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Ragtag Bunch Of Misfits
"Are you a rag-tag band of adventurers with unclear goals and good hearts? ...Yeah, you people are my biggest threat."
—Galgarion, RPG World

"Does the insurance cover if a rag-tag band of adventurers come in and destroy my lair?"
"Depends. How rag-tag are we talking here?"
—Xykon, Quest Buy Salesman, Order Of The Stick

This mission is important. The fate of the battle, nay, the war, nay, the entire world rests on the outcome. Who has the capability to stick it out, to give the good guys the victory they desperately need? This calls for a special team. The group of experienced, highly skilled, professional, team-oriented experts? Not them. The assorted group of ex-con lowlife inexperienced jerkasses who are trying to off their commander when they aren't trying to kill each other? Yeah, them.

This is usually justified in one or more of several ways:
  • Despite their flaws, they're still the best at what they do. See Bunny Ears Lawyer.
    • They have talent but not much tolerance for traditional procedure, and/or they're the only ones who can stand to work with each other.
    • Or, they are really good and not at all flawed, but really want everyone else to see them that way: making sure that the Big Bad does not realize that the Mildly Military goofballs are a Badass Crew is part of the plan
  • They're the best team that could be put together at short notice and/or budget.
  • In case the mission fails, they're expendable.
    • Alternately, they are expected to fail, so their commander will be free to take Nuke Em like he wanted to in the first place.
  • Sending in more experienced/skilled/powerful teams would have drawn too much attention. Indeed, the better suited teams may be deliberately deployed elsewhere to distract from them.
  • More powerful teams would not put up with the person ordering them about.
    • This can be that the Only Sane Man does not have authority to get the best.
    • Conversely, the man in the know can be such an annoying bully that no one would work with him, and such a control freak that he can not give his knowledge to a Reasonable Authority Figure.
  • The authorities haven't actually noticed (or are) the problem, and the heroes have to gather whoever they can.

Of course, the Ragtag Bunch of Misfits will eventually have a Misfit Mobilization Moment to get their act together and win the day. Most often it produces casualties: typically, the guy forced to go on the mission despite being the Convicted Innocent, or the Officer And A Gentleman who's been stodgy and uptight just before making a Heroic Sacrifice.

In the world of sports, this trope counts double. Last year's Super Bowl champions don't stand a chance against a random group of ex-cons, couch potatoes, and farm animals, who are almost guaranteed to pull out a last-minute win.

Examples

Anime
  • Martian Successor Nadesico has the corporation Nergal throw together an entire crew of Bunny Ears Lawyers in order to get the best of the best in every field. The character Prospector Lampshade Hangs this trope.
  • And then there's Irresponsible Captain Tylor, whose crew is mostly composed of the kind of people you don't want near pencils for fear of what they might do to each other with them, much less a destroyer-class military space ship.
    • In the Soyokaze's case, the reason it's a Ragtag Bunch Of Misfits is because the aging, broken-down destroyer has been assigned as the official dumping ground for all the lunatics, incompetents and misfits of the UPSF. In other words, every trouble-maker or disruptive element that accidentally manages to get into the military is invariably assigned here, so they'll be out of the way. The doctor is an alcoholic who's been drinking since he was three years old, the marines are all violent slobs, The Ace is arrogant and full of himself, as is the navigator, and the captain is, as far as the military higher-ups are concerned, either an absurdly lucky moron or possessed of genuine great insight but limited common sense. The only outright military and competent crewmembers are Lieutenants Yamamoto (who was assigned as the First Officer in the hopes he could somehow cover for Tylor) and Yuriko (who volunteered to join the Soyokaze in the hopes that she could somehow reform the crew).
  • The crew of White Base in the original Mobile Suit Gundam was comprised mostly of civilian refugees and a handful of junior officers who survived the attack on Side 7 in the first episode. They still manage to score a number of improbable victories against the elite forces of the Principality of Zeon, thanks to the Super Prototype principle and some of the cast developing into Newtypes. And more importantly to Federation command, they made really good decoys.
  • Both Justified and Subverted in Twentieth Century Boys. When Kenji starts up La Resistance made of guys he knew back in middle school, as they would be the only ones who were remotely familiar with who they're fighting against. After all, it's not very easy to recruit somebody off the street to fight against a cult based on your own twenty-year-old fanfiction. This ends up blowing up in his face for several reasons, the first of which would be that one of those Ragtag Misfits is the cult-leading Big Bad...
  • Eyeshield 21's Deimon Devil Bats. Other teams have full rosters, deep benches and long traditions. The Devil Bats only have 11 full-time teammembers (eight of whom were only just scraped up for this year, three by blackmail), and they all are weird in their own way.
  • Quite literally in Sayonara Zetsubou Sensei where the depressed-to-the-point-of-attempting-melodramatic-suicide-on-a-daily-basis teacher Itoshiki Nozomu's entire class, the very same people who are supposed to take care of the world of tomorrow, are a bunch of social misfits, mental cases, borderline psychopaths and WORSE... In the end, Nozomu almost comes off as a perfectly sane and socially functional person by comparison.
  • Team Dai-Gurren fits pretty well here. Kamina and Simon, two idiots who had never seen combat before were able to put up a fight against a powerful commander of the enemy forces (through use of stolen mechs they had no idea how to pilot), steal their mobile base, summarily defeat every major general they came across, along with the Big Bad. Their unit consisted roughly of around 30 or so (grew exponentially by the end) people who barely managed to survive on the surface, who were all fighting for a cause they believed in. The Rule of Cool was in full effect here, as well.
  • Division 2, the main cast of Patlabor, is made up mostly of police officers who were either Kicked Upstairs by their superiors or deemed too wimpy or too wild for the rest of the force.
  • The Yang Fleet from Legend Of The Galactic Heroes certainly gave this impression. It was first formed as the 13th Alliance Fleet, composed of new recruits and the remnant survivors of another fleet. Their first mission was occupying an invincible space fortress, which they succeeded at with ease. Ultimately, the Yang Fleet gathers up a colorful array of characters: an elite combat division of expatriate Imperials, a venerable, old Imperial officer in exile, a womanizing fighter jock, a bureaucratic family man, an ingenious orphan, rogue merchants from Phezzan - all of them led by a Genius Ditz who would much rather read history books than wage war, but who just happens to be one of the most brilliant tacticians in centuries. Dusty Attenborough and Poplan coin the phrase "foppery and whim" to describe the Yang Fleet's motivations in the face of incredible odds stacked against them.
  • In Fushigi Yuugi, the antagonist Seiryuu warriors are mostly battle-hardened, ruthless killing machines, a few of whom could conceivably take over Big Bad duties in their own right. The good guys? An Ordinary High School Student, a peasant farmer, a Wholesome Crossdresser, a permanently smiling monk, a rageaholic bandit, a burned-out country doctor, and a young boy who initially refused the call because he was afraid. Oh, and the Emperor. Subverted in that five out of seven of them get killed, and they actually fail to prevent the god Seiryuu from being summoned. Good only triumphs at the end because of a Heel Face Turn by the Seiryuu priestess.
  • One Piece. Just One Piece. Though they are pirates (more or less), it's pretty much par for the course.

