Bait-and-Switch Time Skip

A common gag, where it looks like a long Time Skip has passed, but instead a ridiculously short time has passed instead (usually way too short for the shown things to be realistic). Most often Played for Laughs.

For example, a wife leaves her husband, and then we cut to some time in the future and we see the house in complete disarray and unmaintained, filthy, with dirty clothes, empty beer cans and pizza boxes everywhere, mountains of unclean dishes, and so on. Everything looks like months have passed. Then someone comments that some ridiculously short amount of time has actually passed, like five hours.

Note that this trope is about a timeskip that's too short to be realistic, has no real explanation, and is played for humor. If an in-universe character is deliberately made by others to think that more time has passed than really has, it's a Faked Rip Van Winkle.

Compare Unimpressive Progress Reveal, which similarly derives humor from leading you to believe more time has passed than the amount that actually has.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• Gintama:
  • Exaggerated with the aptly named Time Skip arc. What seemed to have been two years that passed while Shinpachi was away turned out to have only been two weeks, and everyone's strange behavior was the result of a parasite that eventually grows into a version of the host they fed off of.
  • Done again in the finale chapter, when a reactivated Tamako views a video message from Hasegawa. He says it's been centuries since the video was recorded, and that so much has changed that even the capital was moved and renamed — at which point the Odd Jobs gang chews him out for lying and beats him up, revealing not that much time has actually passed.

Comic Books

• Nightwing: In one issue of Nightwing (Rebirth), Dick decides to have a quiet night in at his new apartment. We see a montage beginning at 8:31 with him reading a Robin Hood novel, then watching a TV show version of The Warlord, then reading a Robin Hood Rebirth comic, then back to watching The Warlord, then phoning Roy Harper, and finally lying on the floor looking bored as it's revealed that it's only 8:40.
• The Simpsons:
  • Three characters have been trapped in the trunk of a car. The next shot is of several pages falling off a calendar. Homer looks at the calendar, saying, "Stupid bank calendars. The cheap glue they use never lasts past March."
  • A comic has Homer ordering a product and saying that he‘ll patiently wait for it to come. Next panel, there he is with a long beard... only for the next panel to zoom out and reveal that it’s only days later, and he’s just looking at a picture of when he wanted to join ZZ Top.
  • An issue, shows an apparent time skip where Bart has a beard like Homer’s. However, we then see that he’s eating a chocolate bar, and has gotten the chocolate smeared on his face.
• Superboy: In Superboy (1994), Superboy wakes up on an island drugged and with longer hair after being hit by lightning, and for several issues he and the other humans on the island think they've somehow been flung thousands of years into the future. It's later revealed that there was no time travel: it's just cut off from civilization and the drugs distort their memories of their arrivals, and S.B. has been there for several weeks.

Fan Works

• Ultra Fast Pony: In "The Longest Wedding", Chrysalis demands to know how Twilight and Cadance escaped from the caves. There's a "14 hours earlier" transition card, then we're shown a montage of Twilight and Cadance wandering through the caves, with Cadance repeatedly asking to take a potty break and otherwise being a nuisance. A "14 hours later" card takes us back to the present, at which point:
  Twilight: It was the worst ten minutes of my life!
  Chrysalis: But the transition said—
  Cadance: It was a long potty break.

Films — Animation

• In Invader Zim: Enter the Florpus, when Zim takes over the Membrane Corporation, he puts Dib and Gaz under house arrest by putting a disfigured, pudding-obsessed clone of their father to keep them inside the house at all times. We cut to the house in complete disarray and covered in the pudding, and then we get this exchange.
  Dib: It's been 10 years...
  Gaz: It's only been two days.
• The Sponge Bob Movie Sponge Out Of Water: SpongeBob and Plankton travel into the future, only to see that without the Krabby Patty, Bikini Bottom has become a wasteland and Patrick has grown a long, white beard. They have this exchange:
  Patrick: Finally! The Great Krabby Patty Famine is over!
  SpongeBob: Great Krabby Patty Famine? Oh, what year is this?
  Patrick: It's Thursday.
• In Tangled, Rapunzel sings about how she wakes up at 7 a.m. to do all her chores — sweep, polish, wax, laundry, mop, shine — and by the time she finishes sweeping a second time, it's 7:15.

