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Government warehouses in fiction

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The Government Warehouse is a plot device used in movies, television series, and Wikipedia:novels, a scenario used in Wikipedia:role-playing games, and a belief of some conspiracy theorists. The concept is that there is a secret government warehouse where various items are stored of whose existence the (WP) wants the general populace to remain ignorant.

In Wikipedia:fiction, the Government Warehouse is a plot device used for conveniently disposing of story elements that have fulfilled their purpose in a story, but that would cause consistency or continuity problems for subsequent (or previous) stories in the same fictional setting were they to remain. In many cases, the story items disposed of are of such a nature that they would make it difficult to set up the necessary tensions and conflicts for other stories in the same fictional setting, as they would make such tensions and conflicts simple to resolve.

A secondary purpose of the Government Warehouse plot device is to satirize the ineptitude of governments, the premise being that if a government found itself in possession of an extraordinary object or person, it would simply catalogue it and lose it in a vast filing system. For example, in the film Forever Young, Mel Gibson played an experimental Wikipedia:suspended animation subject, who was frozen in a capsule, which was forgotten about and stored in a Government Warehouse until two children stumbled upon it while playing.

Perhaps the best-known instances of the Government Warehouse plot device are found in the Indiana Jones movies and the television series Wikipedia:The X-Files. At the end of Wikipedia:Raiders of the Lost Ark, the Wikipedia:Ark of the Covenant is hidden away in a warehouse, explaining its disappearance. (The shot of the warehouse is an allusion to the final scene of Wikipedia:Citizen Kane, where there is a similar shot of a private warehouse.) The warehouse (shown located in Hangar 51) reappears in Wikipedia:Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, where Wikipedia:Indiana Jones and Wikipedia:KGB agents go to recover the remains of the Roswell alien, eventually revealed to be an interdimensional being with a crystalline skeleton.

In the closing of an episode of NBC's The Office titled "Conflict Resolution", a similar scene is created using a box full of complaints made by Wikipedia:Dwight Schrute, and other characters. The television series The X-Files is replete with characters and objects with unusual properties and powers that would complicate the fictional setting, or make it too simple for characters to achieve the goals that they quest for, and the Government Warehouse plot device is heavily used to explain the absence of the characters and objects, and to make the goals difficult to achieve. The plot device is in fact a central element of the series. A typical example is found in the pilot episode.

In the television show Wikipedia:Stargate SG-1 Wikipedia:Area 51 serves as a government warehouse for storage of alien artifacts.

Sometimes items are recovered from Government Warehouses in order to construct derived fictional settings. In the first episode of the late-80s War of the Worlds television series a triad of war machines is collected from a Government Warehouse (Hangar 15) where they had been stored since an invasion in 1953, thus linking the television series to the 1953 film The War of the Worlds.

The 2002 Wikipedia:South Park episode Wikipedia:Free Hat took a stand against Wikipedia:Steven Spielberg and Wikipedia:George Lucas re-releasing old movies in order to make them more family-friendly and politically correct. The episode ended with Stan sending such a re-release of Wikipedia:Raiders of the Lost Ark to the warehouse (which is named "Red Cross 9/11 Relief Funds").

The Wikipedia:Family Guy episodes Wikipedia:Peter's Got Woods (2005) and Wikipedia:Back to the Woods (2008) both parodied Wikipedia:Raiders of the Lost Ark - Peter used the top men phrase while shipping James Woods away in the warehouse at the end of both episodes.

In the 2006 film Click, the warehouse serves a similar purpose; however, it is not owned by a government but by Wikipedia:Bed Bath & Beyond.

An upcoming television series on Wikipedia:SCI FI, Wikipedia:Warehouse 13, features the adventures of two Wikipedia:United States Secret Service agents assigned to oversee such a government warehouse facility.


A secondary purpose of the Government Warehouse plot device is to satirize the ineptitude of governments, the premise being that if a government found itself in possession of an extraordinary object or person, it would simply catalogue it and lose it in a vast filing system.

Perhaps the most well-known instances of the Government Warehouse plot device are the movie Wikipedia:Raiders of the Lost Ark and the television series Wikipedia:The X-Files. At the end of the movie, the Wikipedia:Ark of the Covenant is hidden away in a (United States) Government Warehouse, explaining its disappearance from the Wikipedia:Indiana Jones fictional universe. (The shot of the warehouse is believed to be an allusion to the final scene of Wikipedia:Citizen Kane, where there is a similar shot of a private warehouse.) The television series is replete with characters and objects with unusual properties and powers that would complicate the fictional setting, or make it too simple for characters to achieve the goals that they quest for, and the Government Warehouse plot device is heavily used to explain the absence of the characters and objects, and to make the goals difficult to achieve. The plot device is in fact a central element of the series.

