Ragtag Bunch Of Misfits / Real Life

Sports teams

• The 1980 Winter Olympics featured the Soviet Hockey juggernaut playing against a bunch of college hockey players who just happened to be playing for the United States. In what would become known as the Miracle on Ice, the college kids toppled the Russians 4-3, with a little help from the home crowd. Canada did it first, eight years earlier, with an All-Star lineup of National Hockey League players - many of them future Hall of Famers - and in an exhibition series, not the Olympics. The Americans? Over a third of the team, including the captain, never played a minute in the NHL.
• Wimbeldon FC's "Crazy Gang," with a reputation for pulling an assortment of practical jokes on each other and their manager as well as for playing Association Football with a very unsophisticated and amateurish style, were able to beat the much more skilled Liverpool squad in the 1988 FA Cup Final against all expectations.
• The 2010 World Series champion San Francisco Giants, a team literally described in the media and by their own coach as "a bunch of castoffs and misfits", as the roster was cobbled together throughout the year with an ever-changing lineup playing the games. Affectionately dubbed The Scrapheap Gang, these Giants were a group of inexperienced, but talented and sometimes eccentric youngsters backed up by some aging veterans and a few guys signed and given another chance to play when no other team wanted them. Late in the regular season, when they looked like they would miss the playoffs for the sixth straight year, their general manager held a private meeting with the pitchers to break them out of a slump. At the same time, their first baseman acquired a red thong that he claimed would lead them to victory. And did they ever rise to the challenge, with one of the strongest final pushes in MLB history. Leaning heavily on the strength of their pitching, particularly that of the starters and of their "unique" closer Brian Wilson (no, not that Brian Wilson), the Giants eventually notched enough wins in September to qualify for the playoffs on the last game of the regular season. The postseason would be even more dramatic, as most of their games, in sport movie fashion, would go Down to the Last Play. To boot, almost every game they won would feature an Unlikely Hero, and very often it was someone playing better than they ever had before to make up for a slumping teammate's play. To cite two prominent examples: the MVP of the League Championship Series was Cody Ross, who had been released by the third-place Florida Marlins with six weeks to go in the season. The MVP of the World Series was Edgar Renteria, an aging, injury-prone shortstop who for much of the season slumped so badly that he was reduced to being a part-time starter.
• The 2014 and 2015 Kansas City Royals could also be described as this. The team was cobbled together from across a dozen different countries and didn't even all speak the same language. In 2014, they battled back to earn a spot in the American League Wild Card Game. They nearly lost the game, but battled back in the late innings and won. They proceeded to win a total of eight straight post-season games, setting a new record, against teams with twice their money and much more veteran players. In fact, other than a few players like James Shields and Alex Gordon, very few members of the team could be called veterans of baseball at all. Though they lost the world series to the Giants in 2014, they drove the game all the way down to the nailbiting final out. THEN, motivated by being ninety feet from a tied game, they came roaring into the 2015 season and proceeded to win their division, win the division series, win the American League championship series, (again against teams with twice their money using a smattering of cobbled together players and late additions like Ben Zobrist and Johnny Cueto), and roundly and thoroughly defeat the Mets in just five games to Take The Crown. In both seasons, the Royals won most of their games in come from behind victories as well.
• NFL example: If documentaries by NFL Films (such as the America's Game series) are anything to go by, the Oakland/Los Angeles Raiders are likely a good example of this, at least the teams from the 70s and 80s under head coaches John Madden and Tom Flores. Featuring many castoffs from other NFL teams, players who were considered washed up, and some colorful personalities with chips on their shoulders, the Raiders were a bunch of misfits who became the "bad guys" of the NFL because of their highly aggressive play (especially players like George Atkinson and Jack Tatum). They were also a successful bunch of misfits, winning Super Bowls XI, XV, and XVIII.
