Shot-for-Shot Remake

Above: Funny Games, the Austrian version (1997)
Below: Funny Games, the American version (2007)

"This 2011 version is so similar—sometimes song for song and line for line—that I was wickedly tempted to reprint my 1984 review, word for word. But that would be wrong."

— Roger Ebert in his review of the 2011 remake of the 1984 movie Footloose

The Shot-for-Shot Remake is a remake that is nearly identical to the original, in almost every way. It'll use most of the same dialogue, have the exact same plot, and change very few things.

See also Setting Update. May lead dissenters to say It's the Same, Now It Sucks! In animated works, often overlaps with Stock Footage. Sister tropes with the Multi-Animator Project.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• Much of Evangelion: 1.0 You Are Not Alone is reanimated shot-for-shot from the original TV series. The most prominent exception is the (much-improved) battle against Ramiel. It gets subverted with its sequel, as the plot diverges rather quickly.
• When fans upload HD "remastered" Toonami intros on YouTube, it really means this, but using superior HD footage.
• The cutscenes for the 1993 Japan-only video game Dragon Ball Z: Plan to Eradicate the Saiyans received an OVA release of their own that year (also Japan-only), and in 2010, that received an updated shot-for-shot remake as a bonus feature on the video game Dragon Ball Z: Raging Blast 2, though shorter and with a more coherent plot. It was also on the US version of the game, though subtitled-only.
• The Junji Ito Collection goes into this a little too much, and suffers due to the small budget. Some of it is that it recreates some stuff shot for shot, but doesn't take advantage of the medium and has either cheap or no animation at all, all while losing detail as if it were animated. Some of it is animated, but it suffers from missing smaller details Ito put into the original work to make it scarier, or just does a poor job making it work.

Comic Books

• The 2004 Marvel Age line by Marvel Comics was this to the company's The Silver Age of Comic Books publications, being beat-for-beat retellings with new art and the dialogue slightly adjusted to be more modern. Occasionally other details would need to be altered, for instance in Marvel Age Spider-Man #6, retelling Amazing Spider-Man #7, the Vulture's plan to rob the Daily Bugle on payday is established to be ridiculous, because Bugle staff are paid by check, while Marvel Age Spider-Man #8 corrects the backwards physics of Amazing #7, in which Spidey earths himself so that Electro's bolts will pass through him harmlessly, instead giving him rubber boots.

