History Main / Padding

* ''Animation/SimpleSamosa'' has its theme song written into a few episodes rather than played before the proper episode, since it uses an ExtremelyShortIntroSequence. In some cases, they use the theme song to pad out the runtime of the episode, such as with the episodes "Comic Book" and "Kheer" which both play the full song at the end. If you're wondering, the full theme song is about two minutes and 30 seconds long.

Compare with {{Filler}}, which is when whole episodes/issues/whatever else in a continuity-based serial applies this principle, rather than just individual scenes. See also EngagingChevrons, InactionSequence, LeaveTheCameraRunning, OverlyLongGag, PurpleProse, ArcFatigue.

** The [[Creator/DakariKingMykan author]] outright admits to using this, as he believes he has to fill a word quota. More specifically, he believes [[InsaneTrollLogic that every chapter has to be an equivalent length to a half-hour TV episode, with no exceptions.]]
*** Amazingly, he complains in the author's notes of the third series about how long his fanfics are, and yet does nothing to fix this.

* Much of the third act in ''WesternAnimation/Foodfight'' is just endless shots of the ikes dumping food and gunge over the Brand X goons that takes up so much of the movie, many people who do video reviews of this movie end up skipping these scenes entirely.

** The Email conversations and the submissive rules and contract that are printed in the book twice take up a lot of space without adding much content.

* ''Franchise/SpiderMan'' comics back in the mid-'90s were really bad at this. Among those were ''ComicBook/MaximumCarnage'' (which was 14 parts, compared to the 3 parts the creature's first appearance took) and ''ComicBook/TheCloneSaga'', which was meant to last 6 months and lasted ''two years''. ''Clone Saga'''s problem was due to ExecutiveMeddling -- the Marketing Department noticed how fans were gobbling up the stories and demanded more.

* ''ComicStrip/ModestyBlaise'': One newspaper Peter O'Donnel wrote for was published five days a week, the other six days a week. Therefore every sixth strip is padding, irrelevant to the main plot, but adding seamlessly to the story. Also when one newspaper was on strike he had to write a whole short story to publish in the non-striking newspapers, before getting back to the original story.

** Someone on the internet neatly summed up the plot of ''Crossroads of Twilight''.

*** It must be noted that the intent of the ''entire'' book seemed to be a "Do you remember where you were and what you were doing when (JFK was shot/9-11/etc.) happened?" for a world-changing event from the previous book. Therefore, almost nothing of importance occurs because the entire book is just a ReactionShot. Most fans would probably opine that this experiment....didn't exactly work.

* Done well by Peter O'Donnell in ''ComicStrip/ModestyBlaise''. One newspaper he wrote for was published five days a week, the other six days a week. Therefore every sixth strip is padding, irrelevant to the main plot, but adding seamlessly to the story. Also when one newspaper was on strike he had to write a whole short story to publish in the non-striking newspapers, before getting back to the original story.

* ''Literature/SilasMarner'' involves an older man finding an abandoned child after his wealth is stolen and the father of said child not claiming her to keep up appearances. Doesn't sound too bad until you see pages upon pages of the characters trying to decide what to do with this girl. After about two hundred pages, there is a second part about how the girl has grown into practically a PuritySue and chooses to stay by her adoptive father's side when her biological father wants to adopt her. The whole thing is padded, taking a mildly interesting short story and turning it into a dreadfully boring story. Due to the book's age and the author being female during a time when women weren't authors, the book is considered a classic, much to English classes' chagrin.

* This is a common criticism of the late Discworld novel ''Literature/RaisingSteam'', with regular meanderings to get opinions/views from characters who have absolutely no impact on the actual plot; ie, the Unseen University wizards taking a leisurely pleasure ride on the newly invented steam engine. Adora Belle Dearheart is the focus of one that subjects her character to ContinuityDrift in the bargain.

* ''Music/MitchBenn's 24 Hour Album'' was written and recorded in 24 hours for charity. The final song, "Party Animals Need Not Apply" is [[HowIWroteThisArticleArticle about the difficulties of doing this]], and ends with an extended riff on how this song needs to be three minutes long if he's going to fit the criteria.

* ''Radio/TheHitchhikersGuideToTheGalaxy'' contains a lot of this due to its WritingByTheSeatOfYourPants nature, especially towards the end of the Secondary Phase where the story pretty much derails into RandomEventsPlot as a result. For instance, the "'Hey, Roosta, I've Just Had This Really Hoopy Idea' Incident" sequence, in which Zaphod escapes the Frogstar Fighter taking him to [[AFateWorseThanDeath the Total Perspective Vortex]] by going to a horrible robot discothéque, but it all turns out to be a mindgame his captors are playing with him and he ends up stuck on the ship where he started, is classic 'the characters attempt to escape but get captured again' move, especially since (due to AnachronicOrder) we already know Zaphod ended up in the Total Perspective Vortex and somehow survived with his mind intact, a much more pressing concern. There's also the sequence where Zaphod calls a seance to fend off a missile, which is a borderline BigLippedAlligatorMoment (not to mention an OutOfGenreExperience from science fiction parody to horror parody). Then there's the {{Cutaway Gag}}s with the Book {{Wiki Walk}}ing around the events to provide useless anecdotes, such as the scene with Veet Voojagig and his biro planet. Of course, because the series runs on RuleOfFunny, and these sequences definitely are, most fans forgive them.

* Theatre/{{Macbeth}} has a scene where a porter gets woken up by knocking at the gate and goes to answer, taking his own sweet time about it and sort of drunkenly narrating his actions. This is smack dab in the middle of one of the play's more suspenseful moments. There is much debate about whether this scene was a deliberate attempt to increase tension by putting off the discovery of the king's death and forcing the audience to watch this rather jarring comedy bit, or whether it's just padding put in so the theater's resident comedian can have a part worthy of his talents.

[[folder:Western Animation]]
* Some episodes of ''WesternAnimation/{{Animaniacs}}'' do this. Usually it's near the end of the episode, with the various short subjects (one episode had several "Good Idea Bad Idea" segments appearing in a row). A couple or so episodes pad out the show at the beginning of the episode with a longer version of the "Newsreel of the Stars" intro. This was even lampshaded by Wakko in one "Wheel of Morality" segment.
* ''WesternAnimation/DinoSquad'' had at least one early episode that featured a character's transformation sequence repeated in full (sometimes backwards) as he repeatedly transformed from a human into some kind of a ceratopsian over and over again.
* ''WesternAnimation/DoraTheExplorer'' uses 5-10 second pauses to compensate for the show's FakeInteractivity. However, the special "Dora's Dance to the Rescue" began with a FramingDevice of Dora and Boots dancing and recalling the episode as a flashback, [[ForgottenFramingDevice which was not acknowledged for the rest of the episode]]; said scene might've been added for a few extra seconds to compensate for the running time for double-length episodes.
* ''WesternAnimation/FamilyGuy'':
** The creators admitted that the vaudeville singers Vern and Johnny were added just to fill out time before commercials, and viewers found them so annoying that they were killed off by Stewie in the episode "[[Recap/FamilyGuyS5E4SavingPrivateBrian Saving Private Brian]]", with him saying that there'll be no further performances by the duo.
** The most infamous example was the inclusion of a three-minute Music/ConwayTwitty music video in "[[Recap/FamilyGuyS7E9TheJuiceIsLoose The Juice is Loose]]".
** "The Father, the Son, & the Holy Fonz" includes a very long sequence in which Peter, Brian, and Francis just have a SeinfeldianConversation badmouthing Music/{{Madonna}}. The audio commentary admitted this was done because the episode was short.
** Then there was the scene from "[[Recap/FamilyGuy8E7JeromeIsTheNewBlack Jerome is the New Black]]", where Peter complains that without a TokenBlackFriend, his gang would be as boring as the London Gentlemen's Club, cueing a cutaway of three Englishmen sitting around clearing their throats that ran for maybe a full minute. At least the Conway Twitty scene had a song.
** One of the bonus clips after "[[Recap/FamilyGuyS8E17BrianAndStewie Brian & Stewie]]" was a deleted scene from "[[Recap/FamilyGuyS8E9BusinessGuy Business Guy]]" that was almost as long as the Conway Twitty song, almost as uneventful and repetitive as the London Gentlemen's Club scene, and, oh yeah, ''ripped wholesale from another source'' (specifically, the "Blues in Hoss's Flat" pantomime sequence from ''Film/TheErrandBoy'').
** "[[Recap/FamilyGuyS7E7OceansThreeAndAHalf Ocean's Three and a Half]]", which aired in the wake of Creator/ChristianBale's rant at a ''Film/TerminatorSalvation'' crewmember going viral, included the audio of the rant with Peter's voice dubbed into it and with a simple animation of a tape player to accompany it. Like the bonus clip from "Brian and Stewie", it too was deleted on all subsequent airings and home releases. Website/PlatypusComix notes on that scene, "the cutaway won't make any sense in a few years, and it was shoved into an episode that already had a three-minute Stewie music video. Even for ''Family Guy'', that's some terrible pacing." The scene can be viewed alongside some other rare TV moments [[http://www.platypuscomix.net/hollywood/rarestuff.html here,]] though it's missing the dialogue setting it up -- in the original airing, while going over his plan to rob the Pewterschmidt mansion of potentially $40 million, Peter says, "Look, I'll be honest with you. My father-in-law has treated me like crap... for 20 years, and it's time for a little payback. I tell you, he's treated me worse than that jerk Christian Bale did." In the wide-release version, after Peter says that it's time for payback, Quagmire speaks up and imagines making an action B-movie with his share of the heist money.
** Even worse, there was a scene "[[WesternAnimation/FamilyGuyPresentsLaughItUpFuzzball Something, Something, Something Dark Side]]" that consisted of about a minute of '''Peter breathing in and out heavily'''.
** The overly long "desert skiff reaction shot" gag from "[[WesternAnimation/FamilyGuyPresentsLaughItUpFuzzball It's a Trap!]]"
--->'''[[Film/{{Caddyshack}} Judge Smails]]:''' Well, we're waiting!
** Similar to the 3-minute Conway Twitty clip note above, "[[Recap/FamilyGuyS9E17ForeignAffairs Foreign Affairs]]" includes Music/DavidBowie and Music/MickJagger's music video of "Dancing in the Street" shown in its entirety, introduced [[CutawayGag cutaway-style]] by Peter, who claims it's "the gayest music video of all time." Not an animated version of the video, just the music video itself.
*** The same episode also includes an OverlyLongGag cutaway that consists entirely of Joe singing the ''WesternAnimation/AmericanDad'' theme song in order to revisit the already not particularly funny gag surrounding how Joe bears resemblance to ''American Dad'' lead character Stan Smith.
** Peter vs the Chicken, especially the later ones that go on for 4 to 6 minutes long.
** The episode "[[Recap/FamilyGuyS2E20WastedTalent Wasted Talent]]" has Peter trip on the sidewalk and hurt his knee, causing him to hold it in pain and loudly wince with labored gasps as he attempts to tough it out for almost 30 seconds. This gets mirrored in "[[Recap/FamilyGuyS7E10FOXyLady FOX-y Lady]]" where Lois goes through the same gag, but winds up injuring ''her boobs''.
** A gag from "[[Recap/FamilyGuyS9E5BabyYouKnockMeOut Baby, You Knock Me Out]]" had a scene where Peter gets a birthday card from Cleveland where he records his voice, but apparently got into a [[PoliceBrutality run-in with an officer]]. This was mainly used to save on animation and time. In fact Peter blinked his eyes '''once''' during the whole scene.
** Some of the songs are much longer than they need to be to fill in time as well, like "Mr. Booze" and the football song from "Patriot Games."
** "[[Recap/FamilyGuyS11E2RatingsGuy Ratings Guy]]" features a CutawayGag of Peter as a voice on NPR with a still shot of a radio for a full minute.
* ''WesternAnimation/TheFairlyOddParents'':
** "Country Clubbed" has two subplots: one of Cosmo fighting a gopher, and another of Wanda and Sparky switching bodies. These feel like padding for the already thin main plot, and the latter isn't even resolved by the end of the episode.
** ''WesternAnimation/AbraCatastrophe'' has the whole sequence with Bippy's wish. The real conflict of the special is between Crocker and Timmy, and so the whole ''Film/PlanetOfTheApes1968'' parody does nothing but stretch it out to movie-length, and is undone without any lasting effect. All it really does is get Crocker closer to the muffin, which would have happened anyway because he was already in the cafeteria. That said, the sequence does establish that the muffin can do ''anything'', and foreshadows Crocker's own world conquest.
* The latter half of the first season of ''WesternAnimation/GormitiTheLordsOfNatureReturn'' extended the already kinda long {{Transformation Sequence}}s by inserting random StockFootage of the characters using their special attacks at the end of each of them.
* ''WesternAnimation/KampKoral'': "Helter Shelter" has three {{Overly Long Gag}}s of the characters crying and a random scene near the start of them acting like cavemen, which goes on for way too long. It takes over half of the episode's runtime for the plot to start.
* ''WesternAnimation/KevinSpencer'':
** "Hogtown Hogwild" has Kevin thinking about whether or not he should go with his parents to the bus station, which eats up 36 seconds. During which Percy and Anastasia are barely even moving.
** "Operators Are Standing By" has its musical number, which goes on for 48 seconds seemingly to show Kevin's squeegee skills.
** "Quest" has a scene in the opening where Kevin needs to steal Percy's money and smokes, which, from the moment Kevin goes into the living room to when he exits the house, takes '''''3 minutes and 36 seconds'''''. There's also the scene at the end where Kevin and Allen are waiting for an old man to slip and fall over, which eats up '''1 minute and 29 seconds''' before anything happens. At which point Allen points out a couple days have passed.
** A lot of Percy and Anastasia's conversations, especially in the later episodes where entire scenes consist of them arguing for a good solid minute or more. "Blow Job" takes a conversation and uses it as the opening to the episode, which goes on for '''2 minutes and 36 seconds''' before the plot even starts.
** "Die a Lot More and Also Once Again" lampshades this and plays it straight, with their conversation lasting a minute and eight seconds:
--->'''Percy''': Jesus, it's like this conversation has no purpose and is just some cheap excuse to fill time.
--->'''Anastasia''': Well, why the hell would we do that?
--->'''Percy''': I don't know, but I will tell you what I ''do'' know. Anytime I gotta do somethin' I don't fuckin' wanna do, you can bet your fat ass some dumb cocksucker somewhere is makin' fuckin' money off it.
* A number of ''WesternAnimation/LooneyTunes'' cartoons pad here and there, despite being fairly short anyway. The "Larriva Eleven" (widely considered the nadir of ''Looney Tunes'' as a whole) are most noticeable in this regard - while Wile E. Coyote always orders his tools from ACME, those shorts will actually show him ''fill out and mail the order form'' in order to use up time.
* ''WesternAnimation/ThePatrickStarShow'', to match the style of Patrick's in-universe VarietyShow, sometimes cuts away to random, extended sequences that rarely have anything to do with the main plot.
** [[Recap/ThePatrickStarShowS1E3LostInCouchPatAThon "Lost in Couch"]] opens with a minute of Patrick watching TV, and then a ParodyCommercial takes up time later on.
** In [[Recap/ThePatrickStarShowS1E14ShrinkingStarsFitzPatrick [=FitzPatrick=]]], we randomly get a fantasy sequence inside a comic that Patrick reads. "Terror at 20,000 Leagues" notably spends more time on {{Cutaway Gag}}s to Halloween-themed fare like a zombie brain buffet or a werewolf hair salon than on the actual plot.
* ''WesternAnimation/RobotChicken'' parodies this in the episode "Help Me".
* Given its dirt-cheap production values, the '60s Canadian TV series ''WesternAnimation/RocketRobinHood'' is a good example -- to the point that, between the overlong opening sequences, the oft-repeated "character profiles" and the show's annoying habit of recapping, at length, what happened ''before the last commercial break,'' any given half-hour episode would probably contain no more than five minutes of original animation.
* An InUniverse example comes from ''WesternAnimation/RockosModernLife''. Ralph Bighead wanted to get out of his contract with his studio, so he made an episode that just showed a single image of a jar of mayonnaise for the entire run. [[SpringtimeForHitler The episode became a hit]].
* Similar to the ''Dora'' example, ''WesternAnimation/ShimmerAndShine'' started production with the ExtraLongEpisode "The First Wish" (aka "My Secret Genies"). When the episode ended up being the Season 1 finale, it added in a FramingDevice of Shimmer and Shine reading a photo album and reminiscing about the time they became Leah's genies, which was not acknowledged for the rest of the episode.
* ''WesternAnimation/TheSimpsons'':
** The "[[OverlyLongGag Rake Scene]]" in the episode "[[Recap/TheSimpsonsS5E2CapeFeare Cape Feare]]". The crew even admitted to padding here. It was ''supposed'' to be just one rake: [[ThrowItIn the writers decided to loop Bob's "nhrghghrh" over and over and make it about fifteen rakes when they realized they still needed to fill up time.]] This actually made the scene about ten times funnier than it would've been with just one rake. The longer-than-average couch gag and the inclusion of an [[ShowWithinAShow Itchy & Scratchy cartoon]] were also to eat up time. Despite all that, the episode was still running short. Even Sideshow Bob's performing the libretto to ''Theatre/HMSPinafore'', one of the episode's signature scenes, was padded with extra visual gags.
** Couch gags in general are either padded or shrunk depending on whether or not the rest of the episode plus the commercials fill all 1800 seconds of the 30-minute timeslot. The writers quite enjoy this bit of breathing room.
** The episode "[[Recap/TheSimpsonsS23E11TheDohcialNetwork The D'oh-cial Network]]" contains both a two minute long [[LampshadeHanging "Show's Too Short"]] short at the end of the episode ''and'' an unusually long CouchGag.
** "[[Recap/TheSimpsonsS24E6ATreeGrowsInSpringfield A Tree Grows in Springfield]]" ends with a Simpsonized parody of ''WesternAnimation/{{Logorama}}''.
** "[[Recap/TheSimpsonsS4E19TheFront The Front]]" ends with the 30-second "The Adventures of Ned Flanders" skit, in order to pad out the episode.
--->'''Theme Song:''' ''Hens love roosters, geese love ganders, everyone else loves Ned Flanders!''
--->'''Homer''': Not me!
--->'''Theme Song:''' ''Everyone who counts loves Ned Flanders!''
--->''(organ music)''
--->'''Flanders''': Knock that off, you two! It's time to go to church!
--->'''Todd''': We're not going to church today.
--->'''Flanders''': (gasps) What? You give me one good reason!
--->'''Rod''': It's Saturday.
--->'''Flanders''': Okely-dokely-do!
--->'''Theme Song:''' ''Hens love roosters, geese love ganders, everyone else loves Ned Flanders!''
** Lampshaded at the end of "Homer and Apu". After the family hugs Apu, Homer says, "There's still time left. Let's hug Apu again."
** "Mathelete's Feat" ends with self-admitted filler, featuring the Simpson family as hillbillies playing jugs.
* ''WesternAnimation/SofiaTheFirst'': The special "Elena and the Secret of Avalor" added a FramingDevice where Elena recounts the episode to Naomi when the spin-off ended up airing early before the special premiered, possibly to add up more time for a crossover special.
* Some ''WesternAnimation/TinyToonAdventures'' episodes did this. Two noticeable examples come from two episodes animated by Creator/EncoreCartoons: "[[Recap/TinyToonAdventuresS1E38StrangeTalesOfWeirdScience Strange Tales of Weird Science]]" opens with a DeletedScene from "[[Recap/TinyToonAdventuresS1E1TheLooneyBeginning The Looney Beginning]]" with ADR'd dialogue to make it sound like Elmyra's hounding Buster and Babs Bunny is preventing them from getting the episode properly started, and "[[Recap/TinyToonAdventuresS1E44HeroHamton Hero Hamton]]" has a few brief bits animated by Creator/KennedyCartoons that were added later in the episode's production to pad out the length (most notably a brief bit where Hamton jump-ropes with Babs Bunny, and Hamton freaking out and begging Buster and Babs to help him after Monty challenges Hamton to a fight.)
* The [[WesternAnimation/SpiderMan1967 Spider-Man]] cartoon from the 1960s was loaded with lengthy padding shots of Spidey swinging across New York for several minutes at a time, especially in the second and third seasons, where the budget had been cut immensely and the stories were now 21 minutes long instead of two 10 minute episodes. It should be noted that these seasons were made by the same people who did Rocket Robin Hood, mentioned above.
* ''WesternAnimation/SpongeBobSquarePants'':
** For example, in "Pet or Pests," [=SpongeBob=] is trying to find a new home for a litter of worms, and when he goes to Mrs. Puff's house, he rings the doorbell for about thirty straight seconds. Even after Mrs. Puff answers and tries to ask him why he's visiting, he still rings the doorbell.
** "Pineapple Fever" features [=SpongeBob=] counting off activities that he, Patrick, and Squidward can do now because a storm has knocked out the power. He lists the same activities over and over, even taking several seconds to drag out individual phrases.
---> '''[=SpongeBob=]:''' C'mon Squidward, it'll be fun! While the elements rage outside, we'll snuggle in here and pass the time by playing board games, and playing TabletopGame/TicTacToe, and drinkin' hot cocoa, and playing tic-tac-toe, and doing jigsaw puzzles, and watchin' TV, and drinkin' hot cocoa, and doing jigsaw puzzles, and playin' board gaaaaames, and drinkin' hot teeeeeeeaaaa...
---> '''Patrick:''' I thought it was cocoa!
---> '''[=SpongeBob=]:''' Oh, yeah. Hot cocoaaaaaaaaaa... we'll be drinkiiiiiiiiiiiing...
** Many episodes that take place in the Krusty Krab feature sequences of [=SpongeBob=] elaborately preparing Krabby Patties before the episode's actual conflict begins.
** In "The Masterpiece," there is a sequence of [=SpongeBob=] revving up the grill, slicing cheese, opening the restaurant, and Squidward watching a soap opera before Mr. Krabs sees the Sea Chicken Shack commercial that sets the plot in motion. There's then a scene of [=SpongeBob=] showing off his spy gadgets to Mr. Krabs, even though he only uses one of them. And ''then'' there's a scene of [=SpongeBob=] inside the Sea Chicken Shack before getting kicked out and noticing the statue that gives Mr. Krabs an idea to build his own. There's minutes of mundane conversation before Squidward agrees to build the statue. Not helping is that the episode has {{Overly Long Gag}}s throughout ([=SpongeBob=] going "oh!" and raising his hand, Krabs pacing around looking for an artist).
** In "Penny Foolish", Mr. Krabs watches [=SpongeBob=] walk down the street and pick up a penny. Just a few seconds after, he comments, "I can remember it as if it happened a moment ago!", and then we see the exact same scene playing out in his memory.
** "Kracked Krabs" starts with [=SpongeBob=] making fries in a rather long sequence.
** "The Executive Treatment" starts with Patrick going to the Krusty Krab, Krabs verifying that his money is legit, him waiting in line and hearing about a sandwich, then he and Squidward having a tedious conversation about it. It takes almost four minutes for Patrick to arrive at the office that he spends the rest of the episode in, and the plot is so simple (Patrick wants a popular sandwich that's only for business executives) that it really shouldn't take that long to set up.
** "The Card" starts with a minute and a half of [=SpongeBob=] withdrawing money at the bank. While he ''does'' spend it, the scene could easily be cut from the episode without losing any plot, because exactly where [=SpongeBob=] gets the money from isn't relevant.
** "Hide and Then What Happens?" has a lot of filler. It starts with [=SpongeBob=] and Patrick just staring and blinking at each other, then multiple demonstrations on how hide-and-seek works.
** In "Gramma's Secret Recipe", we see Plankton's plan to get the secret formula: dress up as an old lady, ask Krabs for the list of ingredients (so none of them trip up his health conditions), and then take it. This scene proves pointless and irrelevant, as he instead goes straight to [=SpongeBob=]'s house and pretends to be ''his'' grandma so he'll take him to his work station.
** The "[=SpongeBob=]'s Runaway Roadtrip" episodes (aka the vacation miniseries) each began with a ForgottenFramingDevice of whoever is having the vacation presenting a slideshow of how it went, leading into a WholeEpisodeFlashback; said scene was never seen again at the end.
** "[=SpongeBob You're Fired=]" has a straight minute of [=SpongeBob=] crying, which isn't funny and goes on for way too long.
** "Captain Pipsqueak" is notable for its overuse of {{Overly Long Gag}}s: the Robot Mantis destroying instruments, Plankton's CostumeTestMontage, the TerribleIntervieweesMontage, Plankton watching ''Mermaid Man'' and then cutting back to explain what's happening on it... It takes half the episode for the plot of Plankton joining EVIL to begin.
* The {{Imagine Spot}}s in ''[[WesternAnimation/UltimateSpiderMan2012 Ultimate Spider-Man]]'' can come across this way, given that when they're used to give out exposition, the stuff tends to have been explained just a moment ago, and even when Spidey does explain it when it hasn't been explained before, it's sometimes explained ''afterward'' in a manner that's much more simple and to the point, making the necessity of the exposition via ImagineSpot questionable. When they're done for humor, they take time away from the episode and in some cases, ruin the pacing due to just how out-of-the-moment they are.
* The ''WesternAnimation/WanderOverYonder'' episode "The Battle Royale" features the villain, [[HarmlessVillain Something the So-and-So]], hemming and hawing over what to do with the Ring of Invincibility after claiming it. WordOfGod states that this was literally time filler after the episode came in a minute short during production.
** An InUniverse example occurs in "The Cartoon" where Lord Hater watches a cartoon about himself and during a scene that features an OverlyLongGag of Cartoon!Hater and Cartoon!Wander dueling each other, Lord Hater lampshades this and the Watchdogs explain that the cartoon ran short and had to pad it out for 15 seconds.
* The ''Challenge of the WesternAnimation/SuperFriends'' episode "Conquerors of the Future" begins with the Legion of Doom [[FalselyReformedVillain pretending that they've decided to fight crime instead of committing it]]. This is completely forgotten when the main plot (the Legion time-travels and conquers future Earth) kicks in.
[[/folder]]