• The Oakland Athletics in the early 2000s, as seen in the book and film Moneyball, were deliberately assembled as a championship team that the club could actually afford. This entailed culling players from "the Island of Misfit Toys", standouts in one area who flounder in others. A classic example of this was Scott Hatteberg — where most of baseball saw a catcher with an injury that prevented him from throwing the ball, the A's saw a batter with a preternatural ability to avoid getting an out (and whose arm injury wouldn't matter if they put him at first base instead).
• The Cleveland Cavaliers with LeBron James usually had those as his support cast, aside from a few big names like Kyrie Irving and Kevin Love - or in 2017-18, the over-the-hill Dwyane Wade and Derrick Rose, who were even traded mid-season. Still, LBJ made it work as he led them to 5 finals and one title.
• Many of the NHL's "Cinderella" teams can be described as this. The 2003/2004 Calgary Flames and 2005/2006 Edmonton Oilers could be best described as a group of talentless players (minus one or two) that played their hearts out, sacrificing their bodies to outplay everyone. By the time the dust settled, the teams had little, if any, players healthy enough to play the last games of the playoffs.
• Expansion teams always start with a bunch of castoffs that the rest of the league deemed expendable - less talented free agents, inexperienced players, and veterans nearing retirement. Thus most of the records for bad performances in all major leagues are held by teams in their inaugural seasons. But a major exception was found in the NHL's Vegas Golden Knights, who before the season started were expected to be terrible, only to reach the Stanley Cup final.
• The 2011 Arizona Diamondbacks were branded this by the media. While the 2001 World Series team feature a group of proven veterans, the 2011 team featured only Justin Upton as the only star. But coming off a miserable 2010 they managed to grab two pitchers for players of lesser value. They also featured a pitcher that throws a baseball like a tomahawk and the player with the most tattoos in the majors. They managed to unseat the 2010 Giants as division champions, against them no less before losing in the first round of the playoffs.
• The 2013 Boston Red Sox managed this despite being a major market team based on their total failure the year before. They consisted of a bunch of guys who had marginal success throughout their careers and David Ortiz. They were guided by the bombing of the Boston Marathon earlier in the year and also were unified in the fact that every member had a beard.
• In 1973, Bing Russell (Kurt's dad) brought a bunch of hopefuls, has-beens, and never-weres to Portland, Oregon, and called them the Mavericks. The short-season Class A ball club, under the first female general manager in professional baseball history, was independent but soon started beating farm teams. Badly. The Mavericks won their division three seasons in a row and had the best record in the league in 1977. Then narrowly lost the 1977 championship series to the Bellingham Mariners, Seattle's farm team. The majors took that as an affront, bought out the Mavericks over the winter, and put a Class AAA expansion farm team in Portland. Portland fans preferred the ragtag bunch of misfits; less than half as many fans came out for Beavers' home games. A documentary about the team, The Battered Bastards of Baseball, debuted at the 2014 Sundance Film Festival and can be watched on Netflix.
• The first real Cinderella run in the NCAA basketball tournament was by Utah in 1944, and they were a classic sports example. With World War II raging, Utes coach Vadal Peterson faced several huge obstacles going into the season: a bunch of his players had been drafted, all the other teams in the conference had canceled their seasons, and the Army was using the Utes' home gym as a barracks. Peterson held open tryouts for the team and pulled together a team with four freshman starters, and also featuring two Japanese-American players, a huge novelty and also very socially significant during the war years. They ended up playing most of their games against local military teams (plus a couple of colleges from Idaho and Colorado) and bounced between the tiny university women's gym, a gym owned by the LDS Church and a local high school gym for home games. Still, they only lost three games in the regular season and got an invitation to play in the NIT in New York, then considered the equal to the NCAA tournament. After losing to Kentucky in the first round, it appeared their season was over, and they decided to stay in New York a few more days to sightsee. But then they got word that the Arkansas team had gotten into a car accident on the way to Kansas City for the NCAA West regional, and the NCAA invited Utah to be a last-second replacement. They accepted the invite, won the regional, then returned to New York, where they defeated East regional champ Dartmouth in the national championship game, then turned around and defeated NIT champ St. John's in a benefit game for the Red Cross, sealing their unlikely championship.