Film

• In The Parent Trap (1998), it's surprising how much of the dialogue was almost exactly the same as the 1961 original. It also kept several of the important plot lines from the original (i.e., the camping trip, the grandfather discovering the identity of the two girls, and the recreation of the wedding dinner). Having said that, however the remake did deviate pretty heavily at times. The recreation of the wedding dinner happens much earlier in the remake and ends up failing, unlike the original, leading to a heavily altered third act. Aside from the camping trip, it almost completely deviates from the original.
• Psycho (1998) is regularly criticized for being too much like the original and, consequently, entirely pointless. Van Sant went so far as to give himself a cameo role talking to a Hitchcock lookalike. There was an added scene with Bates masturbating, though.
• The Bollywood remake of Some Like It Hot is nearly identical to the original, though possibly with more gratuitous musical numbers.
• Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer remade the 1937 film The Prisoner of Zenda in 1952 with Stewart Granger, Deborah Kerr, and James Mason in the Colman, Carroll, and Fairbanks roles. The film was more or less a Technicolor carbon copy of the 1937 film, reusing the same script, score, and even camera angles — the director, Richard Thorpe, actually sat watching the earlier film in an 8mm viewer, and copying from that.
• An Affair to Remember from 1957 (with Cary Grant and Deborah Kerr) is a remake of the 1939 film Love Affair (with Charles Boyer and Irene Dunne). It uses the exact same script, with very minimal alterations and additions to the story. The songs were also updated. The film was remade again in 1994 under the original title (with Warren Beatty and Annette Bening), but this version, while keeping the basic story, had a new script. The original film is also responsible for several Bollywood films, a couple of which also use the same script.
• Enforced in the Chinese remake of the short film Tears of Steel; because the film and its assets were open source, it was possible for a team of Chinese students to obtain the original CGI files and edit in the live action parts with Chinese actors — but as they weren't capable of changing the CGI files on a large scale, they had to do each scene shot for shot.
• Algiers is nearly a carbon copy of the original French version Pépé le Moko, right down to shot angles. The only difference is the ending; the original has the Anti-Hero opt for Better to Die than Be Killed while the remake has him shot by the cops.
• The American remake of Funny Games was directed by Michael Haneke, who also directed the original German version, to be almost exactly the same, but English-speaking actors (like Naomi Watts and Tim Roth) are used instead of German and Austrian actors.
• The Omen (2006) for the original film, apart from changing the dates and adding a bit at the beginning which included modern signifiers of the apocalypse. They can be practically synced into one another as they are word for word the same.
• The 1931 Spanish language production Drácula was basically this to the 1931 Bela Lugosi film. In the early 1930s (before dubbing and subtitling), it was common for studios to simultaneously film foreign language versions of their films at night using the same sets with different casts and crew. The Spanish "Dracula" is by far the most famous of these. The final product is almost identical to the English-language film in most respects. The dialogue was a direct translation, and the staging was mostly the same. However, many scenes were longer since they used the entire original script (the English version had bits cut out to quicken the pace), and the Spanish film's director used more creative cinematography in an attempt to make the better film. Universal Horror fans do generally consider the Spanish film's pacing and cinematography to be superior, but the performances aren't considered to be quite as good, especially Carlos Villarias' Dracula not comparing to the legendary Bela Lugosi. Interestingly, the Spanish film's female star, Lupita Tovar, lived to the age of 106 (passing away in 2016), and the film itself can be easily seen with subtitles on most Dracula DVD and Blu-ray releases as a bonus feature. It was reissued to theaters in 2015 as a double feature with the Lugosi film, and was even inducted into the National Film Registry later that year.
• Let Me In, Hammer Horror's Americanized version of Let the Right One In is virtually identical to the original. The only differences aside from cosmetic changes are actually giving a date, an In Medias Res prologue for about a minute, removing a scene where the protagonist visits his father's drinking buddy, the vampire's transgendered aspect, and explicitly making the vampire's helper someone who has been with the vampire since they were a child, something that was only vaguely hinted at in the original.
• The Debt (American, 2011 remake) features an identical plot, the same characters (some names changed). The only significant difference is the pace; the American version features more atmosphere shots, and stretches scenes out more than the original did, and adds a single action scene.
• The only changes made to Come Out and Play, a remake of Who Can Kill a Child?, is the removal of a handful of scenes, mostly the war footage.
• LOL, a French film from 2008 was shot-for-shot remade in 2012 in America with Miley Cyrus, Demi Moore, and Ashley Greene.
• Carrie (2013) is identical to the original film to the point of including scenes that weren't in the book and mirroring the original film's changes to the book such as Carrie telekinetically impaling her mom rather than stopping her heart, the massacre taking place with Carrie in the middle of the action, and an homage to the infamous final scene of the original. This is all in spite of both director Kimberly Pierce and lead actress Chloe Moretz saying this film would adapt the book, not the original film. Thank you, MGM.
• The Rocky Horror Picture Show: Let's Do the Time Warp Again is pretty similar to The Rocky Horror Picture Show apart from the lips singing Science Fiction Double Feature being replaced with the Usherette from the original play.
• Some of the Disney Live-Action Remakes have been criticized for this:
  • The Lion King (2019)'s "Circle of Life" sequence is a maddeningly direct remake of the original film's, differing only in the use of photorealistic CG and a new recording of the song. While the rest of the movie isn't quite that slavish, it still follows all the plot beats of the original with little deviation, and uses many of the same lines of dialogue, to the point of keeping the Actor Allusion to Reversal of Fortune even though it now makes no sense due to Scar's recasting.
  • Beauty and the Beast (2017) added some things, but a common complaint is that those additions don't matter, as the story still repeats as though nothing was different. For example, in this version the Beast has a magic book that can teleport you anywhere. Does Belle use it when she needs to rush home and save Maurice? No, she rides off dramatically on a horse, like in the original. She's also an inventor instead of Maurice, but does this become a Chekhov's Skill? No; it's used early on and never again. Et cetera.
• The American remake of [REC], Quarantine (2008). The greater changes to the plot are the result of it being set in Los Angeles rather than Barcelona and changing the virus from a demonic possession to a Hate Plague created by a doomsday cult, but way too many scenes copy the original, especially the final sequence in the blacked-out room that provides The Reveal.
• There are a number of scenes where Airplane! follows its source material, Zero Hour! (1957), almost shot for shot—though, obviously, in Airplane! situations taken seriously in the first film are largely played for laughs.
• Cold Pursuit is this to In Order of Disappearance, as both were directed by Hans Petter Moland.
• Wild Card is a remake of the 1986 Burt Reynolds vehicle Heat. Beside some shuffling of the action sequences and Nick's desire to move to Venice being made less specific in Wild Card, they're mostly the same movie.