Films — Live-Action

• In Spider-Man: Homecoming, Peter is locked in a high-security vault, presumably until the lock releases in the morning. We see him trying out new web-shooters, working out, talking to his AI, Karen, looking at weapons, etc. It's implied that a lot of time has passed, but when he asks Karen how long it has been she reports that it's only been half an hour.
• In Top Secret!, after Nick Rivers is captured by the East German government he's shown in a cell, where he's making the twentieth mark on the wall (implying that he's been incarcerated for twenty days). Then his manager arrives, and he says he's been waiting for twenty minutes.
• In Wet Hot American Summer, some of the counselors go into town. A Good-Times Montage ensues of them buying beer, smoking cigarettes, and gradually entering into more and more depravity until they're all hardcore junkies living in a heroin den and debasing themselves to survive. Then there's a cut and everyone is back at camp, and someone comments that they'd only been gone an hour.

Live-Action TV

• Arrested Development: George Sr. gets put in solitary confinement in prison, leading to a dramatic montage of him struggling with the isolation. When he scratches a hashmark to mark his time, we see he's been in for two days.
• Doctor Who
  • In the episode "Forest of the Dead", there's a time compression montage in which Donna meets a nice man, falls in love, gets married, and has two children. After she starts suspecting something is wrong with her new life, she discovers that she's in a Lotus-Eater Machine — and has been for less than ten minutes. The entire process of meeting a nice man, falling in love, getting married, and having two children occupied exactly the same amount of time it took the audience to watch the montage.
  • In the episode "The Power of Three", a bored Doctor needs to pass time, so he paints a fence, mows the lawn, and dribbles a football (by his count) over a million times. At the end of the montage, it's still only been an hour.
  • In the episode "The Doctor's Daughter", Cobb told the Doctor and his companions that the war with the Hath had gone on for "many generations". The Doctor and his companions assume that "generations" correspond to multiple years of lifespans. The assumption persists for most of the episode until Donna Noble figures out that the numbers on various plaques she's been noticing are dates and that the war started roughly a week ago. The cloning machines can create hundreds of "generations" of soldiers every day, and apparently, the war was so bloody, the generations went extinct just as quickly.
• Eli Stone: The episode moves along as normal until Eli suddenly realizes that for the past week he hasn't changed his suit or had any non-plot relevant conversations with anyone. This is his realization that he's not actually awake, he's under anesthetic while surgeons operate on his brain aneurysm.
• From an episode of Get Smart:
  Max: When I joined Control, the Chief had a full head of hair.
  Agent 99: Really? When I first started here the Chief was completely bald.
  Max: That's right, you started a week after I did.
• How I Met Your Mother:
  • In "Atlantic City," the gang waits for a judge to walk by so they can get Marshall and Lily a marriage license. Lily remarks, "I'm sure we won't be waiting for long." Cue Match Cut with a bunch of old people sitting in their seats... who turn out to have taken the gang's bench while they were getting snacks at the vending machine.
  • The episode "Shelter Island" ends with Stella leaving Ted at their wedding. The next episode, "Happily Ever After", opens with Ted reminiscing about that experience, how it seemed so horrible at the time, but looking back on it he feels he's come out of it a little stronger, and hardly even thinks about Stella anymore. Lily then remarks, "Ted, the wedding was yesterday. It's been 24 hours."
• Kenan & Kel: In the TV movie "Two Heads Are Better Than None," the duo sets out to get help after Kenan's family's car breaks down in the middle of nowhere. After a cut, the two are walking in the heat and Kel is ready to collapse from dehydration. Kenan rolls his eyes and turns back to the family car - a few feet away - and asks his mother to get Kel some water.
• Lucifer: The Season 3 premiere makes it look like Lucifer has gone from Los Angeles for a very long time, and he believes it as well, worrying how his friends are moving on without him. Then he arrives at the LAPD precinct, where he learns to his dismay that it's only been a few days since he left.
• Malcolm in the Middle: Hal takes the boys to a NASCAR race. At first they're excited, but after a series of slow dissolves showing the cars going around, the boys sweating and fidgeting and the fans cheering, they look miserable... only to show them checking off the second lap on their scorecard.
• In the Modern Family episode “Halloween 3: Awesomeland”, the following exchange takes place between Claire and Phil during a talking head:
  Claire: Our new neighbors, medical marijuana retailer Ronnie and his wife Amber, moved in two months ago, and-
  Phil: It's been a week and a half.
  Claire: Dear God. Really?
  Phil: Yeah.
• In one episode of Moonlighting, David is arrested. He begins marking the days on his cell wall. After he's made enough marks to indicate that he's been there for several months, a cop arrives to let him out, and comments that he's only been there about 20 minutes.
• The Red Green Show: In an early episode, Red's Handyman Corner involved cutting X's in the bottoms of empty plastic containers with a utility knife, and Red starts by demonstrating on one container. He has a large pile of containers on one side of him before the cut, and then after the cut, the pile is on the other side, making you think he's made X's in all of them during the cut. By the end of the cut, he's working on another container, and when he finishes making an X with his knife, and then says to the camera, "Okay...that's two!"
• In the episode "Interesting" of The Young Ones, at one point when a party seems to just keep dragging on, a clock's hands are shown spinning around. One of the guests asks if that's the actual time, but Vyvyan tells them that the clock's hands just spin around really fast sometimes and it's still quite early in the evening.