• The American Football League in its first few seasons. Born out of the mutual desire of would-be NFL owners (who were denied opportunities to buy into the existing National Football League), the player rosters and coaching staffs were full of NFL castoffs and rejects (The biggest name among the early batch would be Houston QB/K George Blanda, starter for the Chicago Bears for over a decade before being cut), along with players from smaller schools and historically black colleges that the NFL largely ignored. There were a handful of big time college players signed (like 1959 Heisman winner Billy Cannon, who was Houston's first ever draft pick), but until around 1965 (with the signing of Alabama QB Joe Namath by the NY Jets), this was the AFL standard operating procedure. They eventually came to be considered equals to the NFL... But this was around the time of the NFL/AFL merger, when the AFL ceased to exist as a separate league.

Armies

• The "Mille", the thousand-something volunteers that followed Giuseppe Garibaldi on his expedition to conquer the Kingdom of Two Sicilies and unify Italy in 1860. The youngest was 10 years old. The oldest, 70-something. There were students, poets, shopkeepers, tailors, pharmacists, bakers, former soldiers and officers of the regular army, medics, pretty much anything, including a woman, each with his own motive: fame, fortune, romance, adventure, ideals, death (reportedly one of the volunteers jumped offboard the ship twice during the trip to the shores of Sicily). They wore civilian clothing that only had in common the color red (the closest thing they had to a uniform) and were armed with old rifles obtained by tricking an army quartermaster into giving them. Besides, the rifles themselves never saw much use, since Garibaldi's tactical philosophy was "the rifle is nothing more than the grip of the bayonet". And apparently it worked, as they eventually conquered the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies.
  • This always was Garibaldi's Modus Operandi: find a big country, assemble a ragtag bunch of misfits, and go kick asses. Sometimes, Garibaldi's troops were fighting long after the rest of the country they were fighting for had been crushed: during the Uruguayan civil war, the regular Uruguayan forces were crushed at the battle of Arroyo Grande: Garibaldi's ragtag bunch of former slaves and immigrants held the city for nine years and eventually won the war.
  • Garibaldi was helped by two factors: first, his foes tended to think that time he had bitten off more than he could chew and didn't take him seriously for a while; by the time they realized he could actually do it, their army had lost morale and his own had grown, partly thanks to defections from his enemy. The Mille are a good example of this: when they landed in Sicily proper there was about a thousand of them and were regularly faced by similar-sized forces, when they landed on the continental part of the kingdom after conquering Sicily there were twenty thousands of them and had much better equipment than at the start, and by the time of the final battle they were thirty-five thousands, most of which having deserted the Sicilian army during the campaign. That's why the Italian army (that would usually stick him at a place they wanted conquered and wait 'till his 'unexpected' success gave them an excuse to intervene) and the French army (who had already fought him once and got their collective asses kicked hard) managed to defeat him: at the Aspromonte (Italians) and Mentana (French) they attacked him with their best troops in superior numbers, either forcing him to back down (Aspromonte) or utterly defeating him (Mentana).
• Hollywood History example: According to widespread belief (and would Hollywood lie to you?), the Americans were the Ragtag Bunch of Misfits who drove the British from their shores during the American Revolution. In history, of course, the Americans did form proper military units, with ranks and rules and discipline and everything. They did do so with a lot of foreign (especially French and Prussian) help, but...
  • General von Steuben ^note Who was not in fact born a noble and only tacked the "von" onto his name to get military street cred in America took advantage of the long winter at Valley Forge to whip the Continental Army into some kind of shape. A lot of the Founding Fathers were emotionally and ideologically committed to the 'citizen soldier' ideal. George Washington, who for his sins, had commanded militia men in the French and Indian War knew that this was unworkable. Not because citizen soldiers are cowards but because it takes training and discipline to make men do something as counter-intuitive as stand still and let the enemy empty their muskets into them.
