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"Industry, science, and technology! Big men sticking screwdrivers into things, and turning them! And adjusting them!"
Tom Servo, on the construction of the interocitor from This Island Earth, Mystery Science Theater 3000: The Movie

One or more characters is shown working hard at a particular task through a sequence of shots meant to imply time passing. This may often incorporate a signature piece of energetic or heroic music, or the characters themselves will sing as they work.

This includes the A-Team Montage, "Everybody Helps Out" Denouement, the Training Montage, House-Hunting Montage, and any montage in which somebody does a lot of construction, communication, travel, martial arts training, or scouring many books and files. May be featured in the Forging Scene and other Creation Sequences.

The joyful and optimistic strains of the Adventurous Irish Violins can often be heard in the background of such sequences, especially if the work is one from the Adventure Genre.


Examples:

    open/close all folders 

    Anime & Manga 
  • The Death Note anime likes these - lots of scenes of frantic scribbling set to Ominous Latin Chanting.
  • Doraemon: Nobita's Treasure Island has the montage when the gang's ship (onboard with them, their new friend Flock) crashes on the shore of a deserted island after barely surviving a storm. Which is followed by a lengthy scene of the heroes working together to fix the vessel, collect supplies, and upgrade their equipment for the final battle.
  • In Earth Maiden Arjuna, Juna and Tokio work over the course of a day to earn a meal from a strange man they found living in the mountains. Complete with Adventurous Irish Violins.
  • THE iDOLM@STER: Cinderella Girls uses them, usually to show the cast practicing in preparation for a big event.
  • Momotaro's Divine Sea Warriors contains a long sequence showing the rabbit sailors and the island's native animals working together to build the Imperial Japanese Navy's air base.
  • The chapter "Magical Girl Yue" in Negima! Magister Negi Magi has this being used while Yue studies to be a mage in the Magic World, complete with Exploding Calendar. More Knowledge. More Power.
    • Also the chapter in which Negi and Kotaro are shown training for their fight with Rakan.
  • Episode 9 of Neon Genesis Evangelion titled "Both of You, Dance Like You Want to Win!" which features quite prominently a montage of Shinji and Asuka training together while also living together, accompanied by appropriately heroic(?) music.
  • The rebuilding of the city in SoltyRei. Unfortunately, it's not safe yet.
  • One is used to show a normal day's work at the bathhouse in Spirited Away, with Sen, of course, being completely outperformed by Lin and the other workers. It's set to a catchy beat actually called "Hard Work".
  • The classes in Stellvia of the Universe.

    Asian Animation 
  • In the first episode of Pleasant Goat and Big Big Wolf: Mighty Little Defenders, Weslie is given a montage where he cleans up the storehouse and Wolffy has one that runs concurrently where he puts General Wolf's stuff back into his suitcase. Both montages have several parts where they are shown at the same time in a way that gives the illusion of them being directly connected to each other, such as a split-screen that makes it look like Weslie is taking something out of a box and giving it to Wolffy to pack up.

    Comic Books 
  • Tom's training in Chinese from Double Happiness.
  • My Little Pony Micro Series Issue #3: Rarity doesn't realize it until later, but all the various jobs she does around the farm help the hippie ponies create their beauty products.

    Fan Works 
  • Calvin trying out several sports in Calvin & Hobbes: The Series.
  • The fan-video "Master Chief Sucks At Halo 3" features a montage of Master Chief making a montage, with the Team America: World Police montage song playing over the top. The "montage" he makes however is a parody of the many fans make of their best Halo moments, complete with shoddy editing, poor picture quality and loud, looping Linkin Park soundtrack.
    Master Chief: omg![sic] I must be teh [sic] best halo 3 player in teh[sic] planet!1[sic] It is decided! I shall make.......... a montage!!1!one[sic]
  • Chapter 9 of Riding a Sunset is largely this, as it features the Autobots, Charlie, and several soldiers of Sector 7 building the Autobot base while working to the song "Back to Life (80s Remix) by Hailee Steinfeld.
  • Ultra Fast Pony:
    • In the episode "Little Miss Montage", Rarity invokes her powers as "master of the montage" to finish making her friends' dresses in record time.
    • The "Behind the scenes" bonus video subverts this. Series creator Wacarb promises to show viewers the process of creating an Ultra Fast Pony episode... and the montage shows Wacarb playing computer games, running around his house at random, and singing along with the radio.

