Mal: Well, look at this! Appears we got here just in the nick of time. What does that make us?
Zoe: Big damn heroes, sir!
Mal: Ain't we just.
Zoe: Big damn heroes, sir!
Mal: Ain't we just.
Any time the heroes/anti heroes get to save the day in a big, awesome manner.
For instance, say that the poor Damsel in Distress is looking her fate dead in the face, and is seemingly resigned to it, because it seems that Nothing Can Save Us Now… and then, boom! The heroes kick down the door and proceed to stomp the bad guys into the ground. Just in Time.
A Ragtag Bunch of Misfits will often have a Misfit Mobilization Moment before becoming the Big Damn Heroes. If they were busy with something else, but saw the crisis and dropped whatever they were doing in order to save the day, it's a case of Dudley Do-Right Stops to Help.
Note that a Big Damn Heroes moment doesn't have to succeed. They can fail to save the day, or even make things worse. These are all straight versions of the trope.
If the heroes just finished a training arc and show off new powers, it's Look What I Can Do Now!.
If this is done in an anticlimactic way, then it's a Deus ex Machina. When done right, it is a sure-fire way to get a Crowning Moment of Awesome or, why not, a Crowning Moment of Heartwarming. Sometimes a moment like this is used to introduce a heroic character.
A Super-Trope to Roaring Rampage of Rescue. The King in the Mountain always has a legend of becoming this.
A Sister Trope to Gunship Rescue, I Got You Covered, Horseback Heroism, Just in Time, or even Changed My Mind, Kid.
Compare The Cavalry (it's the heroes saved in the nick of time), Contrived Coincidence, Bad Guys Do the Dirty Work (otherwise known as Big Damn Villains), Villainous Rescue (when the villains are like this trope) and "Hell, Yes!" Moment.
Contrast You Are Too Late, Nice Job Breaking It, Hero, The Cavalry Arrives Late.
Example subpages:
- Anime & Manga
- Comic Books
- Fan Works
- Films — Animation
- Films — Live-Action
- Literature
- Live-Action TV
- Music
- Professional Wrestling
- Tabletop Games
- Video Games (including Visual Novels)
- Web Comics
- Web Original
- Western Animation
- Real Life
Other examples
open/close all folders
Advertising
- MORNING RESCUE
! Saving Japanese office workers from tiredness! (And, thanks to Memetic Mutation, saving characters from other works from their horrible fates.)
- John Jameson. He will punch out Cthulhu, kill and cook the Hawk of Achill, flood Dublin to extinguish the fire, and drop a steam engine off a cliff to stop the Prussian Incursion of 1807... once his whiskey is threatened.
Multiple Media
- BIONICLE loves this trope. It's used as a Running Gag in Onua's case, and was used three times in a row in the serial Reign of Shadows.
Myth and Legend
- It is said that King Arthur will return in England's hour of greatest need.
- The same is said about Dom Sebastião of Portugual. It's called Sebastianism.
- The Other Wiki has a page for this "folk-motif" called Sleeping King.
- Some Jews believe this of a coming Messiah. Christians believe in the Second Coming of Jesus.
- Muslims also believe in the Second Coming in way that invokes this trope; the big difference is that Jesus is just one of many Prophets, not the Big Good Himself. Instead of dying on the cross, he was spared and taken up to Heaven still alive as a miracle. In the last days, he is expected to return to Earth to help marshall the forces of Good and then die a mortal death in the final battle against Evil.
- Jesus' first coming is a double subversion of this trope. None of his disciples believed that he was going to die on the cross; they thought he would be mounting an army to take over the Romans.
Pinball
- Prominently demonstrated in the backbox art for Stern Pinball's The Avengers.
Podcasts
- As discussed in the Vesuvius episodes of both Great Disasters and Relative Disasters Pliny the Elder attempted one of these, but unfortunately was unsuccessful and lost his own life in the attempt.
- At the end of the second episode of Sequinox, Vivaldi shows up to power up the Sequinox girls as they're being beaten down by Antares in their first fight.
Theatre
- in Cesare - Il Creatore che ha distrutto, when Barbaric Bully Henri starts to pick a fight with Angelo in the tavern, and Giovanni, the leader of Angelo's student association, fails to diffuse the situation, Cesare comes in at just the right moment and saves him.
Web Animation
- From Arenas:
- Sarge appears to save Doom in "Worthy".
- In the Season Finale, Doom uses Ranger's rune in order to access the operations area of the Vadrigar. Then, he summons each one of the warriors. When they can't defeat the Vadrigar, Doom goes again to said room and summons Gorre, who takes care of the Vadrigar. Cue the Sequel Hook.
- Almost every time a new character is introduced in Dead Fantasy, said character is intervening to aid someone else in a fight. In fact, very few fights have had a clear winner, since every time someone's on the verge of defeat, someone else has come to save them. So far, Rikku, Hitomi, Tifa, Rinoa, Cloud, and Ryu Hayabusa have pulled Big Damn Heroes moments.
- Dreamscape: Melissa shows up to save Dylan from Ethan in the first episode.
- In a flashback in "The Mystery of Melinda" the entire population of the Mirror Universe shows up to fight Melinda before she can spread her curses on the world.
- In "A Curse or a Blessing", when the heroes are struggling in the battle against Ghost Melinda, Keedran (who Ghost Melinda had seemingly taken down) shoots her snake arm out at Ghost Melinda, grabs her by the neck, and seals her in the pocket dimension contained within her body.
