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Max: Hold it, Sam. Is this turning into one of those shows where we sit around and reminisce, thereby recouping eighty percent of the episode cost, via the use of clips and archive footage?
Sam: Yes it is, Max. Now stop talking, stupid, it's costing money.

An episode which consists mainly of fragments (clips) of previous episodes, sometimes with voiceover added. Usually has a theme: for example, to highlight a character's development over the years, or show the relationship between characters. Sometimes, however, it won't be shown that the events take place in the past, but they are shown as appearing directly one after another.

Clip shows can be used to stretch the budget — they utilize footage already shot, thus needing only narrative glue money for the episode. In that sense, they are similar to a Bottle Episode. They can also be used to stretch the story — when a show's episode order is suddenly expanded after its early episodes prove popular, but the writers don't have enough story to fill quite that many episodes, clip shows are a popular recourse.

Sometimes regular episodes turn into clip shows when they are localized for other markets, as it's simple and inexpensive to edit in recap segments made up of clips from prior episodes to replace the gaps made when nudity and other risqué content is deleted. (Occasionally this can even happen before an episode is aired in the original market, as was the case with Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann's infamous Hot Springs Episode.)

One place you might see a clip show is in the second-to-last episode of a season; it's used to conserve the last of the season's budget, so they can blow the wad on a kickass finale.

When a clip show is used to sum up a season or storyline, it is a Recap Episode.

Clip shows were more appreciated by viewers in the days before reruns, syndication, and videotapes/DVDs provided an alternative way for them to revisit the old moments of their shows. There were even theatrical films that served as these, most famously the That's Entertainment! films in the 1970s. In those days, they were less likely to get today's cynical reaction, "They've just done it to save money." They still occasionally emerge in today's TV productions, though mainly in children's programming. In the rare occasion where they manifest in adult scripted programming (such as occurred with Alias) they are usually built into an ongoing story arc. Otherwise, bottle shows are more likely to be produced these days. Due to their low popularity, clip shows are practically more parodied than played straight these days—a very common choice is to have a clip show setup, only for the actual clips to be from stories and events we never actually saw, or be comically off from the ones we did see.

A variant on the clip show are the recap or catch-up specials that often precede new-season premieres for arc-heavy series that serve to help new and returning viewers understand the storyline so far. Shows that have done these sorts of specials in recent years (they are rarely considered regular episodes) have included Farscape, Lost (several), Once Upon a Time, Doctor Who and Game of Thrones. Often, these specials are documentaries, with narration or on-screen introductions by cast members; occasionally, however, the actors appear in character (or, as occurred with the Farscape: Undressed, there was a mixture of both).

Another variant is a clip show using footage not from any one particular series, with voice-over narration. These shows are usually factual, like rolling news, Magazine Shows, or nature documentaries, but purely entertaining shows with this format also exist.

When previous clips of a single character's line or action are played out in rapid succession (such as Homer's "D'oh" sequence in So It's Come To This: A Simpsons Clip Show), that's a Fully Automatic Clip Show.

Compare this to the use of the Magical Security Cam. For instances of a feature-length film essentially being a Clip Show, see Compilation Movie. The video game equivalent is Megamix Game. See also Recap by Audit.


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Other examples:

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Straight examples:

    Asian Animation 
  • The BoBoiBoy episode "Fan Mail" acts something like one, as a lot of the questions sent to Probe and Computer are answered by playing footage of previously-seen episodes (and even some that hadn't aired up to this point yet).
  • Happy Heroes:
    • There's a season called Funny Highlights which is clips from earlier episodes.
    • There are a few episodes that are clip shows sampling episodes from earlier, such as Season 2 episode 26 - where the heroes mention their greatest accomplishments during an interview, with these accomplishments shown as clips from previous episodes - and Season 7 episode 4, which has a bunch of flashbacks to Season 6 showing that the heroes need to unlearn their habits from Planet Guling, the central focus of the season being sampled in that episode.
  • The Pleasant Goat and Big Big Wolf season Everyday Pleasant Goat is composed entirely of clips from older episodes.
  • The Simple Samosa episode "Guest of Samosa" is about Samosa and his gang wondering who will visit his house and thinking of some encounters Samosa had in earlier episodes. The specific episodes that are sampled are "Makkhi Makkhi!" (where the gang are scared of a fly that gets stuck to Jalebi), "Meethi Masi" (where Samosa's aunt visits), and "Anda Bhatija" (where an egg alien lands in Chatpata Nagar and follows Samosa around).

