Archived Army

Monster Mash is fun and all, but it's just a little too cheesy. Hey, we've got all these colorful historical figures, why not throw them all together as a Quirky Miniboss Squad?

Justified in different ways: They could be simulacra, clones, or magically reanimated. Or brought forward in time. Related to Jury of the Damned and Stupid Jetpack Hitler.

See also Army of the Ages, for fighting forces composed of warriors from different eras who aren't famous figures.

Examples of Archived Army include:

Anime and Manga

Read or Die: The I-Jin are all made up of famous figures from the past, most notably Ludwig van Beethoven. They're cloned.
Fate Stay Night and its prequel is pretty much the mythological version of this, although some (like Gilgamesh and Alexander the Great) were historical people.
- With some exceptions, the heroes summoned were all real people at some point. Their appearance and personality may change based on perceptions, however.
Samurai Deeper Kyo's concept.
Drifters has this on both sides at a crapsack fantasy world - the good guys summoned there at the verge of death while the bad guys were those who historically died tragically.

Comic Books

The Seven Soldiers of Victory once fought a villain with a time machine who brought forward Alexander the Great, Nero, Genghis Khan, Attila the Hun, and Napoleon Bonaparte to serve as commanders in his army of conquest.
- He deserves credit for effort, though Nero is perhaps not the most obvious of choices.
Kid Eternity had this as his superpower, along with invisibility.
- In a crossover with Captain Marvel, Dr. Sivana revived several villains to oppose them. It didn't work out—Benedict Arnold betrayed him.
A Justice Society of America comic had the JSA fighting what appeared to be a band of villains out of history: Nero, Goliath, Captain Kidd, Cesare Borgia, Genghis Khan and Attila the Hun. It turned out to be one guy (a guard at a wax museum) masquerading as all these figures.
In Knight And Squire #3, Richard III is resurrected and he proceeds to resurrect England's other 'bad' kings: Edward I, Charles I, John and William II. The monarchs are granted genetically enhanced superpowers and each leads a criminal army to take over a different part of the UK.
In All-Select Comics #7, the sorcerer Terdu summons a group of villains from the past, whom he dubs the 'Men of Evil', to battle Captain America (comics) and Bucky. The Men of Evil were Captain Kidd, Jack the Ripper, Frank and Jesse James, Bluebeard, Gyp-the-Blood, and three gangsters (names unrevealed) who had died in the elctric chair decades earlier.

Fan Works

In Mother, May I (Take Over The World) (MSTing here), a hilariously bad Fanfic, the world's most evil people - among them Saddam Hussein, Hitler, Pikachu, and an increasingly bemused Martin Luther King, Jr. - take over the world.

Film

The second Night at the Museum movie features animated statues of Ivan the Terrible, Napoleon, and Al Capone as henchman to the Big Bad, an Egyptian King.

Literature

The Night's Dawn Trilogy features an invasion from The Legions of Hell in a Space Opera setting… A disproportionatly large portion of whom hail from the 20th century, potentially leading to massive Narm on the reader's part.
- There were enough people from other eras (past and future) so that (apart from the multiple Elvises) it could plausibly just be a statistical blip. And one of them's Al freakin' Capone.

Live Action TV

Star Trek: The Original Series episode "The Savage Curtain". The Hero team is Captain Kirk, Mr. Spock, Abraham Lincoln and Surak of Vulcan. The Villain team is Genghis Khan, the Klingon Kahless, Colonel Green and the Mad Scientist Zora. Everyone except Kirk and Spock are actually alien rock creatures masquerading as humanoids.
Red Dwarf: The episode "Meltdown" features a war between the greatest and the worst people in history (technically, robot duplicates thereof, from a now-abandoned theme park).
One episode of Lois and Clark involved clones of Al Capone, as well as Bonnie and Clyde.

Tabletop RPG

In the Gamescience adventure "The Future King", Doc Holliday, Nostradamus, Bruce Lee, Harald Hardraada, Owen Glendower and Cyrano de Bergerac are gathered together to find and wake King Arthur.

Video Games

If you stretch it a bit, this is basically the concept of the Warriors Orochi series - bringing together legendary warriors from China's Three Kingdoms Period, others from Japan's Warring States Era, and a few guys from mythology for good measure - just so Orochi can have a decent challenge. Certainly, a teamup of Masamune Date, Lu Bu and Sun Wukong invokes the same sort of feeling...
The Fallout 3 expansion "Mothership Zeta" has you team up with several cryogenically-preserved warriors on the alien spaceship: a military doctor from Operation Anchorage, a contemporary slaver, a wild west cowboy, and a samurai.

Western Animation

Parodied in The Simpsons Treehouse of Horror, where Billy the Kid leads a gang of historical villains, including the most evil German in history—Kaiser Wilhelm!
- Another Simpsons example, though this one's just a brief throwaway - when Homer and Mr. Burns are stuck in a cabin together, Homer says he has "power... political power!" and we see a ghostly team of historical figures (including Gandhi) brandishing weapons.
Played with in Futurama when the Holo-shed malfunctions and Attila the Hun, Jack the Ripper, Professor Moriarty, and Evil Lincoln become real and attack Kif and Amy.
Xiaolin Showdown had these as Jack Spicer's army in a time travel episode: Attila the Hun, Blackbeard, most likely Billy the Kid or some other famous western villain, and Jack Spicer's first-grade teacher.
- Don't be fooled. She's the worst of the bunch.
An episode of the 1967 Spider-Man cartoon had a bad guy bring wax figures of Jesse James, Blackbeard, and an old-timey executioner to life to fight Spider-Man.
The Venture Brothers episode "Escape to the House of Mummies Part II" has the Venture crew inexplicably team up with Caligula, Sigmund Freud, and Edgar Allan Poe. It's never quite explained how the team-up happened, as it is the second part of an episode for which the first part was never made.
There's an episode of The Tick (animation) titled "Leonardo da Vinci and His Fightin' Genius Time Commandos!", featuring a team of famous inventors, including da Vinci, Edison, Guttenberg, George Washington Carver, and the cavewoman who invented the wheel.
This is the idea behind Clone High: The Omniscient Council of Vagueness has cloned many of history's greatest leaders to rule the world somehow.
In one episode of The Super Globetrotters, the Time Lord assembled "the greatest criminals in history" into a gang.
Johnny Test had an episode where Johnny brought back several historical figures, including Attila the Hun and a caveman, to create the most powerful hockey team.