Puppet Shows

• In the Dinosaurs episode "Baby Talk", Fran has Earl babysit Baby for an hour while she cooks dinner, but she doesn't want Baby to watch television due to Baby repeating the dirty word, "Smoo", which was shown on Don't Lift that Heavy Object! the night before. Earl does everything he can to entertain Baby without having to resort to using television, which includes singing and dancing, playing with puppets, making balloon animals, and attempting to spin plates on sticks. It is then revealed that all of that only took two minutes.

Video Games

• Downplayed in The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom given that there is a legitimate Time Skip involved. Assuming you follow the game's intended path, one of the first returning NPCs you'll run into is Purah (last seen as a child in Breath of the Wild due to an anti-aging experiment gone wrong), who appears as a full grown adult. This may lead players to think that Link was unconscious for decades during the Upheval, when in reality it's only been a few weeks at most. Purah just managed to perfect her de-aging tech during the roughly six year Time Skip between games.
• Portal 2: In the downloadable sixth co-op course, "Art Therapy", GLaDOS tells ATLAS and P-body that "it has been one hundred thousand years since I last assembled you for testing." Later though, she corrects it to 50,000 years, then further corrects it to just a week.
• Warframe has a rare case of this being Played for Drama during The New War, with the resulting psyche being tied to several vital parts of the quest's storyline. After Ballas and Erra easily crush the Operator and take over the entire solar system, the game cuts to a new mission that ends with the reveal of an aged-up Operator (who was physically a teenager), a crashed Orbiter, and all of the player's previous assets presumed lost — implying that countless years had passed between their defeat and their return. However, the Operator being controlled here is revealed to be an Alternate Self with no powers or deeper knowledge of the outside world named the Drifter who switched places the moment the Operator was defeated by Ballas, meaning that in reality it had only been a few days to perhaps a month or two.

Web Animation

• How It Should Have Ended: In the Villain Pub short, "Palpatine's Quarantine", Palpatine is suffering from Cabin Fever during the 2020 pandemic. It seems like the quarantine losts for months, but it started only two hours ago.
• In Red vs. Blue: The Blood Gulch Chronicles, Grif is locked in a prison cell with Church for five hours, but when he gets out he acts like he's an institutionalized long-term convict.

Webcomics

• 8-Bit Theater: While in a submarine, Black Mage gets a long monologue on Go Mad from the Isolation, how his shipmates are now babbling incoherently and there is nothing but the endless ocean around them. Said shipmates point out it's been less than three hours.
• In Katamari, the Prince learns of an earth-shattering event from his gadget-clad future self. When asked how far in the future this was, the future Prince checks a calendar and confirms it's happening in three hours.
• Lampshaded in this The Order of the Stick with Elan's deliberately invoked training montage, where Julio Scoundrél trains Elan in front of false backgrounds to create an illusion of time progression.
• This Port Sherry comic features a woman getting hair extensions just to invoke this on her husband.
• In one Sluggy Freelance strip, the group is stuck at an airport and Torg measures Riff's rather long beard to estimate they've been there several months. Riff reveals it's a fake and Torg estimates that they were there for only a couple hours, as that's when he tends to break out the sight gags.

