Resurrect the Wreck

One large, wrecked plane is transformed into one much smaller, marginally airworthy plane.

Well, the heroes need a vehicle. They don't know anyone who will lend them one (probably for good reason). They don't trust Honest John's Dealership. (Would you?) And stealing is not an option. (Not that we'd condone that.) Luckily, they've found a vehicle. Unluckily, it's seen better days. Much better days. In fact, it's an abandoned wreck. But that's not going to stop the heroes. They've come back from low points. Now it's the vehicle's turn.

Resurrecting the wreck is when the heroes find their needed vehicle as derelict and set about getting it in better condition. "Better" ranges from just running properly to something amazing. The repair job might be done in the form of a montage or interspersed with plot scenes if it takes longer, but the end result is always worth the time and effort put into working on it.

In Real Life, armies in the field on the front lines may face supply line problems, so that the only way they can repair non-functional jeeps, tanks and planes is by salvaging spare parts off wrecked vehicles and planes. Sometimes a skilled mechanic can use a few wrecked vehicles' parts to put together one jury-rigged, but functioning vehicle.

Compare Break Out the Museum Piece where the vehicle in question has already been restored to working order when the heroes get their hands on it. May overlap with The Great Repair.

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Examples:

Advertising

• A commercial for Autozone ("Free Ride") has a young man come upon an abandoned car. There's a sign in the window that says "If you can fix her, you can have her." The kid goes to Autozone to get the parts he needs to fix it and gets help from one of the employees. The commercial ends with the boy buying an air freshener and driving off in the car he was fixing up.

Anime & Manga

• Girls und Panzer: All of Oarai's tanks have been left abandoned for twenty years after the school closed its last tankery program. None of them were properly mothballed, and only one was actually left in the hanger — the rest were outside and one was even submerged in a pond. Despite this, all of them were brought up to working order within days of being found.
• Mobile Suit Gundam: Iron-Blooded Orphans: Throughout the series, Tekkadan fixes several old and wrecked Gundam Frame mobile suits that they find to use in battle, such as the Gundam Barbatos (driven by Mikazuki Augus), the Gundam Gusion (driven by Akihiro Atland), and the Gundam Flauros (driven by Norba Shino, though he insists he and everyone else call it Ryusei-Go, much to everyone else's annoyance).
• In Mobile Suit Gundam 0083: Stardust Memory, Kou Uraki meets an ex-Principality of Zeon mobile pilot named Kelley Layzner, who is content to retire after the end of the One Year War. In his spare time, Kelley tries to restore a leftover mobile armor called the MA-06 Val Walo. While both men are aware of their past and current military affiliations, they decide to work together and repair the Val Walo because of common experience as soldiers.
• In Dominion Tank Police, Leona Ozaki is so eager to prove her worth to the police force that she goes so far as to accidentally wreck Brenten's Ace Custom tank, the "Tiger Special". While somehow avoiding being fired on the spot because Brenten was more preoccupied with an actual police emergency at the time, Leona and Specs set out to build her own custom tank out of the spare parts and created Bonaparte literally overnight.
• Space Battleship Yamato is about a wrecked oceangoing battleship from World War II that was resurrected as a space battleship.
• In Bad Company, the prequel to Great Teacher Onizuka, Eikichi and his friends find an old motorcycle in the trash and repair it. When the Skull Gang steals it once the kids have put in all the work, Eikichi and Ryuji go fight them to get it back.

Comic Books

• In the Carl Barks Uncle Scrooge story "The Great Steamboat Race", renowned sportsman Horseshoes Hogg is pestering Scrooge McDuck to get him to finish a very special boat race that was begun eighty-five years prior by Horseshoes' uncle Porker and Scrooge's uncle Pothole. The outcome of the race will determine the ownership of a large southern mansion called Cornpone Gables. The odd (and costly, hence Scrooge's reluctance) part is that for the race to be valid, it will have to be completed with the same 1870 boats with which it was begun, meaning Scrooge and Horseshoes have to raise their uncles' boats from the muddy waters of the Mississippi before they begin! Of course, Donald and Huey, Dewey, and Louie eventually convince Scrooge to give in, and the race begins!

