Replacement Mooks

Goldar: Might I suggest we send down a group of Putties to attack the Rangers? They're in the open and will be easy prey.
Lord Zedd: (laughs evilly) Your Putties are as useless to me as you are. I have my own army of Putties, the likes of which you have never seen!

— Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers, "The Mutiny"

In this trope, a villain replaces older or more familiar Mooks with new ones, usually because the older ones failed or are no longer useful.

Our Big Bad may have been defeated last time, but they ain't stupid. It seems that all of the weak, pathetic mooks the hero(es) barged right through last time have been replaced. Possibly, by something much worse.

This typically happens in series which retain a recurring villain who, after failing in their plans the last time, has seen fit to replace their forces with newer enemies for the hero, whether in part or in whole. A variation is that a new Big Bad comes with their own, more powerful forces. Another variation is for the Elite Mooks or Giant Mooks from the previous iteration to now to be the standard Mooks. This is usually because the villain is attempting to learn from his or her mistakes during the previous altercation—after all, if something doesn't work once, why try it again? New enemies could catch the heroes off-guard, or make it much more difficult to adjust. Or, the villain might just want to send a message about what happens when his minions aren't up to task.

The inversion to this is Mook Carryover, whereas a new Big Bad uses the same Mooks or Elite Mooks as the previous one. Compare Hard Mode Mooks, which is when higher difficulties in a given videogame have different mooks from easier ones.

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Examples:

Comic Books

• Done as one of Robotnik's schemes in Sonic the Comic, where he basically exploits Sonic taking the games' difficulty curve for granted by transposing some of his more advanced badniks from a Sonic CD level into the Green Hill Zone.

Fan Works

• The J-WITCH Series (a crossover between Jackie Chan Adventures and W.I.T.C.H.):
  • In "J-WITCH Meets The J-Team!", Finn, Ratso and Chow are forcibly recruited by Prince Phobos, leaving Valmont only with Hak Foo. He eventually hires the Ice Crew as replacements in "Pleasure Cruise".
  • Just like in canon, Daolon Wong (who also serves Phobos) makes the Enforcers his new Dark Chi Warriors after Uncle imprisons the original Warriors in the Urn of Wei Cheing.
• Star Wars vs Warhammer 40K: After General Grievous goes rogue and forms a Renegade Splinter Faction of the CIS, he orders the droid factories under his command to cease producing the standard B1 battle droids due to how useless they are against the Jedi and Space Marines, instead opting to replace them all with B2 super battle droids.

Films — Animated

• The Incredibles: Syndrome's scheme centers around this trope, as he tests his robots against various superheroes in order to improve them until he gets the ideal model to send out on the city.
• The Mitchells vs. the Machines: PAL creates the PAL Max Prime robots to take the place of the regular PAL Max robots when the latter prove to be too incompetent to get the Mitchells.

Films — Live-Action

• The Matrix Reloaded: After the failure of the Smith-model Agents in The Matrix, the Machines come out with improved Agents (which Neo calls "upgrades" when he first meets them), though Neo still knocks them out in short order. And then Agent Smith rolls around with his replacement mooks... himself.
• In the Star Wars prequel trilogy, the Trade Federation replaces its rather laughable battle droids from the first film with more advanced Super Battle Droids with a more menacing, dehumanised silhouette. One of them can be seen knocking the earlier models aside to get at the Jedi enemy in Attack of the Clones.
• Terminator: Every Terminator starts as this. The first one introduced, the T-800, was a replacement for the T-600. In the next film, the T-1000 replaced the T-800. Then, the T-X replaced the T-1000. Justified, because they're machines and SkyNet is just upgrading.

Literature

• A realistic version of this shows up in A Song of Ice and Fire. When civil war wracks the Kingdom of Westeros during a Succession Crisis, the Kingsguard (bodyguards for the royal family) suffer several losses. When Jaime Lannister finally makes it back to the capital to take command, he's horrified and infuriated to find that he has two dependable knights left in the Kingsguard, while most of the other new members are political appointments, second raters, or amoral mercenaries.

Live Action TV

• Kamen Rider: When Rider 1 returns with an upgrade in episode 53 the entire series does as well. The Shocker grunts remove the useless rankings (the red grunts had a higher rank than the black ones, they were beat up all the same) and replaces them with it's most remembered outfit, which is black with a skull pattern. It doesn't do much difference. Later, in the series, Gel-Shocker appears with much more flamboyant mooks, in ther first episode they actually catch the heroes by surprise and give them a lot of trouble. By the next episode, though, they are back to being easily defeated.
• Power Rangers: MMPR season two saw Rita's Putty Patrollers replaced by Lord Zedd's Z-Putties, who were in turn replaced with Rito's Tengas in season three. Then the Machine Empire marched into their territory with the Cogs. This doesn't apply as much post "Space", as each year is now an entirely different story set in the same world, but some villains will introduce elite versions of their own grunts, eg Kelzacks becoming Kelzack Furies.
• In Justified, Boyd ends up pulling this trick against some his former Neo Nazi friends. When they think Boyd is hopelessly outnumbered, he introduces his own new crew... The Crowe family.
• In Breaking Bad, Gus kills Victor because Victor was spotted at the scene of Gale's murder by witnesses. Victor is replaced by another henchman, Tyrus Kitt.
• Chouseishin Series: The Descal start off reusing the Gig Fighters from Chouseishin Gransazer. When their Neo Descal descendants arrive from the future, they bring with them their own set of footsoldiers called Deathmeid which quickly replace the Gig Fighters.

