"If you can't pay for your car, the bank takes it back. If you can't pay for your house, the bank takes it back. If you can't pay for your liver, well, that's where I come in."
— Remy, Repo Men
The rules of using credit to make purchases are simple, and dreaded by all grown-ups: you buy something and you cannot pay the bank, the Evil Debt Collector will send repo men to take the items you bought and try to get back their money.
This is when the repo men go above and beyond what the audience would consider "the call of duty", legality, morality, safety or even sanity, and repossess items that are either:
- Impossible to sell off, so it doesn't make sense to take them away,
- Absurd to remove to begin with, such as entire buildings or a person's thoughts or identity/existence,
- Not covered under the original contract (read: unless it's something extreme like bankruptcy — and sometimes not even then — repo men are normally only allowed to take the stuff you bought with your expired credit card like your Ferrari, not your family heirlooms, dog and the literal clothes off your back),
- May mean the death (or bodily harm in the best-case scenarios) of the indebted person (and while we're at it, it goes without saying that abducting people isn't a legal or sane method of repossession, either).
Sometimes they even come in to repossess the items the very second that the indebted person appears to be unable to pay, with no attempts to negotiate some payment method shown on-screen (and most often heavily implied that there were none made at all). For some of the more sanguinary examples, the plot may supply a Hand Wave that the repo men have obtained the legal capacity to perform these actions.
This trope has some heavy overlap with the Evil Debt Collector, Morally Bankrupt Banker, Intimidating Revenue Service and other financial tropes. Impossible Theft is when the items (usually the same type as that trope) are stolen.
Examples
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Anime and Manga
- Invoked in The Laughing Salesman. A woman is on the verge of bankruptcy due to her habit of buying things to feel better. So Moguro offers her a solution: He gives her a limitless card and she can spend as much as she wants... but the very next day everything is repossessed, so that way she can buy as much as she wants without really affecting her. The employees just use a crane to access her second-story building to take everything. Then taken further when she thinks she is being clever and decides to spend the money on beauty treatments so they can't be repossessed. Moguro proves her wrong at the end and literally takes her youth.
Comics
- The Simpsons: When Bart accidentally wracks up debt by ordering several crates of Armenian seeds, repo men come to repossess the Simpsons house... by cutting it to pieces.
- Spirou & Fantasio: The first page of "Spirou à New York" illustrates how fast fortunes can change in the world of stock trading, with the repo men (instantaneously) seizing not only the newly-impoverished man's luxurious surroundings and replacing them with cheap furnishings (a chandelier with a dangling lightbulb, a massive desk with wooden boards on trestles...),
◊ but also his revolver and all his clothes except for an undershirt and Goofy Print Underwear. The butler (who's just learned his stocks have earned him a fortune) proposes a solution, which is him hiring the former millionaire as butler. Naturally, he's soon ruined, but the butler has a solution...
Alas, sir, it has just been seized. But thanks to my modest savings, I was able to purchase this revolver, which I will gladly lend to sir. - In The Dandy, in a Fiddle O'Diddle cartoon, Muldoon finds a pot of gold and goes on a spending spree, but it turns out the gold was just chocolate money. Bailiffs come in and take everything, even all the potatos he was growing in his garden!
Film — Animated
- Daffy Duck's Quackbusters:
- In The Duxorcist (one of the shorts that compose this Compilation Movie), Daffy exorcises some ghosts off a pretty woman by making jokes. This is the one that works like gangbusters:
Daffy: Did you hear the one about the woman that couldn't pay the exorcism bill? Her soul was repossessed!- In the film's final act, once the ghost of J.P. Cubish finally takes away all of his fortune, it takes approximately five seconds afterward for the bank to send a Singing Telegram telling Daffy that he's broke and they're coming to take everything away and forty seconds after that for the repo men to take all of Daffy's office furniture, the building to be condemned and Daffy to be kicked out of the building via wrecking ball to the face.
Film — Live-Action
- Americathon revolves around an exaggerated Played for Laughs example: In the Crapsack World "future" of 1998, the United States Government has borrowed $300 billion dollars to try to stave off bankruptcy... futilely. They are then forced to create the titular Telethon to try to gather the money, otherwise the MegaCorp that lent them the money (Nike, of all things) will repossess the United States of America.
- In Fun with Dick and Jane, the moment that the Harpers' finances start to decline and their checks start to bounce, the company they hired to install some new grass and plants on their house immediately comes to repossess the aforementioned plants (yes, including the grass).
- In a close variant, Monty Python's The Meaning of Life has the "Live Organ Transplants" sketch, wherein John Cleese and Graham Chapman's characters go to a house to retrieve one Mr. Brown's liver for donation. The fact that Mr. Brown is still using his liver doesn't enter into it.