Comic Books
  • British war-oriented comic Battle Action included a British Empire Dirty Dozen clone called The Rat Pack complete with cockney thug/knifeman/marksman, sneaky little pickpocket and gigantic musclebound Turk. For some reason these "Convict Commandos" wore blue battledress rather than Khaki or green.
    • Mercilessly parodied in The Rifle Brigade where fearless Captain "Khyber" D'Arcy leads Ambiguously Gay Lieutenant "Doubtful" Milk, monstrous Yorkshireman Sergeant Crumb ("'ey oop"), Cockney thug Corporal Geezer ("Yer aht of ordah!"), Private Hank the Yank ("Gawd Dammit!") and The Piper (who isn't an actual soldier but is still probably the most brutal of the lot) on missions against.... well you really just have to read these for yourself! But to give you an idea on the type of operations entrusted to the Rifle Brigade, one of their most important assignments involved recovering a powerful arcane artifact before the Axis could get their hands on it. The artifact was Hitler's missing testicle.
    • Captain D'Arcy would eventually lampshade the squad's existance by saying that there's always been a place for a Rifle Brigade in the British forces, and that there was a Rifle Brigade-type collection of misfits before there were rifles, because "when you get down to it there's some things ordinary chaps just can't do!"
    • The Rifle Brigade was also likely a parody of Sergeant Fury's Howling Commandos, the Leatherneck Riders, and the Deadly Dozen. Notable, Doubtful takes the place of Ambiguously Gay Percival Pinkerton, while Hank the Yank is the token foreigner (again, Pinkerton), Crumb the gigantic Bruiser (Dum Dum Dugan), etc.
      • Basically, pick a war comic. Even the stark realism of Sergeant Rock's Easy Company leans this way, featuring the mild-mannered Wildman (whose name comes from his secretly being The Pesci), one armed bazooka expert Zack, nebbish bespectacled sniper Four-Eyes, clinically anxious Worrywart, etc.
  • The Suicide Squad in The DCU. A covert branch of the U.S. government that keeps sending villains (and a few heroes) on suicide missions until they've earned release from prison... or they die. Think Dirty Dozen with superpowers (some of them, anyway). While literally every incarnation fits, the Injustice League version is the most apt , with General Failure Major Disaster, Dumb Muscle Big Sir, Insufferable Genius Clock King, Deadpan Snarker Cluemaster, and The Chew Toy Multi-Man. The subversion happens when all of them die in the first issue except for Major Disaster.
  • Subverted in Kyle Baker's Iraq war satire Special Forces, where an army recruiter desperate to make quota so he doesn't get sent back to Iraq recruits a ragtag bunch of misfits, falsifying records to recruit criminals, drug addicts, those mentally or physically unfit for service, and others who by all rights shouldn't be in the army, but ends up having to serve alongside them when one of them goes off his meds and gets himself killed before boot camp. By the end of the first issue, he and all but two of his recruits have been slaughtered.
  • Also from The DCU, Gail Simone's Secret Six, a team of mercenaries who are spectacularly messed up, and know it. Their enemies are even worse.
    • The Losers in the same universe, several military men who for one reason or another are off official duty and now serve covertly; they're called the Losers because they have nothing left to lose (try understanding the idea behind that), and include Captain Storm, a one-eyed, one-legged salty sea dog if'n thar ever were one, or Johnny Cloud, who was genuinely heroic and uber-competent but insisted on being a Loser because, well, he felt like a loser.
  • The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, naturally. Mina's initially insulted that she should be put in charge of such a motley crew but she's just as weird as the others.
  • The original ABC Warriors; Hammerstein is a warhorse famous for his strength and leadership skills but rumored to have murdered a human superior, Joe Pineapples is an ace marksman who once killed a target from orbit but is perhaps the most unsavory being in the universe, Happy Shrapnel is simply dumped onto them because as an older model he's not very user friendly, Mongrol is a monster of metal who is constantly full of only rage and confusion, Mek-Quake is stupid, violent, and crude, Deadlock is an extreme Knight Templar, Blackblood is a Complete Monster known for murder at the slightest provocation, Steelhorn is the original veteran of the Volgan War turned into a horrific mess of molten slag, and so on and so forth. They're the most capable combat unit fighting the Volgs, but goddamn. Just goddamn.
    • Later additions only enhance this image; Mad Ronn the bomb disposal expert (whose skill at his profession is uncertain because he kind of dies the first and only time he actually tries to defuse a bomb), Hitaki the warrior with samurai programming, Morrigun the waitress whose combat skills come from secondary bouncer software, and Ro-Jaws, who is honestly more of a mascot than anything else. Morrigun was the result of a Terrible Interviewees Montage; you should see the guys they turned down.