[[folder:Anime & Manga]]
* ''Manga/BattleRoyale'' fans who read the novel and the manga notice how the latter version's pacing ''crawled'' after volume ten. [[AdaptationDistillation Whereas the initial ten volumes covered 500+ pages of the novel pretty swiftly]], the last five stretched the novel's final 100 pages to sometimes annoying extremes. Volumes 11 and 12 could've been condensed into one volume, as they contained six chapters of exposition between [[spoiler:Kayoko and Sugimura]] that only needed two chapters of sufficient detail, and a ridiculous ''Anime/DragonBallZ''-style fight between [[spoiler:Sugimura and Kiriyama]] that dragged for WAY too long. Volume thirteen contained an unnecessary flashback for [[spoiler:Souma]], and the final battle between [[spoiler:Kiriyama and Shogo/Shuya/Noriko]] within volumes 14 and 15 was [[InactionSequence practically frozen in time near the end]]. One ''entire'' chapter was [[spoiler:Shuya]] basically struggling with his decision to shoot [[spoiler:Kiriyama]] in self-defense, and this is presented as a tribute to every character who died earlier in the story. Without the padding, the manga could have easily ended at volume thirteen without sacrificing important details.
** However, even the volumes before 10 aren't free from this label. The death by cyanide poisoning in one of the earlier volumes goes on for at least ''10 pages'', with such devotion to graphic detail.
* ''Manga/BlackClover'': The beginning arcs of the anime have this in spades. The first chapter was expanded to last through three episodes, including an entire episode to a flashback that is one page long in the manga. Episode four also adds about 4 minutes of Asta and Yuno walking around the city.
* In the same regard, the modsouls from the [[{{Filler}} Bount Arc]] of ''Manga/{{Bleach}}'' have been kept in the anime purely to slow it down. Their scenes have been tacked on in the hopes that the anime won't [[OvertookTheManga overtake the manga]] ''again''.
** The [[PreviouslyOn recap that starts nearly every episode]] wouldn't be padding if they bothered to change it. The recap of the Hueco Mundo arc in Episode 190 takes ''over half the episode'', and is mostly composed of clips from Ichigo vs. Ulquiorra and Ichigo vs. Grimmjow.
** Then there's Komamura's fight with Poww. After releasing his Bankai, Komamura immediately finishes the fight with one attack. In the anime, it takes ''three minutes'' of Poww attacking it to no effect before he goes in for the kill.
* ''Manga/CardcaptorSakura'' downplays this. While each episode does contain a scepter-summoning sequence and some card-using sequences that follow the same mold, they are always somewhat different -- if only because Sakura [[CostumePorn never uses the same costume twice]], not even if she has to disguise twice in the same episode.
* ''Anime/ChargemanKen'', despite being in a 10 minutes timeslot, frequently uses this. In addition to the TransformationSequence used every episode, redundant scenes are a common sight. In particular, episode 35 begins with a ShowWithinAShow mostly irrelevant to the plot that lasts for almost a minute and features an unusually long explosion.
* ''Anime/DigimonAdventure'' had the infamous episode 40, where all the Digimon started the episode in their Baby 2/In-Training stages and evolved up to their Ultimate/Mega levels. Nope, no split-screen, no scene shortening - each one of the 8 main Digimon had their [[StockFootage transformation sequences]] shown entirely, one after the other, therefore making StockFootage occupy half of the episode's running time.
** A similar thing happens in ''Anime/DigimonAdventure02'', in the episode with Shakkoumon's debut. There's also an episode where digivolving has been blocked, so we're treated to the full extended TransformationSequence... and we're shown it doesn't work by having it ''played in reverse'' (to be fair, only half of it.) So, they decide to try again! Cue ''the whole transformation sequence and then half of it in reverse again!''
** A major problem ''Anime/DigimonAdventureTri'' has. Outside of the Evolution sequences and fights, much of the movies' time is taken up by the characters angsting, engaging in mundane activities, and, in the fifth installment, ''telling scary stories'' while so many plot threads remain unaddressed.
** ''Anime/DigimonFrontier'' is ''very'' fond of showing the whole TransformationSequence. If you're very unlucky you'll get everyone's one after another instead of the usual five-way split-screen.
* ''Franchise/DragonBall'' was infamous for all the padding in the manga scenes used to prevent them from [[OvertookTheManga overtaking the source material]], up to and including flashbacks to earlier in the episode. This first became noticeable in the 22nd World Tournament arc in ''Manga/DragonBall'', where half an episode would have additional pre-fight scenes and the actual fights would be padded with additional-but-inconsequential fight sequences and constant cuts to Bulma in the crowd. The absolute worst was the Namek Arc in ''Anime/DragonBallZ'' with constant cuts to other characters, several of which weren't vital to the current storyline such as Chi-Chi on Earth or the dead Ginyu Force on King Kai's Planet. Creator/ToeiAnimation also resorted to unnecessary flashbacks and even ''padding out the PreviouslyOn segments, sometimes to '''over three minutes'''''! Tellingly, this was the closest the anime got to overtaking the manga during their production.
** Whether a scene was padding or not plays into [[SeriousBusiness arguments about characters' power levels]] within the fan community, as often the anime filler features fights, boasts, and battle power readings that didn't exist in the original manga that tend to throw out what was previously established, leading to many completely disregarding those scenes for the sake of debate.
** To give some idea of how bad this series was about this and filler, ''Z'' was ReCut into ''Anime/DragonBallZKai'' in 2009, which literally cut the number of episodes ''in half''. For further details see InactionSequence, a technique the show perfected.
** And if you think the number of episodes of ''Kai'' is still too much, ''WebVideo/DragonBallZAbridged'' took this even further by cutting the first 194 episodes into ''60'' episodes (nine of which are part of 3-parters). This was done by cutting off a lot of the padding and filler, and with the exception of Episode 44, always using multiple episodes from ''Z'' when creating an ''Abridged'' one, which lasts a sixth of the time.
** In the Frieza arc, Frieza launched an attack at the planet Namek that caused it to be ''extremely close'' to imploding, about 5 minutes away. 5 minutes which lasted ''ten'' episodes. [[FranchiseOriginalSin Not that this was unique to the anime]]; it was ludicrous in the manga as well! Parodied in ''DBZ Abridged'', where Goku asks Frieza if he even knows what a "minute" is.
* Fans point to the battle against the Hungry Wolf Knights in anime of ''Manga/FairyTail'' during the Grand Magic Games arc as a major offender of this. In the manga, the fight is over fairly quickly but the anime spreads it out over four episodes. Nobody bought them as credible antagonists and it's clear they were filling time for Natsu and co. while the final event of the games was ongoing, delaying fights people wanted to see and causing ArcFatigue.
* Weird "horror" manga ''Manga/{{Fourteen}}'' is terrible at this. Something as simple as a [[DecompressedComic man heading home and opening his door can take a few pages.]]
* The 1999 adaptation of ''Manga/HunterXHunter'' stretched out material from the manga so much that a lot of arcs were twice as long. While it did lead to some nice AdaptationExpansion in some cases, it often resulted in a slower pace that made it easier for ArcFatigue to set in. It gets especially bad during the Greed Island [=OVAs=], where Gon's fight with Genthru lasts several episodes that are filled with [[InactionSequence Inaction Sequences]] and exposition.
* The anime adaptation of ''Manga/MagicKnightRayearth'' filled a lot of the time with extra CharacterDevelopment and world exploration, but there are many examples of blatant padding as the trio unnecessarily rehashes conversations they've already had and/or show flashbacks of things that, in some instances, happened in just the last episode. There's also a lengthy recap at the beginning of each episode where the narrator reminds viewers why the girls have been summoned to Cephiro.
* Similarly, the ''Manga/{{Naruto}}'' anime does this when it doesn't just decide to [[InactionSequence fill out episodes with nothing at all]]. For example, when Suigetsu joined Sasuke in the manga they went to the Land of Waves to get [[spoiler:Zabuza's {{BFS}}]] which was right where they expected it to be and it only took up a few pages. But in the anime someone else took it, and the two spend the episode retrieving it, eventually making a game out of it (as well as spending [[RuleOfFunny a rather amusing]] scene in a restaurant). This also serves the purpose of demonstrating Suigetsu's [[NighInvulnerable abilities]] much earlier than in the manga (where he doesn't get to properly demonstrate his power for nearly fifty chapters). The same thing happened with the other two members of their team but with flashbacks. Earlier in the anime series, during the attempted rescue of Gaara, there were flashbacks to things that had been covered in previous and recent flashbacks, as well as flashbacks to things that had happened five real-time minutes earlier. While this is done in an attempt to not outpace the manga, it gets painful during fight scenes.
** The War arc has taken Padding through so many turns of the dial that listing all the examples would take up several times as much space as ''this entire page''. The most notable example is the rampant Obito flashbacks plaguing his reveal, Naruto's attempt to redeem him, and his team-up with Kakashi; said flashbacks are extremely repetitive and pad out several panels to several ''episodes'', and the reveal's flashback padding actually ''derailed'' to show an entire arc of Kakashi's and Yamato's post-Rin-death history.
* ''Anime/NeonGenesisEvangelion'' had to scrap some episodes due to similarity to a RealLife terrorist attack, then replace those episodes while staying within their original budget. Part of their solution was long scenes that required little or no animation.
** Episode 17 cuts back to the panning shot of Shinji's school courtyard no less than four times, always followed by an extended lingering shot of the Class 2-A sign. Several other shortcuts were also used in the episode to limit the [[LimitedAnimation amount of movement and character designs that had to be used in non-action scenes.]]
** There are probably more examples from the series, but the scene that is the prime candidate for padding is the infamous Kaworu Nagisa [[spoiler:death]] scene. After Shinji grabs Kaworu using the hand of Unit 01, there is a single photograph that stretches on for ''a solid sixty-five seconds'' while Beethoven's Ninth plays in the background. The story goes that most Japanese people watching this thought their televisions had frozen.
** Asuka and Rei in the elevator at NERV, in episode 22. Just one solid frame of them standing there for a little over a minute. The only time that anyone ever moves is when Asuka blinks. Once. However, it's PlayedForDrama, building up the tension for the moment she goes off in Rei's face.
* Other MagicalGirl series, such as ''Anime/OjamajoDoremi'', often abbreviate the [[TransformationSequence transformation sequences]], run several in parallel, or even do them off-screen to ''save'' time. This is usually a sign the creators actually care about the story they're telling.
* ''Manga/OnePiece'' uses padding for similar reasons to ''Bleach'', often so that each episode covers only a chapter's worth of manga material(if not less), and often shows what characters who weren't featured in the original chapter were doing at the time, even if they accomplish nothing significant.
** The 1:1 manga-to-anime ratio started becoming a regular occurrence when the crew got separated after the Sabaody arc. The animators apparently decided to ditch all attempts at making filler arcs. This is partly because there's no opportunity to insert a random island in the middle of the ocean, the typical way of doing a filler arc.
** The padding became most obvious to the viewers when you reached the Marineford arc, with the excessive use of pan shots over background characters and the overuse of having to sit through Buggy's irrelevant comedy acts. Fishman Island was also quite a slow burn, but then it rose to new heights in the Dressrosa arc, which has already been accused of ArcFatigue in the manga. There's a lot of opportunity to kill time with background characters and travel time, and one episode features [[StockFootage the exact same shot]] of Pica stomping a portion of the city several times, almost to the point of a RunningGag.
** During the Wano arc, the initial Gum Gum Sumo Slap clash between Luffy and Urashima where they're stuck in a tug-of-war trying to shove each other's hand, and then flail their arms around trying to stay in the ring after the force of the clash pushed them back, is particularly infamous. Viewers will often point to this as the defining moment that showcases everything wrong with Toei Animation's efforts to drag out the series; turning a brief clash that only takes up a few panels of the manga into a tremendously stretched-out sequence in the anime that goes on for several minutes.
* ''Anime/PrettyCure'' goes both ways depending on how long this week's plot takes. It's not uncommon that one episode of ''[[Anime/YesPrettyCure5 Yes! Pretty Cure 5GoGo]]'' will make you sit through several minutes of StockFootage of the girls transforming, and then the next episode will have the girls all shout [[ByThePowerOfGreyskull "Metamorphose!"]] in unison, followed immediately by a few representative half-second clips and no mention at all of [[InTheNameOfTheMoon the power of hope or the light of the future]].
* Filler arcs aside, the ''Manga/Reborn2004'' anime falls victim to padding during its adaptation of the Future Arc. Tsuna and company are stuck in the future for well over 100 episodes not because the arc in the manga is that long, but because the animators chose to do excessively long recaps at the start of each episode in addition to a 2-3-minute comedy omake at the end of each episode. Add in the openings and endings and you'll get episodes that barely even reach the 10-12 minute mark of new storyline material. Some episodes didn't even truly start until well past the 7-minute mark because the recap was just THAT LONG.
* Most MagicalGirl shows in the ''Sailor Moon'' mold. ''Anime/SailorMoon'' itself often killed upwards of about three minutes an episode on endlessly recycled StockFootage of transformation sequences and magical attacks. It wasn't as excessive as many of the [[FollowTheLeader imitations]] would go, the worst of which was probably ''Anime/WeddingPeach''. ''Sailor Moon'' did get better as the show went on, though. Usagi's transformation sequence in the final season was short compared to her others and everyone else rarely transformed on screen unless they were the focus of the episode or the transformation being seen was plot important. The Outers were rarely shown transforming once they got their Super upgrades, and Saturn was never shown ever in any season transforming. The other main source of padding is the other four senshi yelling X's name in despair or to show their support, usually Usagi's.
* In ''Manga/{{Saki}}'', this is used InUniverse in ''Saki Biyori''. The girls of Shindouji's mahjong club start a "round robin journal", that members of the club take turns writing in. Hitomi Ezaki, having missed half the mahjong club's meeting because of a ClassRepresentative meeting, is running out of ideas and decides to fill in the blank space with a "Mister Shindou" mascot character, which eventually becomes the star of a comic strip. ClubPresident Mairu Shirouzu's initial reaction to seeing the drawing of the mascot taking up almost half a page likely mirrors that of many viewers to padding.
-->'''Mairu''': '''[[LampshadeHanging I would've preferred blank space]].'''
* ''Animation/SpaceThunderKids'' might have some kind of plot buried in all those fight scenes, but not many viewers care to look for it.
* ''Anime/{{Steamboy}}'' has a plot that makes a pretty good point about the role of science in the world and warfare... then pretty much spends about a ''third'' of the movie with the latter, and stretches it out by a good 40 or so minutes. One of the criticisms launched to ''Steamboy'' was the massive EndingFatigue. About a third of the movie is dedicated solely to its action-packed climax. While interesting to watch with all the TechnologyPorn going on, a lot of people started to get bored when one battle led to another, another machine exploded only for two more to take its place, more and more steam clouds part to reveal more machines joining the battle... the animators and designers ''really'' got a little too carried away.
* In the ''Anime/TengenToppaGurrenLagann'' manga, Kamina's "Giga Drill Breaker" takes up a whole chapter. The anime gave it about half a minute. Granted, this is possibly the most epic case of padding ever made, but it's still padding nonetheless.
* ''Anime/TransformersEnergon'' and ''[[Anime/TransformersCybertron Cybertron]]'' both suffered heavily from overuse of StockFootage, although eventually ''Cybertron'' had characters (the ones that weren't transforming) [[LampshadeHanging commenting while the sequence was going on]].
** Padding was perhaps ''Transformers: Energon''s biggest problem. The first quarter of the series is fairly well-paced and flows well but once the Transformers go into space, the pacing falls apart. At one point '''10 whole episodes''' are spent with Unicron dying and coming back to life over and over again. Even then there ''still'' wasn't enough plot to cover the set number of episodes so there was one last arc filled with combiners and repaints put before the final episode.
* The ''Manga/TsubasaReservoirChronicle'' anime has ''one full minute'' of staring between Shaoran and a particular foe.
* Lampshaded in the Hayao Miyazaki segment on TCM. It's explained that much of Japanese cinematography centers around long dramatic scenes, while Americans would be "going for popcorn."
* ''Anime/{{Voltron}}'' had over half a dozen pieces of stock footage. Two of them (forming Voltron and forming Blazing Sword) happen in pretty much every episode. How many of the others (generally related to getting the pilots to the lions, launching the lions, getting the lions to the battlefield, and breaking out various other stock footage weapons that invariably don't work) get used is a function of how much time the studio had to use up to get the episode to the desired length after all the actual plot-related scenes were finished.
* ''Anime/YuGiOh'': A lot of the duels suffer from this, which generally also makes them less epic than if they just focused on the duels and saved everything else for after the damn card games... In particular, the Battle City Arc is full of padding. The duel between Yugi and Kaiba, for instance, is ''six episodes'' long, one of which is dedicated to nothing but Osiris/Slifer and Obelisk destroying each other. Also, duels tend to be stretched out longer compared to the original manga.
[[/folder]]

