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alt title(s): Mook; Zako 
It's a nasty, thankless job, but somebody's gotta do it.
They may be called the Palace Guard, the City Guard, or the patrol. Whatever the name, their purpose in any work of heroic fantasy is identical: it is, round about Chapter Three (or ten minutes into the film) to rush into the room, attack the hero one at a time, and be slaughtered. No one ever asks them if they wanted to. This book is dedicated to those fine men.
A slang term for the hordes of standard-issue, disposable bad guys whom the hero mows down with impunity. Also called "goons," "scrubs," "drones," "flunkies," "pawns," "crunchies," "popcorn," "grunts," "minions," "lackeys," "underlings," "henchpersons," and " Cannon Fodder;" in Japanese, the word is "zako." Nameless, faceless, horribly awful shots, incompetent, unwilling to retreat, and completely disposable: they provide a chance for the characters to show off their flashy fighting skills and can be shot without guilt. The hero might find it in his heart to Save The Villain, forgive him, even accept him into his inner circle, but the guys whose only crime is not finding a better employer will be shown no mercy. Next to Punch Clock Villain, but usually more faceless, this is one of the tropes most liable to Just Following Orders, a fact that may be pointed up in order to reduce Moral Dissonance about their disposability.
It's rarely explained just why they're willing to fight and die for villains who want to destroy the world, or what they get in return. Their life expectancy stinks, and you have to wonder how they found the job in the first place.
Sometimes, Mooks will act more as comic relief than an actual menace, having their jeeps flipped in the air, tripping back into their own traps, etc. (The Trade Federation droids in the Star Wars prequels are a good example here.)
Specific variations include:
Compare Redshirt Army, which are Mooks on the good side. Similar to but not to be confused with their non-combat brother Evil Minions (likewise the Redshirt Army with the Red Shirt). Occasionally, it turns out they were Good All Along. If a "character" who would otherwise qualify as a Mook is disqualified because he's apparently acting on his own, you have a Bit Part Bad Guy.
In Video Games, mooks tend to be slightly more powerful, and able to at least hurt the hero, if not kill him a few times. However, 9 times out of 10 the hero has a Healing Factor (more often objects used to heal than spontaneous healing) while the mooks stay hurt forever. Also, while the hero can restart if he/she dies, the mooks (usually) only die once per level, and when the level is restarted, they usually do the exact same thing they did before.
If they're lucky, mooks may very occasionally get promoted to the status of a more major villain. The heroes may also be able to persuade them over to the good side, in which case they have performed a Mook Face Turn. Humanizing mooks is a basic technique of Deconstruction.
Note: With respect to media (particularly anime) a "mook" can also refer to a Japanese publication which is a hybrid of a magazine and a book.
Note #2: It's also a mostly obsolete racial slur against Italians, so use with caution.
Examples:
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Anime and Manga
- Ghouls in Hellsing. Mindless, infinitely disposable and created en masse by inexperienced vampires. At one point, very early in the original Anime, Seras Victoria shoots them down in rows with her first BFG. It doesn't seem to do much.
- The typical low rank Marines in One Piece. Luffy can defeat hundreds at once, and their role is just typically to showcase the abilities of a certain character (and freak out about how crazy he is,) then continue the attack so that they can get mowed down some more. True to form, they are frequently endless, for all intents and purposes.
- Non-ninja in Naruto. Any kind of soldier that's not a ninja, most notably in the movies, is totally useless.
- Except the Samurai...
- Most of the ninja too, for that matter.
- The Zako Soldiers in SD Gundam Force, and later the Pawn Leos as well.
- When some Ryozanpaku masters in Kenichi The Mightiest Disciple tell Kenichi that he is not as good fighter as he ought to be because he didn't defeat his last opponent fast enough, Shigure, who nurtures some sisterly feelings towards Kenichi, tries to defend him by telling that the opponent threw too many mooks at him. This provokes the following responses from them:
Sakaki: ( laughing) There's no need to count trash... I once took out a master who had over 100 underlings. Ma Kensei: I once slipped through 1000 soldiers and only took out the commander. Apachai: I once completely annihilated all my enemies and allies.
- Terrorists, cartel goons, Nazis, mercenaries, yakuza punks and other no-name bad guys tend to die in droves whenever the crew of the Lagoon Company or one of the many other Badasses of Black Lagoon swings into action.
- Fist Of The North Star has mooks by the truckload. Most of them meet a very messy end.
Comic Books
- Subverted in Grant Morrison's comic series-cum-"memetic hypersigil" The Invisibles. In the very first issue, King Mob guns down a large array of cannon-fodder, all wearing helmets with visors. Later in the series, we see the life and times of one of these nameless mooks, and his widow eventually saves Mob's life, calling in medical help for him when she finds him dying of gunshot wounds. When asked about her motive, she replies that her husband was likewise gunned down.