  • Modern researchers on the battles of Lexington and Concord have concluded that the Massachusetts Militia actually contained a higher percentage of combat veterans from the French and Indian war than the so-called professional soldiers they opposed. Which probably shouldn't surprise anyone, considering that they managed to pull off a seven-mile moving envelopment. One British Officer writing home after the battle concluded "These people know very much what they are about."
  • There were also instances of decent-sized forces appearing more-or-less out of nowhere, the important Battles of Bennington and Kings Mountain being the most significant examples. These pick-teams didn't stick around for very long, though. Almost all were local militia taking time away from farms and business. The song "Yankee Doodle" was invented by the British to mock these rag-tags, but they made it their own and sang it in battle.
• The 1st United States Volunteer Cavalry, better known as the Rough Riders, was a regiment formed in 1898 to fight in the Spanish-American War. Also known as "Roosevelt's Rough Riders" (due to Theodore Roosevelt resigning his position as Secretary of the Navy to become one of the unit's commanding officers), the Rough Riders were initially made up of cowboys, frontiersmen, prospectors, and other adventurers from Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, and Oklahoma. But after Roosevelt joined the ranks, the Rough Riders received volunteers that included Ivy League college athletes, New York aristocrats, glee club singers, Texas Rangers, and American Indians. Every man who joined the Rough Riders was required to be a skilled horseman, and they received more publicity than any other unit during the war. They are best known for their victory at the Battle of San Juan Hill, during which they ironically fought on foot despite being trained as cavalry because there weren't enough ships to carry their horses to Cuba. After the war, the Rough Riders achieved legendary status due to Roosevelt writing his own history of the regiment as well as silent film reenactments made many years later.
• Gen. George S. Patton, when taking control of the US armed forces in Africa, started by levying heavy fines for soldiers and especially officers for unkempt uniforms. By the time Patton engaged in the famed 609 Battle, he'd transformed, well, you-know-whats into bonded soldiers.
• Another example of "folk history", this time Russian, is the Red Army, which, according to popular belief, drove out the White Army with pure revolutionary enthusiasm during the Russian Civil War. While it was a ragtag bunch for a short time since its creation, it was completely unsuited for combat, and only began to score victories against the Whites after its transformation into an actual army, with ranks and discipline — mostly courtesy of former war specialists from the disbanded Tsarist army, whom the Bolsheviks began to enlist after realizing that the "army of workers and peasants" ideal didn't work at all.
  • The reorganization of the Red Army was supervised by Leon Trotsky. Trotsky became the ultimate persona non grata during Stalin's rule, which may help to explain where the popular belief came from. Stalinist history textbooks obviously couldn't talk about Trotsky's role in building the Red Army, let alone the role of counterrevolutionary officers from the Tsarist period.
• Real-world example: grab a book about Mexican history, open it on the chapters about the 19th century and the Revolution, and you'll see at least five disorganized bands duking it out for any reason. In fact, the reason why the Cinco de Mayo is a national holiday is that was the day when a ragtag bunch, led by Ignacio Zaragoza, kicked the crap out of the disciplined and well-equipped French invaders. Puebla was lost a year later but after too much complication the liberals won the war and completely squashed the competition, this time permanently. (That doesn't mean other conflicts appeared but...)
• The Texans who won their independence from Mexico were mostly ranchers, farmers, brigands, and failed American politicians, but some of them (mostly officers) had some military experience. Some even Mexicans as Lorenzo de Zavala.
• The violent Indian Freedom Fighters who fought the British were very much this. Although their role in securing Independence was fairly minor, Britain simply didn't have the resources to maintain its empire after World War II, not to mention it had very much lost the High Moral ground to Gandhi.
• The Calcutta Light Horse were less a ragtag bunch of misfits and more a bunch of expatriate English barflies, but they did manage to infiltrate Portuguese Goa during World War II and destroy an interned German merchant ship passing radio intelligence out of neutral territory.
• The Battle of New Orleans at the end of the war of 1812 was basically won by one very good leader (Andrew Jackson) with a ragtag bunch of misfits. And pirates!
