Grail in the Garbage: Difference between revisions
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{{examples}}
==
* Chii, in ''[[Chobits]]'', is found in a
* Saito's talking sword in ''[[The Familiar of Zero]]'' was sold for dirt cheap in a weapon shop. Since [[Named Weapons|Derflinger]] is actually the [[Cool Sword|traditional weapon/partner of the Gandalfr]], [[There Are No Coincidences|karma almost certainly arranged for him to be in the shop solely to end up in Saito's hands]]. In fact, Derflinger looks pretty crappy and likely handles poorly in the hands of anyone but Gandalfr. It's a good bet everyone else ''thought'' it was worthless junk.
* In ''Ressentiment'', the game containing the original AI girl of which all others are simplified copies is found lying under a rack of disks in an ordinary game shop.
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* Seen in a ''[[Witchblade (Comic Book)|Witchblade]]'' spinoff, in which a medieval woman warrior ([[MST3K Mantra|don't ask about the plausibility]]) discovers the Witchblade while shoveling manure.
* In the ''[[Tintin]]'' book ''The Secret of the Unicorn'', Tintin buys a model ship from a street vendor to give to Captain Haddock as a gift. It turns out the ship has a scroll concealed in the mast which, when combined with two others from identical ships, leads to a fortune in gold and jewels.
* ''[[Archie Comics]]'':
** [[Double Subversion]]
** In one story set in winter, Archie wants to impress Veronica by giving her a ride in a snowmobile, and is scammed into buying an old lemon from an [[Honest John's Dealership]]. Naturally, Reggie revels in his rival's stupidity, betting him he can circle a block ten times in his new snowmobile before Archie can do so even once in his - and Reggie easily wins. However, when the humiliated Archie finally gets to Veronica's house, Mr. Lodge recognizes it as a very rare antique, offering Archie his own expensive modern snowmobile in exchange for it, plus $500 in spending money, plus the services of his chauffeur for the night. In the final scene of the story, Reggie is back at the dealer, begging him to pull the same scam on him.
== [[Film]] ==
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* ''[[The Lord of the Rings]]''.
** In ''[[The Hobbit]]'' (written first), Bilbo finds the One Ring on the ground, after Gollum misplaced it. (As the narration says, "[[Understatement| It was a turning point in his career, but he did not know it]]. He put the ring in his pocket almost without thinking; certainly it did not seem of any particular use at the moment.") So you have an ordinary ring owned by some deformed hobbit. Then Bilbo discovers it can make the wearer invisible.
*** Then in ''The Lord of the Rings'', we discover that Gollum's friend first found the ring many years ago just lying at the bottom of a river. So it seems like Bilbo has an "ordinary" ring of invisibility-until we learn it is far more than that.
** Also in ''[[The Hobbit]]'', Bilbo and the dwarves find Orcrist the Goblin Cleaver and Glamdring the Foe Hammer in the trolls' lair, amidst the bones of their victims. These powerful swords are elven blades forged in Gondolin during the First Age. How the trolls got them is unknown, but Elrond suggests the trolls plundered other plunderers.
** To a lesser extent, the small dagger Bilbo also finds in the trolls' lair. He doesn't think much of it at the time; it's a useful blade to someone his size, but doesn't seem to be anything else. As it turns out, it's also an elven blade forged in Gondolin. He later calls it "Sting".
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* "Chivalry", a short story by [[Neil Gaiman]], features an old woman who buys the Holy Grail in a secondhand shop. She has a bunch of items like this and uses them to decorate her house. After she buys it, Sir Galahad of the Round Table stops by and offers her such gifts as the Philosophers' Stone and an apple of the Hesperides and a phoenix egg in return for giving up the Grail, she goes gives it to him and goes to the store a second time. She considers, for a moment, buying what is heavily implied to be the lamp from the tale of [[Aladdin (novel)|Aladdin]]... before realizing she has nowhere left to put it.
* Abdullah of ''[[Castle in the Air]]'' buys a plot-important flying carpet from a tattered, dirty traveling carpet salesman.
* In ''[[
** And again in ''[[
* [[Follow the Leader|Mirroring]] ''[[The Lord of the Rings]]'', the eponymous ''[[Shannara|Sword of Shannara]]'' is found in the last place you'd expect it—in a bunch of junk that a looter picked up off a battlefield. Despite every legend about it saying it was embedded in a block of "Tre-stone" in the druids' castle. Subverted, though, when the looter knows that the battered, cheap sword with the gold paint peeling off it is the most valuable weapon in the world, even though the heroes don't, and refuses to let go of it.
* In ''The Serpent's Egg'' trilogy, [[Our Dragons Are Different|Typhoon]] gives a busted up crown to [[Bratty Half-Pint|Penelope]] as a reward for watching a very much alive and ready to hatch ''dragon egg'', which she was told was a rock. It was far bigger than her. {{spoiler|The dinky little thing turned out to be the [[MacGuffin|Crown]] they had been looking for the entire time, but didn't realize it till she placed it on the head... of the enemy. It proceeded to [[Good Hurts Evil|kill the]] [[Twist Ending|evil]]. Then, she put it on the Elf Prince's head, to no real effect.}} Notably, she tried to steal from Typhoon earlier, and had to clean his entire hoard with a bowl of... [[Cool and Unusual Punishment|spittle]]. Which was pretty stupid, seeing as he literally saved their lives from a damn army before that. {{spoiler|But maybe, Typhoon knew about it, being the leader of the Black Dragons.}}
* In ''[[Heralds of Valdemar|Oathbreakers]]'', Kethry happens to find a useless-looking dull-bladed old sword abandoned in a cabin in the mountains; she and Tarma speculate that it must have been a decorative sword and the gems and gilding were all stripped off by previous travelers, leaving behind what was left as junk. Kethry, on an impulse, takes it along when they leave, and it turns out to be the ancestral Sword that Sings, traditionally used to choose the proper ruler of the country of Rethwellan.