Film
  • The Dirty Dozen, of course.
  • The Devils Brigade, the Americans are an example, while the Canadians are more serious about it. The real First Special Service Force recruited its American members by asking for volunteers, not forcing the dregs of the Army into it, though plenty of troublemakers got "volunteered" by their commanding officers to get rid of them. The SSF weeded out a lot of the worst, but it was still a pretty motley bunch.
  • Armageddon: "The fate of the planet is in the hands of a bunch of retards I wouldn't trust with a potato gun."
  • The crew of the Stingray in Down Periscope were either a parody of the concept, or a ham-fisted exaggeration of it. The trope is justified by the fact that they were intended to fail, and their complete willingness to ignore regulations, common sense, and sanity are key to their victory.
  • Shaolin Soccer provides an interesting twist with a rag-tag soccer team full of washed-up Shaolin monks. Despite their shabby appearance and total lack of soccer experience, they harness martial arts superpowers to defeat the reigning champions.
  • Both the Bad News Bears and The Mighty Ducks play out this formula with kids.
  • Major League is basically The Bad News Bears with a Major League team. Also, unlike the Bears, the Indians win the AL East.
  • Dodgeball A True Underdog Story actually calls the team of average Joes "The Average Joes".
  • Wall-E has the titular character, his girlfriend and a bunch of insane robots, HANS in particular.
  • Sort of subverted in The Last Castle, where a convicted army general gathers up an army of inmates at a military jail. One would think his army is a Ragtag Bunch Of Misfits, but since they all used to be soldiers, they're as disciplined and well-coordinated as any official battalion.
  • The Ghostbusters (as well as their Animated Adaptation equivalents The Real Ghostbusters and the Extreme Ghostbusters) are a group of losers and outcasts who wind up saving the same world that shunned them.
  • The replacement Washington Sentinels in The Replacements, featuring a notoriously easy-to-neutralize quarterback, a convict, an ex-soccer player, a sumo wrestler, two gargantuan gun-toting brothers, an Evangelical Christian who waves a bible at all his problems, a deaf man, and a former policeman with serious anger management problems. Even the Sentinels cheerleaders are a collection of bizarre performers who would never work on any other squad but pull it together for awesomeness.
  • You'll be hard pressed to find a bunch more rag-tag or misfit than the one being asked to save the Earth in Monsters Vs Aliens: a bug-headed Mad Scientist; an over-the-hill Fish Person; a brainless, sentient glob of Soylent Soy; a fuzzy baby Kaiju; and leading them all, a White Haired Pretty Girl (albeit a very tall one.)
  • The Diggers who join up with Dr. Noah after one of them is killed by Ecoban soldiers in Sky Blue.
  • Red Dawn has this with a group of teens fighting the evil Soviets.
  • Inglourious Basterds has a lovely Reconstruction of the classic millitary sort. The Basterds are a bunch of Jewish-American Sociopathic Soldiers (joined by one angry German Jew) willing to do all kinda of horrible things to Those Wacky Nazis. Their quirkiness works for them, as legends sprout around them.