- Subverted with the X Men character Strong Guy. Guido started out as just an anonymous mook working for some bad guys... but then he reformed and joined the good guys. At the time, he joked that he was just doing it for the paycheck, but he has proven to be a worthy hero.
- Used extensively in Marvel Comics in the form of HYDRA.
- And AIM, The Hand and HAMMER.
- Don't forget Flag-Smasher's ULTIMATUM.
Film
- Most James Bond villains employ mooks.
- Dr Evil has a neverending supply of disposable 'henchmen' in Austin Powers.
- Subverted in the first film as, whenever a wisecracking Austin killed a henchman, the film would immediately cut to the Mook's family or friends learning of his death and mourning him.
- Played with and lampshaded by Nigel Powers in Goldmember:
Nigel Powers: Do you know who I am? [henchman nods yes] Have you any idea how many anonymous henchmen I've killed over the years? [henchman nods in the affirmative] And look at you. You haven't even got a name tag. You've got no chance. Why don't you just fall down? Go on, son. [henchman falls to floor]
- The storm troopers from Star Wars.
- In the prequels, the battle droids.
- In the Blaxploitation thriller Three The Hard Way, the heroes take on a bunch of thugs, with nothing stronger than cap pistols, at long range, and never miss, while the thugs, armed with fully automatic machine guns, at point-blank range, can't hit the broad side of a barrel. The bad guys all succumb to the cap pistol assault, and the good guys emerge unscathed except for one of them who has a slight flesh wound.
- The Chinese movie Hero has some almost Diablo-like flashback scenes where the heroes mow down enemy soldiers by the scores, if not hundreds.
- The most recent Mummy film had an army of (technically) zombie clay soldiers. Which is about as dangerous as that sounds. Just the thing for killing with impunity.
- Repo! The Genetic Opera has Gene Cops, employees of Gene Co who are a lot more public and a lot less deadly than the henchgirls and Repo Men but are still enough to scare fifteen scalpel sluts and Grave-Robber into fleeing. Amber Sweet also has her valets.
- David Lo Pan's army of Wing Cong in Big Trouble In Little China.
- The horde of Japanese thugs whom the Bride effortlessly reduced to cold cuts in Kill Bill, Vol. 1.
- Ecoban soldiers in Sky Blue.
Literature
- As above, Terry Pratchett not only subverts, but smashes, immolates, and urinates on this trope with Guards! Guards! and, indeed, any book that stars the Ankh Morpork City Watch. People who have read these novels often have a hard time, thereafter, accepting city guards as nothing more than a mild threat to the hero. Even Nobby and Fred, ineffective coppers in every sense of the word, manage to be more competent officers than your standard fantasy watchman. Of course, the whole matter could be because standard fantasy officers are nameless, sometimes faceless, and effectively rankless since they're going to die anyway, while the average Ankh Morpork copper usually even has a personality, much to the envy of his friends on other worlds.
- This may be due primarily to Pratchett's compulsive character-deepening. Originally, Guards! Guards! was going to be about Carrot and told from Carrot's perspective, but Pratchett found that Vimes had way more character to him than he expected, so he wrote it from Vimes' point of view. Every character he introduces into the watch ends up with a rather definable personality, even those who seem like cheap jokes based on the War On Straw. Constable Visit-The-Unbeliever-With-Explanatory-Pamphlets ends up with a fairly rounded personality even by the end of his introduction.
- Guards! Guards! also has a side-example in the genuine Mooks of the Palace Guard, who are Genre Savvy enough to be terrified at the prospect of facing a single, unarmed, smiling foe: after all, that is statistically the most dangerous kind of enemy.
- The archetypal Mooks must surely be the orc hordes from Lord Of The Rings.
- In The Dresden Files, the presence of hired, disposable minions is not only common, it is regularly lampshaded by the First Person Smartass that is Harry Dresden.
Live Action TV
- The Batman Rogues gallery (in the Adam West series, at least) employed mooks. A particularly nicely named group were the Penguin's Grand Order Of Occidental Nighthawks (GOONs).
- Some villains in the 1990s animated series followed suit, most memorably Mr. Freeze's thugs who wore heavy, hooded fur coats. Of course, since their employer produced pure cold, this may have been less about adhering to a theme, and more about staving off frostbite.
- Joker started off with a few minions of his own, but between his financial troubles and his reputation as a Bad Boss, it was eventually down to just him and Harley.