    Blogs 
  • Renegade Rhetoric, a Facebook page that was a Character Blog for Cy-Kill from Challenge of the GoBots and had many posts used to describe the events of episodes from a non-existent second season of the cartoon, had hints that the fictional episode "Nightmares of a Leader" was a clip show episode. The framing device is that Leader-1 gets injured from a Renegade attack and the rest of the Guardians and their human allies use monitors to watch Leader-1's memories of past adventures while waiting for him to recover. While the specific episodes used aren't addressed by title, Cy-Kill does provide succinct hints that the episodes clips are used from in this hypothetical clip show are "Time Wars", "Cy-Kill's Shrinking Ray", "Sentinel", "Wolf in the Fold", "A New Suit for Leader-1", "Ring of Fire", "Lost on Gobotron", "Ultra Zod", "The Renegades' Rampage, Part Two" and "Dawn World".

    Comic Books 
  • Yes, this happens in comics too, especially during the Silver and Bronze Ages. A fairly common tactic for Padding a storyline or filling in gaps due to Schedule Slips was to reprint material from older issues and treat it as though it were a Whole Issue Flashback. Since most of the readers were too young to remember the original stories, they were often unaware they were paying good money for recycled material.
  • This is explicitly discussed in Miracleman #8. The editor of the book actually breaks the fourth wall and comments on this trend, citing an issue of Doctor Strange where Marvel just reprinted an old Steve Ditko story and had the gall to pass it off as a Flashback.
  • The entire second half of the Milestone Celebration The Avengers #150 is a condensed reprint of The Avengers #16.
  • Captain America and The Falcon #155 contains a lengthy "flashback" made up of pages from Young Men Comics #24, an issue that had been printed over two decades prior. To the book's credit, the editor included a caption acknowledging that the flashback was indeed recycled content.
  • The Incomplete Death's Head is a whole miniseries of this, presented as a computerised archive the characters are browsing. It was intended to introduce the original Death's Head character's tangled history to fans of the Legacy Character, the cyborg Death's Head II. Some new captions were added to the reprinted stories, as were a couple of panels of Talking Heads exposition. Most issues also had a page or two of new material as a framing device, showing the real world events occurring while Death's Head II is reviewing the records of his past.
  • Want to see what this can look like in the hands of a master? Alan Moore did one of these during his run on Swamp Thing, retelling the original Swamp Thing story from House of Secrets #92 with a framing device that (re)introduced Cain and Abel as storytellers in the realm of Dream. That's right, a single-issue clip shownote  singlehandedly laid the groundwork for Neil Gaiman's The Sandman (1989).
  • The hundredth issue of The Simpsons Comics is essentially a Simpsons clip show in comic form. The issue revolves around Bart and Lisa discovering that there are comics about them, and trying to find out why they never knew this, while getting to read snippets from earlier issues.

    Fan Works 
  • Eiga Sentai Scanranger has one. You read that right, an online written story has a clip show.
  • It's not the only one: chapter 2note  of Paper Mario X 2 is not only also a clip show, but a Recap Episode.
  • The WWE story Ghosts Of Divas Past is a clip show devoted entirely to the career of WWE Diva Victoria.
  • Cat Tales: Discussed with a variation in "Do No Harm", which features the characters recalling events from the past that hadn't actually been depicted on screen until now, such as Barbara and Tim's reactions to Selina having learned Bruce's identity.
  • Ultraman Hero Academia:
    • Chapter 26 is akin to this as Hero recounts certain events from various Ultra series; such as the creation/near destruction of the Plasma Spark & Belial and Zero's first appearances in Mega Monster Battle: Ultra Galaxy, his defeat at the hands of Geed in Ultraman Geed, the Ultimate Wars, etc.
    • Chapter 42 counts as a more traditional clip show, framing it as one of the messages Hero sends back to the Land of Light.

