History Main / BreakOutTheMuseumPiece

* ''ComicBook/GreenLantern'': During the ''War of the Green Lanterns'' storyline, Krona the Mad Guardian manages to take over the entire Lantern Corps by reinserting Parallax into the Central Lantern Battery, forcing Hal Jordan and the other lanterns from Earth to use alternate rings (Sinestro's yellow ring for Hal, Saint Walker's blue ring for Kyle, Atrocitus's red ring for Guy Gardner, and Indigo-1's indigo ring for John Stewart). While trying to move undetected, the group finds themselves in the Guardian's vault where the original prototype for the green lantern rings is kept; a gauntlet and a backpack power source. As the prototype isn't connected to the central battery, Guy equips it to supplement the red ring and describes the surge of power as feeling like he was wearing twenty power rings at once.
* There's a ''ComicBook/TheHauntedTank'' story where a French WWI tank troop offers their aid, having kept their tanks in working condition while running a military museum.

** An early comic has a thief stealing the new (red/gold) armor, so Tony has to put on the old (grey) armor to face him. The new armor is superior in almost every way, but Tony has two advantages. He's more experienced in using ''his'' armor (and thus knows the weaknesses of it), and the old suit is said to be stronger.

** Subverted with the "rehab armor" from issues #191-199; although physically resembling his original gray suit, and not as powerful as the red-and-golds Rhodey wore at the time, the internal technology was more advanced. The rehab armor even eliminated an exploit of the red-and-gold (one which Tony himself took advantage of when he had to stop a rampaging Rhodey) -- it replaced the old hip-mounted power packs with an internalized power source, a design element that carried over to later armors.
** Exemplified in issue 300, the debut of the original Iron Legion. After the telepresence armor was trashed by Ultimo and Tony needed time to recover and complete his modular armor, ComicBook/WarMachine enlisted Eddie March, Happy Hogan, Carl Walker, Michael O'Brien, and Bethany Cabe to don older Iron Man suits to join him in holding off Ultimo.[[note]] Cabe was the only one who hadn't previously filled in temporarily as Iron Man, but Rhodey picked her because she knew Tony's SecretIdentity and could hold her own in a fight. O'Brien and Walker had also had their own armored identities, as the Guardsman and Force, respectively.[[/note]] Abe Zimmer, who readied the armors, noted that they had been stored without any thought of sending them into battle again. At least three of the suits were replicas re-created by Stark, as the original versions had been destroyed[[note]]March donned the original gray "Model 1" armor; Hogan donned the old red-and-gold suit with the horned mask; and O'Brien donned the Silver Centurion armor. In ''Iron Man'' #175, Rhodey slagged all of the armors except the "classic" red-and-gold suit he was currently wearing, in order to keep them out of the wrong hands after Tony had lost Stark International; the Centurion was destroyed by Firepower in #230, near the end of the Armor Wars. Walker wore the "classic" suit, which had been damaged the last time Rhodey had worn it in issues #215-216, while Cabe wore the "neo-classic" suit Tony had worn between issue #231 and #280[[/note]].
** Turned against Tony in a [[TimeTravel time-travel]] adventure, where he meets Andros Stark, who in 2093 busted out his grandfather Arno's armor from storage to commit terrorism. Despite the armor being seventy years old, it's still over a hundred years on Tony's armor, so despite his lack of experience [[BiggerStick Andros still wins his first fight with Tony]].
** In the ''Comicbook/MarvelAdventures'' version of ''Armor Wars'', the first armor Tony retrieves from a group of Russian SuperSoldier terrorists is the Golden Armor.

* ''ComicBook/JudgeDredd'' once faced off against a SerialKiller who was [[FanOfThePast obsessed with the twentieth century]] and was killing modern musicians because of their generic pop music. He makes his kills using twentieth-century weaponry, which is noted by Dekker as being antique.

* ''Comicbook/{{Starman|DCComics}}'': In the first arc of Creator/JamesRobinson's series, "Sins of the Father", Jack Knight loses the cosmic rod that his father gave him and has to rely on his father's much older gravity rod.

* ''Anime/SteinsGate'': [[FiveManBand The gang]] has to find an [[BlandNameProduct IBN]] [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_5100 5100]] to run some legacy machine code to unravel the plot.

* In ''videoGame/ZingZingZip'', the heroes are reduced to fighting TheEmpire with WWII-era planes due to the latter being equipped with an {{EMP}} weapon that fries the computer components of modern planes.

[[folder:UrbanLegend]]

* ''ComicBook/{{Commando}}'': In a story titled "Charlie's Tank" a group of plucky British soldiers trapped in occupied France liberate a World War I tank from a museum and use it to escape the Nazis.

* In ''Literature/{{Victoria}}'' the [[RightWingMilitiaFanatic protagonists]], who are seceding from the US, are given Russian military aid in the form of a hundred T-34 tanks. As in, WWII vintage tanks. Rather than be dismayed, the protagonists praise the tanks for their ruggedness and reliability over contemporary armor ([[ArtisticLicenseMilitary hahaha, not really]]) but resolve not to get into any tank battles, instead using them in raids to disrupt enemy supply lines. This dovetails nicely with the rebels' philosophy of "[[OlderIsBetter Retroculturism]]".

* ''WesternAnimation/SouthPark'': In "Go God Go XII", Cartman tries cryogenic suspension to avoid waiting for the release of the UsefulNotes/{{Wii}} but ends waking up in the year 2546. He actually finds and gets a Wii from a museum (but he can't play because there's no compatible screen at the time).

* Examples in [[UsefulNotes/WorldWarTwo World War II]]:

* Modern flatscreen televisions have a slight bit of lag that wasn't present in old [=CRTs=]. For most purposes, this is completely ignorable, but high-end tournament play in ''VideoGame/SuperSmashBrosMelee'' requires lightning-quick reaction times that simply aren't possible with that lag, leading to several tournaments having to dig up old bulky units just for this game. Despite the game's enduring popularity, the increasing difficulty of acquiring working CRT televisions was one of the factors leading to [[UsefulNotes/FightingGameCommunity EVO]] finally retiring ''Melee'' in 2019.

* From the Russian invasion of UsefulNotes/{{Ukraine}} that started in February 2022:

*** Similarly, the Separatist conscripts were less equipped compared to their Russian allies, and were seen armed with Mosin Nagant rifles, [=PPSh=] submachine guns and even some early UsefulNotes/ColdWar / UsefulNotes/WorldWarTwo era helmets such as the [=SSh-60=].

** By the time of the battle of Donbas (which started sometime after the failure of the Kyiv offensive), Russians had lost so much [=T-72s=] (with the more recent [=T-90s=] in short supplies and the T-14 "Armata" not even having entered mass production yet) that some regiments had to resort to using antiquated T-62 tanks. Later, they started pulling T-55 and T-54 tanks (the first prototype of which were completed in ''1945'') out of storage.