Literature
  • The Discworld novel Monstrous Regiment features one of these. Not only is the titular group of Borogravian soldiers a Ragtag Bunch Of Misfits, they're all secretly women in disguise.
    • The Monstrous Regiment's survival is a little more believable when you take into account that several of their number have super(natural) powers and their commanding officer (in fact if not name) is a Magnificent Bastard who knows everyone on both sides of the conflict and carries a bit more pull than their rank would suggest.
    • And of course, the early City Watch novels. The change occurs after Feet of Clay, when the Watch starts getting so big that Vimes doesn't even know all his officers anymore. (Vimes still thinks of them as being something of a Rag Tag Bunch Of Misfits, of course—no one sane wants to be a copper.)
  • Knowingly enacted by a Genre Savvy warrior in Mercedes Lackey's Tales of the Five Hundred Kingdoms. An ambient magical force in the land (The Tradition) likes to have events work out like they do in stories. The warrior assembles a group of untrained teenage girls, equips them to look suitably ragged, and leads them into battle. The Tradition then ensures that they fight like expert soldiers, because they are a Ragtag Bunch Of Misfits and Underdogs Never Lose.
  • The Wraith Squadron novels in the Star Wars Expanded Universe were based on this principle. Having witnessed some of the problems his squad ran into during the Bacta War, Wedge Antilles proposed a new type of squadron. To address the New Republic's budgetary problems, he said that he would give the squad to them "for free"—taking the washouts, the disciplinary screwups, the mental cases, aliens who just trouble fitting in with human and near-human socities, and those who were in general on the verge of being discharged, to get them out of other commanders' hair but still give them a second one last chance.
    • After Wraith Squadron's initial success, though, several new members explained that they signed up because of the squadron's success rate, unaware of their initial reputation. That being said, they are either as charmingly wacky or as deeply scarred as the original squad, and, soon fit right in. The Wraiths are eventually considered competent...if unpredictable, unorthodox, and hardly military disciplined. Appropriately, they're recommissioned as an Intelligence unit.
  • It seems that most of the Malazan Empire's army is made up of a Ragtag Bunch Of Misfits. Well at least the Bridgeburners and the Bonehunters anyways.
    • It's hinted that the Empire actually encourages that sort of thing, believing that allowing individual squads (and soldiers) to find their own idiosyncratic ways of fighting is more efficient than enforcing conformity in the ranks. Seeing as this is more or less accurate in the Heroic Fantasy world the story takes place in, this might make the Empire an entire nation that is Genre Savvy.
    • And then there's the Mott Irregulars, a bunch of insane country hicks lead by twenty warlock brothers and a sister (the meanest of them all) who are so ragtag and fit so badly that they managed to run circles around the Bridgeburners for more than a year and win at the end.
  • The Phule's Company novels have this as their premise; The "Omega Company" is a dumping ground for troops that no commander wanted to deal with, and Phule is given command as a punishment for strafing a peace treaty signing.
    • Naturally, the Omega Company just need a leader with charisma, patience, flexible ethics, and loads of money, which is what they get in Phule. The rest goes splendidly.
  • Justified in Eve Forward's Villains By Necessity, where only criminals and evildoers can save the world, and there's only a handful left. Naturally, it takes a while for them to get along.
  • The 27th Penal Panzer Regiment of the Sven Hassel novels is made up of ex-convicts and court-martialed soldiers who have been 'pardoned' and sent off to die for Nazi Germany.
  • The Zone series of World War III novels by James Rouch is about the Special Combat Group, made up of soldiers picked up on their various assignments from the US, British, and Dutch forces, and deserters from the Soviet army and East German border police. The established special forces units despise such ad-hoc groups and are exerting political pressure to shut them down.
  • In Dan Abnett's Eisenhorn novels, Inquisitor Eisenhorn's retinue includes in their number: a gunslinging pilot, an aging scholar who's literally addicted to knowledge, an ex-cop, an anti-psychic prostitute, and a flamboyant cyborg starship captain. And that's just the first novel.
    • In his Ravenor novels, Inquisitor Ravenor, though starting with a retinue, adds a Street Urchin, an arbite who was targeted by the Chaos forces for knowing too much, and a doctor who is working illegally because of having lost his license by caring for people not allowed to be treated and falsifying records to get the supplies he needs.
  • In Sandy Mitchell's Ciaphas Cain novel Duty Calls, Inquisitor Vail's retinue already includes a former commissar/member of a penal regiment, and a former arbite who had, while undercover, imploded a criminal organization with a judicious murder and frame, and picks up a food vendor who had stumbled into some knowledge of the Inquisition — and picked up a gun when cornered by a Chaos cult. Warhammer40000 Inquisitors seem to attract this trope.
    • It's lampshaded, too; Cain wonders if eccentricity is a requirement for joining up with Vail, who notes that in a job like that, you just tend to find more people whose view of the universe is... unusual.
  • In Sandy Mitchell's Ciaphas Cain novel Death or Glory, Cain whips together "Cain's Liberators" from the tattered remnants of the PDF armies and civilians on the continent overrun by orks. Including getting all their medical attention from a vet.
    • For the Emperor; the ragtag band of court-martialed soldiers offered amnesty in exchange for their services function as a well trained military unit. So much so that even two of them who were specifically court-martialed for trying to kill one another were able to work together without incident... at least between each other.
  • Perhaps more so than the above examples, Gav Thorpe's Warhammer 40000 Last Chancers novels fit this trope to a dark and bloody tee, being made up of the scum and villainy of the Imperium.
  • In Sandy Mitchell's Warhammer 40000 novel Scourge the Heretic, Carolus already has an interesting collection in his retinue. He picks up two soldiers who were at a post when witches attacked and alerted him, and the shuttle pilot who took him there.
  • Poul Anderson's Operation Chaos ends with the narrator considering the Ragtag Bunch Of Misfits that had literally gone To Hell And Back. He concludes that it's the devil who has no sense of humor; God must love to laugh.
  • Lois Mc Master Bujold's Dendarii Mercenaries were a pretty ragtag bunch when Miles first created them in The Warrior's Apprentice.
  • In Tad Williams' Otherland series, the group of protagonists that ends up infiltrating the Grail Brotherhood's private virtual reality network consists of a South African schoolteacher, a Bushman, a pair of American teenage gamers (one of whom has a terminal disease), a third teenager who's an ex drug addict, a reclusive blind French researcher, a Chinese grandmother, a German doctor and cult refugee, and an old man who's an Accidental Pervert. Their only connection is that they all know someone who's fallen victim to the mysterious comas caused by the Other and stumbled upon the clues left by Mysterious Informant Sellars.
  • In the latest Temeraire book, the title character forges one of these from the collection of renegades, retirees, and rejected experimental crossbreeds that were in the breeding grounds he was exiled to, after getting word that his captain had been killed and Napoleon had invaded Britain.
  • The five central characters in Douglas Hill's ColSec Trilogy are a group of juvenile delinquents who have been exiled to an alien planet by the world government. Of course, they end up as recruiters for La Resistance when one of its leaders falls in with them...apparently, because they're "tough, smart, lucky, and survivors." (Bear in mind that this group consists of a Barbarian Hero—in a Space Opera, no less—an empathic Wrench Wench, a Tsundere with super night vision, a Keet, and a Deadpan Snarker...oh, hell, it's actually Better Than It Sounds.)
  • The cast of any story set in the Bordertown shared universe, ever.