Western Animation

• The Adventures of Jimmy Neutron, Boy Genius had one in "Who Framed Jimmy Neutron?". Jimmy, Carl, and Sheen are stuck in prison picking up trash and Carl begins to lose it.
  Carl: I can't take it anymore! I'm going crazy! I'M CRACKING UP!
  Jimmy: Carl, we've only been here for two minutes.
  Carl: It feels like four.
• In the American Dad! episode "Home Wrecker", after Stan and Francine split their house after being unable to agree on the redecoration, it looks as though a whole year has gone past. The Smith kids take turns in celebrating various holidays on each parent's side of the house, while the other parent is left alone on their side. It's revealed later that only a week had passed, where Stan and Francine had been intentionally celebrating the holidays early and cramming it in a short time span just to spite their partner.
  Francine: Oh, Stan. How have you been?
  Stan: A little exhausted celebrating all those holidays in one week just to make each other feel bad.
• In the Arthur episode "Waiting to Go" (loosely based on Waiting for Godot) Brain and Binky are left alone waiting for their mothers to pick them up after soccer practice. They act as if they've been on their own for hours and expect to die there, but at the end of the episode when their mothers show up it turns out they've only been waiting an extra 15 minutes.
• The Futurama episode "The Cryonic Woman" has Fry and his ex-girlfriend Michelle cryogenically freezing themselves with the intention of waking up in the year 4000 and discover a barren wasteland when they emerge. However, the cryogenic pod was merely set to 2 days and was shipped to L.A. while they were frozen.
• Used in an episode of Hey Arnold!. As Stinky takes up farming, a montage shows him diverting heavy rains from his plant, keeping it shaded from the hot sun, and finally protecting it from heavy snow. The characters then remark how strange the weather's been in the week since he started working.
• Hilda: In Season 2's episode "the Jorts Incident", after delivery guy Gil becomes the new host of the magic tide mice, we see Gil getting promotion after promotion within Jorts until he reaches CEO position, and become Employee of the Month so many times his pictures fill up an entire wall, all of which implies months or even years go by. Then we learn it's actually still the same day the episode started on.
• In the third The Jimmy Timmy Power Hour, Timmy and Jimmy program their own villain, but when he becomes clingy, they take a break and tell him to meet them at the mall in an hour. The villain waits as the sky cycles through day, night, and various forms of weather, and believes he has been abandoned, becoming angry. The next scene shows Jimmy and Timmy programming a new villain in their treehouse, but it's revealed that they didn't abandon their old villain for that long:
  Cosmo: Wow! I can't believe the sun came up, went down, came back up, and then we had rain and snow and night again all in one hour!
• The Kim Possible episode "Tick-Tick-Tick" has the eponymous character facing detention for being tardy. Mr. Barkin is the head of detention, which sounds swell for Kim. The clock swings hands, thinking that time passes through the room, until Mr. Barkin points out it was malfunctioning and fixes it. Double swell for Kim.
• My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic:
  • "Read It and Weep" features a scene resembling a Boredom Montage during Rainbow Dash's hospital stay. She tries to pass the time by talking to the furniture, bouncing a ball off the wall, and so on. Then after a minute of the montage, we cut to a clock — and only a minute has actually passed.
  • In "It's About Time", Twilight Sparkle is visited by her very disheveled and tough-looking future self. She asks her if there was some epic pony war in the future, and Future Twilight responds that she's actually from next Tuesday.
  • In "Hearth's Warming Eve", the Show Within a Show has a scene where Princess Platinum (played by Rarity) and Clover the Clever (played by Twilight Sparkle) embark on an epic quest to find a new home for the unicorns. We cut to them trekking through the woods, and an exhausted and whiny Platinum asks how long they've been walking, complaining that her hooves are killing her. Clover pulls back a branch to reveal their castle in the very near distance, and says, "About five minutes, Your Majesty."