    Film — Animation 
  • Blossoms in the Dust includes a montage in which Edna crisscrosses Texas, tirelessly raising donations one quarter at a time, in order to save the orphanage from the bureaucrats who want to shut it down.
  • Several montages throughout Chicken Run show the chickens building contraptions or digging tunnels for their escape attempts. The biggest one involves them constructing the "crate", or airplane, where every single chicken is working their rump off while sawing and hammering, intercut with Mr. Tweedy as he also repairs the damaged pie machine.
  • "Cinderelly/Mouse Work Song" from Cinderella, sung during the scene where the mice all put together Cinderella's pink dress.
  • Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs shows inventor Flint creating things in montages including time for taking breaks.
  • "Song of the Roustabouts" from Dumbo.
  • Goofy had one in An Extremely Goofy Movie while trying to boost his grades in college. He's also exercising while studying his textbooks. This got him all A's.
  • Meet the Robinsons makes use of this example during the sequence in which Lewis builds the Memory Scanner.
  • My Little Pony: Equestria Girls:
    • Friendship Games: Most of the "ACADECA" song, which covers the academics part of the Friendship Games, is under this form, showing the students competing with each other in chemistry, Home Ec, workshop, spelling, and mathematics.
    • Legend of Everfree:
      • Sunset Shimmer's solo song "Embrace the Magic" shows all the girls minus Twilight (who is absent) working on rebuilding the dock while coming to control their magic in the process.
      • The song "Legend You Were Meant to Be" is both sung during the Crystal Gala, and shows the preparations for it (thus in the form of flashbacks), with clearing up the entrance of boulders, writing and sending the invitations, setting up the musical equipment, decorations and lights, preparing the food (or saving it from mishaps), etc. Though it is intercut by snapshots that fall instead into Good-Times Montage.
  • Sleeping Beauty has a lyric-less montage when the Good Fairies prepare a surprise birthday party for Aurora. It alternates between showing Flora sew her a new dress, Fauna cooking a birthday cake, and Merryweather cleaning the house - while arguing with Flora over the color of the dress.
  • The song "Whistle While You Work" from Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, which is sung during the scene where Snow White and her animal companions are shown cleaning up the Seven Dwarfs' cottage prior to their introductory scene.
  • The song "When Will My Life Begin" from Tangled is actually sung during the scene when Rapunzel is shown cleaning up Mother Gothel's tower at the beginning of the film.
  • In Turning Red, there is a montage of Mei and Ming cleaning and conducting tours of the family temple.
  • The construction of the rocket in Wallace & Gromit: A Grand Day Out.
  • In Wolfwalkers, during both days Robyn has to work as a Scullery Maid, there's a montage of her doing various chores. Unlike most examples, these montages aren't played positively, since the work is shown to be long and monotonous and Robyn is clearly unhappy while doing it.