- DSBT InsaniT: Pulled off by LISA of all people near the end of 'Beach Brawl'.
- Waterfall Girl has a great one in 'The Camping Webisode'.
- Lizzie and Fire Guy come to the aid of Asia and Autmn in their fight with Michael and Ashley. They even use technology and chemical reactions to defeat them in order to show that science can be used for good!
- When the head zombie cornered Scrooge, Louie and Dewey in Episode 2 of Ducktalez, Huey showed up and killed the head zombie in one shot with a revolver.
- In Epithet Erased, Molly gets cornered by Mera Salamin, and all hope seems lost. Then, Molly signals for Giovanni Potage to come in, and he appears out of nowhere and knocks Mera Salamin into the wall.
- Gaming All-Stars: Given how a large portion of the heroes introduce themselves introduce themselves this way (Especially in The Ultimate Crossover and Remastered), it would be unnecessary to list every example the series has to offer. Some of the more notable ones include:
- The Heavy joining Mario and John Marston to even out the odds against the Babylon Rogues in “Heavy Weapons”.
- Kirby effortlessly defeating Shao Kahn before joining Mario’s group in “Outworld.”
- A Yellow Colosi/Group of Yellow Colosi saving Tails and Amigo from an enraged Big Daddy by levitating it just before it can attack them, in "On the Loose".
- 2 has the Hocotate Ship landing on top of a Burrowing Snagret just before it prepares to eat Mario in “Rise Again,” then later in “Dino Crisis,” when Louie inadvertently docks it on top of an unsuspecting General Scales.
- Double Subverted in Lackadaisy. When Marigold Gang highwaymen Nico and Serafine are seconds away from stealing the Lackadaisy booze runners' surviving whiskey and discovering Getaway Driver Ivy hidden under the car, and Consummate Professional Mordecai is advancing on a bullet-grazed, unarmed Hired Gun Freckle he has dead to rights, Wild Card Rocky turns the tide and saves Freckle and Ivy by way of riding in the bucket of a commandeered steam shovel and using a cache of dynamite as bombs, all the while laughing and screaming an impromptu poem about a circus train and its Fighting Clown. Then he accidently drops a lit stick of dynamite in the bucket just as it hits the quarry's water tower. However accidental, the resulting explosive flooding does provide cover for their escape.
- Minilife TV: In "The X-Team Attacks", after the X-Team announce they'll be executing the fighters of the 28th Legondo World Martial Arts Tournament, Chris, Ian, Snowball, and Clair use the time machine at Minilife Studios to teleport to the arena and rescue the fighters.
- In Part 3 of Pinkie Pie's Exciting Adventure, when Derpy shows up to aid Pinkie and Pinkis in a battle against three mind controlled freaks.
- Red vs. Blue has a handful of these.
- At the beginning of Season 8, Sarge and Grif save Simmons and Doc from the Meta and Agent Washington after the latter’s Face–Heel Turn the previous season by crashing the Chupathingy through the wall of Valhalla.
- Season 10 also features this towards the end. After being abandoned by their friends following Church’s "Reason You Suck" Speech, said friends come to his and Carolina’s rescue when the army of Tex drones stored at the Freelancer Offshore Storage Facility prove to be too much even for the veteran Agent to handle solo.
- Season 11 has the New Republic soldiers who come to rescue the Reds and Blues when the Feds, led by Locus invade Crash Site Bravo.
- When Felix shows his true colors midway through season 12 when the heroes are being held at gun point by Locus and the Space Pirates, Carolina pulls this off by revealing herself as being disguised as a member of said Space Pirates, in the perfect position to help her friends.
- When Sharkface is Caught Monologuing during his and Carolina’s final confrontation in season 13, Kimball and Wash do this by simply shooting him dead.
- Locus and Grif of all people do this when the Blues and Reds are revealed to have been hunting down and murdering any and all remaining Freelancer agents, including attempting to do so to Wash and Carolina.
- RWBY:
- In her first fight at Beacon Academy, Ruby's cape gets caught when a Giant Nevermore pins it with a barrage of feathers. Yang tries to reach her before a giant Deathstalker kills her but is stopped by another bombardment of feathers. The Deathstalker is just about to kill Ruby when Weiss streaks into view; having used her Glyphs to race to Ruby's rescue at super-speed, she is able to freeze the Deathstalker just inches from Ruby's face.
- When the team attempt to stop Roman from breaching the city's walls with a runaway train, Yang fights Neo but is easily defeated by her and knocked unconscious. As Neo unsheathes her blade to stab Yang to death, a portal unexpectedly opens in the ceiling and a masked woman with a huge sword drops out of it to the floor. Clearly recognising the woman, Neo backs off in obvious terror and flees. The woman then departs without a word to the now semi-conscious Yang. It's later confirmed that the masked woman is Yang's Missing Mom, Raven.
- During the Battle of Beacon, Cardin finds himself surrounded by some Atlesian robot soldiers that have been hacked by the villains. Just as he's about to be killed, the soldiers' heads are blown off... by their general. Ironwood, who has just survived the hacked soldiers crashing the airship he was on, walks into view, gun first. Cardin stares in open-mouthed awe as Ironwood single-handedly destroys every single soldier present. His clothes are in rags from the plane crash, revealing that the entire right side of his body has been replaced by cybernetic body parts.
- Shrapnel: Right when it looks like Brynn and Goggles are done for, Reznya arrives on the scene and makes short work of their assailants. Unfortunately by that point, Goggles has already been mortally wounded.
