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A team is needed for The Con or The Caper. Each teammember is contacted in a short scene revealing their specialty. This sequence is terminated by all the members being in the same room together. c.f. Oceans Eleven, Mission Impossible.
Compare A Team Montage.
Examples:
- Named for the rallying cry of Marvel's most prominent superhero team. On those occasions where the roster changes, The Avengers tend to assemble in a more haphazard fashion than described in this trope.
- Tweaked a bit in Star Trek III The Search For Spock. Although the crew needs no introduction; following the scene where Kirk decides he's going to disobey Starfleet and just steal the Enterprise; we get a Mission Impossible-esque montage of each crew member doing their part to execute the heist. Each persons part is related to their skill. Kirk breaks out McCoy, Scotty sabotages the Excelsior's engines, Sulu kicks a guard's butt, and Uhura famously shows a cadet "some adventure".
- Seven Samurai is arguably the Trope Maker.
- Its American adaptation, The Magnificent Seven, even has Steve McQueen hold up fingers to denote everyone who's assembled.
- This was also spoofed in the first season of Blackadder.
- Mission Impossible had an interesting take on this, at least in the earlier seasons: The Captain would take out a dossier full of potential team members, many of them shown engaging in activities relevant to their particular skills, and we would watch him picking out the team he wanted — usually the same core members, but with an occasional addition.
- Spoofed in the film Return Of The Killer Tomatoes, as each new team member is revealed to have a stranger special skill than the last.
- This was just a rehash of the sequence in the first film, Attack Of The Killer Tomatoes. Of course, it was explained there that the team was being set up to fail.
- The Animated Series MASK did this. Once An Episode, a computer would review the specifics of the upcoming mission and select the appropriate operatives for the job based on their helmets (Masks) which gave them their powers, their natural skill sets and their vehicles.
- The introduction videos in the Sly Cooper video games have these, such as Bently: The Brains, Murray: The Brawn and so forth.
- The entire third game is spent assembling a team for a very difficult break-in, told as a How We Got Here.
- The manga based on the Galaxy Angel Gameverse begins with one of these, but as it shoves the battles out of the way almost entirely, the montage is more about the girls' individual quirks.
- Comic book example: In Fantastic Four #1, Reed Richards first summons the group together by creating a huge cloud above Manhattan that bears the words "Fantastic Four" before morphing into a "4." The other three show off their abilities because it's symbolic or something: The Invisible Girl vanishes in public, and being quite a ways away has to take a cab while invisible. (This actually works, though it scares the pants off the driver.) The Thing ditches his disguise, causing traffic accidents and drawing fire from the NYPD before he opts for the sewers. The Human Torch flames inside the car he was fixing, melting it, and while in flight is intercepted by jet fighters and ultimately a nuclear missile — still over Manhattan — requiring Reed to use his stretchiness to save the day. This, fellow tropers, is what awesome is.
- Modified example: the lengthy sequences spent getting the band back together in both Blues Brothers movies.
- The premiere of Hustle spent about ten minutes doing this for the four team members, and was narrated by a policeman explaining their enemy to a colleague. The footage from this sequence was used in quite a few TV spots.
- Spoofed in the final episode of Irresponsible Captain Tylor, when Yamamoto calls back the Soyokaze's crew from their absolutely ridiculous journeys to find themselves (such as Lt. Andressen's stint as a nude life-drawing model.)
- In the Fullmetal Alchemist manga, Roy's group has a scene where each of them is shown displaying what their specialty is, culminating in everyone being on board with the long hard slog that is being the rebel group in a corrupt military.
- Power Rangers Lightspeed Rescue and Power Rangers Operation Overdrive open this way.
- Most of the cast of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (the film, that is) are introduced in this fashion in one scene. Extra scenes are needed to introduce Jekyll/Hyde, Sawyer and Gray.
- In The Usual Suspects, it's done through the team's arrests.
- Subverted (or just plain done weirdly) in, off all things, Dumas' The Three Musketeers. Losing his companions en route of a dangerous mission, D'Artagnan must spend three chapters collecting them back up and extricating them from the situations their particular personality quirks have gotten them into.
- In The Bourne Identity, Treadstone headquarters orders all their field agents to go active. Cue the montage of each agent in the middle of some civilian activity, and dropping it upon receiving instructions from HQ.
- The Guns of Navarone The Film Of The Book. The officers planning the operation have a Mission Impossible-style set of photographs of the soldiers who will be taking part, and list their specialties (lucky, genius with explosives, mechanical expert, born killer etc.)
- A great example begins the second episode of Hoolywood East TV's New Kids on the Rock.
- This happens in Eddie and the Cruisers 2: Eddie Lives!, while Eddie is assembling a new band; We get to see each prospective member play to get a feel for their, you know, style. But, like everything else in the movie, it's retarded; Among other things, Eddie picks a repressed concert pianist to play keyboard in his blues rock band, and also gives a spot to a guy he absolutely hates for no real reason.
- This occurs after the team has actually been assembled in the first issue of the next-to-most-recent Suicide Squad, where the Terrible Trio Injustice League is put to work doing dangerous missions for the government. As they land on the island their mission is to take place on, it becomes clear what everyone's role is quickly: Big Sir hauls a gigantic watercraft on his back with ease, Clock King calculates the exact amount of time the task will take, Major Disaster barks orders and coordinates the team, Multi-Man frets about what his ever-changing powers are right now, and Cluemaster proves to be astonishingly perceptive.
- NEEEEEEEWWWWWWWSSSSSSSSS TEEEEEAAAAAAAMMMM! ASSEMBLE!
- The original script for Monty Python And The Holy Grail had this as a sequence, shortened greatly in the final film, probably due to budget constraints. All this troper can recall clearly is Arthur finding Galahad building a chicken coop for an elderly couple, but there were similar scenes for each of the knights.
- The Teen Titans in the cartoon got together in an Everyone Meets Everyone flashback episode, but in the comic book, it was an Avengers Assemble (or should I say, Titans Together)-style gathering. When the Justice League refused to help Raven with her demon father, thinking it a trap, she appeared in the dreams of various teen heroes and rallied them to help her fight Trigon. Starfire just so happened to be escaping to Earth from her captors in time to help them.
- Also in the cartoon, In the episode "Calling All Titans" Robin contacts every single member (thirty or so) to let them know to stand by for further instructions.
- Stanley Kubrick's The Killing (1956) has a couple scenes along these lines; although the main heist team is already assembled, ringleader Johnny Clay is shown recruiting sniper Nikkie Arcane (Timothy Carey) and Maurice, a chess-playing wrestler.
- An ad for Spyro: A Hero's Tail does this.
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