* In L. Jagi Lamplighter's ''[[Prospero's Daughter|Prospero Lost]]'', Miranda finds a chameleon cloak in a second-hand store. Both its presence and her discovery get explained later.
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* Janet and [[Isaac Asimov]]'s ''Norby'' series begins when young Jeff Wells buys Norby, a battered, apparently malfunctioning robot that the proprietor doesn't even think is worth selling. Said robot turns out to be a completely sentient alien artifact capable of antigravity, telepathy, FTL transportation, and ''time travel''.
* The time-travelling Glass in ''[[Septimus Heap]]'' is found in a warehouse where everything else is random junk like sheep bones.
* One of the illustrations on the back of a ''Reader's Digest'', entitled "Treasure Hunt", had a man at a garage sale looking at a bust of Lincoln. If you look closely, you can see a copy of [[Superman|''Action Comics'' #1]] sitting in a box of old newspapers.▼
== [[Live-Action TV]] ==
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* An episode of ''[[Modern Marvels]]'' about garbage reclamation showed a box of seemingly ordinary gray dust; then we're told that it's over $1000 worth of platinum.
* In an episode of ''[[Power Rangers SPD]]'', Piggy (a [[The Scrounger| scrounger]] and [[Knowledge Broker]] for both the good guys ''and'' bad guys) is scrounging around the trash dump as he always does, and finds a winning lottery ticket worth $10 million! He uses the money to open his own business, hoping it will help him ''stop'' having to work as a scrounger and knowledge broker.
▲== Periodicals ==
▲* One of the illustrations on the back of a ''Reader's Digest'', entitled "Treasure Hunt", had a man at a garage sale looking at a bust of Lincoln. If you look closely, you can see a copy of [[Superman|''Action Comics'' #1]] sitting in a box of old newspapers.
== [[Video Games]] ==
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* Most ''[[Pokémon]]'' games have the Leftovers, one of the most useful held items in the series, hidden in a trash can.
** Somewhat justified in-universe. It ''is'' just a small pile of half-eaten food...that just so happens to be able to be able to regenerate itself, giving the Pokémon an infinite supply of free health.
* In ''[[Borderlands]]'', you can sometimes find a really good gun when you open up a garbage can.
* ''[[Team Fortress 2]]'' has a heavily hat-based in-game economy between the players, where some virtual hats can cost several hundreds of real life dollars. This also means that there are varying degrees of currency, including using other expensive hats as a large denomination of metal (the primary currency) to free up spaces in one's backpack. One of the common things newbies do is to trade away a pair of earbuds or a Bill's Hat for a bunch of weapons. Both are promotional items that seem worthless, but on the hat market are worth 40 and 20 real life money (or 40 and 20 in-game refined metal). By comparison, any given weapon in the game is worth 1/18th of a buck (18 weapons to make 1 refined metal).
* Happens often in ''[[The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword]]'', not only because the involved items do seem unimportant, but also because Link is ''actually'' unable to carry them on his own. And very fittingly, the player doesn't happen to suspect about these items until Fi's dowsing ability indicates that they're important indeed:
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* ''[[The Angry Video Game Nerd]]'' acquired a copy of the gold cover Nintendo World Championship, the absolutely rarest game in the world in a sale where the previous owner bundled it in with other other much more common games. The bundle contained two copies of the game, the other being a much more common reproduction.
* Some of the artifacts held by the [[SCP Foundation]] were discovered in this manner.
* Satan's wife, [[Take That|Kim Kardashian]], left ''[[Son of the Mask]]'' in the human world in a trash can. Cue the ''[[Nostalgia Critic]]'' picking it up to review. It turns out to be possessed and was ''[[Lord of the Rings (film series)|the One DVD!]].''
{{quote|Well, if it's in a public garbage can, [[Bile Fascination|it must be worth reviewing.]]}}
== [[Western Animation]] ==
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* A Tennessee man visiting a museum gift shop wound up buying a copy of the Declaration of Independence as a souvenir, but after noticing it didn't seem all too fresh, he had it appraised. It turned out to be an original draft, one of the few in existence, worth almost as much as the genuine document.
* One of the lost episodes of early ''[[Doctor Who]]'' was found in a church basement.
* In 2003, a set of [[World War I]] Renault FTs (a near tie for the first tank ever, and the first tank to fit the modern definition of "tank") were found in an Afghanistan junkyard. An American soldier who recognized what they were sent photos to Fort Knox, who promptly started the process of getting them moved to the Army's official museum (with permission from the Afghanistan government) to fill the missing hole in their collection.
* In May of 2013, an old scroll that had been lying around in plain sight in the Bologna University library was identified as an 800-year old copy of the Torah, likely the oldest complete copy in existence<ref>aside from maybe the Leningrad Codex</ref>, and possibly worth millions.
* A Sturmgewehr StG 44, the grand-daddy of the modern assault rifle, [https://www.yahoo.com/gma/blogs/abc-blogs/valuable-wwii-gun-police-buy-back-022155231--abc-news-topstories.html was encountered at a Hartford Connecticut police gun buy-back]. The police who accepted it knew what it was, and convinced the owner to hold on to it and explore options of selling it to a historical museum instead of subjecting it to the melt-down that all the other guns at the buy-back were heading for.
{{reflist}}
[[Category:
[[Category:More Than Meets the Eye]]
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[[Category:One Man's Trash Is Another's Treasure]]
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