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alt title(s): Elite Mook
One of the Monarch's Black Guards telling a lesser henchman to go to his room without supper. They have served the dark will of Persian kings for five hundred years. Eyes as dark as night... teeth filed to fangs... soulless. The personal guard to King Xerxes himself; the Persian warrior elite. The deadliest fighting force in all of Asia... the Immortals.
Has your Red Shirt Army been cut to shreds by uncaring heroes? Are the Mooks, Goons and Minions at your disposal incapable of providing more than half a second worth of challenge to the hero? Well worry no more! Because we at EvilTemp© have just the thing!
New and improved Elite Mooks! Now with twice the hero-removing power as regular Mooks! They're the same size as regular Mooks but with the fighting power of Giant Mooks and the coolness of an Evil Makeover!
We can accommodate all budgets and tastes, so all Elite Mooks can be customized and upgraded from base mooks to suit your needs. From simple cosmetic changes like a Palette Swap to adding Spikes Of Villainy, and tangible changes like a raised Power Level and New Powers As The Plot Demands to match those pesky Level Grinding heroes. If you already have normal mooks, you can promote them to Elite Mook squads via upgrading them with Ninja Pirate Zombie Robot oil.
Call now! Don't delay! With your purchase of 50 or more Elite Mooks EvilTemp© will provide a complimentary coffee mug (Best Evil Overlord!)
For other EvilTemp© services, see Equal Opportunity Evil. If still inadequate, feel free to invest in some Psycho Serum and upgrade them further to Superpowered Mooks.
Alternately, go for prime quality, and hire yourself your own, hand-picked Praetorian Guard!
Examples
Anime
- Griffith's Apostle army in Berserk.
Film
- 300 was fun because it applied Action Movie tropes to historical events, including making the Persian 10,000 Immortals Elite Mooks.
- The Uruk-Hai in The Lord Of The Rings movies. Fell down just as easy as the regular Orcs.
- The Super Battledroids and Destroyer droids (Droidekas) in Star Wars Attack of the Clones.
- Also General Grevious' Magna Guards, non-Jedi Droids who are able to fight against Jedi in melee combat and do relatively well (i.e. live longer than about 6 or 7 seconds). The expanded universe even has them beating some of the lesser Jedi.
- Believe it or not, the Stormtroopers and their ever-famous Imperial Stormtrooper Marksmanship Academy are ostensibly Elite Mooks. The basic mooks are apparently those guys in the dorky hats, who we see far less of than the Stormtroopers. Odd. Ironically, ditto for the TIE fighter pilots.
- There are also "Elite Elite Mooks" then, because the Royal Guard (red armor) are the Elite Mooks of Stormtroopers.
- For those that consider the Expanded Universe material to possesses canonical relevance, Stormtroopers have multiple levels of "elite," others including storm commandos, space troopers and environment-specific ones (Snow/Sand/Forest Troopers) along with the above-mentioned Royal Guards (within which there were also varying standards of "elite"). Just to make the "elite mookdom" more hilarious, the "true" mooks at the Imperial Army — who, except in the form of the walker crews in Episodes V and VI, don't even appear in the movies. (The West End Games Star Wars RPG using a d6 system was responsible for a lot of what is known about the Imperial Army.)
- In fairness, though, this "treadmill of eliteness" gave a ladder for the henchmen to climb that didn't have the Emperor as its highest rung although that didn't stop a group of highly-placed officials from trying to overthrow Palpatine the year before the first Death Star's destruction, or Carnor Jax — one of the "elite-r" Royal Guards, a Sovereign Protector — from having Palpatine's clones and their template sabotaged.
- And as we are in Elite Elite Mooks, don't forget the cyborg Dark Troopers from Dark Forces.
- At the end of Batman Begins, Ra's Al Ghul sends 4 serious-looking ninjas in full metal body armor to fight Batman. They do about as well as everyone else who's tried to fight Batman up to this point. In other words, they get pwned pretty much instantly.
- It makes you wonder why Ra's doesn't use more flaming ceiling beams when fighting Batman.