Live Action TV
  • Black Sheep Squadron (originally titled Baa Baa Black Sheep) is about the exploits of a squadron of misfit pilots fighting the Japanese in the South Pacific during World War Two. One pilot has crashed so many times he's techically a Japanese ace. Others are drunks, insubordinate brawlers, Japanese-American pacifist mystics, or just plain crazy. Their commander is a drunk, insubordinate, over-the-hill ex-Flying Tiger who whips them into shape and turns them into the terrors of the South Pacific. It's based on a true story, and the while the misfit tendencies of the squadron members themselves are highly exaggerated, Gregory "Pappy" Boyington, the squadron commander, was if anything MORE of a drunken misfit Magnificent Bastard than the one in the TV series.
  • The Darker And Edgier BBC TV show Torchwood details the exploits of a band of misfits who seem to have nothing in common save the fact they are all inexplicably bisexual. In fact, almost as many episodes (including the apocalyptic season finale) deal with the team members fighting each other as with the supposed premise of protecting Earth (or, at least, Britain) from aliens.
  • Firefly is essentially the ragtag bunch of misfits IN SPACE!.
    • Of course, they weren't hired by anyone, and any big heroing was entirely their idea.
      • Well, they do aim to misbehave.
  • Battlestar Galactica. A Commander who's brilliant but can't play politics and as such is about to be quietly retired; an alcoholic, caustic, foul-mouthed tyrant of an XO; a stratospherically gifted but undisciplined and half (or more) crazy pilot; the commander's competent but resentful-yet-idealistic son; a genius scientist who can't keep it in his pants; and a schoolteacher are the people exemplified as the best that is left of all of humanity. And their ship is an aging, battered, about-to-be-decommissioned bucket which (due to being ancient and obsolete) is actually the perfect weapon against masters of electronic warfare.
    • The Fleet itself qualifies. It carries the last survivors of humanity and consists of; cargo ships, one or two science vessels, factory/refinery ships where workers toil endlessly in terrible conditions, a freighter which essentially becomes a slavery and black market hub, passenger liners (airplanes in space) and a massive luxury liner (complete with artificial gardens) that travel together with an old battleship that was supposed to be retiring, its brand-new cousin commanded by General Ripper and, much later, a Cylon Baseship. And the best bit is, there are plenty of episodes showing just how much they can't stand each other and only do because it is the next best option.
  • Hogans Heroes are a ragtag bunch of multinational soldiers who are probably one of the most powerful Allied sabotage and espionage forces in all of Germany. Even the oblivious and childish Carter is a Genius Ditz when it comes to explosives.
  • Power Rangers dips into this quite often; even when the team as a whole are trained professionals their leader is often a rookie. Still, some teams are more ragtag than others:
  • Babylon 5 makes being a Ragtag Bunch Of Misfits (or as J Michael Straczynski puts it, being "community-builders") our collective Hat.
  • The leader of the outfit is addicted to his own adrenaline. The mechanic and The Big Guy is in desperate need of anger management classes and has to be knocked out every time they need to travel by airplane. The con man is, shall we say, very easily distracted by the presence of pretty women. As soon as he breaks the team pilot and in-house medical advisor out of the psychiatric ward, they're on their way. Aren't you glad you just hired The A Team?
  • Glee gets its entire premise from this. A Cool Teacher Mentor takes on the worst Glee club in the state consisting of an obnoxious diva, the school's star quarterback, a Camp Gay who also plays football, a Sassy Black Woman, a stuttering Asian Perky Goth, a nerd in a wheelchair, three celibacy club cheerleaders and three more football players.
  • Supernatural: The entire subculture of hunters. They're all just a bunch of emotionally scarred people who make it their (non-paying) job to hunt and kill supernatural beings, most likely because someone they were close to was killed by one. Considering how rampant these paranormal attacks seem to be, you'd think the government would set up a secret agency to fight them. But no, it's left entirely up to these people, who will break as many laws and wander the earth as much as they have to in order to get the job done, with no thanks or pay to show for it.

Tabletop Games
  • Taken to an extreme, as is everything in in the Warhammer 40000 universe with entire penal legions, where the worst of the worst of the Imperium's convicted felons are sent on literal suicide missions in return for a general pardon in the unlikely event they survive. Think Dirty Dozen in battalion size. This trope is best exemplified in in the novel Kill Team.
    • Hell, the entire 597th could be considered a ragtag bunch of misfits. Of course, given the 40k universe's casually lethal nature, it's a good thing that they get constant reinforcements from Valhalla...
    • Colonel Schaeffer's Last Chancers. Recruited from penal planets and given the opportunity to redeem themselves by dying for the Emperor.
    • The 40k fanfilm Damnatus follows the same idea, centring around a squad of mercenaries conscripted by the Inquisition to root out a suspected Chaos cult. There's the leader von Remus, sidekick Corris, big guy Wodan and their resident tech-priest Oktavian, all kept under close watch by more straight-laced PDF sergeant Adeodatus and his sidekick Nira.
    • A lot of Inquisitor's retinue tend to end up as this as well since Inquisitors frequently recruit people that they meet during their work with the only criteria being competence and loyalty.
  • Blood Bowl gives us the Motley Horde, a Blood Bowl team that fits this describtion to a tee. Not even the coach knows what kind of lineup he will see each game.
  • Every Dungeons And Dragons party ever, with few exceptions. See also the Video Games section and how they talk about the various RPGs; this is where they got the idea. It's possible to coordinate a non-ragtag adventuring party with some pre-game work, but a Ragtag Bunch of Level 1 Misfits spontaneously joining up for mutual adventure and profit is the default assumption.