    Films — Animation 
  • Oddly enough, this is Older Than Television; there are old animated theatrical shorts composed mainly of footage from other shorts. Again, this was long before reruns and home video, thus audiences would have actually looked forward to these. Tom and Jerry is very guilty of this, having sevennote  shorts composed mainly of footage from earlier T&J cartoons. The last one, "Shutter Bugged Cat", goes even further: after the usual schtick of having Tom watch older T&J cartoons, it then uses the first and last scenes of the short "Designs on Jerry"note  as part of the short's actual story.
  • The Casper the Friendly Ghost short "Ghost Writers" is a meta example, with a plot revolving around cartoon writers coming up with story ideas for Casper cartoons. The ideas they come up with are represented as clips of the earlier Casper cartoons "Once Upon A Rhyme", "To Boo or Not To Boo" and 'Casper's Spree Under The Sea".
  • Popeye cartoons from both Fleischer Studios and Famous Studios are also very guilty of this.
    • "Adventures of Popeye" (1935: Popeye leaps out of a book to tell a live-action boy his adventures, using clips from "I Eats My Spinach", "Popeye the Sailor" (the pilot short), "Wild Elephinks" and "Axe Me Another".
    • "I'm in the Army Now" (1936): Popeye and Bluto prove they're Army material by showing scenes from "Blow Me Down", "Shoein' Hosses", "Choose Yer Weppins" and "King of the Mardi Gras".
    • "Customers Wanted" (1939): Popeye and Bluto show Wimpy clips from "Let's Get Movin'" and "The Twisker Pitcher".
    • "Doing Imposskible Stunts" (1940): Popeye auditions to be a stuntman by showing clips from "I Never Changes My Altitude", "I Wanna Be a Lifeguard" and "Bridge Ahoy", while Swee'pea shows a clip of his heroics from "Lost and Foundry".
    • "Spinach-Packin' Popeye" (1944): After losing a boxing match, Popeye tries to win Olive back by showing scenes from Popeye the Sailor Meets Sindbad the Sailor and Popeye the Sailor Meets Ali Baba's Forty Thieves. It turns out to be All Just a Dream.
    • "Spinach vs. Hamburgers" (1948): Popeye tries to show his nephews the benefits of eating spinach by showing clips from "The Anvil Chorus Girl", "Pop-Pie a la Mode" and "She-Sick Sailors".
    • Popeye's Premier (1949): Popeye and Olive Oyl watch Aladdin and His Wonderful Lamp.
    • "Popeye Makes a Movie" (1950): Popeye shows his nephews the making of ''Popeye the Sailor Meets Ali Baba's Forty Thieves".
    • "Friend or Phony" (1952): Bluto fakes an injury to he can make Popeye give up spinach and relates the events of "I'll Be Skiing Ya" and "Tar with a Star".
    • "Big Bad Sindbad" (1952): Popeye tells his nephews the story of his encounter with Sindbad the Sailor.
    • "Popeye's 20th Anniversary" (1954): Popeye celebrates 20 years in show business with clips from "Rodeo Romeo" and "Tops in the Big Top".
    • "Penny Antics" (1955): Popeye and Bluto show Wimpy clips from "Silly Hillbilly", "Wotta Knight" and "The Fistic Mystic".
    • "Assault and Flattery" (1956): Bluto sues Popeye for beating him up all the time and relates the events of "The Farmer and the Belle" and "How Green is My Spinach", while Popeye defends his case with a scene from "A Balmy Swami".
    • "The Crystal Brawl" (1957): Popeye poses as a sooth seer and shows Bluto and Olive scenes from "Quick on the Vigor" and "Alpine for You" from a crystal ball.
  • The Betty Boop short "Betty Boop's Rise to Fame", using clips from "Stopping the Show" (cut from modern prints), "Betty Boop's Bamboo Isle" and "The Old Man of the Mountain".
  • The Trope Codifier (if not, the outright Trope Maker) is likely an Out of the Inkwell short from 1925, Koko's Thanksgiving. Koko shows Max Fleischer clips from earlier cartoons in order to score some turkey.
  • If you chose the "Robin dies" option in the Batman: Under the Red Hood follow-up, DC Showcase – Batman: Death in the Family, it only goes into one of these about the original film, with the only new footage being at the start of the film and the end, where Bruce is recounting the events of the earlier film to Clark Kent.