[[folder:Live-Action TV]]
* Unrelated to the programmes themselves, in the past, it was sometimes necessary to use some form of padding to fill in the time between TV programmes, or during commercial breaks when nothing was on. Creator/TheBBC used to do this back in the day with "interlude films" such as the [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p-wmbM6EpZU "Potter's Wheel"]] to cover intervals during televised plays and [[WeAreExperiencingTechnicalDifficulties breakdowns in transmission]], frequent during the days of live broadcasts. Breaks in programming, especially in the days before daytime TV, would be filled in by "trade test transmissions" -- usually just the test card (sometimes with music), though during the days of early colour transmissions, [[http://www.bvws.org.uk/405alive/info/prog_tradefilms.html short test films]] would be used instead, and by TheEighties, pages from the broadcaster's teletext service. Channel 4 used "break fillers" like [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V1tqeRKLBMk this]] when they couldn't sell advertising space.
* Bob Costas probably can drone on ''for hours'' about what we already saw. Admittedly people like him purposely keep talking.
* Many of the two-hour ''Series/{{Columbo}}'' episodes suffer noticeably from this; since the Lieutenant didn't have a personal life by conceptual mandate, the writers were forced to stuff in scenes like him taking the dog to the vet or asking a suspect where he'd bought his shoes.
* All ''Series/{{CSI}}'' shows have montages of evidence analysis set to techno or rock music. Because what the evidence has revealed is always explained after the conclusion of the montage these scenes could be completely excised at no detriment to the coherence of the plot.
* ''Series/{{Dateline}}'' and ''Series/TwentyTwenty'' are especially egregious about padding as networks use newsmagazines to timesuck failing parts of their schedule, and usually they go on and on about one long-solved TrueCrime or MissingWhiteWomanSyndrome story per episode rather than multiple stories (which is the entire point of a newsmagazine but that's another trope entirely). While cable True Crime shows can usually get in programs about cases in an hour or even a half-hour, they can spend '''two''' hours going on and on about a case with information repeated multiple times to pad out a program.
* ''Series/DoctorWho'':
** Often suffered by the Classic series, especially in the earlier years when stories would sometimes run for six or seven (and in [[Recap/DoctorWhoS3E4TheDaleksMasterPlan one notable instance]] twelve) episodes, but also with the more standard four-parters; the stereotypical third part episode would involve the regulars, having been captured or imprisoned at the end of the previous episode, breaking free and spending a lot of time running up and down corridors before being recaptured at the end. In some of the worst cases from the Creator/JonPertwee era, entire episodes are given over to a 25-minute chase sequence which doesn't advance the plot ''at all''. Particularly painful padding in the classic series is the long shots of characters turning knobs and levers ever so slowly, or lingering on them making tea (or doing something equally mundane) just a bit longer than necessary. Notably, the amount of padding in each story does not necessarily increase with the number of episodes. While one story may have a rather thin plot stretched out to fill four episodes, another may have an incredibly dense plot that barely fits in [[Recap/DoctorWhoS6E7TheWarGames the ten episodes it spans]].
** "TARDIS padding" is fairly common in both the old and new series, and refers to sequences set in the TARDIS before the story starts in which the companions wonder where they are this time, the Doctor says he isn't sure, if it's an old enough episode he'll check the air to make sure it's safe... Both the Classic and the revival series often do it well, to flesh out characters or establish the themes of the episode (or at least to be funny), but just as often it can be obnoxious.
** Creator/TerryNation's serials were notorious for underrunning, requiring the script editors to add in scenes.
*** The ScriptWank scene at the end of "[[Recap/DoctorWhoS10E4PlanetOfTheDaleks Planet of the Daleks]]" was added by Creator/TerranceDicks at the last minute to extend the episode, which is why it's a BrokenAesop that doesn't fit with the rest of the story.
*** "[[Recap/DoctorWhoS13E4TheAndroidInvasion The Android Invasion]]" is a particularly clear example, where all of the scenes developing the relationship between Crayford and Styggron were added by Creator/RobertHolmes (and, since they're in a totally different writing style, it shows). It has the side effect of making Crayford and Styggron's relationship [[RelationshipWritingFumble come off as a bit weirdly sadomasochistic]].
** The final episode of "[[Recap/DoctorWhoS13E3PyramidsOfMars Pyramids of Mars]]" features ten minutes of the Doctor and Sarah running around solving puzzles to get to Sutekh's chamber in the Pyramid. This was self-admitted padding, as Creator/RobertHolmes had run out of plot after Sutekh's successful possession of the Doctor.
** Several of the sequences featuring the guest characters of Jago and Litefoot in "[[Recap/DoctorWhoS14E6TheTalonsOfWengChiang The Talons of Weng-Chiang]]", most notably their attempted escape from where the titular villain is keeping them prisoners by using a dumb waiter, were added by writer and script editor Creator/RobertHolmes to fill time in the six-episode story. (The characters' double act became so popular because of these sequences that they eventually starred in their own AudioPlay SpinOff.)
** In "[[Recap/DoctorWhoS17E2CityOfDeath City of Death]]", there's a whole lot of shots of the Doctor and Romana just merrily running around Paris; excused partly by the BBC wanting to get their money's worth out of the location shooting (literally all they could afford was a silent shoot with Creator/TomBaker, Lalla Ward and no other actors, and they may... um, not have asked permission to film from anyone), partly for SceneryPorn and partly because the script was a last-minute replacement for another story that had fallen through and had been written by the producer and script editor locking themselves in a room with a typewriter over a weekend; the stage directions in the original script literally instruct the director to make sure the chase sequence in part 4 is padded out with shots of Parisian scenery.
** The first episode of the Hartnell-era story "[[Recap/DoctorWhoS2E8TheChase The Chase]]". The first episode opens with a sequence of the characters using a machine to view various historical events. As a result, we are treated to a shot of someone who looks nothing like Abraham Lincoln reading out about seven or eight times more of the Gettysburg Address than necessary, a mildly funny sketch about Shakespeare dealing with Queen Elizabeth I's ExecutiveMeddling, and a weird sequence where they all dance to Music/TheBeatles singing "Ticket to Ride", apparently under the assumption that ItWillNeverCatchOn. The plot only starts about eighteen minutes in when Barbara accidentally leaves the machine on and picks up a transmission from the Daleks.
** One padding technique used to stretch Creator/WilliamHartnell and Creator/PatrickTroughton serials out to six or seven episodes was a violation of the UnspokenPlanGuarantee - they would have the characters explain their plan in great detail for five minutes, then do the plan exactly as said. If you're really unlucky, the characters would then encounter new characters who would have to have the plan explained to them, too. Both of these techniques are used extensively in the two very slow middle episodes in "[[Recap/DoctorWhoS1E2TheDaleks The Daleks]]". The third episode of "[[Recap/DoctorWhoS5E5TheWebOfFear The Web of Fear]]" also uses this technique, as a new character (Lethbridge-Stewart) is added to the mix and the plot needs to be explained to him for the whole episode - although it is a MissingEpisode and the only one of the serial not to have been recovered, so provides a good excuse to skip the telesnap reconstruction.
** "[[Recap/DoctorWhoS3E7TheCelestialToymaker The Celestial Toymaker]]" is packed full of this because TroubledProduction meant the point of the script had to be removed late in development. There's all sorts of dance scenes and shots of the characters rolling dice and making moves on board games, and pointless conversations. At least they had a top-class actor [[HamAndCheese having a great time hamming it up as the villain]].
** The first episode of "[[Recap/DoctorWhoS6E2TheMindRobber The Mind Robber]]" was hastily assembled to extend a four-episode story to five episodes. It lacks a credited writer, as it was devised on-set by the director, prop department, and actors.
** The first episode of "[[Recap/DoctorWhoS18E1TheLeisureHive The Leisure Hive]]" notoriously opens with a slow, nearly two-minute pan across an empty beach. Reportedly, this was because the story was a holdover from Creator/GrahamWilliams' tenure as producer, and when Creator/JohnNathanTurner took over, he ordered all the comedy to be stripped out to fit the DarkerAndEdgier direction he had in mind, which had the side-effect of causing part one to underrun.
** The final episode of "[[Recap/DoctorWhoS18E2Meglos Meglos]]" was underrunning heavily and the budget was tight due to the previous serial ("[[Recap/DoctorWhoS18E1TheLeisureHive The Leisure Hive]]") going vastly overbudget. The cliffhanger recap is very long, and the rest is heavily drawn out. The end credits were even ''slowed down'' in order to extend the runtime a crucial few seconds (meaning, for the music snobs, the end credits are in E minor like the original theme instead of the F# minor the Howell arrangement usually is in). Even ''after'' all of that, it was still significantly short and ended up going out in a 20-minute slot.
** "[[Recap/DoctorWhoS6E7TheWarGames The War Games]]" just goes on, and on, and on, because it had to take up the space of a six-part serial ''and'' a four-part serial and its writers were [[WritingByTheSeatOfYourPants pretty much writing as they were going along]]. Every time they start wrapping up plots, they add another bunch of historical soldiers to incorporate. And, since the very end of the story is [[OutsideContextProblem the Time Lords showing up and breaking the plot]], a lot of it is a ShaggyDogStory.
** Creator/RussellTDavies, the producer of the first few series of the 2005 revival, readily admits that, during season 1, he would frequently find himself several pages short of what he needed, so he would write some quiet drama/exposition scenes, a few minutes long, to fill out the episode. If they were still a minute or two short, trailer for the next episode! By season 2, these scenes were, mostly, gone from the show, as the writers learned how to avoid them, or at least how to make them less obvious.
** The capture-escape-recapture technique shows up as recently as "[[Recap/DoctorWhoS30E17E18TheEndOfTime The End of Time]]". At the start of episode 2, the Doctor is a prisoner of the Master, who is about to put his evil plan into action. The cliffhanger is resolved when he is rescued, but after twenty minutes on the run, he's back exactly where he started, with the Master about to put his ''next'' evil plan into action.
** Another capture-escape-recapture occurs in "[[Recap/DoctorWhoS35E2TheWitchsFamiliar The Witch's Familiar]]". As awesome as the Doctor's escape and facing down the Daleks was, he ultimately ends up back where he started and it only adds runtime. (Also, part one, "[[Recap/DoctorWhoS35E1TheMagiciansApprentice The Magician's Apprentice]]", had Colony Sarff looking for the Doctor, going into several locations and talking to past guest stars only to be told 'nope, not here' and move on. Fun ContinuityPorn? Yes. Easily removed without changing the story in any way? ...Yes.)
** The one-shot special to announce the [[TheNthDoctor actor who would be playing the Eleventh Doctor]] was basically five minutes of padding and fifty-five minutes of mindless filler.
*** The special broadcast in Summer 2013 to announce [[Creator/PeterCapaldi the actor]] who would be playing the Twelfth Doctor (titled ''Doctor Who Live: The Next Doctor'') averts this trope by having a length of only thirty minutes, having (somewhat) meaningful interviews with guests, as well as a fair amount of tribute to Creator/MattSmith. It's helped along by the fact that the actor being announced is an established, veteran actor who has even appeared in the Whoniverse before ''twice'' as opposed to (at the time) a seemingly random, fairly unknown actor.
** "[[Recap/DoctorWhoS31E4TheTimeOfAngels The Time of Angels]]", a Matt Smith-era story, was underrunning by five minutes, so Creator/StevenMoffat added in a five-minute long sequence of the characters being funny in the TARDIS. This included a sequence where River launches the TARDIS without it making the sound, and when the Doctor asks how she could do that, she claims it's because the Doctor leaves the brakes on. It [[FanDislikedExplanation throws up all sorts of continuity problems and made a lot of fans angry]]. Moffat responded to the backlash by saying he just wrote it because it was a funny line, didn't think much about it, and [[{{MST3K Mantra}} suggests you should really just relax]], but says he thinks that River was lying to [[{{Troll}} provoke him]].
* ''Series/TheElectricCompany1971'' and ''Series/SesameStreet'': Both Children's Television Workshop programs adjusted the length of the corporate credits plug ("The Electric Company"/"Sesame Street" is a production of... the Children's Television Workshop) depending on the length of the segments in the given episode. This wasn't noticed so much on ''Sesame Street'' except on Friday shows when the ending theme began in progress at different points in the show to play over the extended credits. On ''The Electric Company'', the show's theme for that season would begin in progress and took anywhere from 15 to 45 seconds (of a song that took around 1 minute, 10 seconds to play), meaning that on one show the individual corporate sponsor names would flash by very quickly (sometimes two seconds or less) and be shown for seven or eight seconds on the next.
** Several of the segments seen on both series (for instance, on ''The Electric Company'', the sound cluster bumpers or a short vignette of a cast member saying a particular word fitting the current discussion; or the "dot bridges" on ''Sesame Street'') came in handy to fill gaps.
* ''Series/GameOfThrones'':
** Season 2 caused a problem when adapting the second book, as there was a sudden explosion of plotlines, and established characters from the previous season needed their roles expanded. Daenerys in particular only appeared in five chapters, resulting in more padding for the Qarth storyline - where she is first refused entry into the city and her dragons are stolen once she's allowed in. Jon also spends a lot of time wandering around in the north with Ygritte, the two of them just sniping at each other.
** Season 3 suffers from this, as some storylines have to wait for others to reach a certain point before they can move forward. So we get quite a few scenes that repeat information that's already been revealed, or just bizarre bits of fluff (like a RunningGag about Podrick's sexual skills). Part of this can be chalked down to Season 3 being an adaptation of only half of the third book.
** Season 4 gets better about it; there are several scenes and even whole storylines original to the show that appear and then wrap up without really impacting the rest of the story, but they're still entertaining in their own right. The mutineers at Craster's Keep is the most noticeable one.
** Season 7 began to really suffer from padding, especially as the writers were artificially trying to stretch out the conflict between Cersei and Daenerys for a whole season. In the finale episode of Season 7, this is especially bad. It takes 10 minutes for the characters to walk to the Dragonpit and sit themselves in place, then another few minutes before anything of value gets said in the meeting. This is especially bad as the episode was already much longer than the usual episodes and really didn't need to be padded out.
** The last episode of Season 8 in particular is an all-time low for the amount of dialogue spoken in an episode. It is packed with long and slow scenes of characters walking, character reaction shots, and sweeping pans of Kingslanding. It's quite egregious as it's also meant to be the episode that wraps up 8 seasons' worth of epic fantasy plot.
* Spoofed on ''Series/GarthMarenghisDarkplace''. Garth and Dean explain that their episodes kept coming up several minutes short, so they would simply add in random slom-mo to pad out the length.
* ''Series/HawaiiFiveO'' had a tendency to pad out car chases by inserting stock footage showing close-ups of ''a wheel of the car turning''.
* ''Series/HellsKitchen'' can, will, and have used 10 minutes of opening summaries, teasers for the upcoming season, and looking back at previous seasons, out of a 42-minute show. Even if that is not an everyday occurrence, five minutes is about the norm.
** The elimination can take forever just looking around between halves of sentences.
* ''Series/ICarly'': ''iFight Shelby Marx'' could easily have been a half hour episode.
** Same with iQuit iCarly. Instead of using Dave and Fleck to cause the Carly and Sam split, they could easily have had a live skit blow up in the opener because Sam didn't bother to rehearse and skip about 15 minutes of pointless filler. Also they could have removed the especially bad webshow skits, and just told the viewer [[InformedAbility that Dave and Fleck were funny]].
** ''iStart a Fan War'' had a lot of going back and forth between Spencer vs. Aspartamay and the fans ooh-ing and aah-ing about the levels of awesome of that particular debate, and then the iCarlies swearing up and down that there was nothing romantic between them only for the shippers to flat-out refuse to see this. Rinse, lather, repeat.
** For a {{Crossover}} the Series/{{Victorious}} Crossover had very little actual cross over between the two casts.
* ''Franchise/KamenRider'', at least in the Neo-Heisei era, tackles this in an egregious way. Take your basic MonsterOfTheWeek plot, usual tropes and all, but drag it out to two episodes, often with the first part ending on the first confrontation with the monster and the defeat of the hero and leave the rest to the second. [[Administrivia/TropesAreTools Some Kamen Rider shows managed to pull this off well]], expanding on some of the story elements that would have otherwise been glossed over if it was in one episode. However, [[DependingOnTheWriter if the writer isn't skilled enough]], [[Administrivia/TropesAreTools it could lead to problems]], such as [[HalfArcSeason minimizing the plot of the show to fit just half the season and make everything else]] {{filler}} or having monsters that would have been killed easily had it not been for a last-minute plot twist or ConflictBall.
* The ''Series/MiamiVice'' episode "Florence Italy" is 48 minutes long, and about 10 of them are taken up by endless car races that don't advance the plot at all.
* As seen on ''Series/MockTheWeek'':
-->'''Fred [=MacAulay=]:''' ... And the detail is vital in padding out the routine...
* This is a popular topic for parody/lampshading/self-referential humor in comedy, especially sketch comedy. For instance, the dead-end trip to "Bolton" in the dead parrot sketch on ''Series/MontyPythonsFlyingCircus''.
-->'''Eric Praline:''' Excuse me, this is irrelevant, isn't it?\\
'''Railway Guard:''' Well, yeah, it's not easy to pad these out to thirty minutes.
** Also at the end of one of the third-season episodes, there is 2-minutes worth of footage of a single piece of seashore. About halfway through, Creator/JohnCleese walks in wearing a conquistador's uniform, and [[LampshadeHanging lampshades it]] by pointing out that they in fact did not have enough material to fill the remaining time, and that there really are no more jokes to stick around for. ''There aren't''.
* ''Series/MysteryScienceTheater3000'' often mocked padding in movies, and the Mads even made it into the selling points of a few movies, but the show itself padded out the ''[[Recap/MysteryScienceTheater3000S03E07DaddyO Daddy-O]]'' episode with a CreditsGag. Host segments varied in length based on the length of the movie being riffed, but the crew usually only resorted to padding as a deliberate gag, particularly if [[OverlyLongGag the gag crossed multiple segments]] (such as Mike's [[Series/FamilyMatters Urkel]] impression or Crow's [[Music/TheGratefulDead Jerry Garcia riff]]).
* ''Series/MythBusters'' has a lot of this; both the cast clowning around and, far less forgivably, endless recaps of what happened previously in the episode. At least one overseas program (Australia's ''Series/BeyondTomorrow'') has repackaged some of their episodes into fifteen-minute segments with new narration, that covered the material quite well.
** Sometimes they have whole episodes that seem to be designed to [[{{Filler}} pad out the series]]. Sometimes this is in the form of a RecapEpisode but other times they use the notorious 'Buster's Cut' episodes, which are effectively straight repeats with a few caption boxes added.
* One episode of ''Series/PeeWeesPlayhouse'' had about [[LeaveTheCameraRunning two or so minutes]] of Pee-wee's dog Roosevelt eating dog food.
* The opening episode of ''Series/RedDwarf VIII'', "Back in the Red", was originally intended to be an hour-long special, and was filmed as such. However, various production difficulties beset the series as filming went on, with several episodes having to be cancelled entirely as the budget ran out. The only way to reach the required number of episodes was to split ''BITR'' into not two, but ''three'' parts, and go back and shoot new material. Resultantly, many scenes in the final episodes - especially Part Three - were either written specifically to pad the thing out, or were reshot to pad them out, including making [[OverlyLongGag Overly Long Gags]] go on for even ''longer'', a three-minute flashforward scene that adds nothing to the plot whatsoever, and recaps of the previous episode that go on for inordinately long times.
** From the same series, "Pete" was originally intended to be a standalone episode, and was also filmed as such, but the ongoing production crisis meant it had to become a two-parter, because the nature of the script (SerialEscalation of Rimmer and Lister annoying the Captain, with a RunningGag about them being repeatedly summoned to his office) meant it was easy to add another 30 minutes to it, and the episode featured a CGI dinosaur which was the main reason for why the budget had run out ahead of time, and they could claw back some money by making another episode that used it (a further money-saving opportunity was afforded by splicing in a subplot that had been filmed for, but later cut, from another episode). Hence, the ''entirety'' of "Pete (Part Two)" is effectively just padding.
* Famously on ''Series/{{SCTV}}'', when they transferred from private network CTV to public CBC they were given an extra two minutes commercial-free, but told the content had to be "recognisably Canadian". Miffed, they put in a piece that just showed two losers inanely bickering- and the Mackenzie brothers boomed to stardom.
* One of the best examples of this involved the montages in the ''Series/StargateSG1'' episode "Window Of Opportunity", which is about a [[GroundhogDayLoop time loop]] (time loop episodes themselves are practically half padding anyway). The show came in short, so they added scenes where O'Neill and Teal'c realize they can do anything they want in a loop and not face consequences for it, they get very creative...
** And yet somehow, those scenes are the best part of the episode!
** Stargate is also the Trope Namer for the padding technique EngagingChevrons.
* Vic Fontaine in the last season of ''Series/StarTrekDeepSpaceNine'' was given huge chunks of the show to sing Music/FrankSinatra songs. The thing is that this was padding that was widely regarded as unnecessary, given the loads of pivotal events going on at this time. This made Vic not a fondly looked upon character by fans.
* ''Series/TrueBlood'' season one was described by the movie magazine ''Empire'' as having "more padding than the Michelin man."
* [[OnceAnEpisode Every episode]] of ''Series/TheTwoRonnies'' featured Ronnie Corbett sitting in a chair telling a joke but going off on no end of humorous tangents and deviations, without which the joke would have taken well under a minute to tell and [[Administrivia/TropesAreTools wouldn't have been all that funny anyway]].
* Described as a common criticism of the first half of ''Series/TheWalkingDead'''s second season, partially on account of the setting (a rural farm in Georgia). Due to the isolated nature of the farm, and the characters not having much to do outside of looking for one of their group (who went missing), a majority of each episode is devoted to drawn-out conversations between characters, sometimes repeating the same information two or three times (Rick has a conversation with Herschel Greene about letting them stay on his property once an episode, on average). Meanwhile, the main plot of the early episodes (find Sophia Peletier) is reiterated by at least one character in each episode, while several other story threads (Lori Grimes discovering she's pregnant and trying to keep it a secret, Dale thinking Shane is hiding a dark secret) are rehashed constantly, with little payoff.
* ''Series/SeventhHeaven'' had what was dubbed by Website/TelevisionWithoutPity the "Opening Credits Timewaster", OnceAnEpisode. It would usually feature one member of the family performing a mundane chore. Riveting.
* Prevalent to an astonishing degree in Indian soap operas - numerous flashbacks, recaps, and slow-motion reaction shots (the same ones often repeated several times in the course of one conversation) mean that the proportion of new footage in any given episode can often seem rather low.
* Sports broadcasts, full on. Ever wonder why a game of sports you play at school or home lasts maybe an hour or two with no complications (like injuries), yet whenever you watch a professional game on TV, it seems to take an entire evening to finish? Obviously when you're just playing two-on-two with friends you don't pause the game every two seconds every time someone scores, looks at someone, fouls, breathes out in an interesting way, falls, gets hurt, or sneezes. If you took most sports broadcasts and cut out all the commercials, random gossip, fan shots, and interviews, you'd be surprised how long the game ''actually is''. Some are also much longer than others, ''ComicStrip/BabyBlues'' for example mentions "Football Time" as "[[DownToTheLastPlay about 30 seconds left in the game]] - I'll be done in about 30 minutes".
** Oddly, there's a general consistency across all sports - every two minutes of time on the game clock will translate to about five minutes of real time being spent on airing said sport. Factor in appropriate breaks between halves/quarters/periods, and you can roughly know going in how long you'll be sitting in front of the television (barring overtime). The padding/time dilation effect is more pronounced at the end of the game, as noted above.
** A running joke with both college and NBA basketball is that both their entire regular seasons and everything but the last two minutes of playoff games can be considered filler as multiple fouls and free throws can easily stretch said last two minutes out as far as forty-five minutes.
** Stage breaks in UsefulNotes/{{NASCAR}} have been viewed by some as a means of padding out the duration of the race to allow for networks to get some time for commercials that isn't happening during green flag racing, although the points awarded at the end of each stage also give it the benefit of forcing drivers to perform their best the entire race instead of just at the end.
* Most series of ''Franchise/SuperSentai'' and its adaptation ''Franchise/PowerRangers'' live on this trope. To fill up for time, almost every episode features {{Transformation Sequence}}s, the [[InTheNameOfTheMoon roll call]], the [[SuperSentaiStance sentai pose]], the combining weapons into a blaster, the summoning the HumongousMecha, and the formation of the CombiningMecha. It's the use of all this stock footage over and over that kept the budget low and kept the show on the air for nearly 20 years in America and more than 40 years in Japan.
* Parodied with plenty of BlackComedy in [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DaDZGjO30VU this]] ''Series/ThatMitchellAndWebbLook'' sketch involving an insanely padded-out gameshow. At first, it's funny because of how contrived and over-the-top the padding is, but then [[TomatoSurprise there's a sudden twist]] that reveals the padding is there for a deliberate, horrifying reason.
* The {{UsefulNotes/Supermarionation}} series, ''Series/{{Thunderbirds}}'' is a positive example of this when Lew Grade ordered the series be made with hour-long episodes. To do this, the Andersons had to pad out many of the early episodes with character asides and plot twists, which gave the series a newfound narrative sophistication that made it a cult hit.
* ''Series/TwentyFour'' had a particularly bad rap for this. Because the writers [[TheChrisCarterEffect didn't often plan the season in advance]] they would often have scenes in earlier episodes that could be expanded on, but would later be abruptly dropped. As a result, the viewers would get a fair amount of extraneous scenes that didn't advance the plot, or worse, would re-iterate what the audience already knew. Worst case scenario, the show would pull an illogical plot twist to keep the terrorist plot going for a full 24 hours, making the entire rest of the season padding to fill out the 24-episode order. In fact, "Live Another Day" is generally considered one of the better seasons, if for no other reason than it's the only season that is free of any padding.
* Each of the Marvel Netflix show seasons has often run into accusations of being padded to fit the 13-episode order. While the first season of ''Series/{{Daredevil|2015}}'' avoided this, the first seasons of ''Series/{{Jessica Jones|2015}}'', ''Series/{{Luke Cage|2016}}'', ''Series/{{Iron Fist|2017}}'' and ''Series/{{The Punisher|2017}}'' had bigger issues with this.
** ''Jessica Jones'' had a problem with villains being captured and having long conversations with the heroine (prompting viewers to think big reveals were imminent), only to rehash information from the first half of the season before the villain escaped in a contrived manner and repeated a variation of their same plot again. This can be seen with Kilgrave in Season 1 and Sallinger in season 3.
** With ''Iron Fist'', the subplots with the Meachum siblings dealing with boardroom politics and corporate intrigue at Rand are often viewed as filler that have no relevance to the main storyline.
** Some of the episodes that are lengthy flashback episodes are viewed as such. ''Jessica Jones'' season 2 had a whole episode about an attempt by Jessica's mother to get in contact with her daughter during Jessica's late teen years. ''Daredevil'' season 3 had an entire episode that was about Karen Page's backstory.
* ''Series/TheMandalorian'' Chapter 19 runs longer than any other chapter from the first three seasons, thanks to a lengthy look at the efforts of former Imperial scientist Dr. Pershing to start anew on Coruscant. Since he only appeared sporadically during Seasons 1-2, and never appears again for the rest of Season 3, many viewers didn't think he deserved such a big chunk.
[[/folder]]