The Government Warehouse is not the only way that inconveniently powerful persons and objects are disposed of. In Wikipedia:Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, the plot is arranged such that the Wikipedia:Holy Grail, a source of miraculous healing and immortality and thus a potential inconvenience to other stories, falls into a crevasse and is lost at the end of the film. Wikipedia:Terry Pratchett has arranged for equally inconvenient magical objects in the Wikipedia:Discworld novels to fall into the sea and to sink to the bottom "thereby vanishing from history".

Sometimes items are recovered from Government Warehouses in order to construct derived fictional settings. In the first episode of the War of the Worlds a triad of war machines is collected from a Government Warehouse ("Hanger 15") where they had been stored since an invasion in 1953, thus linking the television series to the 1953 film The War of the Worlds.


A Related Device[edit]

In the Wikipedia:Tom Clancy novel Wikipedia:Without Remorse, the protagonist, ex-Wikipedia:Navy SEAL John Kelly, lives on an island he leases from the Wikipedia:General Services Administration, which has such ordinary suburban comforts as wiring, plumbing, and heating; and also a few less-ordinary features: two-foot-thick concrete walls, a dock, a Navy-standard machine shop, and a Navy-standard Wikipedia:recompression chamber. Kelly was issued the lease through the intervention of a grateful Wikipedia:admiral whose son Kelly had rescued from Wikipedia:North Vietnam. The GSA's files of disused properties serve the same purpose as a physical warehouse but can accommodate larger objects.


RPG scenarios[edit]

The concept of a Government Warehouse has been used as a fun scenario for role-playing games:

  • The MMORPG (WP) Wikipedia:City of Heroes parodies this plot device by having the MAGI Vault be where dangerous magical artifacts are stored safely under the care of Azuria. However, these items tend to get stolen from the vault very quickly, often right after the player gives the item to Azuria for safekeeping.
  • Government Warehouse list version 1.2.1. URL accessed on September 11, 2007. — an attempt to construct an RPG scenario of a Government Warehouse containing every famous item ever mentioned in fiction or a conspiracy theory as being lost or suppressed
  • Government Warehouse list version 1.3.2. URL accessed on September 11, 2007. — Notice that in this later version the introduction has been removed and replaced by seals denoting United States government agencies and a purported Wikipedia:security classification notice, giving a greater impression of realism.
  • Wherehouse. URL accessed on September 11, 2007. — an even more detailed attempt to do the same thing, that even includes a classification system for the objects, and includes objects that logically could not possibly be contained in such a warehouse.
  • GURPS Warehouse 23. URL accessed on October 26, 2007. — an entire book based on the strange and mysterious things that might be in such a warehouse, run by Secret Masters. Wikipedia:Steve Jackson Games also calls its online store "Warehouse 23".

RPG scenarios[edit]

The concept of a Government Warehouse has been used as a fun scenario for role-playing games:

  • Error on call to template:cite web: Parameters url and title must be specified — an attempt to construct an RPG scenario of a Government Warehouse containing every famous item ever mentioned in fiction or a conspiracy theory as being lost or suppressed
  • Error on call to template:cite web: Parameters url and title must be specified — Notice that in this later version the introduction has been removed and replaced by seals denoting United States government agencies and a purported Wikipedia:security classification notice, giving a greater impression of realism.
  • Wherehouse an even more detailed attempt to do the same thing, that even includes a classification system for the objects, and includes objects that logically could not possibly be contained in such a warehouse (The planet Earth was demolished in the plot(s) of the Wikipedia:Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy, therefore the spaceship Heart of Gold could not be stored in a Government Warehouse on Earth.)

An early and significantly notable appearance was in Wikipedia:Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) as the final resting place of the Wikipedia:Ark of the Covenant. Since then a version of that warehouse has been the primary focus of a number of independent fictional works:


Contents[edit]

The government warehouse contents vary widely depending on the source, including the following categorized into the government of the warehouse:

Alleged or Fictional United States Contents[edit]

Alleged or Fictional British Contents[edit]

Alleged or Fictional Vatican Contents[edit]

Alleged or Fictional Soviet Contents[edit]

Alleged or Fictional Japanese Contents[edit]



External links[edit]


References[edit]

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