Live-Action TV

• The second episode of Ahsoka ends on a shot for shot recreation of the final moments of the epilogue of the animated Star Wars Rebels wherein Sabine Wren meets with Ahsoka Tano to go on their journey to find Ezra Bridger. The Star Wars social media account would confirm this is the exact scene being retold by posting a side-by-side comparison of the two sequences, differing only in the medium of presentation and some details like Ahsoka's outfit, Sabine's haircut, and a few minor actions being excised.
• Though Power Rangers deviates from Super Sentai most of the time, there are some seasons that are close to the source material. However, Power Rangers Wild Force was criticized for being almost exactly like Hyakujuu Sentai Gaoranger, with many episodes being shot for shot remakes, the only changes being the main Big Bad, and the two crossovers that occurred that season. Power Rangers Samurai, the Western adaptation of Samurai Sentai Shinkenger, went in this direction as well, though it did deviate in a few parts.
  • Power Rangers Jungle Fury and Power Rangers Mystic Force had some major deviations from the source material, and yet still needed to do some scenes that were exactly like the sentai to fit that portion of the plot - mostly villain scenes, who had some storylines that really were word-for-word adaptations of their counterparts. It is nearly impossible to tell which scenes in Dai Shi's temple are from Jungle Fury and which are from Gekiranger, and the same with the Underworld/Infershia. Some of it is for actor purposes (Dai Shi's actor doesn't look like Rio's at all, but Dai Shi is often doing what Rio did) and some of it is for censorship purposes (Morticon and Branken both execute a Mook who failed, but Morticon does it with one slash where Branken stabs him on the ground and raises him into the air like a freaking meatball). This may mean extensive recreations of sets, or it may simply mean the PR villains are green-screened into villains' lair shots.
  • As mentioned above Samurai is almost identical to Shinkenger yet a few minor details are changed such as Kevin being a swimmer instead of being a Kabuki performer like his counterpart and Jayden and Lauren being siblings instead of Jayden being a decoy for Lauren like Takeru was for Kaoru.^spoilerHowever, this is a plot hole, since anyone who's familiar with the rules surrounding historic Japanese clans will tell you that the first born son is automatically the heir, regardless of if they are not the first born child. Deker and Dayu's backstory was the biggest departure from Shinkenger with Juzou and Dayuu being unrelated in Shinkeger but the former being husband and wife. This was one of the few things the series was praised for.
    • The similarities were pretty much shot for shot. Considering that Samurai had Megamode new cockpit scenes were filmed but as stated tended to be shot for shot of many of Shinkenger's.
  • Even for seasons that deviate the most from the source, it's still rare for a season to not have at least one episode that just straight up reshoots the Japanese episode. Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers, Power Rangers in Space, Power Rangers: Dino Thunder and Power Rangers Operation Overdrive have all done it. However, some seasons will mix it up and swap out the main focus ("All About Beevil" from Power Rangers Ninja Storm) or apply one episode's story to another episode's monster footage ("The Dome Dolls" from Power Rangers RPM).
• The pilot of The Office (US) was an almost exact copy of the U.K. version's pilot. The U.S. Office later deviated from the U.K. original and became its own show.
• And speaking of growing the beard, Star Trek: The Next Generation had a tendency in its early years to copy episodes from the original series. The most blatant example is "The Naked Now", which is virtually identical to "The Naked Time" aside from being Hotter and Sexier and with Wesley Crusher saving the day.