[[folder:Game Shows]]
* Speaking of ''Series/AmericanGladiators'', one of their favorite padding techniques is interviewing each contestant before ''each'' challenge and the winner after said challenges. As an episode will have 4 contestants, and, including the eliminator, about 4 events ''per pair'' of contestants, this adds up to at least 32 interviews. Assuming these interviews are merely a short 45 seconds long (Enough for 1-3 questions) and not including each contestant's intro at the beginning of the episode (which can run from 1 to 2 minutes each) or interviews with the actual gladiators; that padding can count for almost 24 min of a 42 minute ''American Gladiators'' episode's airtime. To put this in perspective, 24 minutes is the average run time, without commercials, of a normal half-hour show - meaning the difference between a half-hour show and an hour-long episode of American Gladiator is entirely made of padding. These interviews end up being very redundant (how many different ways can a person say "I'll try my best" or "Yeah I'm going to win!"). Note also that said padding served another important purpose in the newest iteration of the show: they gave celebrity host Wrestling/HulkHogan and Laila Ali screentime.
* ''Series/DealOrNoDeal'' makes ''Series/WhoWantsToBeAMillionaire'' seem positively ''rushed.'' In any given ten minutes of episode time, there are five minutes of pure stalling and four minutes of the contestant agonizing over "decisions" that are purely luck-based. The remaining minute consists of the banker making offers, which is the only point at which anyone can actually affect the outcome of the game in any way.
** If the contestants were allowed (and smart enough), they could rapid-fire their way through all the cases and ignore the banker, cutting their time down to [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hmZFHjQfx-o less than two minutes]]--and there would be an absolutely ''absurd'' amount of grand prize winners, which is why this isn't allowed. (Interestingly enough, however, something not all that dissimilar to that format has been adopted for online versions of the game.)
** Other than ''Deal'', every other hour-long ''[[WhoWantsToBeWhoWantsToBeAMillionaire Millionaire]]''-[[WhoWantsToBeWhoWantsToBeAMillionaire wannabe]] game show born after followed this with the inclusion of CommercialBreakCliffhanger.
* ''Series/DontForgetTheLyrics'' is extremely bad with this. Most of the contestants don't take their time in making decisions, but once they lock in their lyrics, the show would stall for more than 10 seconds to reveal the correct lyrics. It gets worse when they do this for just revealing a few words at a time. The worst offender is when they build up the suspense to see if the lyrics are right, only to cut away to a commercial break.
* The second episode of ''Series/{{Greed}}'' was infamous for recapping the progress of the show's first million-dollar winners with ''two separate clip montages'' (which mostly consisted of the right answers to each question being lit up again) towards the end of the show, just to make sure that the decision to play for the $2M question could be put off until next week's show.
* The short-lived NBC show ''Identity'' was a major offender of the genre. In one particular episode, the host made it look like he was preparing to ask the last onstage personality to reveal his identity, only to throw it to commercial. Then they came back from commercial, recapped the whole thing, and ''went to commercial again'' before the host ''finally'' got around to asking the personality to reveal her identity... and we're still subjected to ''[[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QybVceekCPo thirty-five seconds]]'' of random camera shots before she confirmed her identity. Made worse since the contestant had already used one of her {{Lifelines}} to "Ask The Experts", who all pegged the identity of this final person. Commercials included, this question was padded for over ten minutes.
* ''Series/Jeopardy'' typically averts this, with 20-minute episodes devoted almost completely to clues. However, the 2022 Celebrity Jeopardy tournament had 45-minute episodes, and even adding a Triple Jeopardy round couldn't fill out the bloated runtime. To compensate, a second contestant interview was added (and both interviews were typically much longer than on the proper show), and the contestants were allowed to interject, mug for the camera, and exchange [[WittyBanter "witty" banter]] with [[Creator/MayimBialik Mayim]] and each other after virtually every clue.
* Another [=NBC=] game, ''Series/TheWall'', is padded to the brim with excessive melodrama (especially during the endgame). In one episode, the contestant's father inadvertently padded the game further by constantly monologuing in the SoundProofBooth about personal stories related to the question subjects, to the point that when a question about cars came up, the ''contestant'' warned host Chris Hardwick that he was [[ThisIsGonnaSuck likely going to tell a long-winded story about their old Dodge Caravan]] (which he did).
* A short game show series called ''Series/TheMillionPoundDrop'' that aired live every night for its five-episode run was bad with this, dragging out some of the answer reveals out, or just having one door open up to reveal the wrong answer. The worst offence was in the final episode though. As it was a live show, they could not prematurely end the game of the last contestants playing, and on their final question, after they had confirmed their answer, they decided to cut to a commercial break. After the break, the answer was revealed to be wrong, and the credits rolled. Seriously, what was the bloody point of that commercial break if they had given the wrong answer? It kind of makes you wonder if Channel 4 wanted to push back their schedule for the night. Made worse because the host (Davina [=McCall=]) will hurry the contestants if they take more than thirty seconds deciding which category to choose - only to take five minutes giving the answer. This format was later adopted as ''Series/MillionDollarMoneyDrop'' for the United States on FOX, and it's just as bad, if not worse. They got through 13 questions on the ''2-hour'' premiere. Thankfully, from season two onward of the original series, the padding has mostly disappeared, with them getting through many more teams in a single show and being far better about not dragging out the reveals. Now, they usually have more than one door (often all three of them) drop at once or have all three wrong answers drop in quick succession.
* In the PBS educational game show ''Series/WhereInTheWorldIsCarmenSandiego'', if the game concluded faster than expected, they would usually trot out some StockFootage of in-house acapella band Rockapella singing "Zombie Jamboree". In the first season, when the show ended earlier than usual, a segment called "Acme Crimenet Detective Academy" would air in which the Chief would call random audience members to her office and ask some geographical questions. If they got it right, they would be given a Carmen Sandiego T-shirt, but if they got it wrong, they would get an atlas.
* ''Series/WhoWantsToBeAMillionaire'':
** During its early runs, ''Millionaire'' got real bad when stalling contestants dragged out the show. When they got to the harder questions, they would take 5, 10 minutes, or more before making their final answer or using a lifeline. Usually, most contestants would stall some more after their lifeline was used in order to think over the results. It was almost as if the contestants were told to stall increasingly as the question value increases, to improve the chances that a channel surfer will randomly wander into a high-paying question. From 2008 to 2010, the American ''Millionaire'' added a time limit to each question, forcing contestants to answer quickly. Harder questions have a longer time limit. Answering questions quickly as you could would add to the clock for the million-dollar question so contestants could take longer on the final round. The addition of the timer was most likely added to speed up the game so it would allow more new people to enter the hot seat.
** However, that does not excuse pauses for dramatic lighting changes and music stings, nor does it excuse suspenseful reveals of the correct answer. Video game adaptations move painfully slowly because it types out the question and each individual answer, then has a music sting between each question, presumably as a breather. But there's nowhere near the tension of the game show, because the producers are not in control.
** Worse in the Japanese version. After locking in your answer on a difficult struggling question, you have to wait for the host to respond while he intimidatingly stares at you over a minute or less, and sometimes a [[CommercialBreakCliffhanger commercial break]] shows up unannounced. This is practiced because the show never continues where it left off. It helps, like many Japanese game shows, that they fast forward a few questions leaving only the "final answer" part to accelerate the show.
** ''WesternAnimation/TheSimpsons'' makes fun of ''Millionaire'''s padding habit by having Moe appear on an episode and "stalling for about 15 minutes". He later states he did this because the people running the show instructed him to do so.
** One commercial for ''Franchise/ThePowerpuffGirls'' had Mojo Jojo do this on a show that was an obvious reference to ''Millionaire'', though that's really his normal way of talking.
* ''Series/OneVersusOneHundred'' was a big offender. Early in the first season's run in the US, the show was slowly paced with stalling contestants, chit-chatting between the host and the mob, and stalling after locking in an answer which a CommercialBreakCliffhanger may occur sometimes before the reveal. The show sped up later by less talking and simultaneously lighting up all the eliminated mob members' panels. Then they completely threw out the improvements in season 2 when the money ladder retooled.
* Numerous other game shows which rely on suspense in between the question being answered and the real answer being revealed, or similar. Pretty sure ''Series/{{Pointless}}'', ''Series/{{Eggheads}}'', ''Series/TheChase'', etc. have all done this...
* Some game shows can be pretty bad at this. Usually not the fault of the producers, but due to various factors, such as stalling contestants who take several minutes to make a decision, or a game cut short because of a decisive game that took quicker than expected. In the latter instance, it is because either because the winner was so dominant or the losing contestant fell far enough behind that because he could no longer catch the leader with the remaining questions, the game was ended early (presumably because to play the game further would serve no purpose and to avoid further embarrassment of the loser). Examples include ''Series/{{Pyramid}}'' and ''Series/MatchGame''.
** There are still some standard padding tricks to most GameShows, including having the host talk to the contestant about his or her life and what they plan to do with their winnings in excruciating detail, interviewing relatives and/or other audience members, or sometimes airing "filler" vignettes relating to the game.
** Another trick involves having an audience being invited to play an [[AudienceGame abbreviated or modified version of the game for a nominal prize]]. This often happens when there isn't enough time to begin a new game (or if played more regularly, on Friday episodes). Some examples:
*** ''Series/WhoWantsToBeAMillionaire'' will have an audience member answer the next question a departing contestant would have been faced with for a $1,000 prize.
*** ''Series/TicTacDough'' had a "Dragon Finder's Game," where two audience members were invited to play either an uncompleted "Beat the Dragon" bonus game (if won), or a new board if the game ended in a loss. The objective here was to ''find'' the Dragon (an inversion of the regular game) for a cash prize.
*** ''Series/TheJokersWild'', a sister Barry-and-Enright game show of ''Tic Tac Dough'', also invited players to play its bonus game, "Beat the Devil." Just like the regular bonus game, the player had to avoid spinning a Devil to win an announced prize.
*** ''{{Series/Concentration}}'': The 1970s version saw both contestants invited to play one Double Play puzzle each for a $50 cash prize for solving the puzzle within 10 seconds. Varied as to when it was played, but usually as a time-filler. Sometimes an audience member was invited onstage to play – when, in that case, just the ones where contestants solved the puzzle were kept. The ''Classic'' version sometimes invited an audience member to play the car-matching bonus round. Dollar amounts were substituted for the names of cars, and -- with the cash accumulating as the player made matches -- he/she kept any amounts matched; the maximum amount possible was $500.
*** The 1970s version of ''Series/MatchGame'' had the player play a version of the Super Match for a cash prize (usually, $500).
** ''Series/{{Whew}}'' switched from straddling matches to self-contained ones near the end of its run. Whenever a team defeated their opponents in two straight games (of a best-of-three match), the runtime was padded out by having the champion team play an extra round "against the house" before progressing to the BonusRound. This allowed them to rack up some extra time...and save the budget by ensuring the producers wouldn't have to shell out $50,000 in one episode!
** If all of the above techniques/tricks have been used and there is still more than enough time remaining, an extended version of the closing credits (that is, longer than normally seen on shows with the full credit roll) is played. This sometimes allows game show fans to hear much more of the show's theme -- possibly in full -- than even on shows with a credit roll at the end.
* TV talent show results. Actually announcing who's being kicked off that week takes less than a minute. The results show can be up to an ''hour'', most of which is filled with unnecessary suspense building or flashbacks to the contestant's performances last night. As the season goes on, the padding will inevitably get worse as they start to run out of acts to kill time with.
[[/folder]]