  • In "Wonderbolts Academy", two consecutive shots from the darkened interior of a mailbox show Pinkie Pie excitedly opening the mailbox, wilting when she sees it empty, and closing it. Cut to exterior, and we see Pinkie is just standing there, repeatedly checking the mailbox as if a letter will appear by magic.
• In the Rugrats episode, "Grandpa Moves Out", after Lou moves out of Tommy's house and into a retirement home, it seems like an entire year has passed, as the weather changes from summer, to fall, to winter, and then back to summer. But then a subtitle reading, "One Week Later" appears and Drew remarks to Stu, "Crazy weather we've been having this week, huh?"
• The Simpsons:
  • In the episode "And Maggie Makes Three", Marge's sisters Patty and Selma promise not to tell Homer about Marge's pregnancy and use the telephone to call other people about it. We see the following happen:
    [Patty and Selma open a phone book and dial the first number]
    Patty: Hello, is this A. Aaronson? It might interest you to know that Marge Simpson is pregnant again.
    [Time Skip occurs]
    Patty: Just thought you'd like to know, Mr. Zykowski.
    [Patty hangs up]
    Patty: There. Aaronson and Zykowski are the two biggest gossips in town — in an hour, everyone will know.
  • In "Bart's Girlfriend", Bart resolves to avoid seeing Jessica Lovejoy for a while, and he's seen marking several months' worth of days on his calendar. He then concludes, "There. I just need to make it this many days," and re-marks the first day.
  • One episode has a cut from Moe as he looks now to Moe, wrinkled and bald, implying decades have passed… but then he says “It’s been a rough three years.”
• Sonic Boom:
  • In "Eggheads", when Tails, Knuckles, Amy, and Sticks are under the effects of the evil cookies that Dr. Eggman created, Eggman puts them through villain school. We get glimpses of his lessons, skipping around from 1 to 4 to 7, etc. Then we get to lesson 12.
    Eggman: Lesson number 12, lesson numbering. Evil lessons should be numbered as follows: 1, 4, 7, 12, 16.
  • In the episode "Battle of the Boy Bands", when Sonic, Tails, and Knuckles form their own boy band, they have to come up with a name, and a montage is shown. This includes the usual montage tropes, such as the Wastebasket Ball and Spinning Clock Hands. Then we see pages coming off the calendar, only for Sonic to reveal it was Knuckles:
    Sonic: Knuckles, stop tearing pages off that calendar!
• South Park:
  • In the episode "The Wacky Molestation Adventure", the children discover that if they accuse their parents of molestation, the authorities will take them away. When this becomes popular enough, the rest of the parents leave town voluntarily, leaving a town with only children in it. We cut to some time after, and the town is all boarded up and desolated, like a ghost town that has been abandoned for years. The children have become wild, having gone full way into Lord of the Flies-style tribal wars. In the end, it turns out that only a week has passed.
  • In another episode, Cartman gets injured and ends up in a coma. We dissolve to Cartman in a hospital bed with a Time-Passage Beard, then he wakes up. It turns out he's been in a coma for two days, and the "beard" was just a face-warmer.
• SpongeBob SquarePants: In "Selling Out", Mr. Krabs sells the Krusty Krab and retires, planning to go and relax now that he's free of a job. He visits the Hook Museum, paints a piece of Krabby Patties in a bowl, and plays golf - until he remembers that he hates golf. It then cuts to Mr. Krabs lying in bed and drooling , before he grabs a clock and bemoans that it isn't even noon yet.
• ThunderCats Roar: In "Working Grrl", Cheetara joins a company and is shown getting promoted until she becomes CEO. Cut to the other ThunderCats talking about how it's been three hours since she started on her first day.
• In the Tiny Toon Adventures episode "Prom-ise Her Anything", Babs rushes home to wait for Buster to ask her to the prom. A montage is shown, wherein she passes the time by tossing cards into a hat, playing with a paddleball, making a paper doll, and knitting a scarf. It is then revealed that all of that only took two minutes.

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