Clip Show / Western Animation

Straight Examples

• Popeye had shorts that showed this trope is Older Than Television. In both shorts, Popeye and Bluto would show clips from their past shorts; Bluto's would be when he was getting the best of Popeye, while Popeye's clips would show how he got back at Bluto.
  • In "Customers Wanted", Popeye and Bluto are running rival penny arcades, and try to get Wimpy's patronage by showing them moving picture shows from their past shows.
  • In "I'm In The Army Now", Popeye and Bluto try to join the army to impress Olive Oyl. However, the recruiter only has room for only one more, so Popeye and Bluto show clips from photo albums to impress him.
• Alvin and the Chipmunks: The episode "Chipmunkmania" is framed as a documentary for the 30th anniversary of the Chipmunks with one shortened past episode each for Simon, Theodore and Alvin.
• Besides the full-length features, the Looney Tunes shorts had several of these.
  • The 1951 short His Hare-Raising Tale has Bugs Bunny telling his nephew Clyde about his adventures from Baseball Bugs, Stage Door Cartoon, Rabbit Punch, Falling Hare and Haredevil Hare.
  • 1954's This is a Life, where Bugs is feted on a testimonial TV show (Daffy thinks he's the one being celebrated), uses clips from Buccaneer Bunny and Hare Do.
  • The 1958 short Feather Bluster has an elderly Foghorn Leghorn and Barnyard Dawg recalling their past pranks on each other with the grandsons listening in, with clips from Henhouse Henery, The High and the Flighty and All Fowled Up.
  • The 1959 short Hare-Abian Nights has Bugs ending up in a sultan's palace and forced to tell stories, which he does with clips from Bully for Bugs, Water, Water Every Hare and Sahara Hare.
  • The 1959 short Tweet Dreams has Sylvester going to a psychiatrist about his problems with Tweety, using clips from Too Hop to Handle, Sandy Claws, Tweety's Circus, A Street Cat Named Sylvester and Gift Wrapped. Oddly, the clip from the first short, which featured Sylvester with his son, is presented as a flashback to Sylvester as a kitten with his father.
  • The 1963 short Devil's Feud Cake has Yosemite Sam going to Hell following the events of Hare Lift and making a Deal with the Devil to bring Bugs to Hell in exchange for being set free, which he attempts with the shorts Roman Legion-Hare and Sahara Hare.
  • The 1964 short Freudy Cat has Sylvester Jr. taking his father to a psychiatrist to talk about his problems with the "giant mouse", as illustrated with scenes from The Slap-Hoppy Mouse, Cats Aweigh! and Who's Kitten Who?.
• Phineas and Ferb:
  • Phineas and Ferb had a "Musical Cliptastic Countdown" composed of clips from their most memorable musical numbers, as voted on by the viewers. There's also "Phineas's Birthday Clip-o-Rama", where the gang makes a clip show for Phineas's birthday. As expected, they take joy in lampshading this trope at every chance they get. It is also a subversion because there is at least one clip in each segment that didn't come from any episode and makes no sense at all.
  • There is also the episode "This Is Your Backstory", which is a much more traditional clip show. Dr. Doofenshmirtz makes a device that will use all of his tragic backstories to make his more evil. It also comes off as a not-quite-successful attempt to organize his numerous backstories.
• In addition to re-using old animation in "new" theatrical shorts and TV specials, the Warner Brothers cartoon set has five movies devoted to this. The first, The Bugs Bunny/Road Runner Movie (1979), is a That's Entertainment!-esque retrospective hosted by Bugs Bunny in new linking segments; the sequels use new animation to link the shorts together into a long storyline. For example, Daffy Duck's Movie: Fantastic Island has a framing device of various characters making wishes in a wishing well. You can easily tell what is original footage and what isn't because of the difference in animation. Also Mel Blanc's voice was noticeably different towards the end of his life, making it easy to distinguish original lines from lines that were redubbed to fit the plot of the film.
• CatDog had a mini episode called Winslow's Home Movies sandwiched between two other episodes, where Winslow plays a video tape of his favorite and most humiliating CatDog moments. The episode ends with Winslow nearly getting flushed out of the house after CatDog flood the place while taking a bath. CatDog goes surfing out the front door, and Winslow ends up tied to The TV monitor hanging upside down. Not only was he showing clips he had previously videotaped, he was videotaping CatDog taking a bath and broadcasting it live.
• The final two episodes of short-lived PBS cartoon Danger Rangers are clip shows. The first one ("Fallbot Forget-Me-Not") involves the characters reinstalling safety rules into Fallbot (represented by clips from the show and former musical numbers) before he goes to an elementary school to give a presentation about safety. The second one ("Kitty's Surprise Party") is obviously outsourced to another animation studio, has eight musical numbers to pad out the runtime, and is the only episode that uses CGI animation mixed with 2D animation.
