A Team Montage - Television Tropes & Idioms

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A Team Montage

A team of characters build something that will pull everyone's bacon out of the fire. A montage is used to show each person exercising their speciality (usually without lines) in the pursuit of this goal.

Named after the 80's series The A Team, which had one such montage in every episode. The true "A Team Montage" will often include large quantities of Stock Footage. This can lead to humorous mistakes, such as an obvious set of black hands building the superweapon, even though Mr. T had been captured by bad guys.

The A-Team was also famous for the apparent genius-level skills they employed during the montage; in a matter of a few minutes, the A-Team could turn six feet of PVC piping, a golf-cart, and several kilograms of semi-volatile chemicals into a heavily-armored tank. That their captors were routinely stupid enough to lock them in a warehouse full of PVC piping, golf carts and semi-volatile chemicals is not relevant to the trope, though it is a bit of a Wall Banger.

Special case of the Hard Work Montage, and similar to the Lock And Load Montage. Commonly used in The Caper or The Con, especially if it's an Impossible Mission.

Compare Avengers Assemble and Eigen Plot.

Examples:

A contemporary of The A Team, MacGyver also featured a similar montage towards the end of each show.
The CSI shows employ this idiom frequently, as the various forensic specialists build a case.
Mission Impossible often featured sequences where characters worked on a project without dialogue, but this was never done as montage.
Film example: in the Robert Rodriguez/Quentin Tarantino bandits-on-the-lam-take-hostages-and-then-fight-Mexican-vampires cult classic From Dusk Till Dawn the remaining protagonists (Seth Gecko and Jacob, Scott, and Kate Fuller) perform an A Team Montage as they jury rig a number of weapons against the vampires besieging them as they are hiding in a storage room of a biker bar.
- The remake of Dawn Of The Dead features one of these as the heroes retrofit some parking shuttles, preparing to break through the zombie army that has besieged their shopping mall.
Seen occasionally in Top Gear, although the presenters being what they are to each other, it seldom goes smoothly.
- Lampshaded in the Vietnam special, where James May actually hums the theme to The A Team during the A Team Montage of the presenters modifying their motorbikes into watercraft.
This is used in a way in the animated film Once Upon A Forest, when the three furlings come together and use teamwork to build a flying machine using Bamboo Technology.