• The pilot for Three's Company was a near-shot-for-shot remake of the first episode of the original Brit Com Man About the House with the only major changes being the names of the characters and some of the jokes. The second episode of Three's Company was also a remake of an episode of the British show.
• The pilot of the US version Skins, was one of the British pilot, almost down to the letter. Needless to say, it didn't get much better after that, and was canceled due to a negative reaction from Moral Guardians and fans of the original.
• The pilot episode of the German version of The IT Crowd was this—except they didn't get the punchlines and butchered them, as can be seen here.
• Married... with Children also got a scene-for-scene German remake, titled Hilfe, meine Familie spinnt ("Help, My Family is Crazy"). It worked out just as well as the remake of The IT Crowd.
• The second of the two unsold American pilots for Red Dwarf recycled dialog and even footage from the original, but with a new cast.
• Several of the scripts for the short-lived American version of Coupling followed the original closely. The U.S. version's failure is a good example of how transatlantic adaptation requires more than simple transcription.
• Wylie Draper's re-enactment of Michael Jackson's Motown 25 "Billie Jean" routine in The Jacksons: An American Dream was nearly 1:1 with the original, with the main differences being the stage setup and some of the camera angles.
• There are several points in The New Edition Story where the actors re-create scenes from the group's most iconic music videos, most notably, "If It Isn't Love". The Bobby Brown Story also features shot for shot remakes of "Girlfriend" and "My Prerogative".
• Breaking Bad received a Spanish-language, Colombia-set remake in 2014 called Metástasis.
• Dragnet would reuse storylines from the original radio broadcast and 1950s TV series. Three of the most famous examples are The Big Lamp, The Bullet, and The Christmas Story. The only change would be Friday's partner and setting update to reflect the passage of time.
• Episode 18 of Kikai Sentai Zenkaiger has the Zenkaigers unleash the abilities of Sentai Gear #15, which is a recreation of the "Where Are They Now?" Epilogue of Choujin Sentai Jetman as a special attack.^note The scene of Ryu and Kaoru's wedding and Gai's death
• The Walking Dead:
  • As the show is an adaptation of the comic of the same name, many scenes are framed and shot exactly as they appeared on the printed page such as the iconic shot of Rick entering Atlanta, Aaron’s introduction, and the characters learning the victims of the pike massacre. Many monologues and lines are pulled directly from the comic such as Gareth’s monologue (taken from his comic counterpart Chris). That said, the show does a lot of changes such as some characters outliving or dying earlier than their comic counterparts so the story is still fresh for comic readers. This also sometimes results in shot-for-shot recreations of the comic but with different characters when appropriate, such as Hershel being in the same position to be beheaded like Tyreese's comic counterpart.
  • Negan’s introduction deserves special attention as not only are most of the shots framed exactly how they were in the comic, but his monologue is also almost entirely lifted from the comic, up to and including his brutal murder of Glenn, with Jeffrey Dean Morgan taking many of the same poses and stances his comic counterpart took.
  • The 100th episode "Mercy" features a Cold Open that is a shot for shot remake of the Cold Open of the pilot episode to commemorate the landmark episode, this time with Carl in the place of his father Rick. As an extra nod, Addy Miller, the actress who portrayed the first walker of the series, returns as another walker dressed the same way to hammer home the reference.
• A lot of the important scenes in The Last of Us are 1:1 recreations of the cutscenes from the original videogame.
• A lot of key scenes in Avatar: The Last Airbender (2024) are near-shot-for-shot remakes of ones from the original animated series, or at least have identical dialogue. Aang’s encounter with Koh and Katara’s duel with Master Pakku are notable examples.