• The French Foreign Legion, at least according to all those romantic novelists...
  • Their recruitment still is "unconventional", but there is a pretty strict selection process with a psychological evaluation, physical and medical tests, and even a test of logic and mental abilities. After that, the soldiers receive some of the toughest training in any infantry unit. The basic contracts last for 5 years, and they are deployed regularly (Wikipedia list 5 current missions as per December 2008). So while practically everyone there is some sort of "failure" looking for a second chance, they are much better trained and organized than any movie bunch.
• The Crusaders, especially during the First Crusade. Runaway serfs, criminals promised a pardon for partaking crusade, disinherited younger sons, miscellaneous adventurers and ribauds, who marched through Europe in order to conquer the Holy Land. Surprisingly, after an initial defeat, they are joined by an army of real professional soldiers - the Crusader Knights - which then go together to conquer Palestine and found the Kingdom of Jerusalem.
  • Even the professional soldiers weren't exactly what you called a well-oiled group. Consisting of the forces of:
    • The brother of the excommunicated French king (who considered himself equal to his brother and kept demanding that he be treated as such).
    • An almost bankrupted French duke who had very shaky ties to his tittle and who joined the crusade as a way to get away from it all (selling almost all his remaining holdings in order to fund an army)
    • The brother of said duke who now had very little legitimacy thanks to his brother selling his holdings.
    • A Norman-Lombard Prince who had been disinherited by his father in favour of his younger half-brother. And now joined the crusade for the chance to actually gain something other than a fiefdom.
    • Another French count/duke (he was booth) who was the only one to join because he wanted to spread Christianity. By far the richest of the group he pretty much ended up funding the whole thing much to his chagrin.
    • The eldest son of the Norman-British king who after one to many disputes with his father had been disinherited. And who joined the crusade so he might get something.
    • A Flemish count whose father had been killed while making an pilgrimage to Jerusalem and who wanted revenge.
    • And yet another French count who joined mostly because his wife told him to.
• Israel actually subverts this trope by taking these misfits and organizing them into settlers and soldiers. They started out as misfits, but due to the unifying and organizing force that was the Zionist movement quickly lost that designation. Most of the country's accomplishments are due to having its Misfit Mobilization Moment very early, and most importantly, before getting involved in any war. Against the expectations of every single military power in the world, said ragtag group beat back the well-equipped Arab Armies, who collectively had as much manpower as Israel had people, including the massive elderly Jewish population of Jerusalem.
  • Casting the British Mandatory occupation as the Obstructive Bureaucrats at best, and with many of the companion tropes and ideas such as
    • smuggling (guns, refugees)
    • infighting stemming from vastly different methods (ranging from "attack when attacked" to terrorism),
    • improvised weaponry such as catapults for explosives, canes with a single bullet for the elderly, and an "air force" consisting of tossing grenades out of Cessnas
    • Refuge in Audacity such as claiming to have nukes in 1948, stealing electricity from the British to power the literal underground bullet factories, and so on.
• The Norwegian resistance movement during World War II fits the trope, as the many groups involved developed locally, and didn't have a chance to communicate with the Norwegian exile government for quite some time. Meanwhile, the different groups seemed to step on each other's toes. And yes, they were mostly ordinary guys without proper combat experience and homemade tools that didn't go off as planned. AND there was the communist faction, who did not communicate well with the others.
• The Haitian slaves owned by France back in the Napoleonic days could be counted on to fight, argue, and fight some more. With the help of Toussaint Louverture, they managed to stop bickering long enough to kick the French's ass. Tragically, they went right back to the whole Ragtag misfit thing, and the country has languished in the third world as a result, although much of that can be attributed to racist treatment^note France refused to recognize Haitian independence for decades and so did the US until the 1860s (on Southern insistence) and Britain. France finally agreed to accept Haitian independence as a fact in exchange for an "indemnity" that Haiti paid in full (mostly on credit) which gave Haiti an epic budget deficit it could never quite shake. France by the way hasn't so much as apologized for the indemnity, and paying it back to Haiti is never so much as discussed and interventions by the other World Powers, not happy of seeing a slave revolt succeed as well as the wrecked state of Haiti's sugar and coffee-based economy after the war of independence.
