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Who ya gonna call?
A heroic party whose official professions are defined vaguely enough to allow them to go on all sorts of adventures. Generally requires only one catch (like simply being paid) to take any job no matter how unusual or apparently trite, and all are treated with the same amount of professionalism.
A noticeable trend is for these groups is being some variation of either mercenary work or detective work. If dealing with supernatural forces, you literally have a Who You Gonna Call on your hands.
People who do this stuff without getting paid generally have Chronic Hero Syndrome.
Someone who wanders from place to place doing this is a Knight Errant.
Named for the slogan of Angel Investigations in Angel.
Examples:
Anime and Manga
- Get Backers
- Futakoi Alternative
- The ninjas from Naruto are rather like this, jobs ranging from mercenary work to finding a lost cat.
- The main characters from Gintama.
- The MITHRIL Organization from the Full Metal Panic! series, on an international scale. They are, amongst other things, hired by the UN to clean up civil wars and stop ethnic cleansing.
- The main Five Man Band from Sorcerer Hunters.
- In Hajime No Ippo, Takeshi Sendoh's backstory has him as an ex-gang leader whose followers actually fought against other gangs to counterattack their abuse of other students. And ever since he was a child, Sendoh strived to protect his friends from bullies: his motto was "Leave this to me! I'm gonna protect you ALL".
- The Black Knights from Code Geass are told that their missions is to protect the weak. Even if they are just being manipulated, they do eventually manage to fulfill this role.
- Sawamura Seiji in Midori No Hibi uses his considerable martial prowess to this end because he was bullied as a child.
- Starwind and Hawking Enterprises in Outlaw Star, whose job is to "offer solutions to any kind of problem."
Comic Books
Film
- The Ghostbusters, whose philosophy, as Peter says in a television ad, is that "no job is too big, no fee is too big!" Though they do milk business customers like the Sedgewick Hotel for all they're worth, they're more forgiving when it comes to private individuals like Dana and Louis.
- Seven Samurai gives a somewhat ambivalent and often cynical treatment of this.
Literature
- Skeeve's team and later the M.Y.T.H. Inc. crew (in "Some kind of MYTHsomething" by Robert Asprin) seems to take any client who can meet their fees. Admittedly, they've built up such a reputation by now that not just anyone can afford to hire them.
- Repairman Jack from F. Paul Wilson's series of novels will fix anything, barring mechanical appliances.
- Doc Savage
- Travis McGee, from John MacDonald's novels. He usually gives his profession as 'salvage consulant'.
- Sherlock Holmes makes this trope Older Than Radio, selling his services as a consulting detective to everyone from poor tradesmen and governesses to the official police force of Scotland Yard to aristocrats, captains of industry, and even royalty. He'll even investigate the case for free if the client can't afford to pay him but their problem stirs his interest.
- While it's certainly true that Holmes is glad to help people who need it and see justice done, and glad to collect his fee, his primary motivation is always finding ways to stave off the monstrous boredom that he feels whenever he is not on a case, since his vast intellect makes it very hard to find meaningful challenges and stimulation in life. From his point of view, the more bizarre and outlandish a case is, the better.
- Harry Dresden, only professional wizard in Chicago.
- In Forgotten Realms — pretty much all and any adventuring groups, chartered or not, that have no strict official affiliation. Which is to be expected, as this setting was married to Dungeons And Dragons from a very young age.
- K.A Applegate's Animorphs series plays this trope straight — in several books, the characters (who are fighting a guerrilla war against an occupying alien force) complain about missing school, yet they always end up skipping school anyway to fight the good fight.
- The Hand of Judgment doesn't even get paid. They are five stormtroopers who left the Empire - or, as one of them says, "The Empire left us" when the ISB went after one of them for refusing to kill unarmed civilians; this incident made them realize that the Empire was no longer what it had been when they signed up, so they stole an ISB ship and fled. From there, while they argued about what to do, they kept running into situations where Imperial citizens, or people they thought were Imperial citizens, were in danger, and they kept trying to help them.
Live Action TV
- Angel The Series (Angel Investigations actually used "we help the helpless", memorably mangled by Cordelia into 'hopeless', as its advertising slogan, and in at least one instance, "We hope you're helpless.")
- The A Team
- The Goodies
- Supernatural
- The Avengers
- The Equalizer
- Vengeance Unlimited, for one million dollars or a favor.
- The Pretender does it for free, since he can steal from the baddies' bank accounts.
- MacGyver - does he actually HAVE a job?
- Technically yes, but the job description appears to be VERY VERY broadly defined.
- The WWE tag team The Acolyte Protection Agency (APA for short) hired themselves out to various underdog faces for bodyguarding, six-man-tag-teaming, and general-purpose ass-kicking. They even had a few faux-commercials for their services, with the tag line "APA: 'cause we need beer money!"
- Burn Notice
- The crew of the good ship Serenity in Firefly. As an added bonus, some of their jobs do involve helping the helpless. (When they noticed one of their jobs involved exploiting the helpless, Captain
Tightpants Mal did a Heel Face Turn and brought the stolen loot back.)
- Pushing Daisies
- The new TNT series Leverage has this from the second episode on (in the pilot each of the 5 thieves made out with over $32 million on short-sold stock).
- Leverage is an odd duck because, unlike most other examples of this trope, the characters really don't need money very much at all and are therefore never broke. But then, international thieves are a lot like stock brokers: if the guy's broke, he's probably not worth hiring.
- Sanctuary has a slight twist on this, as the main characters generally help abnormal humans, while fighting the more dangerous ones.
- The Middleman
Tabletop Games
- The majority of adventuring parties in any given Tabletop Games, especially Dungeons And Dragons, also tend to be like this, as a cheap and easy way for the Game Master to get the adventure started.
- A particular Hat of the Lawful Good alignment.
- Superhero RPGs are perhaps an even better example.
- In contrast, Dark Heresy characters distinctly don't help the helpless. In fact, since the players work for the Inquisition, chances are they are actively killing the helpless just in case they happen to be Chaos tainted.
- Shadowrun teams with any sort of ethics at all tend to fall into this category. Of course, most Shadowrunners are immoral scumbuckets who'd slit their own mama's throat for a single nuyen, but the player characters are exceptions. Hopefully.
- Troubleshooters from Paranoia treat all jobs with the same amount of professionalism. That amount is zero.
- They're troubleshooters: They find trouble, they shoot it.
Video Games
- Elite Beat Agents ... but they mainly just stand around and sing so people have the courage to actually do the job themselves.
- Chromas from Phantom Brave, including the protagonist Marona.
- The motivation of Phoenix Wright.
Webcomics
Western Animation
- Kim Possible: From babysitting to saving the world, "she can do anything".
- Disney animated show The Weekenders has a charity organization "helpers helping the helpless," where helpful helpers help helpless people needing help. Description courtesy of the lady in charge losing her thesaurus (she finds it later). Not quite this trope, but the name is there.
- The Real Ghostbusters have been hired by everyone from a pair of young children and a kindly old lady to a Hollywood studio, NASA and the French and Japanese governments. Thankfully, they take that into account when deciding what to charge the customer.
- Chip And Dale Rescue Rangers have the motto "No case too big, no case too small" in their theme song. And they appear to follow that principle...
- Most incarnations of Scooby Doo, whose teenage heroes, a roaming, freelance detective agency in later versions, stumble into just about every paranormal situation imaginable on a weekly basis and take it upon themselves to help the people they've met and debunk the (usually) fake ghost.
Web Original
Real Life
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