- Both Equilibrium and Ultraviolet feature the hero battling a group of several unique-looking Mooks armed with katanas, just before the final fight with the Big Bad. These guys are either Elite Mooks, or complete idiots, for fighting only with swords in a world where pretty much everyone is equipped with automatic weapons. In any case they don't do noticeably better against the hero than all the previous Mooks... i.e. they all get killed in about 6 or 7 seconds.
- Repo! The Genetic Opera has Rotti's shotgun-weilding henchgirls, and the faceless Repo Men.
Literature
- The Lord Of The Rings had the Uruk-hai, elite Orcs.
- Similarly, the Inheritance Trilogy had the Kull, elite
Orcs Urgals.
- The Social Police in Blade of Tyshalle could nail scouts between the eyes as said scouts were peeking through window slats at them. "Say what you like about Soapy, but those bastards can shoot."
- The Wheel Of Time has the Myrddraal.
- Source material notwithstanding, the Warhammer 40000: Gaunt's Ghosts novels after Necropolis had them fighting the Blood Pact, the retinue of the Chaos warlord they were fighting against, who were supposedly better than the generic heretics and zealots that came before. The Guns of Tanith also introduced Loxatl mercenaries that could take lots of lasfire.
Live Action TV
- Supreme Daleks in Doctor Who.
- Power Rangers sometimes has a multiple tier grunt system, such as Kelzak Furies and Styxoids. Blueheads started out as Giant Mooks who led regular Mooks, but started being sent in small groups themselves on occasion.
- The Kull Warriors in Stargate SG 1 are - watch this - Anubis' Frankenstein's symbiotically enhanced super-zombie cyborg Determinator.
- One episode of SG-1 also showed that some of the Jaffa under Anubis were elite Ninja Jaffa. For some reason, they never showed up again after that episode.
Tabletop Games
- Elites choices in Warhammer 40000, which are Exactly What It Says On The Tin. Imperial Space Marines are all Elite Mooks when compared to the rest of the Imperium's fighting forces. Similarly for Chaos Marines on the Chaos side, except when some of the stronger daemons are involved.
- In most places, the local police and Planetary Defence Forces are seen as less capable than common or garden Imperial Guard. Amongst the Guard, you have various elite regiments, which might be veterans or have come from a more militarised culture (such as Cadians) or who have had more extensive training (such as Storm Troopers, the best of the Guard). One step above are the Sisters of Battle, who are just as good as the best Guardsmen, but wear power armour. They have an elite corps called Celestians. Then comes Space Marine Scouts, who are basically Marine cadets. Then come regular Marines, Veterans and Terminators. Then you have the Grey Knights, who are elite psychic Space Marines, who also have more-elite Terminators. Then come the Dreadnoughts, but at this point we're arguably past the "mook" part. Nobody's quite sure where the Adeptus Custodes, the Deathwatch and the various Heavy Weapons/Jetpack teams fit in.
- Custodes are even more elite Space Marines than the Grey Knights and their Terminators more elite still, Deathwatch are Veterans with better equipment, and Assault/Devastator Marines are equivalent in skill to regular Marines but are trained for different roles.
- Simalarly, Special and Rare choices in Warhammer. Every army has at least one unit that is effectively one unit of normal infantry, just better trained, better equipped, less likely to run, Spikes Of Villainy for the evil races, and with a badass sounding name. Compare Chosen to normal Chaos Warriors, Stormvermin to bog-standard Clanrats, Phoenix Guard or White Lions to ordinary High Elf Spearmen... etc.
Video Games
- Just about every action videogame after you get to a certain level.
- The varying ranks of Pig Soldiers in Mother3.
- Just about every long-running enemy group in City Of Heroes has these (the Council goes from random raw recruits to elite special forces to enhanced super-soldiers to superhuman monstrosities and robots). I'm almost certain that this is shared by other MMORPG.
- Koopatrols in Paper Mario
- Metroid series:
- Elite Pirates in Metroid Prime.
- Ridley's "Ninja Space Pirate bodyguards" in Super Metroid.
- Fusion Metroids. Those are pretty much Nightmare Fuel for this troper.
- Literal elite monsters in World Of Warcraft. They have a golden border around their portrait and are much tougher than their normal counterparts. How much more depends on the setting. Outdoor elites might be killed by a single character of the same level, although it's much more difficult, while dungeon monsters are designed to be a threat for a full group or even a raid (up to 40 players).