Video Games
  • Because Destiny Says So, the hero of the various Suikoden games must battle The Empire and optimally gather together a force led by One Hundred And Eight very, very diverse individuals. A minority of them are seasoned troops. Most are crossdressing tea fanciers, elevator operators, cape-wearing squirrels... it just gets weirder after that.
  • Neverwinter Nights: Hordes of the Underdark qualifies, as your possible companions include a gentleman tiefling with a frenzied demon side; a reformed drow assassin; an either vengeful or reformed ghost of a fallen paladin; and a kobold bard turned Red Dragon Disciple. And all of you are Epic-level. Even the kobold.
    • Especially the kobold. The Big Bad tries to persuade your allies to turn on you. Most of them wil stay if you're nice to them at various points, or discovered certain things about them. Deekin will stay no matter what.
  • While the team in Neverwinter Nights 2 is a walking bunch of racial stereotypes, the expansion, Mask of the Betrayer, has you spend the game travelling with a wizard who is a product of some other person dividing their soul; a hagspawn Casanova; an exiled half-angel crusader with plans to tear down a major feature of the foundation of the universe; and, depending on the choices you make, either an undead construct of countless souls of thugs and criminals or a giant fuzzy spirit bear god. It's worth mentioning that the hero him/herself is the manifestation/victim of a spirit-destroying curse with the potential to devour gods.
  • The vast majority of Computer Role Playing Games, for that matter. Who's going to defeat the world destroying monster? Why, a teenage kid, his childhood mad scientist friend, a sheltered princess, a cursed knight, a robot, and a prehistoric cavewoman (and possibly a misanthropic sorceror). They needn't bother recruiting any trained soldiers or acquire any heavy artillery.
    • Lampshaded early in Final Fantasy VII when, upon hearing the party introduce itself one member at a time, Rufus Shinra shrugs and replies, "What a crew."
  • The crew who ends up saving the world from being Porky's oyster in Mother 3 is a cowardly preteenage boy who can't quite get over his troubled past, his loyal but useless in battle dog, a teen girl raised by freaky cross-dressing fairy things who has been locked away in a castle all her life, and a smelly, ridiculed thief in his 20s with a crippled leg. Yet somehow, we're not doomed.
  • In Super Mario RPG: Legend of the Seven Stars, your party consists of a mute everyman plumber with superhuman jumping ability, the monster king who is typically his worst enemy, the princess he has to save just about every other week, a talking cloud that can control the weather, and a possessed doll.
  • Fire Emblem: Radiant Dawn's Dawn Brigade, justified as they are a group of resistance fighters, rather then a formal military group, but that justification goes straight out the window when they become the core of a full blown rebel army.
  • Delta Squad in Gears Of War fit the trope perfectly - though everyone on the team is a soldier, they argue amongst each other constantly, are generally a collection of jerkasses, and the (newly promoted) squad leader is an actual ex-convict freed literally hours minutes before the mission began.
    • It is stated by several of the characters however, that Marcus's trial was a sham and that before it he was an extremely skilled soldier.
  • Planescape Torment. An amnesiac immortal trying to find out who he is and to die while he still can; a flying talking skull with the libido and vocabulary of a frisky teenager; the last warrior of an ancient order who wield blades attuned to their minds, capable of destroying anything; a fiendblooded thief and corpse-collector; a chaste succubus; a perpetually burning man who loves it; a being embodying geometric order cut off from the Hive Mind of its brethren, accompanied by a pair of semi-sentient spirits who have shaped themselves into its crossbows; and a haunted suit of armor kept together by its refusal to abandon its duty to Justice.
  • This is pretty much the entire point of Battlefield: Bad Company. B Company is apparently a dumping ground for anyone the Army deems a troublemaker, making them expendable. Plus, the squad featured pretty much qualifies in and of itself: a demolitions man who blew up the wrong latrine and loves to go in depth on his philosophical non-sequiturs, a cowardly comm specialist who looked up porn and wound up giving the Department of Defense network a nasty virus, a chopper pilot whose boredom and subsequent recreational drug use led to an accident that then led to his reassignment, and a weary sergeant who just wants to get out as soon as possible and is willing to take a transfer to the highest mortality rate company in the Army to get it.
  • Depending on who you recruit in your pack, Spore has elements of this trope. I've ended up with someone with his cilia from the Tidepool, and yet he lasted longer than the others.
  • In Mass Effect, the fate of the entire galaxy rests in the hands of a war hero/ruthless commander/Shell Shocked Senior, who is backed up by a telekinetic tech with training issues, an angry Marine with trust issues, an angry cop with authority issues, a Proud Warrior Race Guy mercenary with parental issues, an alien mechanic with more parental issues, and a blue-skinned Hot Scientist with even more parental issues. Big, happy family, right?
  • Disgaea certainly qualifies, even if the 'heroes' aren't very heroic. You have the orphaned son of the demon king, his sidekick of debatable loyalty, an assassin angel (don't ask), Captain Gordon, Defender of Earth and his two sidekicks, the gorgeous scientist and the funky robot, various defeated enemies, and don't forget the souls sewn into demonic penguin bodies in the Prinny Squad.
  • Bioware seems to love these. Jade Empire features as the last hope for a fantasty world based on East Asian mythology, a martial artist who is secretly the last of a group of monks who served the goddess of rebirth; his/her childhood friend who is troubled by vague prophetic visions; a former assassin; a hobo seeking revenge for his dead daughter; a loud, outgoing, sociopathic mercenary; a Mad Scientist with a fondness for explosives and flying machines; a little girl possessed by a benevolent demon and his evil twin; a henpecked Drunken Master; and a Rebellious Princess who dresses like a cross between a ninja and a belly dancer.
  • The Gallian Militia from Valkyria Chronicles are like this, Squad 7 even more so. Notable in that they're not as ragtag-y as most other examples.
  • Hiro and the gang from Lunar: Eternal Blue qualify as they, strangely except for the main character Hiro, have some problems hidden from others. In fact, BigBad Zophar explicitly refers to them as "the ragtag party of misfits."
  • Boots and his buddies from Anachronox certainly qualify: a stripper, a toy robot, TWO scientists, an alcoholic ex-superhero, and an entire planet, which you at several points were exploring.
  • The Wasteland crew in Tony Hawk's American Wasteland. Unofficial leader Iggy van Zandt is explicitly called "the king of the misfits" for a reason. And with friends like the player character (a clueless farmboy who just got off the bus), Boone (a violent screw-up who couldn't even cut it as a gang member), Murphy (every slimy agent ever minus the money), Useless Dave (whose endless knowledge of pointless minutae never fails to bore)... yeah, that's ragtag.
  • Lampshaded by Agatio in Golden Sun: The Lost Age: "Well, this is an unlikely bunch of ragamuffins."
  • Every team in City Of Heroes (and many other MMORP Gs, really) except particularly coordinated ones, given the Fantasy Kitchen Sink nature of the superhero genre, and also the casual-friendly nature of the game where it's not uncommon for the fate of the world to be in the hands of a team that may include one or more of the following: A 13-year-old, a 60-year-old, a drunk, a furry, a hopeless powerlevelled newbie, and maybe a Munchkin if you're lucky.
  • While Raze's group in the second Mana Khemia game is more-or-less a well-oiled group, Ulrika's group fits this precisely, consisting of a fairy(?) larger than Ulrika and far more timid, a guy in an animal suit/ball which said suit carries who can switch at will, a young boy with a machine obsession (and an abusive sister, but that's on Raze's side), a girl who believes curses are "incantations", and finally, Ulrika herself. In-battle, Ulrika's side is a bit more powerful than Raze's, due to tactical considerations and better overall abilities.
  • In Mercenaries 2, A five-person team composed of a revenge-driven merc, a snarky computer geek, a lecherous helicopter pilot, a perpetually drunken jet pilot, and a snarky mechanic, destroys the Venezuelan government, and defeats a superpower-backed army as nothing more than a means to that end.