- Popeye: The Taxman of Sweethaven takes literally everything from the Oyl home on trumped-up tax charges, because Bluto ordered him to.
The Taxman of Sweethaven: [after taking everything else in the house and being annoyed by the Oyl family, notices that the only thing left in the house is a sunflower] And one sunflower, "embarrass the taxman" tax! [takes the sunflower, leaves]
- Repo Men revolves around a dystopian future in which a company named "The Union" has greatly improved the quality of life through the creation of cutting-edge medical implants. However the dark side is that, if the recipients of said implants are unable to keep up with their fees, the Union is legally allowed to send repo men to reclaim the implants (which more often than not will be a fatal procedure, not that the repo men or the Union cares).
- The dueling film to Repo Men, Repo! The Genetic Opera, revolves around a dystopian future in which following a pandemic of organ failures, a biotech firm called "Gene Co." emerged. Gene Co. has the legal capacity to send repo men (read: assassins) after organ donation recipients that fall behind on their medical bills in order to kill them and extract the organ to sell it to a new client.
- Robin Hood: Men in Tights: Robin arrives home just in time to see Locksley Castle repossessed after his father's death; the repo men literally haul the entire castle away on wheels (revealing the blind servant Blinkin on the chamberpot, unaware that the bathroom is now gone).
- Smiley Face: After Jane fails to pay her dealer on time, he shows up with some friends and takes her and her roommate Steve's furniture, including Jane's beloved expensive mattress.
- In Tomcats, Michael gets himself into an enormous gambling debt and over the course of the movie has his possessions taken away one by one as collateral until he can pay off the debt. At one point the repo man demands his cell phone. Michael objects, the phone rings, and the casino owner simply says over the line "Give him the phone."
Jokes
- The joke "What happens when you don't pay your exorcist bill? You get repossessed!" has become a classic "dad joke", with a history of appearing in joke books as far back as 1974 (apparently it was created as a response to The Exorcist, or at least it became popular after it).
Live-Action TV
- Community: "Repilot" opens by showing how completely Jeff Winger's attempt to become a Crusading Lawyer has failed. Debt collectors are stripping everything out of his office as Jeff is Drowning His Sorrows. His weaselly former colleague Alan appears to tempt Jeff back into his Amoral Attorney ways, but with a drink in his hand Jeff is ready to refuse the offer with his dignity intact. Then one of the repo men ruins it.
Jeff: Look, I might be broke, desperate, and nearly homeless, but I still got one thing deep inside that gives me power. [a man snatches the glass out of his hand] That was it. That was all I had.
- Operation Repo is all about this. The series pretends to be a reality show, but is actually more like a repo version of WWE. The crew gets into a serious of outrageously staged altercations that would quickly put a legitimate recovery company out of business due to liability.
- In the Star Trek: Deep Space Nine episode "Body Parts", Quark breaks a contract with Liquidator Brunt, which in Ferengi society means that he's now an outcast. Brunt confiscates everything, and we do mean everything...
Quark: Including this shirt (that he's wearing). I'm supposed to mail it to Brunt in the morning.
- The Twilight Zone (1985) episode "The Card" plays this very darkly. A housewife signs up for the titular card because she has maxed out all her other cards. When she fails to pay the balance, the company takes her pets, then her children, then her husband. She ends up cutting the card in half but the company takes her anyway. The last shot is the two pieces of the card landing on a vacant lot.
Professional Wrestling
- The Repo Man character portrayed by Barry Darsow certainly qualifies, via both his introductory vignettes (such as repossessing a car whose owner was a day late with his payment) and his interactions with other wrestlers (such as repossessing the cowboy hat of Randy Savage).
Video Games
- In Cuphead, the titular character and his brother Mugman end up being forced to become the repo men for the Devil after losing the bet in The Casino, and were ordered to repossess all soul contracts of those who made the Deal with the Devil. Said repossessions involve fighting said debtors, who are not surrendering their contracts without the fight, in a long chain of painfully difficult boss fights.
- Cyberpunk2077 has an interesting take. In the world of advanced cybernetics it is entirely possible to repo bionics and artificial organs as ubiquitous Bionics have made it so that your expensive 200,000 dollar Cyberarm with built in weapons, powerful muscles, and customized light up skin patterns can be replaced by a cheap 2,000 dollar model that's basically a bunch of tubes with some motors installed.