- Bad as he was, he had one recurring henchman in the comics before Harley: Southpaw, his left-hand man. He also had Moe, Lar, and Cur in Batman The Animated Series.
- Super Sentai and Power Rangers. Suited guys with metal masks will usually come along with the Monster Of The Week to dance around in the background while the Power Rangers pick them off.
- Many Tokusatsu shows feature henchmen for the heroes to fight.
- The Jaffa of Stargate SG-1. Extensive work in both canon and fanon has been done to justify this, mostly with weaknesses that could be removed once they changed sides;
- Biology: As long as a Jaffa isn't decapitated or ripped apart and his symbiote isn't killed, he'll usually heal completely within a week. They thus willingly charge in blindly due to..
- Training: Jaffa are conditioned from birth to see their leaders as gods who will reward them for their service in the afterlife - and thus rush their enemies on command. They have reserves, and young, ignorant soldiers are less likely to rebel.
- Armament: Staff weapons fire energy bolts which are loud, flashy, and inflict distinctive wounds, but are really hard to aim, rarely do damage beyond twenty meters and fire only once a second. People who've trained for years such as Teal'c and Master Bra'tac can hit a human-sized target at range two times out of three. Fanon is that they are purposefully Awesome But Impractical - modified to produce louder, brighter bolts at the cost of range, accuracy and power.
- Once the marines wind up at a rebel training camp, they give them FN-P90s and decent training. It's the birth of the Free Jaffa Nation!
- O'Neil outright stated that their armor and weapons were designed for intimidation, not killing. The Ori solders, who use simpler weapons that were designed for killing and ease of use, are so much deadlier despite being mostly untrained peasants, though still blindly fanatical mooks that die by the hundreds.
- The sheriff's men from Robin of Sherwood, called "The Chevrons" by this troper. The Merry Men killed ten or so per episode. It really got to the point where you had to wonder what kind of recruitment package was being offered.
- Most of the villains in Firefly have gangs of hired goons, mercenaries, or thugs to back them up. In particular, Rance Burgess and Adelei Niska seem to have their own personal armies.
- In The Sixties spy series The Man From UNCLE, THRUSH employs metric tons of Mooks. They even wear uniforms and have distinct ranks of officers (whether commissioned or non-commissioned is left up in the air) and other ranks, usually distinguished by their uniforms when both types appear.
- Subverted by Heroes, volume 4, when a Mook is sacrificed by Danko to keep his plans moving, Nathan tells him about the Mook's wife and children.
Tabletop RPG
- Feng Shui, the "Action Movie Roleplaying Game", divides foes into two categories: Mooks and Named Villains. Villains with a name get all the benefits that players do — Wound Points, deadly skills and feats, the works. Mooks get the ability to attack poorly, and are out of the fight when someone hits them with an attack whose Outcome after subtracting the mook's attack skill from the action result is five or more, and the player can choose whether or not they're either knocked out or dead. Unarmed fighters usually prefer knocking mooks out, though those with deadlier weapons will often go for killshots.
- One of the schticks available to Feng Shui players is a Gun Schtick called 'Carnival of Carnage.' It has four levels, the first two of which reduce a gunslinger's shot (action point) cost when attacking mooks, and the second two of which reduce the Outcome needed to take them down.
- Exalted has a similar mechanic, with "Extras" whose sole purpose is to be mowed down by the players. They have three health levels instead of seven, take greater wound penalties, and basically serve no purpose except to slow down the players (unless they're on the players' side, in which case they serve as cannon fodder/footsoldiers).
- Usually, they have a hard time doing even that.
- Mutants and Masterminds have 'minion' of rules that made them easier for the heroes to drop then in large numbers quickly. The rules make them very weak, including allowing the hero to "take 10" on the attack roll, making missing them unlikely, and the feat "Takedown Attack" allows you to drop unlimited Minions as long as they are within melee reach and each one falls in 1 hit.
- Dungeons and Dragons 4th edition borrows this enemy type and simplifies the rules to "Are taken out as soon as they take 1 point of damage" to simulate fighting hoards of enemies.
- Depending on whose perspective the story is being told from, Warhammer 40000's Imperial Guard can be either hapless Mooks waiting to be slaughtered or Badass Normals that bring the Emperor's fury down on all that stand before them. But, being Warhammer 40000, a number of them will still die. Also, the Orks and Tyranids generally have a lot of reserves, and generally employ the Zerg Rush in the background will reasonable success.
- They actually should be considered a Red Shirt Army, if we consider against what kind of monstrosities the Imperial Guard have to face and the fact (and this is find in the Codex just to make clear any subsecuent moral discussion) they most of the time are actually fighting to preserve humankind from becoming extinct, or worse.