!!Examples in media

[[folder:Films -- Live-Action]]
!! Specific Films:
* Of the four leads' individual stories in ''Film/FourThreeTwoOne'', only Jo's and Shannon's are really essential - Cassandra's jaunt to New York City adds exactly nothing to the story and is only really there as an excuse for cameos (and for a Tamsin Egerton LingerieScene).
* The {{Found Footage Film|s}} ''Film/AlienAbductionIncidentInLakeCounty'''s first draft of the script was only forty-five minutes. WordOfGod is that he hurriedly wrote "about twenty new scenes" in four days to pad it out to ninety minutes. Showing that this is not always a bad thing, one of them is the aliens screwing with the household appliances - one of the film's most memorable moments. Other examples are the aliens somehow influencing two members of separate couples to make out under the belief they're kissing their actual partner, and Tommy giving a confessional to the camera.
* The SlasherMovie ''April Fools'', which is overflowing with slow motion, pointless scenery shots, constant flashbacks to the intro, and random dance numbers.
* ''Film/AroundTheWorldInEightyDays1956'' was exquisitely padded with SceneryPorn, [[TheCameo cameos by any actor who wasn't otherwise busy at the time the film was being made]] and a six-minute CreativeClosingCredits sequence produced by Saul Bass. It won the Oscar for best picture that year, and the backdrops are quite breathtaking, so perhaps Administrivia/TropesAreNotBad. (On the other hand, it also [[FollowTheLeader inspired a slew of big-budget celebrity cameo parades]] over the next ten years or so, and some of them were God-awful.)
* ''Film/AvatarTheWayOfWater'' runs half an hour longer than [[Film/{{Avatar}} the original]], reaching the three hour mark. Mostly it's ShootTheMoney showcasing the impressively realistic alien world and the newfangled underwater scenes, with [[https://www.polygon.com/23507357/avatar-way-water-when-to-pee-bathroom-times-scenes articles]] [[https://noguiltfangirl.com/when-can-you-pee-during-avatar-the-way-of-water/ soon]] [[https://comicbook.com/movies/news/avatar-2-way-water-when-best-time-bathroom-break-pee-explained/ appearing]] warning when those without a BladderOfSteel could go to the bathroom and not lose parts that actually advanced the plot.
* ''Film/BladeRunner'' had this in the first director's cut. The narration [[ExecutiveMeddling added for the theatrical release]] was gone, but the scenes lasted longer than they needed to. This was fixed in the "Final Cut."
* Half of ''[[Film/TheBoogeyman Boogeyman II]]'' is made up footage from the first film! As ''Starburst'''s Tony Crawley pointed out, "It's bad enough when a sequel is the same old story, but when it's the same old footage the feeling of being ripped off is somewhat more acute."
* A frequent criticism leveled at the ([[MovieMultipack first half of the]]) of ''[[Literature/{{Twilight}} Breaking Dawn]]'' - since the filmmakers decided to split the book into two movies, despite how the novel could have been easily squeezed into a single film, Part 1 is packed to the brim with montages to pad out the running time to just under two hours.
* ''Film/TheBrownBunny'' features many loooong sequences of the main character simply driving his van across country or riding his motorcycle across the salt plain. The much-longer rough cut that screened at Cannes sparked a notoriously hostile response, apparently against what must have been interminably padded scenes.
* ''{{Film/Carrie 2002}}'' is a MadeForTVMovie of Stephen King's novel, and had to increase the running time to fit a three-hour broadcast (minus commercials, it's only a 133-minute run time). Additional scenes include Sue meeting Carrie at the mall and trying to be nice to her, Chris antagonising Carrie when she finds her using Miss Desjardin's phone, some commentary on religion by both Sue and Carrie, a scene of Chris's father trying to sue the school (which to be fair is in the book as well) and a sequence of Carrie going into a trance and losing control of her powers in class (which is mild {{Foreshadowing}} for the prom disaster). Writer Bryan Fuller even said it could use forty minutes cut from it.
* ''Film/DarlingLili'' was padded to be as long as the other lavish big-budget musicals that were slowly falling out of favor in Hollywood at the time. These include some extended comedy gags, musical numbers that run well over three minutes, dating montages between Lili and Bill, lengthy aerial dogfights (which was a case of ShootTheMoney as these were the most expensive scenes to film) and most egregiously a random scene of Bill and Lili running into a chorus of French schoolgirls and joining them singing. Blake Edwards recut the film in the 90s and dropped 29 minutes of footage from it.
* ''Film/DjangoUnchained'' has a lot of scenes and shots that run overlong and increase the film's run time to well over three hours.
** A comedy scene involving members of the Ku Klux Klan. After the plot-relevant information that they're going after Schultz and Django is conveyed - they then argue about the practicality of the hoods they wear.
** Schultz pours two glasses of beer, and we see every mechanical process required in that action.
** Candie takes two plates of white cake and walks all the way across the room to hand them to Schultz and Django.
** After the shootout at Candyland, Django has to talk a group of Australians into helping him before we go straight to the climax. According to WordOfGod, the shootout was the original ending, but this part was added to make it less formulaic.
* ''Film/{{Djinn}}'': Two Arab guys and an American friend visit the Djinn's dwelling grounds, with two of them getting killed but the third managing to strike a DealWithTheDevil. This scene has precisely zero bearing on the A-plot of Sarah and Khalid, and never becomes relevant again.
* ''Film/DoubleDown'', would be roughly 30 minutes long had the director not made extensive use of stock footage and not inserted unused takes of previous sequences throughout the runtime.
* ''Film/Drive2011'' would be an hour long if it weren't for all the shots of characters staring off into space for long periods of time.
* Dear God, ''[[Film/DaftPunksElectroma Electroma]]''. The total runtime is for 72 minutes, but it can actually be coherently condensed into ''[[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hl7rpJANHTs nine]]''.
* The public information film ''Film/TheFinishingLine'' has this during the final task which all children cross the railroad tunnel. The camera films ALL the children walking into the tunnel passing by the camera and even leave it running filming nothing for a good number of seconds after last child passed by. This padded scene lasted about a minute.
* ''Film/FireMaidensOfOuterSpace'' barely runs 80 minutes, yet still manages to wear its plot really thinly. Filmmaker Cy Roth had to LeaveTheCameraRunning in a lot of scenes, and there are endless sequences of the men sitting around and smoking and of the maidens dancing to Borodin.
* Creator/EdgarWright admitted that when his very first film, the indie ''Fistful of Fingers'', came out to be 71 minutes long, he went back and created more content to pad out its length an extra 7 minutes, including an extended opening credits sequence and a whole new scene in which characters talk to each other in the dark over an entirely black screen.
* ''Film/FridayThe13th1980'' actually has several:
** There's an out-of-nowhere sequence where Alice discovers a snake in her cabin, and the other counsellors band together to kill it. To be charitable, it might trick the audience into thinking Bill is TheHero and Alice is more fragile, to prop up the tension when Alice is the one left alone with the killer, but the sequence wasn't in the script and thought up on the spot by make-up artist Tom Savini.
** Jack and Marcy have a conversation by the lake, where the latter starts talking about her frequent nightmares; one ominous dream has her describing rain turning to blood. It seems like a flimsy attempt at a 'character moment' and does little to foreshadow that anything bad is going to happen since Annie has already been killed and the scene began with Ned following a mysterious stranger into a cabin.
** There's also a lengthy scene where all the other counsellors have vanished, and Alice makes a cup of coffee. For audiences at the time, it might have been to draw out tension whether the killer might strike while she's unaware.
* ''Film/FridayThe13thPart2'' opens with Alice Hardy, the FinalGirl of the previous film, having nightmares about said film's events. And then we're shown about five minutes' worth of extended flashback to her confrontation with Mrs Voorhees.
* ''The Green Horizon'', which was Creator/JimmyStewart's last live-action theatrical appearance, is essentially an hour and a half of scenery porn and about 20 minutes of story.
* The first part of ''Film/HarryPotterAndTheDeathlyHallows''. While it keeps pace with the book, the first half of the book could have been compressed easily, resulting in what many find a tedious movie, commonly mocked as ''Harry Potter Goes Camping''.
* ''Film/HerculesAgainstTheMoonMen'', as mentioned above. The lack of music and dialogue is what really makes the scene a drag to watch. Adding to the [[Series/MysteryScienceTheater3000 MST3K]] presentation is that the climax of the scene has Hercules come up against a rock face:
-->'''Crow:''' [[FromBadToWorse THERE'S GONNA BE]] [[Film/LostContinent ROCK CLIMBING!!]] AAAAAH!
* ''[[Film/TheHungerGamesMockingjay The Hunger Games: Mockingjay - Part 1]]''. Some fans weren't happy with [[Literature/TheHungerGames the book]] being split into two films and resulting in a lot of the first film just hanging around in the bunker waiting for the real story in Part 2. At times you can tell there wasn't enough material for two movies made of the book. In fact, much of the bunker scenes in Part 1 could be lost with little to no consequence.
* The second Film/JuOn film made, ''Ju-On: the Curse 2'', begins its 80-minute runtime with a 25-minute recap of the events of the first film.
* ''Film/JurassicWorldDominion'': A major and frequent criticism of the film is just how superfluous most of the dinosaur scenes are to the overall story, sometimes described as though it were an unrelated movie script that had several dinosaur scenes awkwardly pasted in at random intervals in order to make it into a ''Franchise/JurassicPark'' movie. Most of the dinosaur scenes could be cut without affecting the plot, but then the movie would only be about half as long [[JustHereForGodzilla and far fewer people would care to watch it]].
* ''Film/ZackSnydersJusticeLeague'' is four hours long, mostly due to a plot [[MovieMultipack intended to be two movies]], but sometimes for having integral versions of scenes that [[Film/JusticeLeague the theatrical cut]] cut to a minimum (the build-up to Wonder Woman's museum rescue, Flash driving to the Kryptonian ship), and the director indulging in his beloved slow motion, with [[https://www.ign.com/videos/justice-league-snyder-cut-all-differences-from-the-theatrical-version 10% of the film]] shot in {{Overcrank}}.
* ''Film/KingKong2005'', and ''Film/{{Avatar}}'', both have this in way, way too much SceneryPorn. This creates severe padding, even if [[SugarWiki/VisualEffectsofAwesome there's a reason for this]]. One film critic even said "the fight between Kong and the [[SuperPersistentPredator V-Rexes]] goes on so long, even Kong seems like he's getting bored."
* The Irish indie film ''Life's a Breeze'', about a grandmother's life savings being in a mattress her children have disposed of, has two:
** The grandmother and her granddaughter trick the {{Jerkass}} of a son that he's won the lottery via use of a recording of that week's broadcast. It was foreshadowed when the children's surprise home renovation included a TV that could do that, but it puts the plot on hold for five minutes. Given that the son was played by Pat Shortt, the only other name in the cast besides Fionnuala Flanagan as the grandmother, it may have been to pad his screen time out.
** For the grandmother's birthday, all her children hire a male stripper and then bicker with themselves over who's going to pay him. It does little to further the plot and the gratuitous {{Fanservice}} is especially jarring with the movie's SliceOfLife tone.
* ''Film/LostContinent'' has ''twenty minutes'' of people climbing rocks. The Series/MysteryScienceTheater3000 cut is notable for being one of the few occasions when the mad scientist nearly succeeded in breaking Joel's mind:
-->'''Joel''': C'mon. Hey you guys, calm down. Hey, it's only a movie, we can handle it, okay? \\
'''Servo''': Okay, I guess you're right.\\
''[{{Beat}}]''\\
'''Joel''': WHO ARE YOU, WHERE ARE WE? CAN WE GET A FRAME OF REFERENCE OR SOMETHING? PLEASE!
* ''Film/ManosTheHandsOfFate'' had several of these, including the opening driving montage (which was supposed to go under the opening credits), the prolonged running-around-at-night shot, the girdle-wrestling scene (which took place simultaneously with the running-around bit), the cops-hassling-the-making-out-couple scene.
* The Film/JamesBond movie ''Film/TheManWithTheGoldenGun'' was guilty of this in spades. Was there really any point to the martial arts school and its ensuing boat chase, the latter feeling like [[RecycledScript a retread of the boat chase in]] [[Film/LiveAndLetDie the previous film]], other than producers saying [[FollowTheLeader "See, we saw]] ''Film/EnterTheDragon'', [[FollowTheLeader too!"]]?
* As [[http://contest.disastermovie.org/?page_id=133 a review]] of ''[[Creator/SeltzerAndFriedberg Meet the Spartans]]'' pointed out, the movie itself ends at 67 minutes, and there are then 19 minutes of credits and gags.
* Parodied in ''Film/MontyPythonAndTheHolyGrail'', where a scene is drifted by many characters discussing trivia... which are then cut short by crowd scenes yelling [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l1YmS_VDvMY 'Get On With It!"]].
* ''Film/TheNightOfTheHunter'' is hailed by critics as one of the best movies ever made, and rightly so. However, it runs for only 93 minutes, barely feature-length, and that running time includes a 20-minute coda after the main story is over where nothing much happens.
* ''Film/RadarSecretService'' - take the tedium of the driving scene from ''Manos'', and the tedium of people sitting around doing nothing to advance the plot from ''Fire Maidens from Outer Space'', and you get this film, which the Mads from [[Series/MysteryScienceTheater3000 MST3K]] advertised as containing "Hypno-Helio Static Stasis" (containing X-4!).
* Although ''Film/RedEye'' averts padding in terms of story it manages to pad out the end credits, which are considerably slower than the norm, in larger type than usual and with bigger spaces between the cast member/crew member and his/her character name/job title (and the film '''still''' comes in at only 85 minutes).
* ''Rescue from Series/GilligansIsland'' was quite bad about this, given that the plot was recycled from an episode of the show they never filmed.
* ''Film/RobotHolocaust'' opens with a [[TheThunderdome fight to the death]] between two beefy guys... but it's so overlong & boring that it's practically another example of, [[Recap/MysteryScienceTheater3000S02E08LostContinent "Rock climbing,]] [[Series/MysteryScienceTheater3000 Joel".]]
* ''Film/TheRoom'':
** ''Nothing'' between the second sex scene and the birthday party has any actual effect on the plot.
** There were at least two or three establishing shots during ''one scene'' that took place in the ''same setting''.
** Probably the most obvious form of padding used is that of having characters essentially repeat scenes with only a few details changed. This is especially obvious when it comes to Lisa and Claudette, whose conversations with each other are always about virtually the same thing, and with Johnny and his friends tossing the football back and forth.
** One odd scene from the middle of the party lasts only a few moments, and is just a shot of the city with the theme music playing. It has no bearing on anything and might have been used just to denote that time had passed.
%%* ''Film/SantaAndTheIceCreamBunny'' is full of it.
* ''Film/ShandraTheJungleGirl'' has two longish scenes that could be removed without affecting the plot in any way. The first where Karen sits in her bath watching a JiggleShow on television. The second is where Shandra goes to the strip club in search of a victim and there is an entire [[YouCanleaveYourHatOn striptease act]] shown before she attacks the fat patron outside.
* ''Film/TheSidehackers''. This includes overly long images of a couple rolling around in the flowers, a character's dramatic and unnecessary walk through various locations (including what appears to be an ''oil refinery''), ridiculously slow or just plain irrelevant dialogue, and the "sidehacking" itself.
* Most of the first half of ''Film/SilentNightDeadlyNightPart2'' is scenes from the ''[[Film/SilentNightDeadlyNight first movie]]''.
* ''Film/SleepyHollowHigh'' contains countless close-up shots of a creek that serve no purpose beyond extending the running time.
* This is played for laughs in ''Film/{{Spaceballs}}'' in the very first scene, where you see a never-ending shot of ''just one huge spacecraft''. HilarityEnsues when the weird shaping of the ship makes you think that finally the end is coming, when it isn't, until it does ''actually'' finally - OhWait! ... But now it is!
** And then we get to see the opening scene ''again'' when Colonel Sandurz has the Instant Cassette of the movie played. Fortunately, though, the entire scene is fast-forwarded through.
* ''Film/SpiceWorld'' does this by putting in {{Imagine Spot}}s everywhere:
-->'''Nicole:''' Just wait until you lot become mothers...
* ''Film/TheStarfighters'', a movie about Air Force pilots training on a new type of jet, featured long sequences of planes simply cruising set to elevator music. At least a few of these sequences were lengthy shots of planes refueling.
* ''Film/StarTrekTheMotionPicture,'' or in some circles, [[FanNickname The Motion]]''[[FanNickname less]]'' [[FanNickname Picture]]. A script for a one-hour pilot for a new ''Trek'' series that never came to be was made into a two-hour-plus movie by the addition of a little extra chatter and ''a lot'' of establishing shots of truly insane length, such as our first look at the new ''Enterprise'', as well as when V'Ger is revealed. ''Film/TwoThousandOneASpaceOdyssey'' moves at light speed by comparison. Fortunately, [[SugarWiki/AwesomeMusic Jerry Goldsmith was on hand]] right from the very first shot (before even the Paramount logo) - which consisted of a minute and a half of a black screen, as it's the only Trek film with an overture, which was extended to ''three minutes'' of backing away from wherever we had been before in the Director's Edition[[note]]though it did allow the optional text commentary to provide a timeline of the ten-year period from the end of the Original Series to the original release of the film[[/note]].
** The ''Enterprise'' drydock scene does get cut some slack from die-hard fans, particularly those who consider the refit ''Enterprise'' one of their favorite versions of the ship, though even they can admit the scene could have been trimmed down a bit.[[note]]The scene was also reportedly as long as it was with the intention of giving fans the chance to cheer for the ship when it made its big-screen debut. This likely meant more in 1979, when it had been ten years since the last live-action ''Star Trek'' episode debuted, than it does nowadays, with hundreds more episodes and a dozen more films out there and having the entire franchise available on demand.[[/note]] Fans are less charitable about the Cloud and V'Ger Flyover sequences, as since as they occur back-to-back, they end up taking up a good ten minutes of run time with almost no dialogue or plot advancement.
* Among its many sins is the fact that the already short run time of ''Film/ATalkingCat'' is blatantly padded out with random scenery interludes, set to execrable and repetitive music.
* The epically painful 1987 Kokomo-filmed ''Terror Squad'' features an unbelievably long and boring car chase between the squad in question and the police which seems to last for around a quarter of the movie.
* ''Film/TicklesTheClown'': Expect the cast to do a lot of talking, oftentimes just to stretch out the movie's run time.
* ''Film/TwoThousandOneASpaceOdyssey''. Sure, it was SugarWiki/VisualEffectsOfAwesome back in the day but ''[[http://flavorwire.com/180069/10-important-movies-you-dont-really-have-to-see/10#post_body still]]''. Probably the most egregious bit is the scene where [[LeaveTheCameraRunning the camera just sits still for several minutes]] watching an elevator ''slooooooowly'' move downward. There's quite a few similar scenes of spacecraft moving with agonizing sluggishness for minutes at a time.
* In ''Film/WarOfTheWorlds2005'', the scenes with Tim Robbins could be seen as padding -- they could easily be removed or drastically shortened. As it is, the film gets particularly bogged down during that plot sidetrack. Of course, some consider these scenes to be the creepiest and most effective in the movie, and Tim Robbins being beaten to death at the end certainly helps.
* ''Film/{{Waterworld}}'' is filled with sequences involving mechanisms ([[RubeGoldbergDevice contrived]] or not) which take up most of the movie.
* The DisasterMovie ''When Time Ran Out...'' features an infamous sequence where several characters cross a bridge for over ''twenty minutes.''
* The main characters of ''Film/WhiteChristmas'' are stage performers, and part of the plot is that they decide to use General Waverly's lodge for rehearsals. This does not really justify three song-and-dance numbers (the Minstrel Show, "Choreography" and "Abraham") that each go on for minutes apiece and don't contribute anything substantial to the plot. Granted, all three are impressive on their own, so it's basically an extended case of TheCastShowoff.
* EroticFilm ''Film/WildCactus'' has a scene where Alexandria and David, driving cross-country, stop in a hotel for the night. It doesn't affect the story at all, but it does provide time for a sex scene.