- EXTRAPOWER: Giant Fist: Saving money earned during gameplay at the Ace Bank ATMs will make those funds accessible in the Professor Room, where players can purchase credits, playable character and game mode unlocks, and features such as the jukebox, stage select and casino. Collecting more money also improves the Professor Room, starting with giving Professor Ace a nicer chair and a sharp white leisure suit and ending with several expensive pieces of furniture, a pet macaw, a manservant and two statuesque stunners on either side of him. The corollary is that as you actually spend money on the aforementioned unlocks, these basic comforts and lavish luxuries are quickly taken away. You can easily return Professor Ace to sitting shirtless on a basic folding chair to buy that final character unlock.
- Franklin and Lamar in Grand Theft Auto V work as repo men for Simeon Yeterian's Premium Deluxe Motorsport, reposessing vehicles sold with dodgy loans, and a reposession of a motorcycle from a Vagos gang member turns deadly. Later, Franklin is sent to reposses an SUV bought by Jimmy De Santa, and once held at gunpoint by his father, Michael, it becomes clear Simeon sent for the repo before Jimmy even had a chance to miss a payment.
- Republic: The Revolution has "Debt Collection" as a low-level action to damage the opponents' Resolve (which functions as a mix of Hit Points and Sanity Meter). The ridiculousness comes from the fact that because there is no actual debt-based mechanics in the game, this action can be launched against any character at any time, as often as you have the Wealth to. So if you want someone out of the game, you just spam "Debt Collection" at them three times a day, for days on end, watching the same cutscene of your agents hauling stuff out of the victim's home that somehow doesn't seem to run out, as the victim yells the same angry curses at them over and over again.
- The Sims: The Repo Man who appears if your Sim maxes out their credit not only will repossess anything to meet the quota of the debt, he will utilize a specialized vacuum-shaped gun to do so, leaving the entire house bare in seconds.
- In Warframe, the people of Fortuna live under the constant fear that the Corpus will repossess their body parts, mechanized or otherwise, to repay the debts they owe on things like their body modifications, their living space, and their vocational training, not to mention most of them inherited debt from their parents. In the most extreme cases, some people are brain-shelved after having their entire bodies repossessed. The quest Vox Solaris starts when Eudico tells the player that they should talk to Thursby and buy stuff from him, as he's very close to having a repo order put out on him.
Web Comics
- Dresden Codak: The Dark Science arc starts with Kimiko becoming bankrupt and the bank responding by blowing up her house.
- The Order of the Stick: In one of the Dragon magazine comics a debt collector for a temple where Belkar previously received healing repossesses his health, with a sword, and a dagger for interest. Then a mind flayer shows up to talk to Roy about his student loans.
Web Original
- Dimension 20: A Starstruck Odyssey: The Repo Reapers are a roving band of glorified mercenaries who violently repossess the assets of people they're hired to target, up to and including the cybernetic augments wired into them. When Gunnie's debt worsens he begins to attract their attention, but once he finally manages to pay all his debt off near the end of the campaign they immediately stop pursuing him, as they're Only in It for the Money.
Western Animation
- The Amazing World of Gumball:
- In "The Money," repo men take the Wattersons' entire house off the ground after they go broke. When that's gone, one of them snatches the front yard turf from under their feet like a tablecloth.
- "The Signature" involves Frankie Watterson's house getting repossessed. Not only do they remove a window, leaving a blank wall, when he looks up from reading they've managed to remove the entire house out from under him, leaving nothing but the bare concrete foundation sticking out of the ground.
- Beetlejuice: In the episode "Keeping Up With The Boneses", BJ runs up his credit card to an exorbitant degree and then is unable to pay the bill. Rather than take the stuff he bought, the repo men instead take Lydia as "collateral."
- In the DuckTales (1987) episode "Nothing To Fear", Scrooge McDuck is forced to endure a magical hallucination of his worst fear, which is a repo man army taking all of his possessions and fortune. The hallucination then dips into this trope when the repo men take all of Scrooge's friends and his nephews as collateral.
- Family Guy: In "Switch the Flip", Brian is convinced by Peter's new virtual assistant into buying a lot of new stuff, eventually maxing out his credit card. When the repo man comes to collect all his purchases, he chooses to take the virtual assistant too, on the grounds that he himself doesn't have one.
- Monsters vs. Aliens (2013): In the episode "Debtor Alive!", monsters and aliens end up exploiting Sqweep's generosity by borrowing his money and spending it all. When Sqweep's financical advicer arrives to collect their debts, he decides to repossess their abstract concepts. Link ends up losing his mass and ends up not being affected by gravity, Susan loses her concentration and ends up being unable to focus on a single task without getting distracted, Dr. Cockroach loses his vocabulary and becomes The Unintelligible, and Coverton loses his dignity and starts constantly humiliating himself on public. Eventually, the debts are paid off with B.O.B.'s "Bob Bucks", which are pieces of paper with B.O.B.'s face on it, and the financical adviser returns their possessions back to their respective owners.