• Duckman's second season ended with "Clip Job", a clip show that deconstructed clip shows. The framing story had a disgruntled television critic kidnapping the titular character and trying to convince him that Duckman is the most immoral show of all time. Duckman is unaware that he is a television character, and can't understand where and how the critic acquired all the clips of his past adventures, which he uses to torture Duckman by showing him the worst aspects of his personality. In the end Duckman is rescued, and his sons Charles and Mambo point out that if their life really were a TV program then this occurrence would have been a clip show created as an excuse to spend less money on original production. Duckman scoffs at the idea and asks who could possibly be so cynical to do such a thing. He then stares out at the audience as the credits start to roll, beginning with the names of the series' executive producers.
• Gargoyles has a clip show centered around the paranoid rantings of a recurring background character. (See Recurring Extra.)
  • A more subtle clip show is the episode "Avalon, Part II", where the villain of the three part episode has Time Travel powers in addition to Physical God status and uses them to instruct his younger self how to attain these powers. Because of the nature of time travel in the Gargoyles universe, which is always stable time loops, the net result is him traveling to different past episodes to arrange the various elements to fall into his younger self's possession only after they become no longer story relative. While his interaction in the old episode segments is new footage, it's often inter cut with old footage to save on animation, creating several noticeable Animation Bumps.
• Kappa Mikey decides to go meta for its clip show episode... the plot revolves around putting together a clip show for the Show Within a Show.
• Jackie Chan Adventures has a phlebotinum-induced one, in which Jackie actually has to travel to several points in the past, while trying not to change the outcome of his adventures.
• The Jay Jay the Jet Plane episode "Snuffy's Seasons" has Snuffy remember several memories of past episodes as the others teach him about the seasons.
• Shadow Raiders has a clip show based around Graveheart having a crisis of faith in his leadership abilities. It consisted of each of the main characters going "Did I just hear you want to quit? What about the time you did X?" and a clip would roll. Sadly, one of the series' weaker episodes, though it did resolve this arc for his character, for what that's worth.
• The Simpsons did a handful, though they were phased out after Season 13. FOX originally wanted four clip-show episodes a season - the showrunners were mercifully able to push back on that, and the ones that did happen usually came with a decent amount of Lampshade Hanging and Self-Deprecation that made it go down a bit easier with the audience.
  • "So It's Come to This: A Simpsons' Clip Show" (Season 4): It's April Fools' Day and Bart has had it with Homer's pranks, so Bart shakes a can of beer up so much that it explodes (using a paint shaker at a local hardware store), putting Homer in a coma. While Homer is in a coma, the rest of the family (and Mr. Burns) reminisces about all the wacky adventures they have had from Seasons 1 through the first half of 4. The episode includes a self-referential joke where Bart remembers an "Itchy and Scratchy" cartoon and says, "It was an amusing episode...of our lives." It also has an unusually large amount of new footage for a clip show - the first act is all brand-new, and they added extra animation to the clip of Homer falling down the gorge a second time from "Bart The Daredevil".
  • "Another Simpsons Clip Show" (Season 6): After reading The Bridges of Madison County, Marge decides to gather the family in the kitchen so they can discuss their love lives, most of which ended in tragedy (Bart getting his heart broken by Laura from "New Kid on the Block" and Lisa yelling at Ralph in "I Love Lisa") or near-infidelity (Homer almost sleeping with his coworker Mindy in "The Last Temptation of Homer" and Marge almost driving to Jacques the French bowler's house in "Life in the Fast Lane"). Notable for intentionally taking the concept to its extreme by having next to no new footage for its framing scenes: the kitchen sequence used for most of the episode was reused from Season 2's "One Fish, Two Fish, Blowfish, Blue Fish", and one of the only other scenes was similarly recycled from Season 1's "Krusty Gets Busted" (meaning it looks notably less polished than the surrounding footage), with only the very first scene featuring new animation. (Even the couch gag was recycled.) Also notable for this exchange:
    Bart and Lisa are watching Itchy & Scratchy
    Marge: How many times can you laugh at that cat getting hit by the moon?
    Bart: It's a new episode.
    Lisa: Not exactly. They pieced it together from old shows and it seems new to the trusting eyes of impressionable youth.
    Bart: Really?
    Lisa: Ren and Stimpy do it all the time.
    Marge: Yes, they do. And when was the last time you heard anyone talk about Ren and Stimpy?
