Many thousands of years ago, Alice and Bob were sealed away (possibly to fight for all eternity). Cue modern times and they have, of course, been released by some idiot, starting the conflict anew. However all those millennia ago, Alice and Bob weren't the only game in town. There's an entire cast's worth of characters for both sides ranging from Dragons to mooks and Lancers to Redshirts. Well then idiot, would you mind freeing Alice's forces while preventing Bob from bolstering his army? Jolly good, off you go!
Welcome to the opportunity of a lifetime, writers, this is when rather than having just one count of Sealed Good in a Can and/or Sealed Evil in a Can, you have tons of cast members trapped and preserved by the same means, all waiting to be released when the plot calls for them. Perfect for fleshing out your cast while making big savings on introductions and origins! But Wait, There's More! This exciting offer comes with hundreds of packages to choose from. Pick our mixed pack and have the villains and heroes scramble to track down their allies! Pick up our all evil pack and have the heroes fight a new Monster of the Week, or pick up our all hero pack and introduce a new member of the True Companions per episode! Or try our new Wild Card pack; each "canned" character will pledge their allegiance to whoever released them!
Disclaimer: Offer may require Plot Coupons. We take no responsibility for any characters who end up unpopular or too popular. If you want a large number of Elite Mooks who are in the same place instead of individual characters, please see our Sealed Army in a Can. Cast members may resent being treated like MacGuffins.
Examples:
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Anime and Manga
- In Dr. STONE, humanity has been petrified for 3000+ years. When the lead character develops a means to un-petrify people, this is the result.
- This is what happens to the Ronin Warriors after the first episode.
- All the main cast members in Sailor Moon were killed in a great battle and reincarnated in the modern world. While they weren't actually "sealed", the show follows the same pattern of tracking them down and unsealing them. In universe it's more tracking their reincarnations down and awakening their dormant powers.
Comics
- Captain Marvel and all his supporting cast, including villains, were put in suspended animation for 20 years thanks to one of Dr. Sivana's experiments Gone Horribly Wrong. (This was how DC explained the characters' twenty-year absence from publication.)
Fan Works
- Beast Wars: Friendship is Magic: Initially, all of the Maximals and Predacons are offline and sealed inside their escape pods. Then others start finding and releasing them, one by one...
- Officer Misako: The Reset allows almost everyone caught up in it to reincarnate.
Film - Live-Action
- Godzilla: King of the Monsters (2019) has most of the kaiju cast dormant all around the world: Godzilla is in a hidden undersea temple in the Pacific Ocean, Mothra's egg is in the jungles of China, Rodan is imprisoned in a volcano in Isla del Mara, Mexico and King Ghidorah is frozen in a glacier in Antarctica. In total, there are 17 monsters hidden dormant around the world, and all are awakened once Ghidorah gets loose and summons them to his bidding.
- The 2010 live-action film, The Sorcerer's Apprentice had half the cast aside from the main character stored on an artifact. They emerged in a sort of Last-In-First-Out.
Literature
- In The Kane Chronicles, Bast and Apophis were both sealed away by the other Egyptian gods so that they could continue their duel for all eternity. While they weren't imprisoned in any particular monument, Bast was freed through the gateway of an obelisk. The effort of keeping Apophis contained inside his prison was what killed Carter and Sadie Kane's mother, but with Bast gone, Apophis was free to concentrate his efforts on breaking loose.
- In The Wheel of Time the Dark One had a whole army of channelers under his command. The thirteen most powerful of them, called the Forsaken, were at the Bore when Lews Therin and his Hundred Companions sealed the Dark One's prison. The Forsaken were sealed as well and was freed only when the seal against the Dark One's prison weakened enough to allow it.
Live-Action TV
- Subverted in Angel; Illyria was a Sealed Evil in a Can, and had an army waiting for her in some kind of pocket dimension. But when she found her way to this pocket dimension, she found that the army had died while waiting in its "can", and she despaired that she was all alone, the last of her kind with no chance of reviving her army or finding any other Old Ones living on Earth.
- The Charmings had a similar premise to the Captain Marvel example listed above: the evil Witch put a spell on everyone (accidentally including herself) go to sleep and to wake up in 400 years.
- The final episodes of the second season of the new Doctor Who ("Army of Ghosts", "Doomsday") feature "putting the band back together" and the freeing of two evil forces (which promptly go to war) and one of which is inadvertantly reinforced by the actions of one of the band that was put back together.
- In Power Rangers:
- Power Rangers Wild Force had the Power Animals. The ones who gave the five main Rangers their powers were still on the Animarium, but there were plenty of others sealed away in different places on the surface world. The same is probably true of the Gaoranger source material...
- Although the series didn't focus on them as much as other examples, Power Rangers: Dino Thunder did the same with the scattered Dinozords.
- Power Rangers Operation Overdrive may be an example; as almost every member of the Big Bad Ensemble was sealed away before the series started. Not that anybody wanted to unseal more: two were released by the discovery of the series' MacGuffin, two were freed by allies and then got caught up in the conflict, and one freed himself.
- Power Rangers Jungle Fury had both sides searching out new masters to train them to be stronger. This was more pronounced with the villains, as Dai Shi's search for masters took up several episodes, while half of the Rangers' teachers weren't actually sealed in the first place and the other half were only consulted in a two-parter.