- Unknown Armies provides GMs with generic Goon stats; though in earlier stages of the game (given its intentionally weak combat skills) they can be quite dangerous when armed.
- Justified for Cartoon Action Hour, which is a kiss-up to 1980s cartoons. They call them "Goons", which are just a unarmed, armed weapon or ranged weapon check which is either up to the Player or the Game Master.
- 7th Sea divides antagonists into three categories: Villains, Henchmen, and Brutes. Brutes are transparently Mooks: their purposes are to buff a villain or henchman, and to provide the heroes with easy victories (players are encouraged to come up with creative ways to knock down two or more brutes at a time). It should be noted that since in Seventh Sea, it is assumed that no character is killed unless someone specifically states that they're doing so, Moral Dissonance is sidestepped.
- In Deadlands (somewhat similar to other examples) any character with some degree of plot importance (even if it's just as a Boss Battle or similar) is a Wild Card: they get Wound points, their own Fate Chips (used to reroll dice and soak damage), and generally better gear and Edges (feats). While all player characters are Wild Cards by default, enemy characters generally aren't.
- Represented by the "Cannon Fodder" rule in GURPS. Minor NP Cs under its purview always fail attempts to dodge and are taken out automatically by any amount of damage.
Videogames
- The Pokemon games absolutely love the latter category of mook. Almost without exception throughout the series, the actual leaders of any criminal organization are a genuine threat... but the legions upon legions of grunt-level members are a bunch of nameless goofballs who are played almost entirely for laughs and are minor obstacles at best.
- It helps that they seem to just randomly recruit people off the streets. The Mooks of Team Galactic don't even know what they're being terrorists over.
- Evil Genius takes the further step of explicitly telling you that Construction Workers are expendable and can be used as cannon fodder; they're still necessary, though, as they're the only ones who can build new rooms.
- EarthBound features a minor enemy species actually named Mook found in large quantities in certain dungeons.
- Senior Mooks, on the other hand, have powerful PSI that can drop Paula in one hit.
- Not as conveniently named, but Foppy and Fobby are perhaps the embodiment of this trope: they are nondescript little blobs with feet, they are completely ineffectual in battle, they give massive experience compared to other enemies in the same areas, and it's unusual to face them any less than three at a time.
- But if they were left alone for several turns, they could concentrate again and start casting powerful PSI powers, which might make them Elite Mooks, or even a lethal Underground Monkey
- The Waddle Dees from the Kirby games are not only completely ineffectual, they barely even have faces. Although they are adorable little guys but get disposed.
- Mooks are the primary resource in most games in the Dynasty Warriors series. They're technically capable of hurting or even killing your character, and they can get between you and the more important foes you're trying to take out, but their primary purpose is to die by the hundreds and provide a bountiful harvest of experience points, arcade-style power ups, morale and, above all, entertainment.
- The beat 'em up genre, consisting of titles such as Final Fight, Streets of Rage and Golden Axe, could be seen as the forerunner to more recent series like Dynasty Warriors. The threat posed by even the most lowly mook in 16-bit era beat 'em ups is more significant, but not by much.
- Used in City of Villains, where one of the early enemy types you encounter are a branch of the local mafia called "The Mooks". Like almost all enemy types in the game, they're an endless supply of easy beatings and experience points, with only the named bosses being particularly dangerous.
- The identical nature of mooks was lampshaded in Serious Sam: The Second Encounter, where Sam asks of one, "Didn't I kick your ass three rooms back?"
- Deus Ex pits the player largely against humans wielding the exact same weapons the player can use. They also use the same model as the player for taking damage and dying.
- Until the mid game, these mooks pose a serious threat as individuals, and more than three at a time is reason enough to look for a maintenance tunnel or sniper's nest.
- The mook status is lampshaded in one mission where a mother begs you not to shoot at her son, who is one of the mooks outside. Her description is composed of elements hidden by the uniform, and chances are good you had to take him out just to get in and talk to the woman.
- Deus Ex goes beyond lampshading and into bona fide deconstruction. Many of the game's faceless mooks have multiple lines of unique dialogue, and mooks constantly have conversations which anviliciously drive home the point that they are real human beings who probably don't deserve to be gunned down en masse just because you don't feel up to sneaking past them or incapacitating them non-lethally.
- Except that they are trained soldiers and police with, for the most part, orders to kill you on sight, So Yeah.
- Except that apart from MJ 12 goons they were misinfromed that you are a terrorist, So Yeah.
- Most of the challenge in the first Prince Of Persia game that wasn't about avoiding the ubiquitous instant-death traps was engaging in sword fights with guards. The sequel, The Shadow and the Flame, had Mooks wearing bird masks in the temple levels.