  • "The Simpsons 138th Episode Spectacular" (Season 7): A take on sitcom retrospective episodes of the 1970s (like the Three's Company example mentioned on the Live-Action TV subpage). It had Troy McClure hosting a retrospective of The Simpsons, showing viewers the show's early years as animated filler on The Tracey Ullman Show, deleted scenes from popular episodes (all of which are real, according to Word of God), including the infamous "Robotic Richard Simmons" scene from season 5's "Burns' Heir" and the alternate ending to "Who Shot Mr. Burns?: Part 2", portraying Matt Groening as a bald, drunken gun nut (instead of a bearded, bespectacled nerd), and, of course, "hard-core nudity!". Interestingly, this is the only Simpsons episode animated entirely in the United States. Usually considered the best clip-show of the series, thanks to some sharp writing, a strong performance from Phil Hartman, and the fact that the material shown was very difficult to find otherwise prior to the release of the DVD boxsets.
  • "All Singing, All Dancing" (Season 9): Starts out as a normal episode (much like "So It's Come to This: A Simpsons' Clip Show") where Homer rents Paint Your Wagon, thinking it was a typical Clint Eastwood western before finding out it's actually a musical, then complains that musicals suck, prompting the rest of the family to show video clips of the many times the Simpson family (and the people of Springfield) have broken out in song. In response to this, Snake barges in and holds the entire family hostage, but leaves when he realizes how weird it is to hold a singing family at gunpoint. This episode becomes Harsher in Hindsight during the credits where gunshots can be heard when Phil Hartman's name appears in the credits (to make matters worse, this was the last episode for which Hartman did voicework shown before he died, although his voice appeared in "Bart the Mother," a leftover season nine episode that aired in season 10).
  • "Gump Roast" (Season 13): Homer is honored at a Friars' Club Roast, when Kang and Kodos invade so they can enslave humanity. Not much to write home about, except for the end song, sung by Dan Castellaneta, parodying Billy Joel's "We Didn't Start the Fire" and the lyric: "We're sorry for the clip show!" Also has a Hilarious in Hindsight moment where the song mentions an episode with a "crazy wedding" involving Patty, Selma, and Grampa getting married to each other. Selma and Grampa would marry each other in season 18's "Rome-Old and Juli-Ech." Patty, on the other hand, would get married in season 16's "There's Something About Marrying," but in that episode she would almost marry a man who looks like a woman and break up with her near-husband/wife because Patty just revealed to Marge that she was a lesbian — despite her and Selma's crush on MacGyver. Also of note that this is the last clip show the writers have done, according to the season 13 DVD commentary, as the writers have now taken to doing "trilogy" episodes [episodes with three separate stories for each act], such as "Margical History Tour," "Tales From The Public Domain," "Love: Springfieldian Style," "Simpsons Christmas Stories," "Four Great Women and a Manicure," and "The Fight Before Christmas."
    • The show itself sent "Gump Roast" up just one week later with "I Am Furious (Yellow)", in which Bart makes Homer the subject of his highly popular Angry Dad cartoon; when Homer catches on, he immediately swears off all expressions of anger. Bart, watching Homer get hit by objects but not reacting, says, "Come on, Angry Dad! Get angry! Don't make me do a clip show!"
    • In addition to the full-episode clip shows, there were some partial clip shows The Simpsons had: in season 5's "Bart's Inner Child," Lisa and Bart think back to all the times Marge has nagged them after Marge asks if she nags the family all the time.
    • In season 11's "Behind the Laughter", the family is portrayed as Animated Actors. During the "documentary", clips are shown from "Bart the Daredevil" and "The Principal and the Pauper", as well as scenes of previous guest stars.
    • In season 13's "The Blunder Years," Homer thinks back to the time he jumped over Springfield Gorge (from season 2's "Bart the Daredevil"), but Lisa interrupts, stating that everyone is sick of that flashback.
    • In season 19's "Eternal Moonshine of the Simpson Mind," Homer travels through his mind to see what he did to make his family leave him. If you look closely at the background, you can see clips of scenes from the past 18 seasons).
    • In season 20's "How the Test was Won," there was a Fully Automatic Clip Show of the many times Homer has injured himself.
      Homer: Heh heh, what a week.
• One of the last episodes of Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog, "Hero of the Year", uses this trope as part of a dinner party held in Sonic's honor (with Dr. Robotnik doing a similar one for himself).
• Spiral Zone did no less than five clip shows.
• The SWAT Kats episode "Swat Kats — A Special Report" is a clip show disguised as a news report about the heroes.
• The final episode of The Critic, "I Can't Believe It's a Clip Show", takes place at the filming of a clip show celebrating the 10th anniversary of the Show Within a Show Coming Attractions. As a result, the clips are from that and the various movie parodies featured in the series.
• The original final episode of Beavis and Butt-Head is a clip show where all the secondary characters have flashbacks over their encounters with the two main characters from the previous episodes.