- The obscure Macintosh Wolfenstein/Doom clone Sensory Overload had, in its later levels, elite guards who looked like Nazi officers and wielded machine guns, and cyborg soldiers who talked like Darth Vader and threw plasma balls(the same projectile as the Electrogun). The unnamed Big Bad herself was just a slightly enhanced(faster, and with a melee attack) graphic swap of the cyborgs. Talk about an Anti Climax Boss.
- Combine Elites in Half Life 2, who wear white uniforms instead of the grey and black variety found in others, and have weapons with an "alternate fire" mode which can instantly disintegrate ... um, NPCs, whether Red Shirt or Mook (in the player's hands), but which do 15 or so points of damage to the player.
- Let's not forget the, well, Elites of Halo (the 1337357 form of which are the cloaked and “goldie” models).
- Not true. The top of the hierarchy is occupied by the silver models. They just show up in only one level of the game.
- Sort of true, looks like you're thinking of the black Spec-Ops Elites in "Keyes" of Halo 1. In Halo 2, the silver ones, called Ultra Elites, are all over the place on Legendary, having mostly displaced the Spec-Ops Elites(which are usually cloaked in this game). Not to mention the Scrappy Room in the Scrappy Level, "Gravemind", where you fight four of them at once.
- Halo 3, of course, has the Brute Chieftains, who are heavily armored and wield Gravity Hammers or BFGs. Then there's the Hunters in all three games, which are toughest in 3.
- In God Hand, there are two basic elite types: the "tall" model and the "fat" model. Both are much harder to send flying and have a lot more health.
- The upcoming RTS Tom Clancy's Endwar has them. How? The player's army, stated to be the best taken and bunched up from all the other elite forces of their root military, and The Cavalry commonly in other circumstances.
- The geth of Mass Effect start off with your regular geth soldiers, but as the game progresses, geth shock troopers start showing up, and then you start getting meaner variants, like Juggernauts, Destroyers, and the pants-browningly potent Primes.
- Metal Gear Solid 2 had the Arsenal Tengu commandos and the Hi-Tech Soldiers, MGS3 had the Ocelot unit and pyro guards, and MGS4 had the all-female Haven Troopers/F.R.O.G.S (which were more or less female Tengus) and exo-skeleton, jet-pack mercenaries only seen for one level.
- Heavy Armor troopers in Army Of Two, who are immune to most gunfire from the front - though grenades and rockets can hurt them, and a well-placed shot with a sniper rifle can knock them down, allowing one to snipe them between the legs.
- The Vanguard beastmen in the Dynamis regions of Final Fantasy XI. The Kindred demons probably also count for the Beastmen hordes as a whole, story-wise.
- Deus Ex featured MIB agents, who mostly carried auto-shotguns, could survive more than 3 times as much damage as standard Mooks, and who exploded when killed.
- The sequel Deus Ex: Invisible War had Illuminati Elite for the Illuminati faction, who looked like Mr. Freeze, carried railguns, and released clouds of poisonous gas from their corpses after dying. The opposing Templar faction countered them with Powered Armor Mooks equipped with rocket launchers.
- Mexican Army Elite Mooks appear in Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter, in the form of Aguila 7 Special Forces soldiers. Realistically, although they're better trained and equipped than standard infantry, they still go down after a couple assault rifle hits.
- Story-wise, some of the terrorists in Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six: Vegas are ex-Special Forces mercenaries, while others are simply Mexican criminals working for Irena Morales. However, in-game, there's no actual distinction between the groups, as they both use the same set of character models and uniforms, as well as the same A.I. and equipment.
- The second-to-last level in Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory ended with Sam up against Shetland's personal bodyguards, about 8 elite Displace Mercenaries equipped with facemasks and thermal goggles. These are the only enemies in the entire series who can see you in the dark (some enemies in the series, i.e. the Georgian Special Forces from the final mission in Splinter Cell, wear night-vision goggles, but still couldn't see you in the dark unless you move or are very close).
- Gears Of War has Theron Guards, who are faster, smarter, and tougher than standard Locust Drones, and are also equipped with one-hit-kill Torque Bows.
- In F.E.A.R., Replica Elite soldiers, wearing black uniforms and white hockey masks, show up in one of the game's final levels. They can only survive slightly more bullets than standard Mooks, but several carry BFGs.