Music

• Taylor Swift: Due to Big Machine, which has since been purchased by Scooter Braun who then sold it to an investment firm, retaining the rights to the original masters for her first six albums, Swift opted to record and release "Taylor's Versions" of said albums that she would own the rights to. These versions were designed to sound almost-identical to the originals, to the point of bringing on many of the same musicians and engineers who worked on the originals.
• The music video of Audioslave's song "Show Me How To Live" is a highly condensed (as in five minutes) remake of Vanishing Point.
• When fanvids are "remastered", it usually means this. Usually done by the original editor, when they obtain superior copies of the source material and/or superior technology with which to edit videos (for example, making a jump from VHS to digital or from basic editing software to fancy, expensive software).
• "Weird Al" Yankovic Loves This Trope. On at least two occasions, he even got permission from the original artists to use their sets ("Smells Like Nirvana", a parody of Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit", was filmed on the same set, and "Fat", a parody of the Michael Jackson song "Bad", was filmed on the same set as another parody version of the video from the Moonwalker feature film).
• The hilarious remake of Kanye West's 'Bound 2', done by James Franco and Seth Rogen. It can be seen here. A side-by-side comparison can be seen here.
• Aimee Mann's video for "Labrador" is a shot-for-shot parody (complete with the original dialogue) of the "Voices Carry" video from her former 1980s New Wave Music band, 'Til Tuesday, under the (fictitious) concept that Aimee was forced under contract to comply with a Prima Donna Director.
• Muse used this trope in the UK video of "Hysteria", being a direct reference to the hotel trashing sequence from the movie adaptation of Pink Floyd's The Wall.
• Weezer's video for their version of "Lost in the Woods" from Frozen II was a live action remake of the song as it appeared in the movie, with Rivers Cuomo as Kristoff and Kristen Bell as Anna.
• Jennifer Lopez's "I'm Glad" is a near-identical remake of Flashdance, to the point where she got into a major copyright dispute with Paramount over it.