• The final episode of Code Lyoko, "Echoes", is a clip show where the main characters are reminiscing of their adventures throughout the series, before shutting off the Supercomputer for good.
• Monster Buster Club also ended with a clip show.
• KaBlam! never had an official clip show, but the episodes "Won't Stick to Most Dental Work!" (in the begining, when Henry shows all the times June has been pranking/beating him up, and at the end, when June was showing all the good times she and Henry had together) and "Under New Management!" (when Henry's thinking back to the moments that Mr. Foot beat him up) played clips from previous episodes.
  • This plays straight in the Action League NOW! segment "And Justice for None", when the Action League is trying to explain why the team shouldn't be terminated.
• Totally Spies!:
  • The appropriately named episode "The Elevator", where the spies reminisce about highlights of previous episodes while trapped in a malfunctioning elevator.
  • They ended up having another one near the end of season five in the episode "So Totally Not Groove-y", though it ended up having more of an active plot than the first one.
• Biker Mice from Mars:
  • The original 1993 series had five clip show episodes: "The Tribunal", "The Inquisition", "Villain of the Year", "Mad Scientist Wanted", and "Academy of Hard Knocks".
  • The 2006 revival had two clip show episodes: "Carbine's Conundrum" and "Cat and Mouse".
• The Grand Finale episode "Clip Hangers" of Timon & Pumbaa had Timon and Pumbaa falling off a cliff after trying to catch a grub. Then, clips of their previous adventures show, but only from the current season.
• Transformers: Prime:
  • The episode Grill, in which Agent Fowler must make a case to his superiors for Team Prime to stay active on Earth in the wake of MECH's plots to discredit the Autobots with a fake version of Optimus.
  • In the same season, we also got the episode Patch, where Megatron enters Starscream's mind and overviews Starscream's previous plots against him to see if he should rejoin the Decepticons. Unlike other examples, it ends up having immediate, heavy consequences for both Knockout and Dreadwing.
• The Legend of Tarzan combines this with Direct Line to the Author. In an episode, Edgar Rice Burroughs himself visits Africa, looking for inspiration, and various characters from the show tell him about Tarzan's previous adventures.
• Taz-Mania: "The Platypi Psonic Psensation Psimulator" (although, this being Taz-Mania, the Playpus Brothers immediately lampshade this episode as what it is).
• Captain N: The Game Master set a new low for cheaply done clip episodes: their clip show has no framing story to justify the clips, and in fact contains no new footage whatsoever. It's just a half hour of randomly assembled clips with no explanation...and with no dialog. Yes, for some reason, all the dialog has been removed from the clips, resulting in 30 minutes of silent reused animation playing over background music. Kids were understandably confused and upset. When the episode aired in syndication, they put the voices back in and added some new narration, most of which has nothing to do with the action on screen.
• Pinky and the Brain: "Schpiel-borg 2000" starts off as this.
• 101 Dalmatians: The Series had two episodes that were clip shows. One was "Humanitarian of the Year", where Cruella attempts to win the mentioned title for publicity, while the pups find photographs she ordered Horace and Jasper to hide of her being her usual cruel self, bringing up clips from previous episodes (Oddly, there were no cameras present to take pictures of these situations). Next was "Horace and Jasper's Big Career Move", where Horace and Jasper try to find new jobs, bringing up events of previous episodes. "The Making Of..." uses a few clips from previous episodes at first, but then goes off on its' own.
• The 13th and final episode of ProStars was a clip show.
• The Recess Direct to Video movies ^note They're not really movies because of this trope, but according to Disney, they're movies. Fans usually consider All Growed Down the show's third movie while Miracle on Third Street is just a special Recess Christmas: Miracle on Third Street and Recess: All Growed Down both consisted of episodes of the television show (Four for the former, three for the latter) with linking material. Some fans felt ripped off because they hardly got anything new, but it could've been Disney's secret way of saying "Alright, we're not making new episodes of this show. Buy these now before we take the show off!"
  • Recess Christmas: Miracle on Third Street (released a day after the show aired its final episode) took place right after the Christmas Episode, with Principal Prickly carpooling Miss Finster and Miss Grotke home after school, until his car gets stuck in a snowbank, making him and Miss Finster instantly blame the kids, due to them having to deal with their pranks every day. So Miss Grotke tries to explain to them that the kids aren't as bad as they make them out to be, bringing up previous episodes ("Principal for a Day", "The Great Can Drive", "Weekend at Muriel's", and "Yes, Mikey, Santa Does Shave"), which play as part of the movie.