Comic Strips

• Zits: Jeremy and Hector are frequently shown working on the broken-down hulk of an old minivan they found lying in a field. Multiple strips depict them discussing repairs, overhauls or wholesale replacements for its various parts and their plans to take a cross-American road trip in it once it's working again; but, comic strip continuity being what it is, they never approach their goal and the van remains perpetually broken and under maintenance.

Fan Works

• In Prehistoric Park Reimagined, the Cool Boat the Ancient Mariner was initially a cargo boat used by Novum during the company's earliest years of existence, only to end up left to spend years in the company shipyard without use as a result of Technology Marches On while the majority of the other former cargo boats ended up either sold to another company or sent on a one way trip to the scrapyard. By sheer luck, the boat that becomes the Ancient Mariner is still in the Novum shipyard when the story's Big Good Theodore Richardson finds it and decides it will fit the purposes of his plans for the then newly thought up Prehistoric Park perfectly, at which point he has it upgraded and repaired in time for the rescue team to make good use of it for the park's rescue missions.
• The Star Trek: Voyager/Stargate Universe crossover "Destiny and Voyager: Crossroads" sees the crews of Destiny and Voyager join forces to get them both home after finding a wormhole linking the Milky Way galaxy in the Star Trek universe to the galaxy that Destiny is currently travelling through in its own universe. The final plan sees Destiny take both crews back to the Star Trek Earth (which is a journey of only a few months at Destiny's maximum speed where Voyager would still need over thirty years), the two crews conducting what repairs they can during the journey; Starfleet gives Destiny a more thorough repair job once it has arrived back on Earth.

Films — Animation

• Studio Ghibli's Porco Rosso sees the titular hero's plane being shot down by his nemesis, Curtis, and being repaired by his friend's daughter Fiona.
• In Titan A.E., after Cale is marooned on a drifter colony, he and Akima find an old ship integrated into the colony. Once Cale determines its engines are intact, they begin restoring it to flying condition so they can catch up with the rest of their crew, and prevent Korso from turning the Titan over to the Drej.

Films — Live-Action

• Army of Darkness: While preparing to defend the castle from the Deadite army, Ash recovers his smashed-up Oldsmobile. With help from the Blacksmith, he rebuilds it into a steam-powered tank called the Deathcoaster, complete with a Deadite-chopping propeller.
• Chitty Chitty Bang Bang: The eponymous race car crashed in its last race and has been little more than children's amusement until it is due to be melted and scrapped. The Potts kids convince their father to scrape up the money to buy it, which he does, and then refurbishes it into a shiny new automobile that may or may not be able to float and fly.
• The Fast and the Furious:
  • The Fast and the Furious (2001) has Brian's Mitsubishi Eclipse get destroyed by Johnny Tran which is unfortunate because he owes the car to Dominic. He then shows up at Dominic's garage with a wrecked Toyota Supra. Luckily, the car's 2JZ engine is intact and the crew gets to working on it. The end result is powerful enough to defeat a Ferrari in a drag race.
  • The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift: To race against Takashi, Sean and Han's friends restore a 1967 Ford Mustang that Sean's father was working on, using the engine salvaged from Han's destroyed Nissan Silvia S15 Spec-S.
• The plot of The Flight of the Phoenix (1965), its 2004 remake, and the novel on which both were based is centered on this trope. However, instead of the protagonists discovering and repairing a derelict plane, they build a new plane out of the wreckage of the one which crashed in the first place.
• Ghostbusters: Afterlife: Trevor manages to breath new life into ECTO-1 with a bunch of other old car parts and get it into ghost-chasing shape again.
• In Herbie: Fully Loaded, the main character, is at a car junkshop in search of a car as a graduation gift. She finds Herbie in a derelict state and set to be crushed and, albeit with some initial reluctance, selects the vehicle.
• In Jurassic World, Zack and Gray find an original Jurassic Park Jeep and get it running so they can get out of the restricted area and back to the main park without getting killed by the Indominus Rex.
• In Mystery Men, Roy is tasked by his junkyard boss to dismantle a weird old tank, but never manages to do so. Near the end of the film, the team's ally, an enthusiast for non-lethal weaponry, sees the tank and explains that it's a "Herkimer Battle Jitney" one-of-a-kind armored vehicle designed not to kill, but instead to disarm its enemies with a high-powered "Electro-Nuclear Magnet" while being impervious to enemy fire, so they resurrect it to use as their transportation to the enemy's hideout. Thankfully, the vehicle's nigh-imperviousness made it resistant to any kind of damage—including attempts to scrap it—meaning it was still mostly intact in the first place.
• In One Crazy Summer, the gang decides the best way to shame the Beckersted family is to beat Teddy in the annual regatta. However, they don't have a boat... until George brings them the boat Hoops and Cassandra found on the beach earlier. They fix up the boat and enter the regatta and easily defeat Teddy Beckersted partly because they installed the engine from Teddy's Ferrari in it.
• Operation Petticoat starts with the U.S.S. Sea Tiger being sunk in a Japanese attack. Her crew manage to raise her and get her moving enough to sail her to proper repair facilities.
• The Enterprise crew in Star Trek Beyond find the wreck of the U.S.S. Franklin, lost nearly a century earlier, on the surface of the planet Altamid. Lacking a ship, they fix it up enough to get back to Starbase Yorktown to prevent Krall's plan to decimate the station.