Video Games

• As part of the advertising campaign for the release of the Nintendo 3DS remake of The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, Nintendo released a trailer at E3 2011 that was a remake of the launch ad for the Nintendo 64 version.
• The 2013 Space Hulk video game is this trope for the board game (specifically, the Third Edition released in 2009).
• While both the Crash Bandicoot N. Sane Trilogy and Spyro Reignited Trilogy were mostly marketed as remasters, the actual creation of each game evokes this. As the original trilogies were from the PlayStation 1 era and therefore their code was unusable for remastering on the PS4, the dev teams simply remade the games from the ground up copying the original level geometry. Vicarious Visions have even coined the term for this difference as a "Remaster+".
• Metal Gear Solid's GameCube remake, The Twin Snakes, is an interesting example. The level design is almost identical to the original, but the gameplay has been updated to include features from Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty with very few level design changes and only a small Artificial Brilliance upgrade to compensate for it, leading to a game with far more Schizophrenic Difficulty than the original.
  • The cutscenes, directed by Ryuhei Kitamura, were going to be completely faithful carbon copies of the original, but Hideo Kojima demanded new cutscenes that used Kitamura's signature over-the-top action.
• Kingdom Hearts frequently does this with movies that it adapts, starting with II. So much so that it was specifically mentioned prior to release that the third game's Toy Story world was not an adaption like it would have been assumed to be. Even with the added characters, the scenes are often criticized for being too much like the originals and, consequently, entirely pointless.
  • Kingdom Hearts III: The stories in the worlds of Tangled, Frozen, and Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End are almost shot-for-shot remakes of the original movies, details and all.
• Halo: Combat Evolved Anniversary and Halo 2 Anniversary are remakes of the first two games in the Halo series that update their graphics to the standards of the Xbox 360 and Xbox One, respectively, while keeping the gameplay exactly the same. To demonstrate how faithful the remakes are, and to serve nostalgic or purist fans, they both have a feature to toggle the original and remastered graphics on the fly during gameplay.
• Similarly, there are plenty of remakes with retro graphics toggles that allow seamless switching to the original graphics. They include Monkey Island Special Editions, Day of the Tentacle Remastered, Grim Fandango Remastered, Wonder Boy III: The Dragon's Trap, Street Fighter II Turbo HD Remix, Duke Nukem 3D 20th Anniversary World Tour, R-Type Dimensions, Command & Conquer Remastered Collection, StarCraft Remastered, and Diablo II Remastered.
• Though it's less noticeable due to the original not getting localized, Trials of Mana is this. Most (if not all) of the script is kept from the original right down to the dialogue, character models and animations are the same as the sprites even in animation (such as the dancing shopkeeps), so on and so forth. While there are a few additions, they're small in number and tend to be additions rather than any actual changes.
• The reveal trailer for Sephiroth's introduction to Super Smash Bros. Ultimate as a DLC character lovingly recreates several moments from Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children, as compared here.
• Bluepoint Games did this with their remakes of Shadow of the Colossus and Demon's Souls. Both of these remakes strove to have near-identical gameplay to the originals, to the point of reusing much of the same code, only with massively revamped graphics that makes them look like modern AAA games.
• Pokémon Brilliant Diamond & Shining Pearl, one of the series' vanishingly few B-Team Sequels (handled by ILCA instead of series creators and primary developers Game Freak), is closer to a port of Diamond & Pearl than an outright Video Game Remake. Besides expanding and updating the Underground into the Grand Underground, some Arc Welding for Pokémon Legends: Arceus, changing Pal Park to Ramanas Park, as well as the obligatory system-wide changes between Generations IV and VIII (Fairy type, buffed EXP share, etc), things are more or less the same as in the original games. No new areas or characters have been added, the original Graphics-Induced Super-Deformed art style is kept, and Flint still uses a Lopunny. It's such a direct remake of the Diamond and Pearl version that precious few of the QOL changes from Platinum in particular made it in—with the back button for Pokétch apps being one of the most notable omissions. Of the few additions from Platinum that did actually make the cut (such as the aforementioned Flint actually using his all-Fire-type team from Platinum in later rematches), most are not accessible until post-game.
• A deep cut: the trailer for the SNK 40th Anniversary Collection was a shot-for-shot remake of Atari's 1981 advertisement for Vanguard.
  "Luthor destroys the Gond/Big Bat."
• The Retro Engine remakes of the 16-bit Sonic the Hedgehog games, first released on mobile phones, and ported much later to PC and consoles via the Sonic Origins compilation, could at first glance be mistaken for Emulation or ports; however, they were actually coded from scratch by a group of Promoted Fanboys who spent years reverse engineering the original games in order to perfectly recreate them on modern platforms with enhancements like widescreen and lag elimination that wouldn't be possible with emulation.

Web Videos

• One of the main varieties of Multi-Animator Project is essentially this, with the segments animated by each person split by "scenes" or shots.
• Erik of Internet Comment Etiquette has become well known over the years for his sophisticated and well written ad segments. In his lesson "Jump Scares" [1], Erik presents a shot-for-shot remake of a scene from Mulholland Dr., except the two characters discuss NordVPN and internet security.
• According to TomSka in "Fun Facts & F**k-Ups", the sketch "The Fallen" was a word-for-word remake of a sketch called "Colonial Morons", which was a cancelled brand deal with Aliens: Colonial Marines.
• An especially weird case, horror host Joe Bob Briggs presented a marathon on Shudder of Halloween1978, Halloween4TheReturnOfMichaelMyers and Halloween5TheRevengeOfMichaelMyers in 2019, then presented just the original again for its 45th anniversary in 2023. The 2023 presentation used an almost identical script for the host segments as the marathon, which was still available on Shudder.