- In the Rocko's Modern Life episode, "Who Gives a Buck?", Heffer convinces Rocko to buy new stuff with a credit card Rocko receives in the mail. At first, Rocko buys a few modest things, like a new dog dish for Spunky, but then he soon gets carried away and buys a lot of expensive, fancy things. When he is unable to pay the bill the next morning, the Repo Men take it all away, along with many things Rocko owned before he applied for the credit card, such as his couch and television set.
- The Simpsons:
- In "Lisa On Ice", all of Springfield takes the hockey game between Bart and Lisa's teams so seriously that, before the game, Moe stops by the Simpsons home, ostensibly checking on Bart and Lisa, before Marge makes him leave, with Moe saying "Please, I'm 64 grand in the hole! They're gonna take my thumbs!".
- In the episode "The Canine Mutiny", Bart goes to the Repo Depot to locate his repossessed dog (which he gave away instead of the dog the repo men were actually supposed to repossess after Bart committed credit card fraud, It's a Long Story) and we discover that the repo men have repossessed the floor of Moe's Tavern, which is seen stacked against the wall at the depot.
Moe: You got to give me back my floor! All my customers are walking around on the pipes!
Repo Man: Hey, next time, pay your bills.
Moe: But I don't want to! - The episode "Miracle on Evergreen Terrace" holds an example that stands out due to its sheer viciousness: After a (quite dark) comedy of errors leaves the Simpsons owing $20.200 ($15.000 to the people of Springfield and, after an Epic Fail attempt at getting the money on Jeopardy!, $5200 to Alex Trebek), the people of Springfield decide to repossess literally everything that the Simpsons own other than their home and the clothes on their backs to get their money back (including furniture, pets, and the medicines on their cabinets). The episode ends with the Simpsons trying to make the best of their lousy situation by playing keep-away with a rag in their empty home.
- In the episode "I Am Furious Yellow", Bart has his internet cartoon bought out by the startup Betterthantv.com. In a parody of the 2000's era tech startups, Betterthantv.com gets rich as Bart's comic goes viral, then goes bankrupt as the popularity fades. Repo men come and start taking everything that isn't nailed down, including a character's soul patch beard.
- In the episode "Milhouse Doesn't Live Here Anymore", Kirk Van Houten provides more evidence that he's the biggest loser in the entire Simpsons universe when a repo man comes to repossess the pants he's currently wearing, leaving him in his underwear in the middle of the street.
- SpongeBob SquarePants: In "Can You Spare a Dime?", after Squidward gets all of his stuff taken away because he can't afford it anymore (because he quit his job after being accused of stealing Mr. Krabs' #1 Dime, which in reality had been in Krabs' trouser pocket all along and Krabs just never thought of checking) and is forced to live in a Cardboard Box Home, a repo man arrives to take away the cardboard box as well, which leads SpongeBob to take Squidward in (much to his eventual regret).
- The Twisted Tales of Felix the Cat: In "Viva Lost Wages", Bet-a-Billion Bill steals Felix's magic bag so he can use it to win bets and become rich again. Right after Felix recovers the magic bag, Bill receives a phone call from the bank informing him that his investments failed, his oil wells dried up, and his lottery tickets awarded him no prizes, making him bankrupt again; and a repo man shows up to repossess his limousine, his yacht, his girl, his mansion (a giant crane removed it from the area) and his suit.
Real Life
- Averted in most legal systems, which set a minimum to leave after repossession to prevent hardships for the debtor, or have a list of items which cannot be seized such as work tools and food (apart if these items themselves have to be repossessed for non-payment).
- One story on A&E's Neighborhood Wars featured a contractor remodeling a new neighbor's shower. They sent her the final invoice, expecting to be paid the minute the job was done. The woman explained that she was at work until the next morning, so she could not pay them that soon. The workmen interpreted this as her refusing to pay and demolished the shower the next morning to repossess the materials, claiming that they belonged to the contractor since they had the receipts. The "repo" resulted in the materials being destroyed, the workmen being arrested, and the woman receiving a new bathroom at no cost in spite of a threat to have her blacklisted from local contractors (who were quite disgusted with the workmen).
- George Orwell noted, in his books on poverty in Britain in The '30s, that there was an absolute legally-enshrined limit beyond which no creditor could go. A household in direst poverty was still legally entitled to a table to eat at, a bed to sleep in, chairs to sit on, and a bureaucratically defined, and very minimal, list of essential clothing and linen. In The Road to Wigan Pier, Orwell also drily noted that if a household had an excess of goods above this statutory minimum, it was expected to sell or pawn them for money before they could apply for any welfare payments.