  • Recess: All Growed Down (Released two years after the show ended, along with Recess: Taking the Fifth Grade) was about the gang getting kidnapped by the kindergarteners, though only because their new leader, Chief Stinky wanted them to, and made the other kindergarteners believe that the older kids were bad. So the gang try to re-affirm the fact that they've been nice to them by bringing up (And playing) the episodes "The Legend of Big Kid", "Wild Child", and "Kindergarten Derby", and the rest of the film is new material- specifically, Gus bringing up the gang's origin story of how they met in kindergarten.
• Clerks: The Animated Series featured a clip show... as its second episode. Most of the footage used was new, but there was a flashback to earlier in the episode.
• Arthur:
  • The episode "DW's Perfect Wish" has Arthur cheer up a depressed D.W. on her fifth birthday by reminding her of all the good times she had when she was four.
  • The episode "Best Day Ever" has Arthur's friends remembering their favorite days, and Arthur trying to come up with one for himself. Even though video clips from older episodes are used, they are dubbed with the show's current voice actors.
  • In some ways, the episode "Arthur's Almost Live Not Real Music Festival" was like a clip show with two of the songs: "Leftovers Goulash" and "(Just a Little) Homework", both songs set to various clips from previous episodes, and in many cases, it's quite funny.
• Rugrats:
  • While Rugrats never officially had a clip show episode, the featurette "The Pickles Family Album" (included as a bonus on the Decade in Diapers DVD) features clips from various episodes of the show. The featurette is hosted by Angelica Pickles.
  • Clips from various episodes can also be seen at the end of the "All Growed Up" special.
• Magic Adventures of Mumfie had "The Album", where the characters find a memento of one of their adventures and a clip from the episode follows it. The order of the items may suggest that all the episodes are Out of Order.
• Mighty Mouse: The New Adventures had a number of clips show episodes. "Animation Concerto" and "Mighty's Musical Classics" were exclusively snippets of original Terrytoons shorts set to musical numbers, "Stress For Success" had Mighty Mouse trying to relax and dreaming of old MM cartoon clips, "Scrappy's Playhouse" had Scrappy disrupting a theater screening of Mighty Mouse cartoons with his constant commentary, and "Anatomy Of A Milquetoast" and "Mighty's Tone Poem" used clips from the first season as part of their storylines (MM on trial for Scrappy's disappearance; MM "punishing" his old foes in lieu of a prison sentence).
• The "Wolves, Witches, and Giants" episode "The Wolf in Sheep's Clothing" contains one of these with the Wolf conducting his latest scheme by dressing up as a sheep so he can blend in with the herd and eat them and his partner the Fox telling him that it's bound to fail, he then shows him a videotape of his various failures throughout the series, and the Wolf tries to counter this by showing him his few victories, and his scheme fails as the Giant tries to eat him and he escapes by slipping out of the skin.
• The Legend of Korra episode "Remembrances" is a Three Shorts version of this. The first has Mako telling his history of the Mako/Korra/Asami love triangle, the second has Korra telling Asami about her doubts and defeats, and third was Varrick's plan to make a "mover" Very Loosely Based on a True Story. The clip show was done due to a sudden budget cut, and the writers tried really hard to at least make the episode interesting. Korra's section is a pretty straight example (albeit one with actual Character Development). Mako's comes off as the creators' Self-Deprecation at how messy the love triangle was, and also sort of retcons an actual character arc onto it for Mako. Varrick's, meanwhile, was basically the writers making The Abridged Series of their own show.
• House of Mouse had two direct-to-video films, a Halloween one called Mickey's House of Villains and a Christmas one called Snowed in at the House of Mouse. Both of them happened to consist mostly of recycled animation (though Mickey's introduction in House of Villains had the animation redone so that his vampire costume was less ghoulish). Technically speaking, the original show itself was a clip show as the cartoons shown at the House of Mouse were mainly recycled shorts from Mickey MouseWorks as well as some of the classic Disney shorts.
• Tom and Jerry did several "cheater" cartoons. This was sometimes made all the more obvious by the pair's character designs changing over the years-for example, the Chuck Jones-era cartoon "Shutterbugged Cat" uses footage of the very different-looking Hanna-Barbera era Tom and Jerry while utilizing original animation in a quasi-classic style by Tom Ray.
• The final episode of the second season of Donkey Kong Country entitled, "The Message in a Bottle Show" involves Donkey Kong getting a letter where he is elected the Future Ruler of all Future Rulers. He has to leave Kongo Bongo, possibly forever, the following day, so that night, Diddy hosts a banquet dinner honoring him, where montages of characters remembering sequences from older episodes (mostly from the first season) are shown. At the end of the episode, it is revealed that the letter was addressed to "Monkey Kong" and DK misread it.
