The Magnificent Seven Samurai

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.
Original flavour

Chris: There's a job for six men, watching over a village, south of the border.
O'Reilly: How big's the opposition?
Chris: Thirty guns.

O'Reilly: I admire your notion of fair odds, mister.
—The Magnificent Seven

So you're one of a group of farmers whose village is under attack by a gang of remorseless bandits. None of you know how to fight, so you leave to hire a group of warriors who are willing to defend you for the pittance you can pay, plus meals. So you come back with seven guys and... hey, Wait a minute, haven't we seen this somewhere before?

No, you haven't been reading All The Tropes for so long that everything is blending together. This is actually a relatively common plot device. Take the basic plot of a bunch of cool guys + awesome goal + clearly defined personality types + any other overtones of The Seven Samurai you can think of and bam! Instant "team on a mission" story!

Because The Seven Samurai contains many plot elements which are not exclusive to Japanese culture, it's easy to shift the basic narrative around and still get a workable movie angle. In fact, it's such a classically popular example of a narrative that many filmmakers don't even bother being subtle in the process of Homage- there's a lot more movies out there with exactly seven heroes doing this kind of plot than you'd expect.

The trope title and namers are Seven Samurai (Shichinin no samurai) and The Magnificent Seven, the latter of which is famous for both transferring the Kurosawa classic to the Old West (with Kurosawa's blessing) and being a classic in its own right. (A trivial note: Seven Samurai was originally released in the USA as The Magnificent Seven; the English title was changed to a direct translation of the Japanese title later to avoid confusion with the remake.)

Cajun-style

The plot is pretty predictable, but always fun.

1. The Hero will receive the Call to Adventure. He will then assemble a Ragtag Bunch of Misfits:
2. The team finds that the people they are trying to protect are largely unwilling or unable to fight for themselves.
3. The team successfully stands off the first attack.
4. The people realize that they can defend themselves, and the team undertakes Training the Peaceful Villagers
5. The team is forced to leave, whether due to the skepticism or wariness of the villagers or due to threats from the villains.
6. The team decides to return.
7. There is another attack; the people join in both enthusiastically and competently. Several of the team are injured or killed; the attackers are defeated soundly, but not always completely.
8. The people indicate that they now can and will defend themselves when/if the attackers return; what remains of the team departs.

See also Training the Peaceful Villagers.

Examples of The Magnificent Seven Samurai include:

Anime and Manga

  • Samurai 7, given that it's Seven Samurai With (Steam Punk) Mecha.
  • A three-part story arc in the anime version of Fist of the North Star 2 featured Kenshiro teaming up with a gang of post-apocalyptic cowboys clearly modeled after The Magnificent Seven. Even the group's name, "The Wasteland Seven", is taken from the Japanese title of The Magnificent Seven.
  • Digimon Adventure was like this, if one considers each Chosen/Digimon partnership to count as a single member of the seven (functionally, that's the case), until Hikari turned up in the second half of the series.
  • The third Crossbone Gundam manga, Steel Seven, has this built into it: remnants of the Jupiter Empire are building a super-massive colony laser in Jovian orbit with the intent of blasting Earth. The only method of getting to Jupiter in time to stop the weapon is a flying wing that can only carry roughly seven Mobile Suits, so The Hero goes around trying to recruit the best pilots he can find.
    • One of the good guys explicitly makes the reference, commenting "I love Kurosawa movies!" when the plan is discussed.
  • Inverted in GaoGaiGar, in the second half of the series the seven most powerful villains show up to challenge the heroes. The fan translation of the series even refers to them as the "Magnificent 7 Machine World Primevals".
  • Kinnikuman, the Planet Rakka mini-arc. The child-like Choujin Beansman comes to Earth to recruit Choujin to help save his people from the Space Samurai, and teams up with Terryman, Ramenman, Brocken Jr., Puyo Puyo, and Crystalman, with Kin forcing himself into the group. Together, they are the Magnificent Choujin 6!

Kinnikuman: Hey, there are seven of us!

  • In Naruto the first major arc, the Land of Waves, quickly turns into this plot. Team 7 is hired to act as bodyguards for a cantakerous old man named Tazuna but instead of protecting him from ordinary bandits on the journey home, they discover he has been marked for death by Gatou, a shipping magnate and crime lord, who has taken over his impoverished country and wants to stop Tazuna from building a bridge to the mainland and thus break his economic tyranny, and has hired dangerous ninja assassin Momochi Zabuza and his gang of missing-nin to take him out. It ends with the people of Tazuna's village being inspired to make a stand against Gatou's army of hoodlums.