    Films — Live-Action 
  • 1974's That's Entertainment! is a collection of highlights from MGM musicals, hosted by performers who had appeared in those films. Released as a Milestone Celebration for MGM's 50th anniversary, it was a surprise box-office hit. There would be two follow-ups: 1976's Part 2 included scenes from musicals and non-musicals, and 1993's Part III included Deleted Scenes and rehearsal/test footage from musicals along with finished scenes. The 1985 Spin-Off That's Dancing! didn't restrict itself to MGM movies. On top of all this, several variations were made well into The '80s, such as:
  • 1982's Trail of the Pink Panther is a variation that uses the format to make a movie starring Peter Sellers two years after he had died. The first half of the film uses then-unseen deleted scenes of Sellers as Inspector Clouseau from the series' 5th film (The Pink Panther Strikes Again) with new material filmed with the other actors to change the context and create a new storyline. When Clouseau goes missing at about the halfway mark, a reporter interviews people who knew him, triggering flashbacks to previously-seen clips from all of Sellers' previous The Pink Panther films. The poor taste of the exercise led to a successful lawsuit by Sellers' widow against the studio and director/writer/producer Blake Edwards.
  • The 1943 musical short Three Cheers for the Girls is based on clips from 1930s Warner Bros. movie musicals, mostly Busby Berkeley Numbers.
  • Gamera Tai UchÅ« KaijÅ« Bairasu is filled with stock footage recounting fights in the previous movies. Hope you really liked those previous films! It's perhaps only bested by 1980's even lazier Uchu KaijÅ« Gamera, which was the last entry in the series until 1995.
  • The New Adventures of Tarzan: The 12th and last episode of this 1935 film serial is basically a recap/highlight episode, after the story has been resolved.
  • Some Mondo film series will do this, an example being The Worst of Faces of Death.
  • When Double Helix Films went bankrupt in 1992, their last effort Sleepaway Camp IV: The Survivor was left unfinished. The film finally saw a release in 2012 when a fan of the series edited the shot footage together with 35 minutes worth of clips from the three previous films.
  • Half of the running time of Silent Night, Deadly Night Part 2 makes an extensive use of the clips from the previous movie.
  • All Monsters Attack, also known as Godzilla's Revenge, uses a framing story of a kid daydreaming about Godzilla in order to present...footage of Godzilla taken from the previous three movies. There are a few new monster scenes, but the majority of the film's (very brief) runtime is made up of pre-existing footage sloppily edited together. The funniest part is that each of the films the stock footage is pulled from used a different Godzilla suit, causing his appearance to change dramatically from scene to scene.
  • The second VHS film of Ju-on rehashes half of the previous film before continuing where it left off, as it ended on a Cliffhanger.
  • Many of the Jules White-directed theatrical shorts by The Three Stooges used recycled material, especially between 1952 and 1956 when Columbia reduced the budgets for filmed shorts and production had to be reduced from four days to three (or fewer), driving White to use more and more material from previous films. For the last four shorts under Columbia this trope was employed extensively in combination with the use of stand-ins to work around the death of Shemp Howard in mid-contract.
  • Love on the Run: This film was the last of five films in The Adventures of Antoine Doinel series. Nearly a third of the movie is clips of the previous four films, presented as flashbacks.