• Averted by the Canadian rebellions led by William Lyon Mackenzie in Upper Canada (later Ontario) and Louis-Joseph Papineau in Lower Canada (later Quebec), who were both rebelling against the nepotism and corruption of the British colonial governments of the time. Papineau and Mackenzie's "soldiers", if you could call them that, were mostly common farmers and labourers who were poorly trained and disciplined. Needless to say, the trained British troops mopped the floor with them, but at least the rebels eventually got the political reforms they wanted after the fighting ended.
• Bolivar's army was a subversion at first (to put it simple: everybody wanted to be the leader by having indy ploys every three seconds instead of the ones they were planning for months before...) since they spent around twenty years of 'we did it!...oh, sorry, the Spanish beat us again...' before deciding it was easier to free Colombia and then, with the support of a whole nation, get Venezuela free. It worked.
• The rebels in the Libyan Civil war. Very few of them were actual soldiers.
• The army of Chad counts as this in the Toyota War it fought against Libya in the late 1980s. Chad's army was a cobbled-together alliance of rebel and government forces who until very recently had been at each others' throats, was outnumbered and outgunned by their Libyan opponents, and was so underequipped that it had to use Toyota transport trucks to ferry its troops. Despite this, they still managed to win against the Libyans.
• The British Army lives and dies by this trope. One of the first modern armies, the New Model Army was a complete subversion (English, but the framework for the British army was laid here), made up primarily of professional soldiers who had been fighting against the Royalists...until they were only able to fill about two-thirds of places. After which, the Army lowered its standards. From then on, to about 1914, the Army was been considered the second service to the far more prestigious and skilled Navy (the "senior service"), taking on colossal numbers of thieves, rapists, murderers and arsonists, then moving on to those who have failed their GCSEs. This trope was so prevalent during the Napoleonic Era that the Duke of Wellington noted how wonderful it was to make so much of them. This applies less to other armies as they tended to still take Peasant Levies, meaning the men were required to serve whatever their profession, or have a very elite air and esprit de corps (the French, up until 1812).
  • Not that the senior service was that picky when it came to filling its ranks via the press gang. After all, the saying about "rum, the lash and sodomy" was originally about the Royal Navy.
  • The Fourteenth Army of WWII, in particular, was the last great colonial army, a massive Multinational Team described as "the scrapings of the barrel." It operated on a shoestring, often using obsolete equipment that other theaters no longer needed and devising local solutions for things it couldn't get. Its predecessor, Burma Corps, was even worse off. It was composed of the newbie and ill-equipped 17th Indian Division, the even more newbie and worse-equipped 1st Burma Division, and the experienced 7th Armoured Brigade of the Desert Rats — supported by the unreliable and completely unequipped Chinese, and the mercenary American Flying Tigers. Incredibly, it retreated from Burma intact under the leadership of Bill Slim.
• The East African Schutztruppe of WWI was held together by the personality of its commander, Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck. Part African soldiers, part Arabic auxiliaries, part African civilian carriers and their families, part professional officers, part German civilian settlers, and part Naval survivors of the cruiser SMS Königsberg, it was the last German force to surrender - having invaded the Congo, Mozambique, and Rhodesia first.
• Augusto C Sandino was a liberal general in Nicaragua when a liberal-conservative civil war ended with the US Marines intervening on the side of the Conservatives. One liberal said "All my generals have laid down their arms - all except one". And that's the beginning of one of the most incredible stories in military history. Sandino borrowed money from a few local prostitutes, assembled the - youknowwhat - and went on to fight the US marines tooth and nail until finally - Sandino's men having conquered half the country - the Marines left. However, Sandino didn't see what was coming. When a peace dinner was held in his honor he was shot on the way home on the orders of the head of the national guard and soon to be dictator Anastasio Somoza. Oh and Sandino died aged 38 and was unanimously named a national hero by the Nicaraguan Congress in 2010, where a party named after him held a plurality. Sandino himself also qualifies, as he was born out of wedlock to an indigenous servant of his father, a wealthy landowner and had to leave the country in his twenties because he nearly killed the son of a prominent conservative who had insulted his mother. He spent his exile in Mexico, where he formed many of his political opinions.