• The Transformers took this is an absurd extreme: the entire fifth season is a massive clip show in which a large puppet version of Powermaster Optimus Prime tells a young boy stories from the Autobot-Decepticon war, with each story consisting of an episode from one of the earlier seasons and the movie edited down somewhat to make room for the new segments with the kid.
• Danger Mouse:
  • "Demons Aren't Dull" uses clips from the very first series in a sequence unrelated to the story's main plot. While searching for a dimensional demon, Danger Mouse is re-routed to a This is Your Life-themed TV show which uses the clips to magnify his presumed shortcomings (all a Greenback plot in a ruse to get DM to resign as a secret agent).
  • The relaunch has three clip shows: The Christmas Episode "Yule Only Watch Twice", in which DM and Penfold appear on a chat show; "Danger-Thon", in which the Danger Agency runs a telethon; and, just five episodes after that, "The Supies", set at the Secret Agent Awards.
• Lilo & Stitch: The Series had the "Ace" segment of late Season 2 episode "Mrs. Hasagawa's Cats / Ace", in which Jumba showed footage of his experiments doing evil things to the head of the Evil Genius Organization. This was to convince the head of E.G.O. that Jumba is still evil and his membership should not be revoked. Notably, the segment showed nearly the entirety of Slushy (523) and Splodyhead (619)'s epic fight from the former experiment's episode, and in that episode, Jumba stated that he forgot to bring his camera. It should also be noted that "Ace" was originally supposed to have a much more substantial plot and not be a clip show, but it was changed in the wake of a then-recent tsunami (specifically, the infamous 2004 Boxing Day Tsunami).
• The series finale of Animaniacs, entitled "The Animaniacs Suite" contains clips from every other segment accompanied by a beautifully orchestrated medley of the show's theme and character themes.
• G.I. Joe
  • The last two episodes of the DiC Entertainment continuation of G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero were both clip shows: "Basic Training" (which was presented in the form of General Hawk giving lectures and battle strategies to new recruits) and "The Legend of Metalhead" (which had Metalhead narrate the events of several episodes that featured him in a significant role).
  • The G.I. Joe: Sigma 6 episode "Awards" consisted of clips from previous episodes edited together and with the premise of the Joes looking back at their greatest moments.
• Aside from the "new" episodes made by revising older episodes or recycling footage from them, the last episode of Spider-Man (1967) was a clip show episode entitled "Trip to Tomorrow". Scenes were recycled from the episodes "Thunder Rumble", "Return of the Flying Dutchman", and "The Evil Sorcerer", with the framing device consisting of Spider-Man encountering a boy attempting to run away from home and deciding to become a superhero in Podunk, Spidey talking the youngster out of his plan by telling him about his previous adventures to make him understand how dangerous and risky being a superhero really is.
• The prime time Scooby-Doo special Scooby Goes Hollywood centers around Scooby leaving his Saturday morning show to become a prime time star. When he leaves, a series of clips from Scooby-Doo, Where Are You! are used as Fred, Daphne and Velma do a musical number pleading for Scooby to come back (the song done to the tune of The New Scooby-Doo Movies).
• Matt's Monsters haves one towards the end of the series, with the main characters searching for fitting clips to use in a commercial for their monster hunting job. Recurring villain Madame Bovary gets in the fun too trying to do the same for her activity, but Matt sabotages her job by replacing the tape with one of her worst moments.
• The Real Ghostbusters had a clip show episode entitled "Deja Boo", which had Slimer captured by his enemy Professor Dweeb so that he could use a machine to study his memories and find out a way to out-do the Ghostbusters in capturing ghosts. The episode had a regular half-hour version (which used clips from the episodes "The Copycat", "Halloween II 1/2", and "Sticky Business") and an extended hour-long cut (which used clips from the same episodes as the half-hour version in addition to the episode "The Two Faces of Slimer").
• Dr. Zitbag's Transylvania Pet Shop had two clip show episodes.
  • The episode "Word of Horror" had the framing device of Dr. Zitbag being put on trial for being too nice with the jury evaluating scenes from previous episodes where he appeared to do good deeds.
  • Clips from previous episodes are used in the slanderous films Zitbag and his rival Professor Sherman Vermin make of each other in the episode "The Seventh Art".
• The second aftermath episode in Total Drama World Tour features the characters trying to raise enough money to refuel the Total Drama Jumbo Jet. To help the cause, Geoff and Bridgette sing a song called "Save This Show", which explains why the viewers should donate money. For most of the song, clips from all of the past episodes (besides "Super Happy Crazy Fun Time Japan") play.
• MAD: In the 100th episode, One Direction lock themselves in a room, in order to focus on writing a great song. However, MAD comes on the TV, and they are mysteriously unable to turn it off. As they're forced to watch clips of the show, they sing "Worst Show Ever", a parody of "Best Song Ever".
