab's artificial population and can often be found conducting maintenance on the lab or slaving away on Dexter's projects or simply catering to his personal whims.
History[]
Creation: LABretto[]
The upstairs closet where Dexter would begin the construction of his lab.
Dexter first discovered the space that would become the location of his lab as an infant after trying to escape Dee Dee's constant attempts to destroy his inventions, where he hid away in his family's downstairs closet and discovered that the walls could come lose, revealing a vast new place of seemingly boundless possibilities where he began the construction of the first iteration of his lab. However Dee Dee would eventually discover the lab while pretending to be a sailor and coming upon Dexter's bookcase entrance, subsequently causing her first button-pushing act of destruction, much to Dexter's grief.
Expansion: Lab of the Lost[]
Dexter's first lab would eventually become the home of Dexter's First Invention and his other early creations, but as Dexter's ambitions grew, he would continue to expand his lab beyond its initial starting point and expand it into an immense monolithic base with whole new areas, facilities and machines with upgraded technology and improved higher quality metals, but this would come at a price as much of the original portion of the lab would fall to decay and be forgotten due to its obsolete status, and it would be overrun by rust and vegetation which caused his early robotic creations to become violent and resentful of their former master.
Cycle: Dexter's Laboratory[]
For many years, Dexter would remain in a seemingly perpetual cycle of creation and destruction due to the constantly destructive antics of his sister Dee Dee, for whenever he invents something new, Dee Dee will eventually appear to damage or destroy it, a cycle which would continue in a near-constant continuum of hilarity and grief for the young Dexter, but despite these setbacks, he would usually manage to find common ground with his sister and achieve success with many inventions that would bring about prosperity for himself and others or cause some form of comedic high jinks.
Final Fate: Ego Trip[]
The ruins of Dexter's lab.
As time passed and Dexter grew older, his life would go through many changes, the most notable and terrifying of which was his enslavement by the tyrannical Executive Mandark which brought about many tragic events. The first of which was Dexter's family selling their home under unknown circumstances with the new owners eventually discovering the old lab and converting it into a game room and Dexter himself becoming physically and mentally broken by Mandark to the point where he was forced to abandon his scientific pursuits. Things would become much worse for the old lab as Mandark obtained the Neurotomic Protocore and took over the world, causing all intelligence and science but his own to become ravaged and civilization to slowly break down into a wasteland of stupidity. Among the many casualties was Dexter's old lab, which became a tragic ruin of its former glory that would be honored by Dexter and his time traveling personas in a brief moment of silence and its subsequently renewed in the form of the 4-Bot which was built from the remains of the lab.
Decades later, the memory and legacy of Dexter's beloved lab would be preserved in Dextopia in the form of styrofoam replicas in the Dexter Museum dedicated to honoring the great and powerful Dexter and all of his inventions.
Trivia[]
- The lab is clearly dimensional-transcendental, meaning its bigger on the inside. Numerous times, the lab has been destroyed, only for a small portion of the house to be gone. This suggests the lab exists in another dimension.
- This makes it similar to the T.A.R.D.I.S. from Doctor Who.
- Lab of the Lost implies once Dexter runs out of space, he creates more as he doesn't know the abandoned part of the lab well.
- The secret bookcase entrance and the Dexpole entrance are obvious allusions to the secret entrance to the Bat Cave from the 1966 television incarnation of Batman starring Adam West and Burt Ward.