• These were the backbone of the Republican resistance to the military coup in the early months of the Spanish Civil War. When Franco and his fellow pro-fascist insurgent generals kicked off their coup against the republic, about half of the Spanish army defected with them. Unfortunately, that half took almost all of Spain's best troops, mostly of the 'Army of Africa', colonial units stationed in Morocco with real combat experience, renowned for their brutality and bravery. The troops that stayed loyal to the republic were mostly 'Peninsular' soldiers, that is, soldiers stationed on the Spanish mainland most of whom had never seen combat. The Republican government disbanded the army in the immediate aftermath of the coup to deprive the insurgents of further support. This left the republic with only smatterings of largely inexperienced loyalist troops (mostly enlisted men, as the officer corps overwhelmingly sided with the rebels) and a collection of ragtag citizen militias organized by various left-wing parties and trade unions. Despite high morale, they were soundly trounced again and again by the professional soldiers of the Army of Africa, who quickly pushed them back to Madrid, which the rebel generals expected to take within weeks at most. However, when the pro-fascist troops were at the very gates of Madrid, literally occupying its outlying suburbs and parks, these untrained civilian militias suddenly whipped themselves into shape and halted the rebel troops at the river Manzanares on the edge of Madrid, holding them back long enough for aid from the Soviet Union to arrive, and for a real army to be organized.
• The Battle of Castle Itter, dubbed the strangest battle of World War II. Five days after Hitler's suicide, a quite eclectic group formed in the castle. Facing off against elements of a Waffen-SS Division were 14 American soldiers, 10 anti-Nazi Wehrmacht soldiers and a defecting SS officer, high-ranking French prisoners (among them, tennis star Jean Borotra, former prime minister Édouard Daladier, Charles de Gaulle's elder sister Marie-Agnès Cailliau, former commander-in-chief Maxime Weygand, the other former prime minister Paul Reynaud, former commander-in-chief Maurice Gamelin, right-wing leader François de La Rocque and trade union leader Léon Jouhaux), Eastern European prisoners, and an M4 Sherman. Also as reinforcements, two German soldiers, a member of the Austrian Resistance, and finally the American 104th Infantry Division. Needless to say, it really was quite strange.

"Well, it was just the d'ernest thing."

— Cpt. John C. "Jack" Lee, Jr.

• The Pacific Theater had a downplayed example in Taffy 3, the force that fought the Battle Off Samar. While they were legitimate and competent navy ships, they were never intended to face surface combat and it showed. Taffy 3 consisted largely of destroyer escorts (designed to be cheap and numerous enough to provide effective anti-submarine escorts at the cost of surface combat potential), escort carriers converted from merchant vessels and with all the armor of an ambitious soda can, and 3 actual fleet destroyers. Because the admiral in charge fell for a Japanese decoy, they were left smack in the way of nearly the entire Japanese navy (led by the Yamato, which alone outweighed Taffy 3 in its entirety) without any fleet units heavier than their destroyers. They won the day by fighting so ferociously that Admiral Kurita thought he really was facing the entire US fleet and withdrew.

Other groups

• The ships that ended up discovering the Americas originally had an overwhelming majority of criminals and other lowlifes as their crews, as they weren't even expected to make it through alive, let alone come back. (Predictably, malnutrition and illnesses did end up mowing a lot of them down on the way.) This also partly explains the horrible treatment the natives suffered.