Web Comics
  • A Girl and Her Fed has a main cast consisting of a hyperactive martial artist (the Girl) a 6'5 cyborg secret agent (her Fed), the ghost of Benjamin Franklin, and a talking koala.
  • Crimson Dark also has the Ragtag Bunch Of Misfits IN SPACE!
    • Last Resort sees this and raises you a Reality Show. Of course, they don't really DO anything of worldly importance (yet), but still, there they are.
  • Lampshaded and subverted in 8-Bit Theater, especially with the second party of worthy warriors always arriving too late to do any good or be hired for the quest.
    • And again recently in Episode 1163 'Semantics' when they faced Sarda. Red Mage confronts him and The Wizard Who did It says "You and what ragtag band of adventurers with humorously conflicting personalities who learn the true meaning of friendship?". RM points behind him. They ran off.
  • The Last Days Of Foxhound portrays FOXHOUND (the Quirky Miniboss Squad of Metal Gear Solid) this way. It is played with a bit, as everyone, including the misfits themselves, readily acknowledge how unstable and insane the team is, but also recognize that they are able to accomplish feats that would be impossible for any other group.
  • The Order Of The Stick crew certainly qualifies. Roy is pretty competent in his own right, but his band consists of a dwarf who is convinced that trees are evil, a childish bard who is completely useless in battle until he takes a prestige class that depends on puns to be effective, a greedy rogue who constantly steals from the rest of the party, a megalomaniac elf wizard with an unknown gender, and a bloodthirsty halfling who defines Heroic Sociopath. Their evil counterparts aren't any better, either…
  • In No Rest For The Wicked, November acquires an anthromorphic cat Perrault (intentionally), the Ax Crazy Red by accident, and Claire after they happen to rescue her from being burnt at the stake.
  • The main cast of Sluggy Freelance consists of a kinda dim freelance web designer, a Mad Scientist obsessed with guns and explosives, a witch who's occasionally possessed by her Tome Of Eldritch Lore, an occasional camel, a Shape Shifter alien, a hyperactive ferret, and the most dangerous and evil rabbit on the face of the Earth. Despite not making it a mission to fight evil, they've actually saved the world a number of times, mostly because apocalyptic matters seem to turn up wherever they go.
    • And if something doesn't turn up to endanger the world, one of them will usually end up endangering it themselves.

Web Original
  • The five protagonists from the web fiction serial Dimension Heroes, despite their increase in power and skill over the course of the series, have yet to fully separate themselves from this trope.
  • The main characters of Red vs. Blue. While they are all fully armed soldiers, they are also the least qualified people to be handling the various omnicidal maniacs that cross their path.