Literature

• Christine: Arnie Cunningham buys the titular derelict 1958 Plymouth Fury from Roland LeBay, who then dies. Roland's brother George is aware that the car is sentient and rightly thinks Arnie should try to dispose of the car quickly. George's pleas go unnoticed as Arnie refurbishes Christine (or possibly not; she may be refurbishing herself) into a shiny 1950s dream machine. Meanwhile, Arnie slowly becomes a jerk towards others thanks to his obsession with Christine, and by the end of the book, he's become a full-on maniac.
• Contraband Rocket, a 1956 sci-fi novel by Lee Correy. In the future, only rich tourists and those who pass stringent physical criteria can go into space. Some rocket geeks find an atomic-powered Retro Rocket abandoned for scrap and help restore it for a flight to the Moon. This means not only Resurrect The Wreck but proving in court that they're not crazy (when losing can mean being Brainwashing for the Greater Good).

Live-Action TV

• In one episode of 7 Days (1998), a man who was presumed dead after testing an earlier model of The Sphere turns out to have survived. After he blows up the current Sphere, the Backstep Project's only hope to travel back and undo it is using said earlier prototype. Not only is this risky to begin with, but this one had spent years lying in the jungle.
• When the eponymous group from The A-Team works on a vehicle, they're usually weaponizing it. But in the episode "Knights of the Road", they end up fixing up an old tow truck that hadn't run in years. They end up using it to go after the Villain of the Week and when they've sufficiently angered him enough to attack them, then they weaponize it.
• In the Doctor Who episode "The Doctor's Wife", the Doctor builds a working Tardis console from the wreckage of various Tardises, with the help of the soul of his own Tardis that has been transferred to the body of Idris.
• Drake & Josh: In "Dune Buggy", Drake's friend gives the brothers his old Dune Buggy... which is completely trashed and utterly unusable. They make fixing it into a project, but once it's fixed, their parents refuse to let them drive it. Drake drives it anyway and gets into a crash, which he's forced to hide, covering up both his horrible injuries and the damage to the buggy.
• Firefly:
  • In the episode "Ariel": As part of a heist the crew resurrect a flying ambulance (that they literally got from a junkyard), repairing, rebuilding, and repainting it to transform it back into a functional and clean-looking emergency vehicle.
  • The episode "Out of Gas" reveals that Serenity herself was an example of this trope.
    Zoe: "Get her running again"?
    Mal: Yeah.
    Zoe: So not running now?
    Mal: Not so much.
• In the Star Trek: The Original Series episode "The Doomsday Machine", while investigating the wreck of the U.S.S. Constellation, Kirk, Scotty, and a damage control team get stuck there when the eponymous weapon attacks the Enterprise. Kirk and company work to get the derelict ship running to at least provide a distraction.
  Scotty: I can't repair warp drive without a Spacedock.
  Kirk: Then get me impulse power! Half-speed, quarter-speed, anything. If we can get this hulk moving, maybe we can do something.
• Star Trek: The Next Generation:
  • In the episode "Peak Performance", a team led by Riker are put in charge of the USS Hathaway, an eighty-year-old, semi-decommissioned starship for a battle simulation exercise. One of the first things they do is get the warp drive working again, at least for a brief hop, which the mediator of the exercise thought impossible.
  • In "Relics", after losing contact with the Enterprise while working to recover the sensor logs from the wrecked USS Jenolan, Scotty and Geordi La Forge work quickly to get the ship flyable in order to find out what happened.
• Star Trek: Picard: The penultimate episode "Vox" reveals that Geordi spent more than 20 years rebuilding the USS Enterprise-D after her destruction during Star Trek: Generations, and they take the Enterprise-D to fight the revived Borg.