    Music 
  • The music video for 50 Cent's "If I Can't" comprised of concert clips and previously-filmed documentary footage.
  • The music video for David Bowie's "Fame '90" consists of Bowie singing and dancing while surrounded by looping clips from his many, many previous music videos and live performances (including a clip of him performing the original version of "Fame" on Soul Train).
  • Cheap Trick's "If You Need Me" mixes original footage of the band sitting by a television set with clips of the other videos shown on the set.
  • Devo's second "Post Post-Modern Man" video, where clips from almost all their previous videos are incorporated into new footage spoofing the Home Shopping Network. It was their last music video before a temporary breakup, but they weren't officially breaking up yet, and the reliance on old footage was more a result of poorly-timed Executive Meddling; MTV rejected the first video, and the label commissioned a second one for an alternate mix of the song while the band were busy promoting the album; Thus they had to use an outside director, Rocky Schenck note , and could only appear in person for a couple of brief scenes.
  • The video for Eminem's "Sing For The Moment" is a compilation of vignettes from The Anger Management Tour along with cameos by various fellow rappers, including Dr. Dre, the members of D12, 50 Cent, Ludacris and Ras Kass.
  • GFRIEND's "A Tale of the Glass Bead" uses parts of previous music videos to introduce the lore surrounding their fictional universe, also showing the story present in their videos like a recap.
  • (G)I-DLE's "Blow Your Mind" music video is produced from footage the members took of each other on a trip to San Francisco.
  • The Human League's "Love Is All That Matters" became one largely out of necessity. The single was released two years after its parent album, Crash, in order to promote Human League Greatest Hits, and by that point Virgin Records was rapidly losing faith in the band in the wake of Crash's critical and fan lambasting for its awkward attempt at a New Sound Album. As a result, the video for "love Is All That Matters" was simply stitched together from previous music videos by the band, intercut with animated stills from key moments in said videos.
  • Michael Jackson's "Love Never Felt So Good" (off of Xscape) combines clips from his classic videos with footage of Justin Timberlake and various extras performing the song and imitating the old videos, complete with one guy trying and failing to replicate the "Smooth Criminal" lean.
  • The music video for Grace Jones' "Ladies and Gentlemen: Miss Grace Jones" is cobbled together from Jones' previous music videos, the A One Man Show documentary, and a Citroën CX advertisement that Jones participated in, interspersed with photos from her then-boyfriend Jean-Paul Goude and footage showing how the cover art for its parent album, Slave to the Rhythm, was made. The video's approach fits said album's central concept as a musical autobiography.
  • The Kids Praise series had a clip album: Psalty's Singalongathon Maranatha Marathon Hallelujah Jubilee, set up as a TV special where viewers at home could phone in their votes for their favorite songs from the previous albums, which Psalty and the Kids would then perform.
  • LOONA's music video of "Loonatic" is mostly made up of the extra footage and bloopers of previous ODD EYE CIRCLE member videos.
  • Lovebites' music video for "Nameless Warrior" consists of clips and footage of the band from 2016 to 2021.
  • Nirvana's posthumous 2002 single "You Know You're Right" is an odd case, using footage from band performances and interviews rather than their earlier music videos; the footage is stitched together in such a way to give the illusion that Kurt Cobain is still alive and performing with his bandmates.
  • N Sync also took a similar approach with "I'll Never Stop", albeit with a Framing Device of four female fans watching archival footage of the band on various objects and dancing to the song.
  • Queen's music video for "The Show Must Go On" had one of these videos partly out of necessity, as by the time the song was released as a single, Freddie Mercury's AIDS had progressed to such an extent that he was no longer physically capable of appearing on-camera. Additionally, the release date for Greatest Hits II, which covered the band's hit singles since 1981, was rapidly approaching. These two factors motivated the band to make the music video for "The Show Must Go On" a compilation of their other videos from the 1981-1991 period.
  • Played with in the video for The Police's "Don't Stand So Close to Me '86", which is primarily a CGI-heavy Surreal Music Video but also heavily incorporates clips and imagery from the videos for "De Do Do Do, De Da Da Da", "Wrapped Around Your Finger", and the original version of "Don't Stand So Close to Me", plus snippets of concert footage and various visual paraphernalia from the Police's career and Sting's solo debut The Dream of the Blue Turtles from the previous year. By the time the video released, the Police had functionally dissolved after years of Creative Differences hit a tipping point, and "Don't Stand So Close to Me '86" ended up being their last official studio release.
  • The The Rolling Stones video compilation, Video Rewind, which is a compilation of some of their videos and archival footage. The clips are framed with footage of Bill Wyman working as a security guard in a museum and is in a back room labeled "Exhibit Of Ancient Antiques". Among the "antiques" is Mick Jagger, in a glass case wearing one of his 1973 stage outfits. The two comment on the clips as they are shown playing on Wyman's computer. In the end, It Was All A Dream as Mick wakes up Bill before a show— or was it?
  • Talking Heads' "Lifetime Piling Up" (released a year after the band split up) is a mostly vanilla example in its execution, but occasionally blends elements of earlier videos together, such as making David Byrne from the "Road to Nowhere" video run though the surreal landscape in "And She Was".
  • The BBC's Top of the Pops 2 mostly focused on selected archive performances from the show's history, as well as showcasing the odd bit of new music.
  • The music video New Century Ultraman Legend, was released in conjunction with the 35th Anniversary of the Ultra Series, and is composed mainly of clips from various TV series and movies existing in the franchise at the time— intersect between scenes of various Ultramen performing an impromptu aerobic dance and tap-dance for the audience.
  • While not a traditional music video, one of the montages in the Yellow Magic Orchestra video album Hi-Tech/Video Crime (a companion piece to the Remix Album Hi-Tech/No Crime (Yellow Magic Orchestra Reconstructed)) incorporates modified clips from the minute amount of music videos that the band made during their lifetime (itself partly the result of the band's US distributors having dropped them before MTV really came about), featuring alterations in color grading, framerate, length, and even Chroma Key effects.
  • Barenaked Ladies had a variation of this in the video for "Thanks That Was Fun", a single off of Disc One: All Their Greatest Hits 1991-2001, their greatest hits album from 2001. The video consists largely of existing footage from the band's existing catalog of music videos, ranging from their first (1992's "Lovers in a Dangerous Time") to the then-most-recent "Falling for the First Time", with CGI mouths plastered over the faces of singers Ed Robertson and Steven to make it look like they're actually singing.
  • Waterparks' music videos for "No Capes", "Plum Island", "Peach (Lobotomy)", and "SELF-SABOTAGE" are mostly live and behind the scenes tour footage.
  • Zug Izland's music video for "Promised Land" is filled with clips of various protests mixed in with clips of the bands' live shows.

