Sealed Cast in a Multipack

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 millenia 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, so 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 Loads and Loads of Characters worth 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 Nakama per episode! Or try our new Wild Card pack; each "canned" character will pledge their allegence 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 amount 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.

Anime and Manga

 * 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.

Comic Books

 * 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.)

Film

 * The recent live-action The Sorcerers Apprentice had half the cast aside from the main character stored on an artifact. They emerged in a sort of Last-In-First-Out It Gets Worse.

Literature

 * 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.
 * Black Company has The Lady, The Dominator and Ten Who Were Taken all sealed in a huge magical diagram stuffed with guardian spirits of their deceased enemies on The Barrowlands. So of course when one poor idiot manages to get through all the death traps and release The Lady. it's only the beginning. And these old folk have their own politics. The Lady greatly improved local security trying to keep her "husband" locked in. But which of the released Taken may be still loyal to him?.. And is he still completely powerless after the wards were opened and partially neutralized?

Live-Action TV

 * Power Rangers Ninja Storm had a few of these. One All Good pack, one All Evil Pack, and one Wild Card pack. The Wild Card pack was an interesting example in that, although the villians beat the heroes to every one, it overlapped with a power struggle in the enemy ranks, so each villain was fighting for personal control as well as group dominance.
 * Power Rangers Wild Force also 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...
 * The same is true of the zords in Power Rangers Samurai, with new ones being discovered and tamed as the plot demands.
 * 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.
 * 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.
 * 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.
 * 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.

Oral Tradition, Folklore, Myth and Legends

 * Older Than Feudalism: The Greek myth of Pandora's Box, in Hesiod's Theogony.

Tabletop Games

 * 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.
 * 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.

Video Games

 * How you gain new characters in Valkyrie Profile: Silmeria.

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.
 * In Thundercats, 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.
 * Beast Wars in particular used this as its primary method of introducing new characters. In the first episode a number of pods containing maximal proformas were put into orbit. Whenever the writers needed a new cast member a pod would crash into the planet.