Roleplay

• In Embers in the Dusk, a major part of the Trust's fleet power in its first centuries stems from the fact that one of the moons in the Helheim star system has an orbiting Derelict Graveyard with over forty thousand combat wrecks in widely varying condition. The nearby shipyards of Vanaheim get into a massive backlog struggling to fix them all up.

Tabletop Games

• BattleTech: Mechs are known for their insane durability. Unless a mech's center torso is destroyed or it gets destroyed by artillery or nuclear attack, a mech can be repaired given enough time and money. Canonically, even a mech that had been left sitting out in the open, completely exposed to the elements for decades or possibly centuries can be brought up to working order after some time in a repair facility.
• Gamma World adventure GW6 Alpha Factor. On Mindkeep Plateau there is a maintenance hanger that holds a derelict military ground car and some mechanic's tools. The car's battery is dead, it's out of fuel, and there are no keys. If the Player Characters can recharge the battery, find a source of fuel, and recover the keys, they can get the car running and drive it around.
• Pathfinder: The top-level "Salvage" spell restores a shipwreck to full working order and lifts it to the surface of the water. Even if it began as a rotten ruin, it ends with the sails rigged and ready.
• Warhammer 40,000: In the Gaiden Game Gorkamorka, the background plot for the game is the Orks trying to rebuild the spaceship they crash-landed on the planet again because a civil war broke out over which of their identical-to-a-non-Ork gods it was meant to represent, nearly destroying the ship. The Meks working on the titular Gorkamorka manage to keep the Orks occupied by having them compete to bring in the most scrap metal to rebuild the ship and get more tags (having a tag will allow an Ork passage on the ship once it's built, so naturally, the Orks think the more tags you have the more chance you'll have to leave the planet).
• Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay 2^nd Edition: One Ritual Magic spell lets a Necromancer raise a sunken wreck as a Ghost Ship. It's crewed by the undead remains of its old sailors and travels at an even speed regardless of local wind or weather.