• Rabbi Yeshua bar Yosef of Nazareth and his friends/followers definitely fit this trope. His disciples included a hot-headed redneck fisherman known for needing things explained to him multiple times, a pair of hot-headed redneck fisherman brothers known for getting into fights, a guy who admired his master in a different way than the others, a Rome-hating Zealot and a Roman-employed tax collector, a guy best known for his doubt, and a guy best known for selling his master out. Then there are the other people Jesus hung out with. His best friends/biggest supporters included (scandalously!) a leper and an ex-prostitute. Just this list demonstrates how radically un-judgemental the guy was.
  • Then there’s Jesus himself, a small-town guy who worked construction for a living, got dissed on for his country accent when he went to the big city, and never was accepted in his home town, at least partly because of his dubious parentage (of course, nobody believed Mary when she told them who the daddy was). Even away from home, he was unjustly accused by pious folks of being a drunken party boy because of the “tax-collectors and sinners” he hung around with.
• Outcasts United by Warren St. John is a real-life example of this. It is the story of a bunch of refugees who ended up living in Clarkston, Georgia (a small suburb of Atlanta), which became a resettlement center for refugees from war zones in Liberia, Congo, Sudan, Iraq, and Afghanistan. These kids eventually start a soccer team, the Fugees, with the help of Luma Mufleh, an American educated Jordanian woman. It the prejudice they endured and the money struggles they have, and the culture clashes (such as how in Georgia soccer is a sport associated with rich people).
• Reddit and 4chan's /v/ board had a competition in Tribes: Ascend. Team Reddit was a well-coordinated, heavily practiced team with high-end computers; Team 4chan was a hastily-gathered team of /v/irgins run by a furry with a tripcode and a Brazilian sniper with 140 ping playing on toasters. 4chan won 3-2.
  "WE WINNERS NOW"
• For the effects George Lucas wanted for Star Wars: A New Hope, supervisor John Dykstra assembled some college students, artists, and engineers to create Industrial Light & Magic. In their large empty warehouse, they wound up wasting $1 million (lots of miniatures and technology were created, but the only scene they made that could be salvaged was the Tantive IV's escape pod being released, which even opened the Star Wars trailer) and had an unorthodox working environment that shocked 20th Century Fox executives when they visited. Once Lucas returned from the already-screwed enough shoot in England, he put the motley crew of technicians under a tight leash to make sure the effects were made (a year's worth of work in six months)... but not before he was hospitalized in shock.
• If there was such a company that fit this in the automotive industry, AMC (American Motors) would definitely qualify. Formed from the 1954 merger of Nash and Hudson, AMC struggled for years against the might of Detroit's Big Three automakers (GM, Ford and Chrysler). Bob Lutz, a noted automotive executive, even compared AMC to the Wake Island Marines, as they were routinely outgunned and outnumbered by the Big Three, yet continued in the face of seemingly certain doom to churn out a variety of innovative and unusual products, including the Gremlin and Pacer. Their ace in the hole was the perennially-popular line of Jeep off-road SUVs. Ultimately, a doomed team up with French automaker Renault didn't yield much success; after Renault's CEO was assassinated by a French extremist group (angry over him continuing to pour money into AMC while laying off workers in France), Renault sold AMC to Chrysler, who primarily wanted the Jeep assets.
  • However, contractual agreements with Renault and state franchise laws forced the creation of the Eagle brand (the name was taken from the AMC Eagle, the last non-Renault/Jeep product being sold under the AMC name), which also falls under this definition, as it was little more than a sideshow for Chrysler while they were working on other things. It had a variety of oddball and orphan cars sourced from Renault, Mitsubishi and Chrysler themselves, and were very much not a priority in comparison to Jeep or the other brands they had. It only lasted 10 years, but it had a Short-Lived, Big Impact — the Eagle Premier sedan (intended as Renault's flagship sedan for the US market), despite slow sales, was much more technologically sophisticated than anything else Chrysler had at the time. It was used as the basis for the LH platform "cab-forward" cars of the 90s, which brought Chrysler a lot of critical and sales success.

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