Western Animation
  • Played with in Transformers: Beast Wars. The oft-bickering good-guy Maximals are somewhat of a ragtag group, the crew of an exploration vessel forced into battle and joined by a Defector From Decadence, but the Predacon antagonists fit the trope even better, backstabbing, scheming, and jockeying for position constantly.
    • Similarly invoked in Transformers Animated, in which the job of saving the day lands on a repair crew with barely any real weapons who've mostly never been in combat before, while the Decepticons also spend a large time disorganized and spread apart. Of course, when the team of experts does show up, they're not a lot of help...
  • Parodied with the elementary school dodgeball team in the South Park episode "Cojoined Fetus Lady", who make it all the way to the finals much to their own shock and dismay.
  • In Avatar The Last Airbender, the responsibility of defeating the Fire Nation and saving the world rests entirely with a 12-year-old goofball of a Messiah and the various other children he picks up along the way. Three attempts were made by various characters to have actual armed forces involved, but the first two times were stopped before they started (the second when a fourteen year old princess and her two handmaidens, a dour Knife Nut and a Cloud Cuckoo Lander acrobat, managed to pull off a coup in a hostile city) and the third time resulted in a crushing, ruinous defeat
  • The Pirates Of Dark Water even says so in the opening credits, "At his side an unlikely, but loyal crew of misfits."
  • Referenced and Parodied in Futurama, when Fry attempts to destroy a giant brain with a Quantum Interface Bomb. He's found by a squad of smaller brains, that try to destroy him. When their brain rays fail, one of the brains say, "But we're an ambitious young squad, with everything to prove!"
  • The Robot Chicken sketch parodying Armageddon, where the heroes are chosen by call-in votes. The winners were Harrison Ford and Aerosmith, who die trying to land. Harrison Ford protests, "I'm just an actor! I'm 62 years old!" but everyone expects him to act like a movie hero.

Real Life
  • Hollywood History example: According to widespread belief (and would Hollywood lie to you?), the Americans were the Ragtag Bunch of Misfits who drove the British from their shores during the American Revolution. In history, of course, the Americans did form proper military units, with ranks and rules and discipline and everything. They did do so with a lot of foreign (especially French and Prussian) help, but...
    • General 'Von' Steuben took advantage of the long winter at Valley Forge to whip the Continental Army into some kind of shape. A lot of our Founding Fathers were emotionally and ideologically committed to the 'citizen soldier' ideal. George Washington, who for his sins, had commanded militia men in the French and Indian War knew that this was unworkable. Not because citizen soldiers are cowards but because it takes training and discipline to make men do something as counter-intuitive as stand still and let the enemy empty their muskets into them.
    • Modern researchers on the battles of Lexington and Concord have have concluded that the Massachusetts Militia actually contained a higher percentage of combat veterans from the French and Indian war than the so-called professional soldiers they opposed. Which probably shouldn't surprise anyone, considering that they managed to pull off a seven mile moving envelopment. One British Officer writing home after the battle concluded "These people know very much what they are about."
    • There were also instances of decent-sized forces appearing more-or-less out of nowhere, the important Battles of Bennington and Kings Mountain being the most significant examples. These pick-teams didn't stick around for very long, though. Almost all were local militia taking time away from farms and business. The song "Yankee Doodle" was invented by the British to mock these rag-tags, but they made it their own and sang it in battle.
  • Another example of "folk history", this time Russian, is the Red Army, which, according to popular belief, was a Ragtag Bunch Of Misfits which, during the Russian Civil War, drove out the White Army with pure revolutionary enthusiasm. While it was a Ragtag Bunch Of Misfits for a short time since its creation, it was completely unsuited for combat, and only began to score victories against the Whites after its transformation into an actual army, with ranks and discipline — mostly courtesy of former war specialists from the disbanded Tsarist army, whom the Bolsheviks began to enlist after realizing that the "army of workers and peasants" ideal didn't work at all.
    • The reorganization of the Red Army was supervised by Leon Trotsky. Trotsky became the ultimate persona non grata during Stalin's rule, which may help to explain where the popular belief came from. Stalinist history textbooks obviously couldn't talk about Trotsky's role in building the Red Army, let alone the role of counterrevolutionary officers from the Tsarist period.
  • Speaking of the Russian Red Army, The 1980 Winter Olympics featured the Soviet Hockey juggernaut playing against a bunch of college hockey players who just happened to be playing for the United States. In what would become known as the Miracle on Ice, the college kids toppled the Russians 4-3, with a little help from the home crowd.
    • Canada did it first, eight years earlier.
      • At least one troper believes the Canadians did it by fighting dirty, but it's almost a given that the enemies of any Ragtag Bunch Of Misfits accuse them of fighting dirty.
  • Real world example: grab a book about Mexican history, open it on the chapters about the 19th century and the Revolution, and you'll see at least five disorganized bands duking it out for any reason. In fact, the reason why the Cinco de Mayo is a national holiday is because that was the day when a Ragtag Bunch Of Misfits, led by Ignacio Zaragoza, kicked the crap out of the disciplined and well-equipped French invaders.
    • They won that battle, but lost the war.
      • No they didn't, it's true that Puebla was lost a year later but after too much complications the liberals won the war and completely squashed the competion, this time permanently. (That doesn't mean other conflicts appeared but...)
  • The Texans who won their independence from Mexico were mostly ranchers, farmers, brigands, and failed American politicians, but some of them (mostly officers) had some military experience.
    • Some even mexicans as Lorenzo de Zavala.
  • The violent Indian Freedom Fighters who fought the British were very much this. Although their role in securing Independence was fairly minor, Britain simply didn't have the resources to maintain its empire after World War 2, not to mention it had very much lost the High Moral ground to Gandhi.
  • The Calcutta Light Horse were less a ragtag bunch of misfits and more a bunch of expatriate English barflies, but they did manage to inflitrate Portuguese Goa during World War II and destroy an interned German merchant ship passing radio intelligence out of neutral territory.
  • The Battle of New Orleans shortly after the end of (but still part of) the war of 1812 was basically won by one very good leader (Andrew Jackson) with a ragtag bunch of misfits. And [[Pirate pirates]]!
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