Video Games

• In BattleTech, one of the campaign missions is about defending a wrecked Star League Dropship until it can be patched up enough to lift off. After that, you gain it as your base and can spend money to restore all the various systems the patch-up didn't.
• Car Mechanic Simulator 2018 has barn finds and cars found in a junkyard. They're normally missing parts and the ones that are still on the car are not in good condition. And it's up to you to repair them. The game features a more hands-on approach than most games on this list.
• Command & Conquer: Generals: While they don't resurrect the actual wreck, many of the GLA's vehicles can salvage parts from destroyed vehicles to improve their weapons (regardless of what those weapons were).
• One of V's allies in Cyberpunk 2077 did this in her youth, fixing up a junked fire truck by herself. Unfortunately, the local police refused to believe she repaired an entire truck on her own, and instead assumed she stole it, and subsequently locked her up in juvie. It's something she is still bitter about to this day, especially when none of the civil servants or law firms she contacts to represent her wrongful imprisonment suit seem to believe her story....but such is life in Night City.
• Dawn of War II: Every campaign has a level where you fight an enemy faction's (or your own faction's) superheavy unit. In the ork campaign, Mista Nailbrain convinces Kaptin Bluddflagg to let him fix the battlewagon they just trashed (named Daisy) exactly like a little boy asking to keep a wild animal as a pet.
  Mista Nailbrain: Oh, you poor poor fing. Look wot we'z gone an' done to ya. Kap'n! Kapn'! Can we'z keep 'er?
  Kaptin Bludflagg: Okay, Nailbrain, but it's yer charge. Keep it fueled and armed and take it out fer rukks.
  Mista Nailbrain: Hooray! I'll take good care of it, you'z see!
  Mista Nailbrain: Come 'ere an' let ol' Uncle Nailbrain fix ya up.
• Divinity: Original Sin II: The epilogue takes place on the Living Ship the Lady Vengeance, which is destroyed at the beginning of the final act. It's Hand Waved as your Big Good ally Malady restoring it with magic as a personal favour.
• In Don't Escape: 4 Days to Survive, you find an old, broken-down car in an abandoned barn. To get it back in working condition (which lets you travel around the map faster and bring more items with you), you need to find gasoline, an ignition coil, and a spare tire. Later, Barry can further improve the car to reduce its gas consumption.
• Early in Fallout 2 the Chosen One will come across a broken down Highwayman sedan. By tracking down the right parts and a mechanic to install them, the player can get it working again. This allows the Chosen One to greatly reduce travel times and carry tons of gear in the trunk at the expense of some spare Energy Weapons ammo to power it.
• The Boomer quest line in Fallout: New Vegas ends in the Courier helping the Boomers extract a WWII-era bomber from the bottom of Lake Mead. Sure enough, they get it back into the air for the climactic final showdown at Hoover Dam.
• As you rescue your friends in Far Cry 3, they gradually repair an old fishing boat found wrecked in a sea cave. Why they don't just use one of the modern, fully-functional boats or helicopters scattered around the islands isn't addressed, but presumably they wouldn't have been able to travel rough seas or have the range needed to reach safe land.
• In Final Fantasy X, the Al-bhed people discover a sunken airship, which Tidus and Rikku investigate and survey near the start of the game. Much later, after Tidus gets separated from the Al-bhed and subsequently reunited with Rikku, Cid sorties the airship and uses it to get his fellow Al-bhed out of Home after it's scorched by the Guado.
• Forza Horizon has the barn finds. Progression through the game reveals clues about neglected cars left in barns around the map. Acquiring one sends it to the player's garage where it's then fixed up and ready for racing in a little bit.
• Life Is Strange: Before the Storm has Chloe finding a rusted truck in the scrapyard. Naturally, it's the one she still drives three years later, in the main game, so her managing to fix it is already inevitable. She does so just in time to rush Rachel to hospital after she's stabbed.
• Marvel's Avengers: The game begins with a celebration marking the opening of the Avengers' West Coast facility in San Francisco as well as the launching of their new helicarrier, the Chimera. Things go awry when a terrorist attack results in Monumental Damage to much of the city, and the Chimera crashing into San Francisco Bay. Five years later, Kamala Khan follows leads to the Utah desert where she finds someone had moved the Chimera there, but otherwise left it derelict. Part of the first part of the game involves getting the ship airworthy again before AIM comes looking for them.
• Need for Speed Payback has the derelicts, cars found abandoned around the map. They only appear after the first five racing teams are defeated with each team leader giving the location for one. After finding one, you need to find the other parts to have a running vehicle which can then be modified for racing.
• Need for Speed Unbound has this when you start the game. After you finish creating your character, the game then asks you to choose a beaten-up car to restore. Once selected, the opening cutscene will show your selected car fully refurbished.
• Sea Plus Plus: The protagonist gets the webship needed to escape the mountain-enclosed cliffside she finds herself on, by taking one of three possible wrecked webships that have already been scavenged by others and fixing it up with webship components like piping, along with maneuvering parts like a sail and engine.
• In SnowRunner, there's a number of tasks where the goal is to repair a truck in the wilderness and deliver it somewhere. Other trucks can be found in similar condition just by roaming around. (However, some are actually in perfect condition, so this doesn't always come up.)
• Star Wars: The Old Republic: In Knights of the Fallen Empire, after the Outlander and crew escape into the swamps of Zakuul, they come across a derelict ship that's been lying there for centuries. Koth quickly realizes it's the Gravestone, the only ship known to have taken on the Eternal Fleet and won, meaning it's now a vitally important asset that they need to get operational again. Several missions are spent gathering supplies and materials for repairs and clearing out the local wildlife that have made nests inside the hulk.
• In Super Mario Odyssey, one of the first things you have to do in the Cascade Kingdom is gather enough Power Moons to resurrect the Odyssey so you have a ship you can use to chase Bowser.
• Downplayed in Treasure Planet: Battle at Procyon: During the sixth mission of the campaign mode, it's possible to find an unmanned ship if the player goes off the beaten path. It's noted to be unharmed, so all that's needed is to approach it and put a skeleton crew on it, upon which it's then added to the player's personal fleet.
• In the World of Warcraft cinematic "Warbringers: Jaina", she magically raises her father's ship from the ocean floor, which she later uses to save Anduin and his army from Sylvanas' Blight.
• In No Man's Sky, you can find wrecked starships which you can claim as your own. They're all initially in very sorry states —not just with crucial systems critically damaged but also many inventory slots being clogged by various damaged systems— but by scrounging for resources you can eventually repair them into a state as good as new, probably even better than the starship you begin with.
• The Warframe quest "Rising Tide" revolves around finding wrecked parts of Railjacks and repairing them to assemble them into a fully functional warship that the Tenno can take to duke it out with the Corpus and Grineer in space.