• The obscure 1980 feature Hurray for Betty Boop (aka Betty Boop for President) is an extreme version of this — it's solely assembled from colorized clips from 35 Betty Boop shorts, redubbed and rescored into an original storyline in which she runs for President of the United States.
• My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic has six of these. The episodes take place before Twilight's coronation as ruler of Equestria, and her friends make her a memory book as a gift. Despite being made during production of Season 9, the clip shows still have yet to appear in the US, even after the presence of My Little Pony: A New Generation.
• Angela Anaconda: "Childhood for Sale", the penultimate episode of the second season.
• SpongeBob SquarePants: Stand-alone clip show specials are produced separately from the main show. The first of these was "Patchy's Playlist" in 2019, a compilation of songs and musical moments from the show. Some following specials were hosted by guest stars.

Subversions and Parodies

• Avatar: The Last Airbender's penultimate episode had another variation: the characters attend a play about their adventures, which provides a more-or-less accurate summary of the series so far while somehow managing to get the details comically wrong and accurately poke fun at itself at the same time.
• Ed, Edd n Eddy:
  • Parodied in the episode "The Good Ol' Ed", which had the Eds collecting things from previous episodes for a time capsule and reminiscing about past misadventures. While events of actual episodes were mentioned, all the "flashbacks" were to events never seen in previous episodes (a fake time machine scam, Edd getting a bad case of the hiccups, and the Eds trying to make the world's biggest pancake), all of which ended with the other members of the trio protesting that said event never happened. The only flashback to something that actually happened was Ed remembering the opening of the current episode, which was interrupted by Eddy smacking Ed with a fish and shouting "I hate clip shows!"
  • In a similar vein was the episode "Every Which Way But Ed," where the Eds end up getting physically lost in the flashbacks of multiple secondary characters, and must find their way back to the present. Unfortunately, they end up going so far back that they end up in the day Edd first met the other two members of the trio, and Eddy, never one to ignore a scam, has Ed slam a house on Edd to give him amnesia, so he would pay to watch Ed eat a TV. This time, however, Ed ends up accidentally eating Eddy as well.
• The Phineas and Ferb episode "Phineas's Birthday Clip-o-Rama" is both a straight example and a subversion, because there is at least one clip in each segment that didn't come from any episode and makes no sense at all.
• The second episode of Clerks: The Animated Series is a clip show that flashes back to a single scene of the first episode several times, and then starts making up clips from episodes that had never happened, as well as showing clips from the episode itself that happened 5 minutes ago. It's made even better by the fact that the series was aired out of production order, and as such there are no clips or references to the fourth episode produced, which was actually the first to air.
• The Powerpuff Girls (1998):
  • Parodied in "The City of Clipsville". The episode starts out looking like a clip show, but the clips quickly turn into outrageous, bizarre events that never took place (most infamously the girls growing into teenagers and the Rowdyruff Boys asking them out), and everyone eventually barges into the girls' house to reminisce about rather insipid things like mowing the lawn. Ultimately, it turns out the clip show was a clip, with them at the end saying "Remember when we were remembering things?"
  • A more subtle parody happens in "Monkey See, Doggy Two", the sequel to "Monkey See, Doggy Do" (both of which were also included in clips from "The City of Clipsville"). The episode begins exactly the same way as its predecessor. When the girls realize Mojo Jojo is reusing his previous plan, they quickly confront him... and he reveals he's made a new plan by looking at the footage from his old one to figure out what he did wrong. He then shows the footage, which are clips from the original episode, as the four provide commentary.
• Parodied in the final episode of the Sam & Max: Freelance Police cartoon. While captured by the most memorable villains of the series, Sam and Max reminisce about things that never happened in the show. They continue to do this while escaping.
• South Park parodies this in "City on the Edge of Forever," where the children recall incidents from past episodes, but their stories increasingly diverge from the original episodes. Eventually, the kids start lampshading the fact that the original stories didn't happen quite like that. Ultimately the episode is explained away as All Just a Dream of Cartman's, which then turns out to be a Dream Within a Dream of Stan's, who notes "I must have some serious emotional problems!"
• Aqua Teen Hunger Force episode "Grim Reaper Gutters" started out as a subversion of a clip show where at least a couple of the flashback turned out to be camera footage secretly compiled by Frylock and Meatwad. Their clip show ends when Meatwad, faced with his depressing and meaningless life, kills himself.
• Duck Dodgers uses a subversion in "Deconstructing Dodgers", where specific episodes and incidents are mentioned, but the actual clips shown are outtakes, unused gags or even one-shot jokes with no setup or context whatsoever.