- Crysis actually has 2 kinds of Elite Mooks. North Korean Special Forces are simply regular Korean soldiers with better accuracy and equipment, whom you probably won't even notice unless you're looking for them (they wear dark armor, black facepaint, and have laser-sights). There are also a handful of North Korean Nanosuit soldiers, who wear the same superpowered Nanosuits that the player does. Enemy Nanosuit soldiers feature increased durability, a recharging energy "shield", regenerating health, super-powered punches and jumping ability, and a cloaking device.
- Red Faction 2 is an interesting case, as Elite Mooks are fought in the very beginning of the game(the prologue mission), and oddly disappear completely after the first few levels, where they're replaced by weaker, but more heavily armed, standard infantry. These "Sopot Elite Guards" wore metal armor and faceplates, could survive about twice as much damage as a standard Mook, and talked like Darth Vader.
- Elite Mooks make a comeback in the final mission of the game, in the form of Elite Nano Soldiers.
- The originalRed Faction also had Elite Guards guarding Capek's lair and other high-level areas, who had a different voice, spoke more aggressive catch phrases, moved and dodged faster and had much tougher armor than the standard Mooks, and frequently wielded BFGs.
- Timeshift had cybernetic Quantum Guards, who possess the same time-bending powers as the player.
- The Big Daddies and Houdini, as well as other special kinds, Splicers from Bioshock.
- Goldeneye 007 and Perfect Dark often broke out the Elite Mooks during a high-alert situation, for example, in 007, once the Scripted Event alarm goes off after hacking the mainframes in Severnaya, endless waves of smart, quick, heavily armed elite guards are spawned(get the hell out of there!). Near the end of the Datadyne Extraction level in PD, Cassandra kills the lights and you have to fight her elite bodyguards in the dark, which is quite frustrating on Perfect Agent difficulty.
- STALKER: Shadows of Chernobyl has Spetznaz special forces soldiers and Military Stalkers, who have the two best non-exosuit armors in the game.
- Dragon Warrior has the Dragonlord's castle, guarded by the deadliest variations of the Mooks you've faced: Axe Knights, Armored Knights, Blue Dragons, Red Dragons, etc. They have high defense stats, deal massive damage, and have the most devastating spells, such as Sleep(Axe Knights have both this and Stopspell, preventing you from using your own Stopspell), Healmore and Hurtmore(the Armored Knight has both Healmore and Hurtmore). If you aren't sufficiently leveled up, you can kiss your ass goodbye here. Some of these are invincible to magic. And sometimes, the only winning move is not to fight.
- The Silent Hill series feature tougher, faster, Palette Swap (or not) versions of the enemies in certain areas (or when you're sucked into the mirror version of the town/area). For example the Night Flutterers (Air Screamers, but more human-like and with their faces covered in worms) and Worm Heads (upgrade of Groaner, the ubiquitous zombie dogs, but with a worm for a face) in SH 1, "nightmare nurses" in SH 2, and "advanced Closers" in SH 3.
- The Ace Combat games have these in the form of the enemy aces, both individual and ace squadrons such as Yellow Squadron (04) or Strigon Team (6), who in a first playthrough will be flying better planes (until late game when the player can afford better) and are better pilots; in 04's "Shattered Skies" mission Yellow Squadron is actually invulnerable, so multiple-target missiles are a bad idea due to the chance of inadvertently targeting one of them and wasting a missile. Subverted in the final mission which emphasizes the Mook half (since Mobius One killed off the elites who hadn't already left the unit)]], but usually in the games when you can shoot them down these guys are boss-level pilots. The Mook half partially comes from the fact that these pilots are usually never individually identified (in 04 whichever Yellow is shot down at Stonehenge is deemed to be Yellow 4, and Yellow 13's fate is sealed at Farbanti by the player having to shoot down all the Yellows there), but the Ace Combat 6 Assault Records subvert this by having individual Strigon profiles unlock after you shoot down Strigons in certain missions.
- Most enemy types in the Wizardry games start off as regular Mooks, but upgrade to Elite Mooks in higher level areas, then eventually to Superpowered Mooks. Not to be confused with the actual Mook race in the game, which are approximately high-tech psychic Wookiees.