    Puppet Shows 
  • Bear in the Big Blue House:
    • In "Need a Little Help Today", Bear is sick with a cold, so his friends decide to help him feel better, remembering all the times he was there for them. Clips from previous episodes are shown in flashbacks.
    • In "Wish You Were Here", Bear stays at the Big Blue House to get his chores done while the rest of the residents go to a square dance lesson taught by Grandma Flutter. As Bear begins to miss his friends and reminisce about the good times they had together, clips from previous episodes are shown in flashbacks.
  • Gerry Anderson Shows have had tons of these episodes. They were generally made towards the end of production:
    • Stingray1964: "Aquanaut Of The Year" (in which Troy is being honoured as part of This Is Your Life - cue flashbacks to previous missions).
    • Thunderbirds: "Security Hazard" (in which a little boy named Chip stows away on Thunderbird 2 and when found is put in the care of the brothers and Jeff - cue flashbacks to previous missions as Virgil, Alan, Scott and Gordon explain how their craft are important).
    • Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons: "The Inquisition" (in which Captain Blue is being interrogated by a representative of Spectrum Intelligence - cue flashbacks to previous missions as Blue tries to show he is who he says he is). He eventually realises it's a Mysteron plot.
    • Joe90: "The Birthday" (in which Joe finally celebrates his 10th birthday - cue flashbacks to previous missions).
    • Terrahawks: "Ma's Monsters" (in which Zelda is unhappy over her constant failures to wipe out the Terrahawks - cue flashbacks to... you know).
  • Land O'Hands: The episode "Birthday Memories", which is set on Bungle's birthday (which means it doubles as a Birthday Episode) and has his family recount memories from verious episodes of the show.
  • The Mr. Potato Head Show: The final two episodes of the show are unabashed clip shows; Mr. Potato Head has frequent flashbacks to earlier episodes when he hears that the show has been cancelled to justify most of them. However, at one point, the narrator just says they're going to show the audience some clips just because. It's as if they were deliberately aiming for So Bad, It's Good!
  • The Noddy Shop had episode called "Sing Yourself To Sleep" that was a unique twist on this. The episode used songs from past episodes, but it had no Noddy's Toyland Adventures segment, instead having clips from previous segments play over the song "The Friend You'll Find In Me".
    • "Find Your Own Song" also utilizes the same method for the Noddy's Toyland Adventures segments as "Sing Yourself to Sleep", where clips from that series are shown over the songs "You've Got Talent" and "Follow Your Voice" instead.
  • Sesame Street
    • The 1994 special, "Sesame Street All-Star 25th Birthday: Stars and Street Forever!" shows clips from various episodes and sketches, with the over-arching story being about the citizens of Sesame Street attempting to save the neighborhood from Ronald Grump and his plan to turn it into the Grump Tower.
    • 1989's 20 And Still Counting, hosted by Bill Cosby, fits this trope as well.
    • And then there's The Street We Live On from 2004, which mostly plays as an extended Elmo's World episode except that its Strictly Formula segments work in some older clips. A retrospective of the show's 35-year history is also shown at the very end of the special.
  • Star Fleet had 3 of these... in a 25 episode run. Due to the redundancy, the third one was simply skipped in the English dub.
    • The third clip show seems to be excluded from import packages, as the French, Italian and Arabic versions also exclude it.
    • The second clip show (Episode thirteen) is a unique example, with the continuity of episodes being scrambled, as well as the events of Episodes 8 and 10 being merged.
  • Donkey Hodie:
    • The last few minutes of "Donkey's Bad Day" involve clips from previous episodes playing when Donkey is making a happy memories box and remembers a time when she used each item.
    • The song "Are We Still Friends?" from "Superhero Squabble" has clips of friendship moments that Donkey and Panda shared together play as the song is sung.
    • The song "Passion To Be Me" from "Fashion Donkey" has clips of things that Donkey loves to do play during the part where Donkey realizes that she's perfect the way she is and doesn't need to be exactly like another person to be happy.