Web Videos

• Atop the Fourth Wall: Nearing the end of The Sleepwalker Arc, Linkara's friends and Lord Vyce repair Comicron 1 after it had crashed on the moon. Somewhat unusually, they didn't need the spaceship for travel or combat, but rather to free Linkara after he was possessed by The Entity.

Western Animation

• Adventure Time: In "We Fixed a Truck", Finn, Jake, and BMO fix up an old truck they found with the help of Banana Man. They later use it to drive to the Candy Kingdom to defeat an impostor Princess Bubblegum, although the truck gets destroyed in the process. BMO is saddened by it, but Finn and Jake just respond to the burning wreck with an apathetic "meh."
• Ben 10: While trapped in a flooding underwater hotel, Ben uses Upgrade to make an eighty years out of commission submarine functional again, getting himself, Gwen, and Edwin out safely.
• Chip 'n Dale: Rescue Rangers: Many of Gadget's vehicles and inventions are built from broken toys that have been thrown out or lost by their human owners. There are also a few specific examples:
  • This is how the Ranger Plane came to be in "To the Rescue": After the Screaming Eagle is destroyed in a crash-landing in part 3, Gadget uses the wreckage to build both the sled the others use to catch up with Klordane, and the Ranger Plane itself (combined with other garbage from the local airfield/camp).
  • The Gyrotank in "The Case of the Cola Cult" was built from the Gyromobile, which virtually fell apart after Bubbles sabotaged it.
  • On several occasions both the Ranger Plane and Ranger Wing were rebuilt into another vehicle suiting the Rangers' immediate needs after being destroyed or damaged earlier in the episode. Because Status Quo Is God they're back to their original condition by the next episode.
• The DuckTales (1987) episode "Jungle Duck" has Scrooge head to the jungle to find a rumored silver statue of a condor, believing there's a silver mine to go with it. Unfortunately, Launchpad crashes their plane when landing. After an adventure with a group of unfriendly natives and Tarzan Expy Greydrake, they find the "statue". It's actually another crashed plane, the one Greydrake came in on. When Mrs. Beakley points out that Greydrake is supposed to be coronated in a few days, they set about repairing the plane.
• The Futurama episode "Bendin' in the Wind" has someone dig up a van from the 60s and let Fry keep it. He turned it into a groupie-mobile when Bender went on tour with Beck. Amy, Leela, and Zoidberg lived in the van with Fry.
• Jim Button: In season 2, after the Wild 13's old ship is wrecked and they find themselves a new ship as a replacement, Pi Pa Po and his goons patch up the old ship for their own use.
• In the Gravity Falls flashback episode Gravity Falls S2 E12 "A Tale of Two Stans", the young twins Stanley and Stanford discover a wrecked boat and being a years-long project of fixing it, dubbing it "Stan-o-War". They seem to come close to finishing it, too, before the fall-out happens.
• In The Loud House episode "Tripped!", the Louds lose their car, but they find an old abandoned plane. Thankfully, Rita has a pilot's license and Lana can repair engines.
• Megas XLR: Coop finds the titular Humongous Mecha rusting in a junkyard under a colossal mountain of junk. According to the yard's owner, Goat, the pile (and, by extension, the robot) had been sitting there since at least the 1930s. The two of them manage to restore MEGAS to working order, give it a sick paint job, and rig up a muscle car to replace its missing head.
• It's not clear if the SWAT Kats built the Turbokat out of junk entirely or not, but it's been destroyed a couple of times and damaged at others, forcing major repairs to be made in the latter cases. In another case, they turned their civilian tow-truck into a monster truck to go up against a water-stealing alien.
• Ninjago: After their monastery is burned down by the Serpentine, the ninja move into a derelict ship called the Destiny's Bounty that Zane finds in the desert. They spend the beginning of the next day cleaning it and Jay installs a system to allow the ship to fly in order to make it a mobile base. We later see how the ship and its original pirate crew sank during a storm long ago, and in the same episode, the pirates are resurrected and battle the ninja. While the ninja also go on to use other headquarters, the Bounty and updated versions of it serve as their HQ for the majority of the series, being rebuilt or upgraded every time it's damaged or destroyed.