Western Animation

• The 1934 Classic Disney Short "Orphan's Benefit" was remade in 1941, with the same soundtrack and animation but in color and with modernized character designs. And apparently, Disney planned to produce color remakes of other black-and-white cartoons, which unfortunately never got made either due to the Disney animators' strike or the outbreak of World War II. Animation drawings for a scrapped remake of "Mickey's Man Friday" exist.
• Looney Tunes
  • "Dough For The Do-Do" was a color remake of the classic black-and-white short "Porky in Wackyland". Animation and soundtrack are the same, but the backgrounds were redesigned in the style of Salvador Dalí. Not an exact shot-for-shot remake, as there are several new or reworked scenes, including the ending.
  • A similar example is "Tick Tock Tuckered" (1944), a remake of "Porky's Badtime Story" (1937). The main change was replacing abandoned character Gabby Goat with Daffy Duck.
  • "Slightly Daffy" (1944) is a color remake of "Scalp Trouble" (1938); it reuses some animation and adds a few gags like the Indian who keeps accidentally shooting his horse in the head and angering it and the way the scout contacts the other Indians, and a few gags are omitted from the original like the Indian swallowing embalming fluid and breathing fire to burn a hole in the fort to enter and an Indian being cut in half by a cannonball.
• Two of Tex Avery MGM Cartoons shorts, "Wags to Riches" and "Ventriloquist Cat", were remade for Cinemascope as "Millonaire Droopy" and "Cat's Meow" by using the original animation and reformatting it for widescreen. Tex got screen credit despite having left the studio years earlier.
• A common target for Family Guy's Seasonal Rot has been how most, if not all, of their Cutaway Gags have become these: the scenes are so identical to their source material, both visually and in length, that whatever joke was intended (if one was even intended at all) is completely lost. A clear example of this would be "Oceans 11 And A Half," where Stewie creates a music video for a song he wrote, which turns out to be an identical remake of Bryan Adams' video for "Everything I Do (I Do For You)" in its entirety.
  • In-universe example: Carter offers to help Lois if Peter does a shot-for-shot remake of Liar Liar.
  • Herbert also performed a rendition of "Somewhere That's Green" from the Little Shop of Horrors that was pretty much identical to the scene in the movie.
  • The spinoff, The Cleveland Show, followed suit in an episode where Cleveland performs a literally identical version of the Montgomery Flea Market ad meme (aka, "It's Just Like A Mini-Mall") and then went for the hat trick by using a Christmas Episode to recreate Die Hard (with the justification that it's Cleveland telling the movie's plot as a story to kill time while he's posing a Nativity scene).
• The Fairly OddParents!: The Made-for-TV Movie Abra-Catastrophe! features a flashback which chronocles how Timmy's parents became neglectful which led to him being tortured by Babysitter from Hell Vicky; the flashback ends with a scene where he angrily throws his Magic 9 Ball at the wall which breaks open and leads to the arrival of Cosmo and Wanda, his fairy godparents. Said scene was completely redrawn from the original Oh, Yeah! Cartoons short.
• In 1967, Warner Bros., having acquired the TV rights to all the black-and-white Looney Tunes that were previously held by Guild Films, had 75 of those cartoons sent to Korea to be redrawn and embellished in color. It was slipshod to say the least; sound synchronisation faltered at times, objects were off-color, the trace jobs were sloppy (it was done on six-field cels as opposed to the normal 10-fields), and some animation was eliminated altogether.
• Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera's 1955 MGM short "Good Will To Men" was a remake of the studio's 1939 cartoon "Peace On Earth." Both films received Oscar nominations. Aside from the animals' designs, the main difference between the two versions is the nature of humanity's downfall. In the '39 version, made as WWII was breaking out overseas, humans literally fight to the last man for increasingly arbitrary reasons; in the '55 version, the Cold War arms race culminates in a nuclear apocalypse. Towards the end of their tenure at MGM they also did remakes of some of their Tom and Jerry shorts to make them compatible with Cinemascope. These remakes are done in Limited Animation, unlike the originals.
• The 1942 Popeye short "Me Musical Nephews" was remade in 1950 as "Riot in Rhythm".
• Animaniacs featured a parody of Disney's The Lion King (1994) that for some reason actually copied scenes from the song "Circle of Life" at the very beginning of that film. Here are comparisons between the two versions:
  • African sunrise
  • Birds flying over river
  • Zebras and Leafcutter ants
  • Approaching herd of elephants
  • Mt. Kilimanjaro
  • Animals migrating toward Pride Rock
  • Pride Rock (Zazu is a generic white bird in Animaniacs version)
  • Rafiki/Yakko moving through crowds of animals
  • Animals giving way for Rafiki/Yakko
  • Rafiki/Yakko climbing Pride Rock
  • Mufasa and Sarabi with Simba (portrayed in Animaniacs as tigers)
  • Closeup of baby Simba
  • Rafiki/Yakko with Simba
  • Overhead view of Pride Rock
  • Animals below Pride Rock
  • Rafiki/Yakko holding up baby Simba
  • Sun shining down on Pride Rock
  • In the Slappy Squirrel short "Bumbie's Mom", while not exactly shot-for-shot, the animation of Bumper the rabbit giggling and falling over looks like it was copied directly from animation of Thumper.
• Tom and Jerry:
  • "Tops with Pops", a 1957 cartoon, is a remake of 1949's "Love That Pup". The only differences are that it is shot in widescreen instead of fullscreen, thicker and more detailed outlines of the characters, and more stylised backgrounds.
  • Many shots in Tom and Jerry: Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory mirror those of the 1971 film it's based on, sometimes even including details that one would reasonably expect to be left out or changed in an animated remake, such as still using the chocolate egg-laying geese rather than restoring the squirrels, emulating the effect of Violet's face turning blue (via an off-screen blue light) from the original movie, and even going as far as keeping the blooper that was left in the original film wherein the candy shop owner accidentally clocks a kid with his countertop gate as he opens it during "The Candy Man". Arguably justified, as the movie was an Ashcan Copy made so Warner Brothers could hold on to the movie rights to the original book (which backfired; the movie was so badly received that they lost the rights to the book anyway).
• In X-Men: The Animated Series, some parts of the Phoenix arc were word-for-word from the comic to the point of Chris Claremont getting credit. Some of the changes were mostly due to the cast being different (Gambit puts the power inhibitor on Dark Phoenix instead of Nightcrawler, who is not a regular team member) and some of it is due to the medium (telepathic duels become the awesome astral plane battle sequences the series always jumped at the chance to create; in the comics, telepathic duels are more "they glare at each other until one drops.") There's even a line of alien language dialogue that is kept (and no, Shi'ar is not a full-on Conlang like Klingon.) It's not that the show didn't have its own (very good) storylines or was afraid to deviate from the comic; The Dark Phoenix Saga is a case of "if it ain't broke, don't fix it."
• The first 6 episodes of Postman Pat used a generic crown logo on the side of Pat's van, but from episode 7 onwards they got permission from Royal Mail to use their actual logo. For consistency they re-made the title sequence, and it is essentially a shot-for-shot remake of the original.
• For his sixth guest Couch Gag on The Simpsons (attached to the episode "Three Scenes plus a Tag from a Marriage"), Bill Plympton remade his short film Your Face but with Homer in the starring role, and a happier ending. It can be seen here.

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