Comic Books

  • Marvel Star Wars (the original Star Wars comic book), where immediately after they finished with the movie, the plot moves on to Han and Chewie leading six other fighters (including wanna-be Jedi Don Wan Kihotay and green carnivorous rabbit-man Jaxxom) in defense of a small village.
  • Marvel Adventures: Avengers had an issue like this. In accordance with the series's early title theme of altering famous movie titles, this was called The Avenging Seven. It actually did include a little village beset by raiders, had someone travel far with the village's single most precious treasure, had an extended sequence of Training the Peaceful Villagers, and at the end the heroes were paid in three tons of food.
  • Although it should be obvious, Grant Morrison's Seven Soldiers series was a stealthy example of this plot. Seven heroes, check. Populace periodically ravaged by marauding raiders, check. Heroes working for little or no reward, check. Naive Newcomer Hero, check. Fraud hero, check. Fraud hero who is redeemed? Check. I can't recall the Training the Peaceful Villagers scene, but I'm sure it's in there. However, the narrative is so surreal and intentionally fragmented that the reader doesn't really realize the connection until it's Fridge Brilliance.
  • Ben Templesmith's Singularity Seven
  • Chris Claremont's Sovereign Seven. The seven in question were aliens, each a prince or princess of his or her homeworld, and each the sole survivor of that world. They banded together to protect the universe (and Earth in particular) from 'the Rapture'; the event that destroyed their homeworlds.
  • The titular ABC Warriors - they are even referred to as 'The Mek-Nificent Seven', both in-story and by fans.
  • Rawhide Kid: The Sensational Seven
  • Demon Knights: Writer Paul Cornell describes the book as "the medieval Magnificent Seven". #3 is titled "The Malificant Seven". Subverted by the end of the first arc - the village they were protecting is rubble, there are few if any survivors among the villagers, and the heroes' "victory" is that they live to fight again.

Film

  • The Trope Namers are the Akira Kurosawa's masterpiece Seven Samurai, and its still excellent wild west remake The Magnificent Seven (which had sequels and a series).
  • Battle Beyond the Stars is The Magnificent Seven In Space. In fact Robert Vaughn played essentially the same character that he did in The Magnificent Seven—and even got to recycle some of his dialogue from the earlier movie!
  • The Seven Magnificent Gladiators
  • Seven Swords
  • Dune Warriors
  • Russian movie Dikiy vostok a.k.a. The Wild East
  • The comedy film Three Amigos!, where the Mexican villagers recruit the heroes of silent westerns, not knowing they're just actors.
  • In Galaxy Quest, aliens recruit the cast of a popular science fiction show to defend them from an Evil Overlord, not knowing they're just actors.
  • A Bugs Life, where the "warriors" are actually circus performers mistaken for warriors.
  • Arthur and his six Sarmatian knights in the 2004 King Arthur movie, with the Britons and the "Woads" as the villagers and the Saxons as the bandits. The scene after the battle of Badon Hill with the graves of the knights who fell is lifted straight from Kurosawa.
  • In the 1979 movie Seven (not be confused with the 1995 serial killer movie), seven hitmen are hired to kill seven mob bosses who planning a criminal takeover of Hawaii.
  • Kamen Rider Hibiki used this for its Non-Serial Movie, Kamen Rider Hibiki & The Seven War Oni.
  • Chopper Chicks In Zombietown!
  • The 13th Warrior, but with Vikings...
  • Star Trek: Insurrection
  • George Clooney and the Weinstien company are remaking the film yet again, but with mercenaries in present day Thailand.
  • World Gone Wild, starring Bruce Dern, Michael Pare, and Adam Ant, is Seven Samurai but without the fantastic script, amazing direction, or brilliant acting, set in a post-apocalyptic wasteland where water is the most precious commodity on earth.


Literature

Live Action TV

  • Blakes Seven's original lineup was this, although one of them was a computer for budgetary reasons.
  • The Seven Swordsmen TV series
  • The Battlestar Galactica episode "The Magnificent Warriors"
  • Mystery Science Theater 3000 episode "Angels Revenge"
  • The Star Trek: Enterprise episode "Marauders" (especially given that there're seven main characters in this series) with a human mining colony being taught to fight against Klingons who are extorting their deuterium.
  • Even more obviously, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine had "The Magnificent Ferengi". And it is funny as hell! Though technically, there's only six of them.
  • The "Heart of Gold" episode from Firefly. An interesting twist is that the "Village" to be defended is a whorehouse.
  • Inverted in The Black Adder episode "The Black Seal" as Edmund gathers the six most evil men in England (plus himself) to take over the kingdom.
  • Obviously, The Magnificent Seven.
  • Kung Fu: The Legend Continues had an episode called "Dragonswing", where Caine and Peter assemble a team of Shao Lin alumni to help a friend rescue his girlfriend from the thugs who've taken over his Northwestern town. Robert Vaughn guest-starred as Rykker, a mercenary very similar to his Magnificent Seven character.
  • The Merlin episode "The Moment of Truth".
  • The Robin of Sherwood episode "The Swords of Wayland" - at least at first. The plot soon took the outlaws away from the village and in search of the stolen McGuffin.