• The classic Disney Short "Susie the Little Blue Coupe" ends with Susie rusting in the city dump, which is depicted as a graveyard for cars (complete with rusted-out radiators that resemble tombstones). A teenager buys Susie and makes her into a hot rod for a well-earned happy ending.
• Sym-Bionic Titan: In "Roar of the White Dragon", Lance and Octus acquire and rebuild a wrecked car, adding Galalunian upgrades in the process to increase efficiency.
• Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (2012): Happens a few times throughout the series with old vehicles Donatello fixes and modifies for the turtles to use against their foes. He first turns an old subway car Leatherhead was living in into the Shellraiser, later a vintage truck found in a barn into the Turtle Racer, and finally Kirby O'Neil's old van into the Party Wagon.
• Thomas & Friends:
  • In the episode, "School of Duck", the school at Harwick is damaged by a storm, rendering the children unable to go to it until it's rebuilt. While the school is being rebuilt, Daisy is left to take the children to the school at Knapford, much to her dismay. Duck, thinking the job sounds like fun, decides to look for a coach after delivering a train of scrap to Reg so he can do it. Unfortunately, every coach he finds is being used by another engine. Duck eventually comes across Dexter, a decrepit coach abandoned in an overgrown siding, whom he is unable to pull due to broken axles. When he hears from Daisy that it could be months before the School at Harwick is repaired, Duck decides to take Reg's advice about recycling old things and making them new again. He comes across Dexter again and uses Judy and Jerome to take him to the Steamworks to turn him into a mobile classroom.
  • In "Thomas, Percy, and Old Slow Coach", while delivering a train of scrap to the scrapyard, Thomas and Percy come across Old Slow Coach, an abandoned coach set to be broken up despite otherwise being in perfect shape. Thomas and Percy wish there was something they could do to save her, and they get their wish when a workman's hut catches fire and burns down despite the firemen's best attempts to put it out (Thomas and Percy even help by letting them use the water from their newly-filled tanks). The two tank engines suggest that Old Slow Coach be used as a new hut for the workmen, and Sir Topham Hatt has her restored to her former glory.
  • In "The Refreshment Lady's Tea Shop/The Refreshment Lady's Stand", Sir Topham Hatt gives Peter Sam the job of finding a new location for the Refreshment Lady's tea shop. Peter Sam shows the Refreshment Lady the Woodland Way, the Old Castle Causeway, and the Whistling Waterfall, but since she likes all three of these locations, she doesn't know which one she should choose. The following night, a storm breaks out, and when Peter Sam is sent to help Rusty clear the damage, they find a derelict railway coach. Peter Sam collects the coach and gives Sir Topham Hatt the idea to turn it into a mobile tea shop, that way, the Refreshment Lady can sell refreshments wherever and whenever she likes.

Real Life

• A man's car broke down in the Sahara desert, but he supposedly was able to jury-rig it into a motorcycle to escape. However, when the Mythbusters tried to replicate the results, they failed.
• Due to how shallow the water was, the US Navy was able to salvage many of the ships sunk during the attack at Pearl Harbor and even put some of them back into service. Within six months, five battleships and two cruisers had been floated and patched so they could be sent back to shipyards for extensive repairs; of the nine battleships lost, only three were not returned to service, those being the Oklahoma, which had capsized and sustained irreparable damage from her superstructure being demolished on the floor of the harbor, the Arizona, which was split in two by an ammunition explosion, and the Utah, which had also capsized like the Oklahoma but had already been removed from service and re-designated as a target ship before her sinking anyways.

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