- Power Rangers Samurai, with new zords being discovered and tamed and/or busted and unfinished equipment being brought out and repaired as the plot demands.
- Smallville: The Half-Arc Season for season 6 was assorted Kryptonian baddies being accidentally released from the Phantom Zone and Clark & Kira having to round them up.
- Supernatural: On more than one occasion Sam & Dean have accidentally released scores of demons from Hell and have to go kill them.
Multiple Media
- BIONICLE's Toa Mata were Sealed Good in a Can, but the sealed and then awakened Bohrok, Bohrok Va and Bohrok-Kal provided the creators with one and a half year's worth of enemy sets and plot-engines for a cheap price... Not so much the collection completists. Subverted in all the Rahi species that escaped from their stasis tubes in the Onu-Metru Archives — those weren't released as sets, and for the most part weren't even that important to the plot.
Mythology
- Older Than Feudalism: The Greek myth of Pandora's Box, in Hesiod's Theogony.
Tabletop Games
- In Exalted, when the Yozis and Neverborn broke open the Jade Prison to steal the trapped Solar exaltations, they only managed to take half of them. The other 150 immediately flew to Heaven and soon began exalting the first new Solar Exalted in hundreds of years. Whether this is a good thing for Creation is a matter of debate, but the Solars are the default player characters. Of course, those 150 stolen exaltations were warped into new kinds of Exalted, becoming a second sealed cast from the same multipack.
- The Innistrad storyline in Magic: The Gathering features this. The Helvault, a giant silver mass, imprisons the legendary angel Avacyn, along with the demon she was fighting at the time, Griselbrand, and a whole host of other angels and demons. Needless to say, the Helvault eventually gets broken, in the expansion called Avacyn Restored.
- Ubiquitous in the New World of Darkness.
- In Vampire: The Requiem, these is usually some kind of elder vampire in a torpor. The awakening of just one of them is enough to change power dynamic in a town.
- In Promethean: The Created, these are the Pandorans, failed Promethean creations that lay dormant until a Promethean gets near them. They are not nice. They are less characters and more like (extremely nasty) forces of un-nature.
Video Games
- In the second expansion of Fate/Grand Order, all your playable characters are forcibly sent away by the authorities as they take over the Chaldea Security Organization. However, Leonardo da Vinci reveals that she recorded and stored them in a briefcase for you to re-summon them at any time with a power source and the proper equipment.
- If you play co-op, this is how both players begin the game in Halo: Combat Evolved. Otherwise it is simply Sealed Badass in a Can.
- In Mortal Kombat 11: Aftermath, Kronika attempted to recruit Fujin, Shang Tsung and Nightwolf to her cause. When they refused, she threw them outside of time, enabling them to help the heroes out.
- Skylanders's story begins with the titular heroes being immobilized into statue form by Kaos, being sent to Earth. However, the Portal Master can send them back to Skylands temporarily with the Portal of Power, if they have the figure.
- Skylanders: Trap Team allows the player to seal the enemies in the first place, sealing away villains within Traps. Once Trapped, the offer is made that they can be allowed free if they work alongside the Skylanders, which the villains accept, thus allowing temporary usage of these villains.
- How you gain new characters in Valkyrie Profile 2: Silmeria.
- World of Warcraft's Mists of Pandaria expansion introduces players to the Klaxxi faction of the mantid by having the player stumble upon and awaken one of their Paragons in the Dread Wastes. The Paragons are ancient mantid heroes who were sealed in amber to be revived in times of crisis, and the player is tasked with reviving (or in a couple cases, killing corrupted ones) all twelve as they progress through the zone's storyline. Initially, the Paragons are allies, but once the player reaches Exalted reputation with the Klaxxi it is revealed that they worship the Old Gods. This comes back at the end of the expansion when the nine surviving Paragons ally with Garrosh Hellscream, who is trying to revive their creator, the Old God Y'shaarj.
Visual Novels
- In Summer Rose Court, it turns out that the spirits who created the portals between worlds are all sleeping; in fact, they've been asleep for so long that people have outright forgotten they exist. And then they start waking up...
Web Original
- In Ascension Academy, The Darkness and his Four Generals are sealed within the Demiplane during the Desolation of Moontide Pass, a brutal battle that ended the Dark War. The Four Generals each are trapped within one of the Seals of the Door, with the Fivth Seal containing the Darkness itself.
Western Animation
- In The 13 Ghosts of Scooby-Doo, Scooby-Doo opens up a box and unleashes thirteen malicious ghosts onto the world, and must get them all back.
- Jackie Chan Adventures might be another example. Around the second season, the Big Bad attempts to unleash a number of demons that have been trapped in the demon world for thousands of years.
- And in the third season, the powers of the Talismans were released when they were destroyed, and went into new hosts: random members of their respective species. They were collected and kept in The Vault in cages.
- In Thunder Cats 2011, this is how the 'Cats arrive on Earth.
- Transformers has this in spades. Since G1, 'bots have been sealed and unsealed time and time again. And the introduction of stasis pods in Beast Wars only served to make this even easier.