    Radio 
  • The Rush Limbaugh Show was effectively this in the months following Limbaugh's death. The show's syndicator, Premiere Networks (part of iHeartMedia), decided to continue the show for four months until placing Clay Travis and Buck Sexton in Limbaugh's time slot. During that time, Premiere brought in a series of guest hosts, incorporating commentary from Limbaugh on past shows that was deemed relevant to the then-current news cycle.

    Theater 
  • The final The Rock-afire Explosion show at Showbiz Pizza restaurants was one of these during the chain's Concept Unification conversion into Chuck E Cheese. Two of the stages remained closed, while the stage with Rolfe and Earle opened up and the characters talked and did a clip show of past Rock Afire moments while trying to guess who the new character was that was coming (Chuck E Cheese).

    Video Games 
  • Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri: The cutscene for "The Voice of Planet" Secret Project consists primarily of sped-up clips from all the previous cutscenes in the game to represent the entire contents of their version of the internet being forcibly uploaded into the Planet brain with the force of every reactor on the planet.

    Webcomics 
  • Brawl in the Family has done this in the "Turnabout Kirby" plot, where Dedede shows several pictures of Kirby's eating mishaps from past comics (amidst newly created ones)

    Web Videos 

Subversions and parodies:

    Fan Works 

    Films — Live-Action 

    Radio 
  • In the Hamish and Dougal episode "Trapped!", Hamish and Dougal find themselves trapped on an escalator (yes, it's that kind of show), and Hamish reminisces about the events of the previous episode, because that's what you do when you're trapped somewhere. Dougal doesn't quite get the concept, becoming confused as to which of him is which when halfway through a line from the clip, and then remembering a scene from Friends instead.

    Web Animation 
  • Spoofed a few times by Homestar Runner:
    • In the Strong Bad Email "personal favorites" Strong Bad, when asked about his favorite emails, lists two real examples, "invisibility" and "gimmicks", but then starts making ones up (like the time he got drunk on soy sauce and tried to fly Bubs' Concession Stand, or the time Coach Z and Pom Pom got in a knife fight at the stone bridge). This caused a lot of confusion when some people thought they were real excerpts, and that they had missed emails.
    • Similarly referenced in "email thunder" when Homestar explains that Strong Bad was in a bunch of his hremails, listing the two real sbemails "caper" and "long pants" before following them up with a fake one where he dressed up like Coach Z.
    • In a cartoon that never aired on the site (originally seen at the Flash Forward convention), Homestar misinterprets the name of the con as "The Flashback Show". Strong Bad's response: "I love a good cop-out!" He then has "flashbacks" to previous cons in the style of a clip show.
    • Also done in Strong Bad's "Sbemailiarized" series, where Strong Bad bookends an old cartoon between scenes of himself reading an email and tries to pass it off as a new episode.
  • Discussed in Terrible Writing Advice. In "Filler" episode, JP eventually scrapes the bottom of the barrel and tells that clip shows make a great filler.

    Webcomics 
  • The Insecticomics has a clip webcomic, in which Tarantulas uses a device to show Megatron past and future comic panels. Oddly enough, some of the panels never actually happened and were probably thrown in for the heck of it.
  • In 8-Bit Theater, at one point Black Mage asks "Have I mentioned that I hate Thief?" Which cues a montage of the times Black Mage said that he hates Thief in response to Thief screwing the team over. One of these is from an event where Black Mage doesn't actually use the phrase, but it's got a lampshade along the lines of "I'm not saying it, but I'm certainly thinking it." The last of these is just a scene from The Boondock Saints with the faces of the Light Warrior pasted on.
  • Basic Instructions provides a "how to".

    Web Videos 
  • Satirized in The Nostalgia Critic's 100th Episode special, where the Critic appears on-camera to tell the audience that they can watch some lame clips of his past episodes while he goes backstage to smoke a joint... until the characters in the clips call him out on it and insist that he review Battlefield Earth. In the commentary for that episode, Mr. Walker said he planned to do a clip show... but with all the clips not being from any episode. Seems like he wanted to do some personal favorites...

 
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Smith Embarrassing Moment's

The Observer Shows the Smith Family every embarrassing moment they did.

How well does it match the trope?

5 (9 votes)

Example of:

Main / ClipShow

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