!! Filmmakers/Multiple:
* A frequent complaint of the [[Podcast/TheScathingAtheist God Awful Movies]] crew is that Christian filmmakers in general seem to think their audiences will be shocked and appalled if they are asked to infer ''absolutely anything'' from context. Character needs to be in a new location? Best show them getting into a car, driving, pulling up and parking, getting out, walking up to the door, and knocking, or the audience will go full TorchesAndPitchforks on you. Need to cut back to a location you've established before? Best establish it again, just in case. Need an answer to the Problem Of Evil? (Crickets, Eli shouts "JINGLY KEYS!", film moves on without a word.)
* Creator/JuddApatow has made a career out of this. Many of his movies (produced or directed) run over two hours (rare for the comedy genre) and as a result will feature many things that could have easily been cut. A prime offender is ''Film/FunnyPeople'', which pads its near-150-minute run time with many celebrity cameos and an additional thirty-minute subplot after the main revelation [[spoiler:that Adam Sandler's cancer has gone into remission]]. Supposedly, the film's extended versions are even worse. It's not even the storyline mentioned above that's the most annoying part, that actually makes some sense, it's several useless storylines - namely the entire subplot involving Creator/SethRogen's love interest as well as his roommate's sitcom career- and scenes (the celebrity cameo festival in the middle film would have been a deleted scene in almost ANY other movie because of how little it has to do with the plot and how long it drags on) that should have ended up on the cutting room floor. Hell, one wonders if there even was a cutting room floor.
* Why, ''Guten Tag'', Creator/UweBoll... To pick just one film from his oeuvre, ''Bloodrayne III'' opens with five minutes of stock footage and flashbacks to the first movie, then cuts to shots of moving trains that noticeably repeat, many times. The title character doesn't appear until minute ''ten''. There are two pointless sex scenes and a pointless fight scene that have zero impact on the plot. The movie runs a total of just seventy-eight minutes, and could easily be cut down to half that[[note]]or possibly to under sixty seconds[[/note]] without losing one damn thing.
* Creator/MichaelHaneke has been known to be one of the worst abusers of this trope. He often aims for the NothingIsScarier angle with the [[LeaveTheCameraRunning looooooong static shots where nothing happens]], and in some cases, it succeeds (the static shots of houses in ''Film/{{Cache}}''), but most cases, it just serves to drag the movie out.
** ''Film/{{Cache}}'', aside from the house shots, pretty much is filled to the brim with pointlessly long shots, the worst offenders being one scene where we hear Georges have a conversation with his TV show crew that serves no purpose to the plot whatsoever and a 3-minute long scene where we watch a character undress and go to bed.
** ''Film/FunnyGames''. You could argue that pretty much everything that happens from the death of the protagonists' child to when the killers return could be cut out with no consequence to the plot, however, even still, there's a ''whopping ten minutes'' where the female protagonist struggles to leave a single room.
** ''Film/{{Amour}}'' is also no different, where we are treated to a ten-minute scene of a woman reading a book. This is only one of many scenes to abuse the trope.
* The works of filmmaker Nick Phillips are chock full of padding, to the point where sometimes lines are said twice for no discernible reason. Many of his films, such as ''Crazy Fat Ethel'', ''Death Nurse'' and ''Death Nurse 2'' use common StockFootage from one of his first movies, ''Film/CriminallyInsane'', and ''Death Nurse 2'' features StockFootage from all three previous films. Its predecessor, ''Death Nurse'', also dedicates a lengthy amount of time to showing a character pulling some food out of his fridge and eating it.
* Oh, Creator/RogerCorman. There's a [[AdaptationDistillation reason]] why his original B&W film ''Film/TheLittleShopOfHorrors'' is [[AdaptationDisplacement largely overlooked]]. It didn't ''need'' padding, but got it anyway - whole, superfluous, boring, kitchen sink dialogue scenes of it. His theatrical version of ''Film/ThePitAndThePendulum'' didn't have it, but it needed to be longer for the TV airing - so he grabbed the only available cast member of the film and shot a new opening to act as a FramingDevice.
* ''Film/MackennasGold'': The movie drags on a lot longer than it needs to, such as by having Tibbs needlessly bargain his way into the gang (which goes nowhere), lots of riding through the desert, and some of the more underwhelming fight scenes dragging on.
* ''Film/ThePhantomOfTheOpera2004'' uses the musical's FramingDevice of the opera house first being shown as a ruin - before the chandelier rises above the audience and shows the building restored to its former glory. In the stage version, this opening is there solely to allow any latecomers to get to their seats before the chandelier rises. It's not needed in a film naturally, and the attempts at AdaptationExpansion to make it tie into the story just result in Padding instead.
* Creator/UmbertoEco has an [[http://non-compos-mentis.blogspot.com/2006/11/umberto-eco-how-to-recognize-porn-movie.html essay]] about pornographic films, in which he explains that you can recognize one if it spends a few minutes showing one of the characters going from point A to point B via bus.
* That old '70s-'80s exploitation movie tradition of seeing the characters drive their car... to the location of the scene... park it... step out of the car... walk over to the scene... and repeat the whole process in reverse when they leave.
** Similar to the endless driving montages seen in Mexican ''lucha libre'' films. Cut those out, and a two-hour movie collapses to forty-five minutes.
** Then there's ''Film/TheMexican'', which showed those traditions still hadn't died in the 2000s.
** Creator/QuentinTarantino applied this theory to his ''Film/{{Grindhouse}}'' movie ''Film/DeathProof''. It was widely criticized for having too much dialog and not enough action. Tarantino countered that the film's talkiness is intentionally in the style of grindhouse films that padded out their length with dialogue due to having NoBudget.
[[/folder]]

* ''Literature/LesMiserables'' was abridged for a ''reason'' when it was adapted for [[Theatre/LesMiserables the stage]]. For example, Victor Hugo takes a break from telling us about his protagonists escaping a failed revolution into the sewers to give us the history of the Parisian sewage system. It should be noted that like many 19th Century novelists, his works were originally published in installments for a magazine. He was being paid by the chapter, so there was considerable incentive for him to take his time so long as people were still reading.

* Creator/AnneRice actually mocked herself for this in ''Literature/TheVampireChronicles''. ''Literature/QueenOfTheDamned'' features a character who tried to read the original ''Literature/InterviewWithTheVampire'', but couldn't get past all the lengthy atmospheric descriptions.

* The ''Literature/{{Twilight}}'' books have lots of padding such as Creator/StephenieMeyer describing how beautiful Edward was and how much Bella loved him and the step-by-step descriptions of Bella getting up, brushing her teeth, picking out her clothes, making breakfast for her and Charlie, [[ExaggeratedTrope closing all the pop-up boxes after running her web browser]], etc. The most extreme example of padding was in the second book (''New Moon''), where there are (literally) ten blank pages in the middle of the book. It essentially goes blank when Edward decides he must remove all traces of his life from Bella's.

* ''Literature/NineteenEightyFour'' by Creator/GeorgeOrwell has the infamous "The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism" book that Winston Smith reads. Every word that he reads is written down in the book and takes up two whole chapters. It reveals the true totalitarian nature of the Party in Oceania, but it also brings the plot to a grinding halt.
* Creator/HarryTurtledove has to be the patron saint of this trope. His Literature/Timeline191 series, in which the Confederacy won the Civil War, spans periods from around 20 years after the Civil War, then the timeline's version of World War I to the end of World War II. How bad is it? Three books for World War I, three for the inter-war period, and four books for World War II. Every 5 pages of something important happening is followed by around 30 of NOTHING HAPPENING. Each book is rather thick as well.

* ''Literature/ASongOfIceAndFire'': New Dornish and Ironborn [=POVs=] are introduced in the fourth and fifth books and most are largely unimportant to the main plot. Areo Hotah, Arys Oakheart, and Aeron Greyjoy's chapters, and especially the eight Brienne chapters in ''A Feast for Crows'', which are long sequences of traveling through the Riverlands looking for Sansa have almost no bearing whatsoever on the main plot aside from a bit of character development and world-building. ''A Dance With Dragons'' continues the padding with the Quentyn chapters, which follow the story of a completely inconsequential character whose only point is getting burned by Daenerys' dragons at the end.
* ''Literature/{{Dragaera}}'': Parodied in the books narrated by Paarfi, an author of historical fiction whose writing style is a parody of Alexandre Dumas's paid-by-the-word style. His [[LemonyNarrator eccentric narration]] will spend paragraphs digressing from the plot to explain a narrative device he's about to use, lecture the reader on some pet subect of his, or vent petty grievances against his rivals. Even when he's not intruding, characters will use ten times as many words as necessary in dialogue, bandying formalities back and forth before getting to the point until even the characters themselves tire of it. The forward of ''The Baron of Magister Valley'' includes the most direct example. It's written by a critic who was hired to write a thousand-word critique of Paarfi as an author. He spends the entire forward bitterly complaining about how his initial one-word summary of Paarfi's writing was rejected, and that he has to deliver exactly one thousand words or else he won't get paid.

Padding is a moment in a story which could have easily been removed from the plot without affecting the story significantly.

This is more easily identifiable in television shows than films, as those techniques are influenced by having to hit a specific runtime threshold that can be aired in a defined timeslot. This sometimes involves the use of StockFootage, which allows the producers to pad multiple episodes with a scene they only have to pay to shoot once. In anime this can be easily identified in works adapted from a manga: if a scene wasn't in the original work, it's almost certainly padding. [[ShonenDemographic Shonen]] works especially like to extend existing fight sequences, or add entirely new ones with moves only used in that scene (which don't affect the outcome of the fight, of course, they have a manga to follow!). Digital-only shows, such as ''Series/OrangeIsTheNewBlack'', ''Series/TheBoys2019'' and ''Series/TheMandalorian'' don't have to adhere to this threshold as much, so they can be as long as they want to be; Creator/{{Netflix}}, [[Creator/PrimeVideo Amazon]] and Creator/DisneyPlus don't really care about per-episode runtime, and so these shows largely escape the issue.

* [[TalkingIsAFreeAction Commenting on the fight]]. (Fast-moving ninjas use up the animation budget, but [[ShowDontTell slow-moving ninjas who stop to explain what they would be doing if they weren't standing there explaining what they're doing]], or how the other side has no chance to win, or cutting away to some guys going "this is a really dangerous situation I hope the hero can win!" will help make that 2 minute fight last several episodes. Popular in anime, so they don't [[OvertookTheManga overtake the manga]].)

* ''Anime/ChargemanKen'', despite being in a 10 minutes timeslot, frequently uses this. In addition to the TransformationSequence used every episode, redundant scenes are a common sight. In particular, episode 35 begins with a ShowWithinAShow mostly irrelevant to the plot that lasts for almost a minute, and features an unusually long explosion.

** A major problem ''Anime/DigimonAdventureTri'' has. Outside of the Evolution sequences and fights, much of the movies' time is taken up by the characters angsting, engaging in mundane activities and, in the fifth installment, ''telling scary stories'' while so many plot threads remain unaddressed.

** Whether a scene was padding or not plays into [[SeriousBusiness arguments about characters' power levels]] within the fan community, as often the anime filler features fights, boasts and battle power readings that didn't exist in the original manga the tend to throw out what was previously established, leading to many completely disregarding those scenes for the sake of debate.

* Fans point to the battle against the Hungry Wolf Knights in anime of ''Manga/FairyTail'' during the Grand Magic Games arc as a major offender of this. In the manga the fight is over fairly quickly but the anime spreads it out over four episodes. Nobody bought them as credible antagonists and it clear they were filling time for Natsu and co. while the final event of the games was ongoing, delaying fights people wanted to see and causing ArcFatigue.

* Similarly, the ''Manga/{{Naruto}}'' anime does this when it doesn't just decide to [[InactionSequence fill out episodes with nothing at all]]. For example, when Suigetsu joined Sasuke in the manga they went to the Land of Waves to get [[spoiler:Zabuza's {{BFS}}]] which was right where they expected it to be and it only took up a few pages. But in the anime someone else took it, and the two spend the episode retrieving it, eventually making a game out of it (as well as spending [[RuleOfFunny a rather amusing]] scene in a restaurant). This also serves the purpose of demonstrating Suigetsu's [[NighInvulnerable abilities]] much earlier than in the manga (where he doesn't get to properly demonstrate his power for nearly fifty chapters). The same thing happened with the other two members of their team, but with flashbacks. Earlier in the anime series, during the attempted rescue of Gaara, there were flashbacks to things that had been covered in previous and recent flashbacks, as well as flashbacks to things that had happened five real-time minutes earlier. While this is done in an attempt to not outpace the manga, it gets painful during fight scenes.

* ''Manga/OnePiece'' uses padding for similar reasons to ''Bleach'', often so that each episode covers only a chapter worth of manga material(if not less), and often shows what characters who weren't featured in the original chapter were doing at the time, even if they accomplish nothing significant.
** The 1:1 manga to anime ratio started becoming a regular occurrence when the crew got separated after the Sabaody arc. The animators apparently decided to ditch all attempts at making filler arcs. This is partly because there's no opportunity to insert a random island in the middle of the ocean, the typical way of doing a filler arc.

** During the Wano arc, the initial Gum Gum Sumo Slap clash between Luffy and Urashima where they're stuck in a tug-of-war trying to shove each other's hand, and then flail their arms around trying to stay in the ring after the force of the clash pushed them back, is particularly infamous. Viewers will often point to this as the defining moment that showcases everything wrong with Toei Animation's efforts to drag out the series; turning a brief clash that only takes up a few panels of the manga into a tremendously stretched out sequence in the anime that goes on for several minutes.

* Filler arcs aside, the ''Manga/Reborn2004'' anime falls victim to padding during it's adaptation of the Future Arc. Tsuna and company are stuck in the future for well over a 100 episodes not because the arc in the manga is that long, but because the animators chose to do excessively long recaps at the start of each episode in addition to a 2-3 minute comedy omake at the end of each episode. Add in the openings and endings and you'll get episodes that barely even reach the 10-12 minute mark of new storyline material. Some episodes didn't even truly start until well past the 7 minute mark because the recap was just THAT LONG.

* In ''Manga/{{Saki}}'', this is used InUniverse in ''Saki Biyori''. The girls of Shindouji's mahjong club start a "round robin journal", that members of the club take turns writing in. Hitomi Ezaki, having missed half the mahjong club's meeting because of a ClassRepresentative meeting, is running out of ideas, and decides to fill in the blank space with a "Mister Shindou" mascot character, which eventually becomes the star of a comic strip. ClubPresident Mairu Shirouzu's initial reaction to seeing the drawing of the mascot taking up almost half a page likely mirrors that of many viewers to padding.

* ''Anime/{{Steamboy}}'' has a plot that makes a pretty good point about the role of science in the world and warfare... then pretty much spends about a ''third'' of the movie with the latter, and stretches it out by a good 40 or so minutes. One of the criticisms launched to ''Steamboy'' was the massive EndingFatigue. About a third of the movie is dedicated solely to its action-packed climax. While interesting to watch with all the TechnologyPorn going on, a lot of people started to get bored when one battle lead to another, another machine exploded only for two more to take its place, more and more steam clouds part to reveal more machines joining the battle... the animators and designers ''really'' got a little too carried away.

* ''ComicBook/CerebusTheAardvark'' is the longest work by a single artist in Western literature. Its creator, Dave Sim, set out to write the "longest sustained narrative in human history". In the end, it amounted to a massive 300 issue saga. Unfortunately, Sim only had plot for 200 issues.

* More than half of ''ComicBook/HolyTerror'' is splash pages. Because of this, the pacing is so slow that the plot starts moving during the last third.. To prove this, at page 93 The Fixer says the attack is still beginning.

* ''Franchise/SpiderMan'' comics back in the mid-90s were really bad at this. Among those were ''ComicBook/MaximumCarnage'' (which was 14 parts, compared to the 3 parts the creature's first appearance took) and ''ComicBook/TheCloneSaga'', which was meant to last 6 months and lasted ''two years''. ''Clone Saga'''s problem was due to ExecutiveMeddling -- the Marketing Department noticed how fans were gobbling up the stories and demanded more.
* Quite egregiously in old German translations of ''ComicBook/SpirouAndFantasio''. Since the editors had decided to use a 3x3 panel layout instead of the original 2x3 one, every row had to be expanded by 50%. And how were the additional 50% filled? With random stuff, most often by adding panels of their squirrel commenting the scene, but sometimes by expanding the drawings (by someone who was very obviously not Franquin).