- In the Pokemon games, after going through enough Team Rocket (Magma, Aqua, Galactic...) Grunts, you may run into an Executive, who often serves as a miniboss of sorts.
- Later in Valkyria Chronicles, the enemies become tougher and become labeled "Elite", the black-clad Imperial Guards even more so.
- There are also additional units during the main campaign called "Aces", which are named and are tougher than the standard Imperial soldier. Defeating one in combat will allow you to get a unique enemy weapon after you win the battle.
Web Animation
- The Madness Combat series features the Agents, starting in the fourth one, where he manages to stall the protagonist... for a few extra seconds. He gets his revenge, however, later in the episode, when he's resurrected as a zombie, and manages to shoot the protagonist. In the fifth through seventh ones, however, they become as common place as regular mooks, until ANOTHER elite group takes their place as as Elite Mooks. The three appear in the sixth and are blasted, and in the seventh, they're highly commonplace, and the upcoming Flash...
- Likewise, the Bunnykill series features two ninja rabbits as Elite Mooks in the first installment (and are actually challenging), bunny 'agents' in the second (the first two are challenging, but then about ten are cut down easily in a display of Katanas Are Just Better), and the dark-grey (mercenary) and brown (techie) rabbits in the third installment (the techs provided extra challenge, the mercs not so much).
Western Animation
- The Dai Li in Avatar The Last Airbender.
- The Monarch briefly employed Black Guards, who were much more menacing than his regular henchmen (despite the fact that the Black Guards all used to be regular henchmen...), as seen above, on The Venture Brothers.
- Cobra Commander had his Crimson Guard, who were supposed to be of significantly higher quality than Cobra's basic blue-shirt mooks, but who (at least in the 80's cartoon version) generally proved as ineffective against G.I. Joe's named character squads as the lesser mooks.
- At least one or two Crimson Guardsmen got a minor Crowning Momentof Awesome (i.e. the one who fights his way out of a top secret lab in one episode), but would usually screw it up at the last moment with a cringeworthy mistake (the aforementioned Crimson Guard accidentally dropped the chemical he was stealing, creating a giant amoeba that ate him and half the county he was in... Cobra's experiments had a funny way of unexpectedly doing whacky stuff like that.)
- The toyline also had the Crimson Guard Immortals, the elite of the Crimson Guard. Possibly a Shoutout to the Persian Immortals
- In The Spectacular Spider Man, Big Bad Tombstone has a cadre of personal bodyguards, all of whom are Scary Black Men with taser guns. The irony is that he doesn't particularly need them, considering his Super Strength. Though being a mega-philanthropist in his civilian identity, he probably has to keep up appearances.
- Regular Neosapien mooks in Exosquad were gradually reinforced with more powerful Neo Warriors and Neo Lords in the second season. Not that any of them had a real chance to harm a recurring character...
- In the new Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cartoon, the Foot Clan has Elite Foot Ninjas (the guys in the red robes and coolie hats). Unlike many Elite Mooks, these guys actually were demonstrably better than the standard cannon fodder Mooks, able to fight evenly against the turtles and almost killing them in their first appearance.
- During one episode of Kim Possible Dr. Drakken discovers how worthless his Mooks are so he sends Shego to steal strength enhancing rings that transforms the wearer into peak condition. They didn't become any better so they were defeated quite easily by Kim (and still proved to be much more reliable than the Elite Mooks by herself...)
- The Fourth Mask shadowkhan from Jackie Chan Adventures could be considered Elite, as they nearly had super-strength and were almost impossible to beat without the strength talisman, or similar.
Real Life
- Spetsnaz, SAS, SEALs... Generally any "Special Forces" unit is Elite compared to standard soldiers.
- Also, the military forces of most nations include non-Special Forces units that consider themselves elite when compared to conventional infantry. As a general rule, the odds of a unit being 'elite' increase drastically if it includes any of the following words in its name: Marines, Airborne, Rangers, Guards, Light Infantry.
Or if it's from Ireland.
- Historical examples include the Praetorian Guard for the Romans, the Janissaries for the Ottoman Empire, the Immortals for the Persian Empire (overlap with Faceless Goons) and knights in all medieval feudal kingdoms.
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