Video Games

• During the early missions of Command & Conquer: Renegade Havoc faces off against regular Nod soldiers carrying assault rifles, among other types of troopers. After the fifth mission, he stops encountering those basic soldiers and starts fighting against elite Black Hand soldiers in their place.
• In the Mass Effect series:
  • The villainous Reapers use the robotic geth as their primary mooks in the first game. While they're still active in the sequel, their role as the primary mooks are taken up by the insectoid Collectors, who are abandoned to die at the end of THAT game.
  • In the third game, the new primary mooks are Husks, reanimated corpses of various species jammed full of cybernetics. They were around in the previous games as simple cannon fodder, but they now come in a variety of forms with various abilities. For example, Marauders (turian husks) can use guns and infantry tactics, Banshees (asari husks) can fly, throw out biotic attacks, and put barriers around allies, and Ravagers (rachni husks) have cannons built into their backs. However, the Reapers have also managed to strengthen their geth forces by taking control of the anti-Reaper geth majority, and have successfully indoctrinated the human-supremacist N.G.O. Superpower Cerberus even as it tries to do the same to them.
• Halo:
  • The High Prophets of the Covenant replace the Elites with the Brutes in the second half of Halo 2, which continues into Halo 3. The Hierarchs claim it's because the Elites had failed to stop the Master Chief, but it's revealed that the Prophets were actually just concerned about the Elites' loyalty, and were looking for any excuse to get rid of them. The resulting civil war cripples the Covenent at a critical point.
  • Gameplay-wise, the Brutes in Halo 3 function far more like Elites than their Halo 2 counterparts. This includes getting some new varieties to replace specialist Elite enemy types (the Brute Stalkers for Stealth Elites, and Brute Jumpers for Elite Rangers), along with their standard varieties now featuring armor that gives them comparable durability to Elites (minus recharging shields until you get to the higher ranks).
• When you beat Super Mario Bros. once and start a new game immediately afterward, all Goombas are replaced by Buzzy Beetles.
• It happens frequently on Metroidvania style games, most likely after defeating an important boss, unlocking a new zone or obtaining a power-up.
• In Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door, eventually the goombas and other basic enemies in the Rogueport Sewers are replaced by more threatening Koopatrols, Hammer Bros., and Magikoopas.
• In Red Faction, you fight the Ultor Corporation's security guards for most of the game. After you kill Capek, Ultor sends in mercenaries, who replace the security guards as your main enemy for the rest of the game.
• Used to horrific effect in Resident Evil. Once you return to the mansion after exploring the guardhouse, you're confronted by a Hunter, a fast, tough and extremely deadly monster that gets its own Mook Debut Cutscene to trick you into thinking it's a one-off encounter. Then you move on to the adjacent rooms and hallways to discover these things have essentially replaced the hordes of zombies that you dealt with the first time through the house.
• In Area 51 (FPS), you start off fighting hordes of mutants. Then, after you gain your mutant powers, you start fighting the Illuminati Dark Ops, as well and more advanced mutants.
• In Half-Life 2, you start off fighting Civil Protection, the Combine's police force. Later, you fight Overwatch, the Combine's military force.

Web Animation

• Madness Combat: The Grunts seen in the earlier episodes are eventually replaced by 1337 agents as the basic Mooks of the A.A.H.W. by the time Madness Combat 5: Depredation rolls in.

Webcomics

• In The Order of the Stick, Big Bad Xykon gets his goblin forces routed by the heroes during the first arc. Soon after, he finds an army of hobgoblins which numbers in the tens of thousands.

Western Animation

• In Teen Titans season 3, Brother Blood's human mooks prove ineffective against the heroes, so he replaces them for the season finale with mecha mooks adapted from Cyborg's technology- which prove to be some of the toughest mooks in the whole show.
• It seems like every season of the '80s-'90s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cartoon has an episode like this, with Shredder and Krang replacing Bebop and Rocksteady, only for the replacements to be de-mutated, destroyed, or do a Heel–Face Turn, forcing the baddies to re-employ Bebop and Rocksteady.
  • Eventually Shredder and Krang themselves were replaced by Dregg. For his first season on the show, he used Insect like creatures called the Techno Gang. Next season he used a race of batlike creatures as his mooks.
• In the later episodes of ThunderCats, Mumm-Ra eventually phased out the Mutants in favor of the more powerful (and more treacherous) Lunataks. This didn't really make things more difficult for the Thundercats in the long run, since the Lunataks were prone to in-fighting and following their own personal agendas.
• Jackie Chan Adventures:
  • At the start of Season 5, the new Arc Villain Drago continues the series' Mook Carryover tradition by forcibly recruiting the Enforcers to be his minions… and after one episode gets tired of their incompetence and fires them. A couple of episodes later, no longer willing to do his own dirty work, he hires new minions in the form of the Ice Crew, who are actually effective fighters.
  • In the beginning of Season 3, Uncle traps Daolon Wong's Dark Chi Warriors in the Urn of Wei Cheing, so Wong transforms the Enforcers into his new Warriors. When he gets tired of their incompetence in "Sheep In, Sheep Out", he takes control over the Shadowkhan which were controlled by Shendu in the previous seasons. However, when the Shadowkhan don't provide better results, Wong stops using them and starts using the Enforcers again at the episode's end.
• Samurai Jack: The Beetle Drones that make up the rank-and-file of Aku's forces are mass-producible replacements for the higher-quality but more expensive X-Series robot assassins that served Aku in the backstory.

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