* For much of ''ComicBook/SonicTheHedgehogArchieComics'' early run the back-up stories would frequently be complete filler clearly only present to pad out issues. Frequently they would be totally disconnected from the current plot lines, consisted mainly of lame jokes, and were rarely, if ever, mentioned again. It wasn't until later on (around the "Endgame" arc onwards) that back-up stories started getting consistently used for actually plot-relevant events.

** ''ComicBook/TwoForTheDeathOfOne'' is an eight-issue-long storyline. Four of those issues have Superman fight villains unrelated to his plight, as well as cross over with the ''Omega Men'' and the ''Teen Titans'', and do little to push the main plot forward. Most of it could be cut to fit the few relevant scenes in the remainder issues. It may come across as Marv Wolfman using Superman as a self-promoting vehicle since the Omega Men are his own creations and he was writing ''New Teen Titans'' back then.

* ''ComicStrip/{{Garfield}}'': The sunday comics, are sometimes guilty of this, featuring a gag that could just as easily be done in the usual 3 panels, with everything else just being there to stretch it out to 6 - 7 panels ([[https://www.gocomics.com/garfield/2020/08/02 this one]] being an example).

* ''ComicStrip/{{Luann}}'' dedicated a full 3 weeks to a story about Mr Fogarty retiring, though he's a minor character at best. Included in the strips were links to old "Fogarty Flashbacks" and old panels that had the unintentional effect of showing exactly how one-note he was ([[CreatorsPet though the author has stated Fogarty was his personal favorite, and was his first choice as main character of a comic strip]]). Contrast that with the 2 weeks given to Luann's prom.

* ''WebAnimation/DoubleRainboom'' was first envisioned as standard-length fan episode of ''WesternAnimation/MyLittlePonyFriendshipIsMagic''. Unfortunately, the project's director made it as his final project for animation school, and said that the project had to be a minimum length of 30 minutes, while the episode script was intended to be a 22-minute episode. In the end, this trope ensued.

** Aside from padding in-chapters, Mykan seems to have an obsession with writing 26 episodes per-season, which leads to many episodes where nothing advances the plot. The biggest offenders are in ''My Brave Pony: Star Fleet Magic II''.

* The Hungarian animated movie ''Animation/CatCity'' has an expository MusicVideo (3 and a half minutes), a mouse performing a trumpet solo (3 minutes, though this one at least impacts the story), a cat lady singing (1 minute 40 seconds), [[LeaveTheCameraRunning and characters engaging in the mundane acts of walking slowly, sitting into cars and driving off, reading and turning pages]], as well as stretching out almost every conversation to its maximum length, and making long, seemingly plot-relevant buildups to relatively weak throwaway gags or other kinds of disappointing payoffs. And though most of the film plays out in this excruciatingly slow, sleepy pace, the ending still feels downplayed and rushed. However, a lot of fans do consider the musical bits the movie's high points.

* You could cut out 50% of ''WesternAnimation/RapsittieStreetKidsBelieveInSanta'', a 40 minute special, and still be left with the basic plot, which is about 10 minutes long.

* The {{Found Footage Film|s}} ''Film/AlienAbductionIncidentInLakeCounty'''s first draft of the script was only forty-five minutes. WordOfGod is that he hurriedly wrote "about twenty new scenes" in four days to pad it out to ninety minutes. Showing that this is not always a bad thing, one of them the aliens screwing with the household appliances - one of the film's most memorable moments. Other examples are the aliens somehow influencing two members of separate couples to make out under the belief they're kissing their actual partner, and Tommy giving a confessional to the camera.

* ''Film/AvatarTheWayOfWater'' runs half an hour longer than [[Film/{{Avatar}} the original]], reaching the three hour mark. Mostly it's ShootTheMoney showcasing the impressively realistic alien world and the newfanged underwater scenes, with [[https://www.polygon.com/23507357/avatar-way-water-when-to-pee-bathroom-times-scenes articles]] [[https://noguiltfangirl.com/when-can-you-pee-during-avatar-the-way-of-water/ soon]] [[https://comicbook.com/movies/news/avatar-2-way-water-when-best-time-bathroom-break-pee-explained/ appearing]] warning when those without a BladderOfSteel could go to the bathroom and not lose parts that actually advanced the plot.

* ''{{Film/Carrie 2002}}'' is a MadeForTVMovie of Stephen King's novel, and had to increase the running time to fit a three hour broadcast (minus commercials it's only a 133 minute run time). Additional scenes include Sue meeting Carrie at the mall and trying to be nice to her, Chris antagonising Carrie when she finds her using Miss Desjardin's phone, some commentary on religion by both Sue and Carrie, a scene of Chris's father trying to sue the school (which to be fair is in the book as well) and a sequence of Carrie going into a trance and losing control of her powers in class (which is mild {{Foreshadowing}} for the prom disaster). Writer Bryan Fuller even said it could use forty minutes cut from it.
* ''Film/DarlingLili'' was padded to be as long as the other lavish big budget musicals that were slowly falling out of favor in Hollywood at the time. These include some extended comedy gags, musical numbers that run well over three minutes, dating montages between Lili and Bill, lengthy aerial dogfights (which was a case of ShootTheMoney as these were the most expensive scenes to film) and most egregiously a random scene of Bill and Lili running into a chorus of French schoolgirls and joining them singing. Blake Edwards recut the film in the 90s and dropped 29 minutes of footage from it.

** After the shootout at Candyland, Django has to talk a group of Australians into helping him before we go straight to the climax. According to WordOfGod, the shootout was the original ending, but this part was added on to make it less formulaic.

* The public information film, ''Film/TheFinishingLine'' has this during the final task which all children cross the railroad tunnel. The camera films ALL the children walking into the tunnel passing by the camera and even leave it running filming nothing for a good number of seconds after last child passed by. This padded scene lasted about a minute.

** There's an out of nowhere sequence where Alice discovers a snake in her cabin, and the other counsellors band together to kill it. To be charitable, it might trick the audience into thinking Bill is TheHero and Alice is more fragile, to prop up the tension when Alice is the one left alone with the killer, but the sequence wasn't in the script and thought up on the spot by make-up artist Tom Savini.
** Jack and Marcy have a conversation by the lake, where the latter starts talking about her frequent nightmares; one ominous dream has her describing rain turning to blood. It seems like a flimsy attempt at a 'character moment' and does little to foreshadow that anything bad is going to happen, since Annie has already been killed and the scene began with Ned following a mysterious stranger into a cabin.

--> '''Crow:''' [[FromBadToWorse THERE'S GONNA BE]] [[Film/LostContinent ROCK CLIMBING!!]] AAAAAH!

* The second Film/JuOn film made, ''Ju-On: the Curse 2'', begins it's 80 minute runtime with a 25 minute recap of the events of the first film.
* ''Film/JurassicWorldDominion'': A major and frequent criticism of the film is just how superfluous most of the dinosaur scenes are to the overall story, sometimes described as though it were an unrelated movie script that had several dinosaur scenes awkwardly pasted in at random intervals in order to make it into a ''Franchise/JurassicPark'' movie. Most of the dinosaur scenes could be cut without affecting the plot, but then the movie would only be about half as long [[JustHereForGodzilla and far less people would care to watch it]].

** The grandmother and her granddaughter trick the {{Jerkass}} of a son that he's won the lottery via use of a recording of that week's broadcast. It was foreshadowed when the children's surprise home rennovation included a TV that could do that, but it puts the plot on hold for five minutes. Given that the son was played by Pat Shortt, the only other name in the cast besides Fionnuala Flanagan as the grandmother, it may have been to pad his screen time out.

** One odd scene from the middle of the party lasts only a few moments, and is just a shot of the city with the theme music playing. It has no bearing on anything, and might have been used just to denote that time had passed.

* ''Film/ShandraTheJungleGirl'' has two longish scenes that could be removed without affecting the plot in anyway. The first where Karen sits in her bath watching a JiggleShow on television. The second is where Shandra goes to the strip club in search of a victim and there is an entire [[YouCanleaveYourHatOn striptease act]] shown before she attacks the fat patron outside.

* ''Film/SleepyHollowHigh'' contains countless close-up shots a creek that serve no purpose beyond extending the running time.

* Among its many sins is the fact that the already short run time of ''Film/ATalkingCat'' is blatantly padded out with random scenery interludes, set to execrable and repetative music.

* Creator/JuddApatow has made a career out of this. Many of his movies (produced or directed) run over two hours (rare for the comedy genre) and as a result will feature many things that could have easily been cut. A prime offender is ''Film/FunnyPeople'', which pads its near 150 minute run time with many celebrity cameos and an additional thirty-minute subplot after the main revelation [[spoiler:that Adam Sandler's cancer has gone into remission]]. Supposedly, the film's extended versions are even worse. It's not even the storyline mentioned above that's the most annoying part, that actually makes some sense, it's several useless storylines - namely the entire subplot involving Creator/SethRogen's love interest as well as his roommate's sitcom career- and scenes (the celebrity cameo festival in the middle film would have been a deleted scene in almost ANY other movie because of how little it has to do with the plot and how long it drags on) that should have ended up on the cutting room floor. Hell, one wonders if there even was a cutting room floor.

* Creator/MichaelHaneke has been known to be one of the worst abusers of this trope. He often aims for the NothingIsScarier angle with the [[LeaveTheCameraRunning looooooong static shots where nothing happens]], and in some cases it succeeds (the static shots of houses in ''Film/{{Cache}}''), but most cases it just serves to drag the movie out.
** ''Film/{{Cache}}'', aside from the house shots, pretty much is filled to the brim with pointlessly long shots, the worst offenders being one scene where we hear Georges have a conversation with his TV show crew that serves no purpose to the plot whatsoever, and a 3 minute long scene where we watch a character undress and go to bed.

** ''Film/{{Amour}}'' is also no different, where we are treated to a ten minute scene of a woman reading a book. This is only one of many scenes to abuse the trope.

* ''Film/MackennasGold'': The movie drags on a lot longer than it needs to, such as by having Tibbs needlessly bargain his his way into the gang (which goes nowhere), lots of riding through the desert, and some of the more underwhelming fight scenes dragging on.

** Similar to the endless driving montages seen in Mexican ''lucha libre'' films. Cut those out, and a two hour movie collapses to forty-five minutes.

* Speaking of ''Series/AmericanGladiators'', one of their favorite padding techniques is interviewing each contestant before ''each'' challenge and the winner after said challenges. As an episode will have 4 contestants, and, including the eliminator, about 4 events ''per pair'' of contestants, this adds up to at least 32 interviews. Assuming these interviews are merely a short 45 seconds long (Enough for 1-3 questions) and not including each contestant's intro at the beginning of the episode (which can run from 1 to 2 minutes each) or interviews with the actual gladiators; that padding can count for almost 24 min of a 42 minute ''American Gladiators'' episode's airtime. To put this in perspective, 24 minute is the average run time, without commercials, of a normal half-hour show - meaning the difference between a half hour show and an hour-long episode of American Gladiator is entirely made of padding. These interviews end up being very redundant (how many different ways can a person say "I'll try my best" or "Yeah I'm going to win!"). Note also that said padding served another important purpose in the newest iteration of the show: they gave celebrity host Wrestling/HulkHogan and Laila Ali screentime.

** If the contestants were allowed (and smart enough), they could rapid fire their way through all the cases and ignore the banker, cutting their time down to [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hmZFHjQfx-o less than two minutes]]--and there would be an absolutely ''absurd'' amount of grand prize winners, which is why this isn't allowed. (Interestingly enough, however, something not all that dissimilar to that format has been adopted for online versions of the game.)
** Other than ''Deal'', every other hour long ''[[WhoWantsToBeWhoWantsToBeAMillionaire Millionaire]]''-[[WhoWantsToBeWhoWantsToBeAMillionaire wannabe]] game show born after followed this with the inclusion of CommercialBreakCliffhanger.

* ''Series/Jeopardy'' typically averts this, with 20 minute episodes devoted almost completely to clues. However, the 2022 Celebrity Jeopardy tournament had 45 minute episodes, and even adding a Triple Jeopardy round couldn't fill out the bloated runtime. To compensate, a second contestant interview was added (and both interviews were typically much longer than on the proper show), and the contestants were allowed to interject, mug for the camera, and exchange [[WittyBanter "witty" banter]] with [[Creator/MayimBialik Mayim]] and each other after virtually every clue.

* A short game show series called ''Series/TheMillionPoundDrop'' that aired live every night for its five episode run was bad with this, dragging out some of the answer reveals out, or just having one door open up to reveal the wrong answer. The worst offence was in the final episode though. As it was a live show, they could not prematurely end the game of the last contestants playing, and on their final question, after they had confirmed their answer, they decided to cut to a commercial break. After the break, the answer was revealed to be wrong, and the credits rolled. Seriously, what was the bloody point of that commercial break if they had given the wrong answer? It kind of makes you wonder if Channel 4 wanted to push back their schedule for the night. Made worse because the host (Davina [=McCall=]) will hurry the contestants if they take more than thirty seconds deciding which category to choose - only to take five minutes giving the answer. This format was later adopted as ''Series/MillionDollarMoneyDrop'' for the United States on FOX, and it's just as bad, if not worse. They got through 13 questions on the ''2-hour'' premiere. Thankfully, from season two onward of the original series, the padding has mostly disappeared, with them getting through many more teams in a single show and being far better about not dragging out the reveals. Now, they usually have more than one door (often all three of them) drop at once, or have all three wrong answers drop in quick succession.

** During its early runs, ''Millionaire'' got real bad when stalling contestants dragged out the show. When they got to the harder questions, they would take 5, 10 minutes or more before making their final answer or using a lifeline. Usually, most contestants would stall some more after their lifeline was used in order to think over the results. It was almost as if the contestants were told to stall increasingly as the question value increases, to improve the chances that a channel surfer will randomly wander into a high-paying question. From 2008 to 2010, the American ''Millionaire'' added a time limit to each question, forcing contestants to answer quickly. Harder questions have a longer time limit. Answering questions quickly as you could would add to the clock for the million dollar question so contestants could take longer on the final round. The addition of the timer was most likely added to speed up the game so it would allow more new people to enter the hot seat.

** Worse in the Japanese version. After locking in your answer on a difficult struggling question, you have to wait for the host to respond while he intimidatingly stares at you over a minute or less and sometimes a [[CommercialBreakCliffhanger commercial break]] shows up unannounced. This is practiced because the show never continues where it left off. It helps, like many Japanese game shows, that they fast forward a few questions leaving only the "final answer" part to accelerate the show.

* Some game shows can be pretty bad at this. Usually not the fault of the producers, but due to various factors, such as stalling contestants who take several minutes to make a decision, or a game cut short because of a decisive game that took quicker than expected. In the latter instance, it is because either because the winner was so dominant or the losing contestant fell far enough behind that, because he could no longer catch the leader with the remaining questions, the game was ended early (presumably because to play the game further would serve no purpose and to avoid further embarrassment of the loser). Examples include ''Series/{{Pyramid}}'' and ''Series/MatchGame''.

* TV talent show results. Actually announcing who's being kicked off that week takes less than a minute. The results show can be up to an ''hour'', most of which is filled with unnecessary suspense building or flashbacks to contestant's performances last night. As the season goes on, the padding will inevitably get worse as they start to run out of acts to kill time with.

* ''Literature/CharlieAndTheChocolateFactory'' has a good deal of NarrativeFiligree that manages to be funny and/or world-building -- the Oompa-Loompa songs, the trips through the corridors and passing mentions of what's in the rooms that the tour group ''doesn't'' visit, etc. But the "Square Sweets That Look Round" chapter pushes things, as it takes several paragraphs to deliver a simple, silly punchline. (Only [[Theatre/CharlieAndTheChocolateFactory one major adaptation]] mentions them, for a passing sight gag.) The sequel ''Literature/CharlieAndTheGreatGlassElevator'' falls headlong into this territory with the scenes set in the White House in the first half, which are funny but contribute little to the plot.
* ''Literature/TheCuriousIncidentOfTheDogInTheNightTime'' has a ''lot'' of this, due to the narrator's autism. Two of the strangest examples include an irrelevant chapter about atheism and belief in the supernatural, and a chapter about an ad for a trip to Malaysia.

** The series would have been a hell of a lot shorter if the author cut out all of the descriptions of Christian being amazingly beautiful, and the needless recaps to things that happened as short as a chapter ago.

** Half of the sex scenes could have been cut, due to them being interchangeable, written identically and barely making a difference to the flow of events or characters.

* ''Literature/LandOfOz'': This became a problem in the sequels to ''Literature/TheWonderfulWizardOfOz''. That book itself had a chapter featuring a WackyWaysideTribe of people made of china; a harmless diversion in the plot that only lasted one chapter and was never mentioned again afterwards, but it would turn out to be a FranchiseOriginalSin. Creator/LFrankBaum was writing Oz sequels basically against his will, forced to write book after book due to poor sales of his other books and failed business ventures. So gimmicky Wacky Wayside Tribes became a fixture in the books, most notoriously in ''Literature/TheRoadToOz'', a book with practically nothing more to the plot. Once it became clear to Baum that he was stuck with the series, he started to put a bit more effort into the plots, and relied on padding less in his final few books. Then he died, and the series was passed onto a new author, Creator/RuthPlumlyThompson, who absolutely loved using the WackyWaysideTribe trope as padding. Later books in the series by other authors normally don’t use padding too heavily, but it’s practically a tradition to have one or two WackyWaysideTribe chapters.

* Louisa May Alcott, like many authors of her time, wrote ''Literature/LittleWomen'' to be published in installments in a magazine, so each chunk of the story was structured in an episodic fashion. Every so often you get a chapter which has little to nothing to do with advancing the story, and more to do with a lovely picnic gone comically awry or some such thing. Somewhat peculiar, to the reader who is more used to reading novels written as novels.
* ''Literature/TheLordOfTheRings'' features lots of long traveling sequences in which the characters do little but walk, eat and make camp. The series is also well-known for its many descriptions of the surrounding countryside.

* This is a common criticism of the late Discworld novel ''Literature/RaisingSteam'', with regular meanderings to get opinions/views from characters who have absolutely no impact on the actual plot; ie, the Unseen University wizards taking a leisurely pleasure-ride on the newly invented steam engine. Adora Belle Dearheart is the focus of one that subjects her character to ContinuityDrift in the bargain.

* ''Literature/SilasMarner'' involves an older man finding an abandoned child after his wealth is stolen and the father of said child not claiming her to keep up appearances. Doesn't sound too bad until you see pages upon pages of the characters trying to decide what to do with this girl. After about two hundred pages, there is a second part about how the girl has grown into practically a PuritySue and chooses to stay by her adoptive father's side when her biological father wants to adopt her. The whole thing is padded, taking a mildly interesting short story and turning it into a dreadfully boring story. Due to the book's age and the author being female during a time where women weren't authors, the book is considered a classic much to English classes' chagrin.

** Just cutting out the sometimes pages-long descriptions of a dress that is purchased, folded, put into a backpack or trunk and ''never mentioned again'' would knock off at least two of the dozen books, and yanking out all the 'Nynaeve yanks her braid' character tics would kill off at least one, possibly two more.

* ''Literature/ASongOfIceAndFire'': New Dornish and Ironborn [=POVs=] are introduced in the fourth and fifth books and most are largely unimportant to the main plot. Areo Hotah, Arys Oakheart and Aeron Greyjoy's chapters and especially the eight Brienne chapters in ''A Feast for Crows'', which are long sequences of traveling through the Riverlands looking for Sansa have almost no bearing whatsoever to the main plot aside from a bit of character development and world-building. ''A Dance With Dragons'' continues the padding with the Quentyn chapters, which follow the story of a completely inconsequential character whose only point is getting burned by Daenerys' dragons at the end.