- The Replicas and ATC Security guards in First Encounter Assault Recon are actually surprisingly competent and very dangerous if underestimated.
- And then you go into bullet time and devastate them with the repeating cannon or whatever ungodly powerful weapon you happen to be carrying. Mooks, mooks, mooks.
- The Fighting Polygons, Wireframes, and Alloys in the Super Smash Bros series (they were all originally called Fighting Zakos, to top it off).
- Lampshaded in Baldurs Gate: Shadows of Amn. There is an NPC called Mook who's only purpose is to die in a plot quest.
- In Metal Gear Solid 3, the enemy soldiers (GRU or KGB or Spetsnaz, or some combination thereof) are so disposable, at one point a bunch of them die to killer bees, while their leader (a plot-important character) simply kills all the bees that come near him. With his guns. By twirling them in the air. Snake, meanwhile, has to jump to probable death, to avoid certain death. Needless to say, he survives as well.
- Depending on the difficulty level, though.
- The Timesplitters series has evil henchmen in employment of the evil Khallos...EVIL, however, he does provide them with communal dressing rooms and rubber miniskirts for female members.
- The short Vietcong campaign in Vietcong 2 is something of a subversion of this. You spend a few levels playing as a young Vietcong soldier, then the campaign's ending shows your character as one of the countless nameless mooks your American character mowed down in the main American campaign.
- All the running men in the original Contra for the NES. And as a reward, the quantity of these running men increases each time you complete the game.
- Overlord has a unique look on this for a video game, in that you have and command mooks to do your evil whim. And since it's a game where you play the Evil Overlord, you use a lot of them.
- Jagged Alliance 2 has two grades of these in the Big Bad's military: constabulary 'admins' and Army 'regulars'. Both wear fatigue pants; the admins wear yellow shirts (and are unseen after only a few engagements), while the regulars 'enjoy' red-orange tops. Towards the end of the game, these two forces give way to the "Elite Guard".
- Lampshaded and parodied like everything else in Evil Genius, where you have access to a virtually unlimited supply of "minions" who tend to die in droves against high-level agents.
- One of the biggest and most egregious abusers is the Grand Theft Auto series from III onward, especially San Andreas and IV. Most of these time these mooks just magically appear after a cutscene with no real explanation why they're there other than an out-of-hand implication that they're working for an antagonist that was in said cutscene. There are even entire missions where the whole point of the mission is to kill a specific collection of mooks.
- Most levels in Banjo-Tooie have their own variant of the basic enemy that runs after you swinging its fists or some sort of blunt instrument: Ugger in Isle o' Hags (and a few other areas); Moggie in Mayahem Temple; Billy Bob in Glitter Gulch Mine; Jippo Jim in Witchyworld; Keelhaul in Jolly Roger's Lagoon; Guvnor in Grunty Industries; Biggyfoot in the icy side of Hailfire Peaks; Flatso in Cloud Cuckooland.
- A large part of Batman Arkham Asylum is spent either beating Joker's mooks into pulp, or slowly and silently taking them out from behind.
- Every Ratchet And Clank game typically has one group of reoccurring organic mooks (the Blarg, Thugs-4-Less, Tyhrranoids, Drophyds, Agorians) and robotic ones (Drek's robots, Megacorp security, ninja bots, DZ Strikers, space pirates, Nefarious Troopers).
- World Of Warcraft (and typically any MMORPG): "Greetings, Darkvarriorz. We need your help; go kill 15 [Mooks with a sword], 12 [Mooks with a bow] and 25 [Mooks with an axe] from the Defias Brotherhood and come back to see me".
- A Guilty Gear spinnoff game features the Mook Squad: Hundreds of generic guys with Only Six Faces, occasionally using Palette Swap to look more varied. Three of them can be unlocked but besides walking jumping, throwing some punched and kicks and sometimes a special attack or two (and sometimes not even that), they are next to useless. And you can't even assign them to the AI.
Web Comics
Western Animation
Web Original
- In the Whateley Universe, the main characters get to leave their Super Hero School Whateley Academy and travel into Boston for the day.. only to face The Necromancer and his homicidal Quirky Miniboss Squad, along with a couple hundred Mooks who are literally nameless and somewhat faceless. The Necromancer has lived up to his name by animating hundreds of corpses, and Phase has to fight them in the sewers underneath Boston. Only she doesn't have a flashlight.
- Clearly the writer had just played Doom 3.
- Leading to one of the funnier Nightmare Fuel sequences. Phase is worried about getting zombie gunk over her/him, and is informed s/he's probably okay. Just..."make sure to get cremated when you die."
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