Tabletop Games

  • There are at least two instances in the Legend of the Five Rings setting. One is the start of Toku's rise from farmer to general. The other were drawn together by a wandering monk to serve as living examples of Bushido. The Seven Thunders drawn from the Great Clans once a millennium or so to face down the Dark God Fu Leng may or may not fit a similar theme.
  • An old 1991 article from Roleplayer, the long-defunct GURPS newsletter, covered this trope and its applications to the Tabletop RPG.
  • "A Fistful of Dwarfs", an article in the short-lived gaming magazine Visions detailing a "spaghetti Western" area of the Discworld, included this scenario. This being Discworld, of course, the villagers have a cast-iron contract for the warriors to sign, which specifies that warriors who die don't get paid and exempts the villagers themselves from the nastier bits of the movie.
  • The Fifth Edition Warhammer Fantasy Battle rulebook included suggestions for a 'Seven Knights' scenario, in which one player took seven Hero Units against an entire army on the other side.
    • In that edition of the game this amounted to a ridiculously easy win for the heroes unless the other player got lucky with the artillery.
    • The Scenario was revived in Sixth Edition in a much harder version TWICE. Once for the Storm of Chaos called Seven Sigmarites which is so unbalanced against the seven (due in great part to the relative weakness of the Empire army book's heroes at the time since the Empire was mainly a gunline army) your goal isnt to win, just to kill enough of the oncoming horde. The second scenario features a group of European knights lost deep in the jungle raiding native tombs who are systematically attacked and slain by native defenders for the Lustria setting. It's slightly easier do to the plethora of random stuff available to the heroes (they have been grave robbing) and due to the Rules for Lustria making single characters in a jungle much harder to find and kill.

Theatre

  • The Seven Samurai is actually based on the third play in the Oedipus trilogy by Aeschylus, Seven Against Thebes, making this one Older Than Feudalism. Although each of the Seven brought his own army, and they were attacking the city during a civil war, not defending it.

Video Games

  • The video game Seven Samurai 20XX. Written by Kurosawa's son, hated by damn near everyone.
  • Bioware seems to like this trope, as it shows up in Dragon Age, where the party defends a town against undead, and in Knights of the Old Republic 2, where the party defends a town against mercenaries.
    • Although in the latter, you can choose to side with the mercenaries.
      • Also, Knights of the Old Republic 2 wasn't made by Bioware.
    • Correction: Three (or four in Dragon Age) save the galaxy/world, the rest patiently slack in the base.
    • Bioware likes this trope so much that they built the party members of Mass Effect after it. Shepard is the Hero. Kaiden is the Lancer. Ashley is the big guy. Liara is the smart guy. Wrex is the Old Guy (he is a couple hundred years old). Tali is the young guy. Garrus is... whatever's left.
      • If you see Tali and Liara as both being Smart Guys in different fields, then Garrus could be the Young Guy. Shepard becomes his mentor, after all, and his character development reflects what he picks up from your own behavior as a Paragon or Renegade.
      • The bulk of Mass Effect 2 is basically assembling an entire 10-person team (12 with the DLC) Magnificent Seven-style, with the added wrinkle of getting said team loyal to you and upgrading your ship and weapons before the main mission of going through the Omega-4 Relay. Though it is possible for people to die during the Suicide Mission, your primary goal is to take out the Collector base and bring everyone back alive.
  • Halo: Reach has some shades of this. Except it doesn't end very well...
  • Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker is about Costa Rica recruiting a heroic mercenary group to defend it from mysterious invaders, since it legally can't keep its own defence force.
  • The Western chapter in Live a Live has a few elements of this.
  • Throne of Darkness was inspired by the concept.
  • The Greil Mercenaries of the Fire Emblem Tellius duology; it numbered seven members at least initially.

Web Comics

Western Animation

  • ReBoot uses this in the post-Time Skip episode "Icons". Matrix and Andraia find themselves in a rundown computer system and have to teach the inhabitants to win games to ensure the system's survival. When Matrix finds that the Tagalong Kid has brought their makeshift team to seven, he utters a sarcastic "magnificent".
  • Wakfu's fifth episode does exactly this, down to the title ("The Magnificent Five"). Though, to be honest, it actually is more of a parody of this trope, subverting most plot points common to other examples (the ending, for one).
  • Star Wars: The Clone Wars has the episode "Bounty Hunters". It even mentions Kurosawa in the opening.
  • Justice League: Crisis on Two Earths involves the six 'core' Leaguers (the same from the series, less Hawkgirl, and with Hal Jordan as Green Lantern) join an alternate universe Luthor to save said alternate universe from evil versions of themselves.
  • Adventures of the Galaxy Rangers had a very deliberate Shout-Out to this in the form of "The Magnificent Kiwi." When you're dealing with a Space Western, this plot's going to show up.
  • Kappa Mikey has an episode where the five crew members are called by a little boy to save their playground from a garbage man intent on turning it into a landfill. The boy is under the impression that they are heroes instead of actors, and the LilyMu crew is under the impression that it's all a publicity gig!
  • A Bug's Life sort of works like this, except that instead of warriors, the ant sent out to get help actually finds circus bugs, so the peaceful villagers aren't the only ones who need to learn to fight.
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