* Unrelated to the programmes themselves, in the past it was sometimes necessary to use some form of padding to fill in the time between TV programmes, or during commercial breaks when nothing was on. Creator/TheBBC used to do this back in the day with "interlude films" such as the [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p-wmbM6EpZU "Potter's Wheel"]] to cover intervals during televised plays and [[WeAreExperiencingTechnicalDifficulties breakdowns in transmission]], frequent during the days of live broadcasts. Breaks in programming, especially in the days before daytime TV, would be filled in by "trade test transmissions" -- usually just the test card (sometimes with music), though during the days of early colour transmissions, [[http://www.bvws.org.uk/405alive/info/prog_tradefilms.html short test films]] would be used instead, and by TheEighties, pages from the broadcaster's teletext service. Channel 4 used "break fillers" like [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V1tqeRKLBMk this]] when they couldn't sell advertising space.

** Often suffered by the Classic series, especially in the earlier years when stories would sometimes run for six or seven (and in [[Recap/DoctorWhoS3E4TheDaleksMasterPlan one notable instance]] twelve) episodes, but also with the more standard four-parters; the stereotypical third part episode would involve the regulars, having been captured or imprisoned at the end of the previous episode, breaking free and spending a lot of time running up and down corridors before being recaptured at the end. In some of the worst cases from the Creator/JonPertwee era, entire episodes are given over to a 25 minute chase sequence which doesn't advance the plot ''at all''. Particularly painful padding in the classic series is the long shots of characters turning knobs and levers ever so slowly, or lingering on them making tea (or doing something equally mundane) just a bit longer than necessary. Notably, the amount of padding in each story does not necessarily increase with the number of episodes. While one story may have a rather thin plot stretched out to fill four episodes, another may have an incredibly dense plot that barely fits in [[Recap/DoctorWhoS6E7TheWarGames the ten episodes it spans]].

** The first episode of "[[Recap/DoctorWhoS6E2TheMindRobber The Mind Robber]]" was hastily assembled to extend a four-episode story to five episodes. It lacks a credited writer, as it was devised on-set by the director, prop department and actors.

** The final episode of "[[Recap/DoctorWhoS18E2Meglos Meglos]]" was underrunning heavily and the budget was tight due to the previous serial ("[[Recap/DoctorWhoS18E1TheLeisureHive The Leisure Hive]]") going vastly overbudget. The cliffhanger recap is very long, and the rest is heavily drawn out. The end credits were even ''slowed down'' in order to extend the runtime a crucial few seconds (meaning, for the music snobs, the end credits are in E minor like the original theme instead of the F# minor the Howell arrangement usually is in). Even ''after'' all of that, it was still significantly short, and ended up going out in a 20-minute slot.
** "[[Recap/DoctorWhoS6E7TheWarGames The War Games]]" just goes on, and on, and on, because it had to take up the space of a six-part serial ''and'' a four-part serial and its writers were [[WritingByTheSeatOfYourPants pretty much writing as they were going along]]. Every time they start wrapping up plots, they add in another bunch of historical soldiers to incorporate. And, since the very end of the story is [[OutsideContextProblem the Time Lords showing up and breaking the plot]], a lot of it is a ShaggyDogStory.

** The capture-escape-recapture technique shows up as recently as "[[Recap/DoctorWhoS30E17E18TheEndOfTime The End of Time]]". At the start of episode 2, the Doctor is a prisoner of the Master, who is about to put his evil plan into action. The cliffhanger is resolved when he is rescued, but after twenty minutes on the run he's back exactly where he started, with the Master about to put his ''next'' evil plan into action.

** "[[Recap/DoctorWhoS31E4TheTimeOfAngels The Time of Angels]]", a Matt Smith-era story, was underrunning by five minutes, so Creator/StevenMoffat added in a five-minute long sequence of the characters being funny in the TARDIS. This included a sequence where River launches the TARDIS without it making the sound, and when the Doctor asks how she could do that, she claims it's because the Doctor leaves the brakes on. It [[FanDislikedExplanation throws up all sorts of continuity problems and made a lot of fans angry]]. Moffat responded to the backlash by saying he just wrote it because it was a funny line, didn't think much about it and [[{{MST3K Mantra}} suggests you should really just relax]], but says he thinks that River was lying to [[{{Troll}} provoke him]].
* ''Series/TheElectricCompany1971'' and ''Series/SesameStreet'': Both Children's Television Workshop programs adjusted the length of the corporate credits plug ("The Electric Company"/"Sesame Street" is a production of... the Children's Television Workshop) depending on the length of the segments in the given episode. This wasn't noticed so much on ''Sesame Street'' except on Friday shows, when the ending theme began in progress at different points in the show to play over the extended credits. On ''The Electric Company'', the show's theme for that season would begin in progress and took anywhere from 15 to 45 seconds (of a song that took around 1 minute, 10 seconds to play), meaning that on one show the individual corporate sponsor names would flash by very quickly (sometimes two seconds or less) and be shown for seven or eight seconds on the next.

** Season 7 began to really suffer from padding, especially as the writers were artificially trying to stretch out the conflict between Cersei and Daenerys for a whole season. In the finale episode of Season 7 this is especially bad. It takes 10 minutes for the characters to walk to the Dragonpit and sit themselves in place, then another few minutes before anything of value gets said in the meeting. This is especially bad as the episode was already much longer then the usual episodes and really didn't need to be padded out.
** The last episode of Season 8 in particular is an all-time low for the amount of dialogue spoken in an episode. It is packed with long and slow scenes of characters walking, character reaction shots and sweeping pans of Kingslanding. It's quite egregious as it's also meant to be the episode that wraps up 8 seasons worth of epic fantasy plot.

* ''Series/HellsKitchen'' can, will and have used 10 minutes of opening summaries, teasers for the upcoming season and looking back at previous seasons, out of a 42 minute show. Even if that is not an everyday occurance, five minutes is about the norm.

* ''Franchise/KamenRider'', at least the Neo-Heisei era, tackles this in an egregious way. Take your basic MonsterOfTheWeek plot, usual tropes and all, but drag it out to two episodes, often with the first part ending on the first confrontation with the monster and the defeat of the hero and leave the rest to the second. [[Administrivia/TropesAreTools Some Kamen Rider shows managed to pull this off well]], expanding on some of the story elements that would have otherwise been glossed over if it was in one episode. However, [[DependingOnTheWriter if the writer isn't skilled enough]], [[Administrivia/TropesAreTools it could lead to problems]], such as [[HalfArcSeason minimizing the plot of the show to fit just half the season and make everything else]] {{filler}} or having monsters that would have been killed easily had it not been for a last minute plot twist or ConflictBall.

** Also at the end of one of the third-season episodes, there is 2-minutes worth of footage of a single piece of seashore. About half-way through, Creator/JohnCleese walks in wearing a conquistador's uniform, and [[LampshadeHanging lampshades it]] by pointing out that they in fact did not have enough material to fill the remaining time, and that there really are no more jokes to stick around for. ''There aren't''.

* Famously on ''Series/{{SCTV}}'', when they transferred from private network CTV to public CBC they were given an extra two minutes commercial-free, but told the content had to be "recognisably Canadian". Miffed, they put in a piece which just showed two losers inanely bickering- and the Mackenzie brothers boomed to stardom.

* Most series of ''Franchise/SuperSentai'' and its adaptation ''Franchise/PowerRangers'' live on this trope. To fill up for time, almost ever episode features {{Transformation Sequence}}s, the [[InTheNameOfTheMoon roll call]], the [[SuperSentaiStance sentai pose]], the combining weapons into a blaster, the summoning the HumongousMecha, and the formation of the CombiningMecha. It's the use of all this stock footage over and over that kept the budget low and kept the show on the air for nearly 20 years in America and more than 40 years in Japan.

* The {{UsefulNotes/Supermarionation}} series, ''Series/{{Thunderbirds}}'' is a positive example of this when Lew Grade ordered the series be made with hour long episodes. To do, the Andersons had to pad out many of the early episodes with character asides and plot twists, which gave the series a newfound narrative sophistication that made it a cult hit.
* ''Series/TwentyFour'' had a particularly bad rap for this. Because the writers [[TheChrisCarterEffect didn't often plan the season in advance]] they would often have scenes in earlier episodes that could be expanded on, but would later be abruptly dropped. As a result, the viewers would get a fair amount of extraneous scenes that didn't advance the plot, or worse, would re-iterate what the audience already knew. Worst case scenario, the show would pull an illogical plot twist to keep the terrorist plot going for a full 24 hours, making the entire rest of the season padding to fill out the 24 episode order. In fact, "Live Another Day" is generally considered one of the better seasons, if for no other reason than it's the only season that is free of any padding.
* Each of the Marvel Netflix show seasons has often run into accusations of being padded to fit the 13 episode order. While the first season of ''Series/{{Daredevil|2015}}'' avoided this, the first seasons of ''Series/{{Jessica Jones|2015}}'', ''Series/{{Luke Cage|2016}}'', ''Series/{{Iron Fist|2017}}'' and ''Series/{{The Punisher|2017}}'' had bigger issues with this.

* Wrestling is known for several hour long shows that are more full of backstage sequences and storylines than matches. It is also common to pad shows out with references to upcoming matches and replay cameras. Usually these are done to advertise for bigger, more important shows like pay-per-views but on pay-per-views they have been known to have bands perform live as well. The complete absurdity of doing this sort of thing is part of the reason why Wrestling/{{WCW}} went down.

* WWE has a habit of using their {{B show}}s to play recaps of the A show (RAW). Sometimes this just amounts to a minute worth of highlights with new commentary but other times they will repeat entire matches or long segments consisting of nothing but talking. Occasionally they don't even try and they just stick in a random 'from the vault' match from years earlier. The less important shows leading up to a major event like Wrestlemania can end up as almost 100% padding.

* At the time of its inception, Wrestling/RingOfHonor videos and [=DVD=]s were praised for trimming parts of the promos, brawls, entrances and everything else that weren't wrestling matches. When ROH started doing Internet Pay Per View, Ring Of Honor was criticized for going too long with intermissions. The intermission's purpose, ironically, was to give the live audience time to catch their breath, use the bathroom and or [[MerchandiseDriven buy merchandise]], more so than for stretching out the length of the show for the sake of it.
* Concerts or other musical acts are often inserted into live [=PPVs=] that are commercial free. Those who aren't fans of the artist performing usually use this as a chance to take a bathroom break or go to the concession stand.

* ''Radio/AmericanCountryCountdown'': Similar to ''[=AT40=]'', except that the host rarely if ever gave an end-of-hour recap, instead relying on "extras" to pad things out. The show has its own version of the Long Distance Dedication, and uses other features such as a top 3 listing of Mediabase's country downloads chart and the "Live Like You Were Dying" segment (where a listener shares his inspirational/beating the odds story).

* Copious padding is pretty much the only way to hold on to the subject in ''Radio/JustAMinute''. Contestants will also tend to say any old rubbish to pad out the time if there's a second or two to go, since the clock is sure to save them before anyone can make a challenge for deviation.

** J.M. Barrie invented several front-cloth scenes to allow for set changes in his various rewrites of the play ''Theatre/{{Peter Pan|1904}}'': for example, a scene of Hook impersonating various actors and a scene after the final pirate battle in which Starkey and Smee are shown to have survived. Notably, the "Mermaid's Lagoon" segment was conceived as a similar transition scene, but turned into a major plot point explaining why Tiger Lily becomes Peter's ally. (In earlier versions, Tiger Lily sides with Peter because she and her braves like to listen in on Wendy's stories.)

** ''Theatre/CharlieAndTheChocolateFactory'' is a modern example -- in the original West End production, each major room sequence was preceded by a front-of-curtain scene. The first doubled as the Act Two opener as Mr. Wonka formally greets each of the guests with the song "Strike That! Reverse It!", while the other four were shorter, song-free stretches all based around them proceeding from one room to another in various fashions (bucket-and-pulley elevator, boat ride, etc.). In the third front-of-curtain scene, Mr. Wonka leds the guests down a lengthy set of corridors to reach a room that's ''right next to'' the one they just left. Granted, ''very'' similar padding appears in the original novel (see Literature above). The Broadway/touring {{Retool}} actually made matters ''worse'' in this regard because 1) the sets are not nearly as elaborate, 2) the third transitional scene involving a maze VisibleToBelievers stretches on for a good '''five minutes''' and turns out to be something of a shaggy dog story when Grandpa Joe can't get through the exit door and everybody has to make their way back to where they started, and 3) one new song, "When Willy Met Oompa", is just a {{Backstory}} number that sublimates the plot-important transformation and demise of Violet Beauregarde (in the London version, "Juicy!", which foregrounded said disaster, had this spot).

* ''Webcomic/EightBitTheater'' has a lot of this. First, there are episodes with practically only dialogues (but being an RPG spoof, [[TalkingIsAFreeAction people talking too much]] was obligatory). Then, the webcomic is running since 2001, has over 1000 episodes, and only now is reaching the end of ''VideoGame/FinalFantasyI'', due all the Padding (which included storylines not in the game [[WackyWaysideTribe and with no plot relevance]]). Fortunately, the padding is [[RuleOfFunny usually funny enough]] that [[Administrivia/TropesAreTools it's not a problem]].

* The National Novel Writer Month arc of ''Helpdesk'' had the guy trying to write a 40,000 word short story in 30 days catch up after falling behind schedule by adding a time loop to the story, which basically meant that he copy-pasted the same chapter into his story five times. And after his story with a DownerEnding was complete, he discovered that he only wrote 39,994 words, so he added "And they lived happily ever after" to the ending.

* Nick Phillips' gratuitous use of padding is parodied in WebVideo/TheCinemaSnob's review of ''[[http://thecinemasnob.com/2010/02/20/death-nurse.aspx Death Nurse 2]]'' in a PreviouslyOn segment where the Snob eats some leftover chinese food to kill screen time, and concedes that it's basically ''Death Nurse'' in a nutshell.
* Many [=YouTube=] videos may deliberately pad out the length in various ways in order to reach the 10 minute mark and monetize the video.

** In the ''Film/{{Unbreakable}}'' pitch meeting, the Screenwriter says that if the Producer wants to make the movie last longer than ten minutes, they'll have to resort to this trope. This includes adding shots of characters staring, inserting long dramatic pauses into dialogue, having characters take a long time to explain things and making David slow to realize that he's never taken a sick day before

** The most imfamous example was the inclusion of a three-minute Music/ConwayTwitty music video in "[[Recap/FamilyGuyS7E9TheJuiceIsLoose The Juice is Loose]]".
** "The Father, the Son, & the Holy Fonz" includes a very lengthy sequence in which Peter, Brian, and Francis just have a SeinfeldianConversation badmouthing Music/{{Madonna}}. The audio commentary admitted this was done because the episode was short.

** "[[Recap/FamilyGuyS7E7OceansThreeAndAHalf Ocean's Three and a Half]]", which aired in the wake of Creator/ChristianBale's rant at a ''Film/TerminatorSalvation'' crewmember going viral, included the audio of the rant with Peter's voice dubbed into it and with a simple animation of a tape player to accompany it. Like the bonus clip from "Brian and Stewie", it too was deleted on all subsequent airings and home releases. Website/PlatypusComix notes on that scene, "the cutaway won't make any sense in a few years, and it was shoved into an episode that already had a three-minute Stewie music video. Even for ''Family Guy'', that's some terrible pacing." The scene can be viewed alongside some other rare TV moments [[http://www.platypuscomix.net/hollywood/rarestuff.html here,]] though it's missing the dialogue setting it up -- in the original airing, while going over his plan to rob the Pewterschmidt mansion of potentially $40 million, Peter says, "Look, I'll be honest with you. My father-in-law has treated me like crap... for 20 years, and it's time for a little payback. I tell you, he's treated me worse than that jerk Christian Bale did." In the wide-release version, after Peter says that it's time for payback, Quagmire speaks up and imagines making an action b-movie with his share of the heist money.

** A lot of Percy and Anastasia's conversations, especially in the later episodes where entire scenes consist of them arguring for a good solid minute or more. "Blow Job" takes a coversation and uses it as the opening to the episode, which goes on for '''2 minutes and 36 seconds''' before the plot even starts.

-->'''Percy''': Jesus, it's like this conversation has no purpose and is just some cheap excuse to fill time.
-->'''Anastasia''': Well, why the hell would we do that?
-->'''Percy''': I don't know, but I will tell you what I ''do'' know. Anytime I gotta do somethin' I don't fuckin' wanna do, you can bet your fat ass some dumb cocksucker somewhere is makin' fuckin' money off it.

** The "[[OverlyLongGag Rake Scene]]" in the episode "[[Recap/TheSimpsonsS5E2CapeFeare Cape Feare]]". The crew even admitted to padding here. It was ''supposed'' to be just one rake: [[ThrowItIn the writers decided to loop Bob's "nhrghghrh" over and over and make it about fifteen rakes when they realized they still needed to fill up time.]] This actually made the scene about ten times funnier than it would've been with just one rake. The longer than average couch gag and the inclusion of an [[ShowWithinAShow Itchy & Scratchy cartoon]] were also to eat up time. Despite all that, the episode was still running short. Even Sideshow Bob's performing the libretto to ''Theatre/HMSPinafore'', one of the episode's signature scenes, was padded with extra visual gags.

* The [[WesternAnimation/SpiderMan1967 Spider-Man]] cartoon from the 1960's was loaded with lengthy padding shots of Spidey swinging across New York for several minutes at a time, especially in the second and third seasons, where the budget had been cut immensely and the stories were now 21 minutes long instead of two 10 minute episodes. It should be noted that these seasons were made by the same people who did Rocket Robin Hood, mentioned above.

** In "The Masterpiece," there is a sequence of [=SpongeBob=] revving up the grill, slicing cheese, opening the restaurant, and Squidward watching a soap opera before Mr. Krabs sees the Sea Chicken Shack commercial that sets the plot in motion. There's then a scene of [=SpongeBob=] showing off his spy gadgets to Mr. Krabs, even though he only uses one of them. And ''then'' there's a scene of [=SpongeBob=] inside the Sea Chicken Shack before getting kicked out and noticing the statue that gives Mr. Krabs an idea to build his own. There's minutes of mundane conversation before Squidward agrees to building the statue. Not helping is that the episode has {{Overly Long Gag}}s throughout ([=SpongeBob=] going "oh!" and raising his hand, Krabs pacing around looking for an artist).

** "The Executive Treatment" starts Patrick going to the Krusty Krab, Krabs verifying that his money is legit, him waiting in line and hearing about a sandwich, then he and Squidward having a tedious conversation about it. It takes almost four minutes for Patrick to arrive at the office that he spends the rest of the episode in, and the plot is so simple (Patrick wants a popular sandwich that's only for business executives) that it really shouldn't take that long to set up.

** An InUniverse example occurs in "The Cartoon" where Lord Hater watches a cartoon about himself and during a scene which features an OverlyLongGag of Cartoon!Hater and Cartoon!Wander dueling each other, Lord Hater lampshades this and the Watchdogs explain that the cartoon ran short and had to pad it out for 15 seconds.

* ''WesternAnimation/ThePatrickStarShow'', to match the style of Patrick's in-universe VarietyShow, sometimes cuts away to random, extended sequences that rarely have anything to do with the main plot. For instance, "Lost in Couch" opens with a minute of Patrick watching TV, and then a ParodyCommercial takes up time later on.

* In ''Film/WarOfTheWorlds'', the scenes with Tim Robbins could be seen as padding -- they could easily be removed or drastically shortened. As it is, the film gets particularly bogged down during that plot sidetrack. Of course, some consider these scenes to be the creepiest and most effective in the movie, and Tim Robbins being beaten to death at the end certainly helps.