• Played with in the Mike Tyson Mysteries episode "My Favorite Mystery". The Mystery Team gets stuck in an elevator with an old man and begin reminiscing about their favorite mysteries, all of them being extended clips from the Action-Hogging Opening rather than clips from previous episodes. The old man then reveals that he was present for about half of them, having been part of the bank robbery that Marquess tried to stop, then used the money to create the dinosaurs and the samurai robot Mike crashed a jet into, and was also the guy in kabuki makeup that Mike punched in the opening.
• Subverted in Total Drama Action, where the contestants briefly return to Camp Wawanakwa from the first season.
  Chris: If you need to take a moment to reminisce about the great times you had here...
  Everyone else: [laugh for a rather long time]
  Chris: Fine. We'll skip the good memories montage.
• There's an episode of The Fairly OddParents! in which Wanda and Timmy show clips to prove what a good godparent, friend, and humor generator Cosmo is — but they're all things that must've happened between episodes.
• Motorcity did this with the episode "Threat Level: Texas" in which Texas retells events that happened in "Power Trip," "The Duke of Detroit" and "Going Dutch" only to match his Self-Serving Memory, so believes that all the good ideas and KaneCo attacks were performed by him instead of Mike. Everyone in these flashbacks are incredibly out of character and can't stop talking about how "awesome" Texas is.
• The Amazing World of Gumball:
  • "The Finale" starts off as a clip show by showing scenes from previous episodes as the Wattersons look through their photo album. However, this quickly gets dropped after Hector's Mom reminds the Wattersons that they owe the town large amounts of money to pay for the damages caused by their past actions. Afterwards, while events from past episodes are constantly mentioned, only twice are clips from past episodes shown, the first of which is a Fully Automatic Clip Show of Richard's reckless driving.
  • "The Compilation" has a Framing Device of being an inexplicable "best of" video, but only the introduction clips are from previous episodes.

• When Looney Tunes was still being shown in theaters, several shorts were compiled in the manner of Bugs telling stories to Yosemite Sam, and at least one where Bugs, as a (possibly) retired multimillionaire tells the story of his life to an unseen reporter; later television reruns often had segments where Bugs (and occasionally Daffy, trying to execute a Hostile Show Takeover) acted as the "host" at the beginning and end of the cartoons being shown.
• Rick and Morty:
  • In the episode "Total Rickall", the Smith household is invaded by alien parasites that multiply by implanting fake memories into people's heads, and taking on the form of a random, zany character. The parasite multiplies every time someone has a fake flashback, leading to a whole lot of fake flashbacks and colorful characters appearing out of nowhere. Eventually, the Smiths realize they can tell which family members are real by remembering bad memories of them, and the resulting flashbacks are real but new to the audience.
  • "Morty's Mind Blowers" is what Rick downright admits is "a clip show made of clips you never sawwww!!!"
• Teen Titans Go! has an episode literally named "Bottle Episode". It features the Titans getting stuck in a giant bottle and remembering the past through clips. It features almost nothing but lampshadings on the topic, with Robin being angry that they're remembering the past instead of singing new songs and having adventures while the others complain that trips cost money and try to make Robin believe that flashbacks aren't boring.
  • There was also "Garage Sale", which did this with items (like the Mumfie example above) rather than clips of the show.
  • "Had To Be There" had flashbacks to four previous episodes.
• Amy's Mythic Mornings has an episode dedicated to simply playing all the songs from earlier episodes without story.
• Little Charmers has several episodes like "Magic of Charmville" which is 95% clips. It gets especially weird when they air this prior to some of the episodes the clips are from.
• The Rotten Ralph animated series had a clip show episode in "Ralph's Bedside Manner", where the Framing Device consisted of Ralph tending to his owner Sarah while she is sick and attempting to disprove everyone's claims that he is bad at helping others.
• The Big City Greens episode "Cheap Show" invokes and parodies this by Bill telling this family to reminisce about previous adventures, such as the time they got banned from a seafood restaurant ("Fill Bill"). However, the family is not buying it, and instead, the episode escalates with Alice remembering an event incorrectly, Tilly using storyboards to illustrate her battling a Kaiju, and Cricket literally Breaking the Fourth Wall.
• The Star Trek: Lower Decks episode "Caves" takes the piss out of this trope and a few others connected to the Star Trek franchise. Boimler, Mariner, Rutherford and Tendi are all trapped inside a cave and, in an attempt to escape, start telling stories of being trapped in caves. Not only are these incidents new, they proceed to piss off the characters because they were hanging out with other people. The one story that even remotely tries to play this straight, Tendi's, not only doesn't take place in a cave (it takes place in a stuck turbolift on the Cerritos), it takes place at the very end of the episode it's flashbacking to!

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