    Film — Live-Action 
  • Ace Ventura: Pet Detective: While examining the Miami Dolphins mascot Snowflake's water tank, Ace discovers a piece of orange amber in it and he determines that it's from the 1984 AFC Championship rings given to the players and coaches from the 1984 Dolphins team, so he tracks down players and coaches from the 1984 team, including head coach Don Shula and quarterback Dan Marino, to see if one of them was missing that piece, and thus, was Snowflake's abductor, accompanied by Aerosmith's "Line Up". The abductor is later discovered to be former Dolphins kicker Ray Finkle, who'd transitioned to Lois Einhorn, now the detective investigating the abduction for the Miami Police Department.
  • Nalinle and Massai preparing the soil, ploughing, and planting the corn in Apache: including Massai acting as a beast of burden and pulling the plough.
  • Assault on a Queen features several—interspersed with plot-relevant dialogue scenes—depicting the protagonists repairing and refitting of the derelict submarine.
  • In The Blind Side, Miss Sue tutoring Michael in academics. (This film also has a Training Montage involving Michael and SJ.)
  • In The Bourne Supremacy, Bourne embarks on a flurry of Internet factfinding while trying to uncover clues about his past and his previous assassination targets.
  • Cadet Kelly uses one when Kelly is learning how to twirl the rifle so she can audition for her school's rifle team
  • Cloud Atlas features one of these in the introduction to Somni-451's story, in which she explains her average working day at Papa Song's: it begins with the workers being forcibly awoken with drugs and it all goes downhill from there, with Sonmi and the other fabricants spending the next nineteen hours vending food, wiping down tables, binning garbage, and being sexually harassed by customers. At the end of the day, the Fabricants are given their evening meal in the form of a single soap-sac and then sent back to bed, set to do the whole thing all over again the following morning.
  • Used to portray Ordway's progress through medical school in Crime Doctor.
  • Combined with Lost Love Montage in D.E.B.S. as the villainess works hard to prove to her lover that she can change.
  • Used in The Deserter to depict the squad constructing the rope bridge from the mesa.
  • Used in Drive a Crooked Road to show Eddie stripping down, rebuilding, and fine-tuning the getaway car.
  • The training montage in Dünyayı Kurtaran Adam or, as you might know it, Turkish Star Wars. The main character trains for the upcoming battle by punching boulders and tying suspiciously polystyreneish rocks to his legs and jumping a lot. Look it up.
  • Fair Game has a montage of Jessica working through the night to prepare the farm for the arrival of the hunters the next morning.
  • Used in Five to show the survivors, primarily Michael and Charles, trying to establish their settlement: clearing the land, tiling the soil, building houses, etc.
  • Used in Frieda to show Frieda and Robert undertaking their work on the farm.
  • Frost/Nixon: After the drunken phone call Frost realizes he's "got to work".
  • Thao making amends for attempting to steal the Gran Torino
  • Hackers. They have to hack the Gibson...and they have a plan! Cue scenes of Kate and Dade dumpster diving for discarded IT memos, Cereal and Nikon stealing technical manuals from a Bell System truck, Cereal installing a hidden microphone for eavesdropping, and Nikon wandering a cube farm shoulder-surfing for passwords.
  • Used to show Max and Joe clearing out the dirt in the tunnel between the theatre and the bank over the course of rehearsals in Henry's Crime.
  • In Hollow Triumph, a montage is used to show Johnny doing the groundwork to take over Victor's life: practicing his signature, studying his patient files, listening to recordings of his voice, practicing his accent, etc.
  • Home Alone: Kevin gets one each time he sets up his booby traps in preparation for battle with Harry and Marv.
  • How the Grinch Stole Christmas!: The Grinch builds a sleigh out of junk during a montage accompanied by the song "You're a Mean One, Mr. Grinch".
  • Iron Man:
    • Iron Man during the construction of the original suit in the cave.
    • Iron Man 2 when he builds his new arc reactor.
  • In King of Thieves, there is a montage of the gang planning and preparing as they assemble everything they will need for the heist.
  • Knocked Up shows Ben moving towards responsible adulthood and parenthood: preparing his apartment, buying (if not necessarily reading) books on the topics, and doing computer-based work, by implication as a paying job.
  • The League of Gentlemen. After they've stolen the weapons and vehicles needed, we have the requisite montage of all the other preparations for The Caper which come to a sudden halt when a London bobby strolls into the warehouse they're using.
  • In Legally Blonde, Elle Woods' montage includes working out while reading law texts, visiting the library, carrying loads of books past the more judgmental law students, etc. All set to the awesome "Watch Me Shine."
  • Lock Up features a montage of the inmates rebuilding "Maybelline" (Eclipse's '65 Mustang), set to The Ides of March's energetic "Vehicle."
  • Happens in The Magnificent Seven (2016) when the Seven and the townsfolk are shown preparing Rose Creek for the arrival of Bogue's army.
  • Near the middle of The Manhattan Project, in which slices of everyday life for Paul are intercut with him studying book after book on nuclear physics and building the bomb over a period of about four weeks.
  • In Napoleon Dynamite, Pedro and Napoleon employ the hard work montage when making campaign posters (designed by Napoleon), rolling rings of tape, shaking hands, and getting awesome close-ups. With the A-Team theme playing in the background.
  • In Nothing in Common, David, an executive at an ad agency, gets the okay to put together a television commercial to pitch to a potential client - an airline - and there's a montage of him with various co-workers pitching him ideas at work and the bar they hang out at, all connected by scenes of David playing his drumsticks on his desk.
  • The Old Man & the Gun: Detective Hunt gets a montage of pursuing elderly bank robber Forrest Tucker's trial of evidence, speaking to law enforcement officials around the Midwest and poring over boxes of case files.
  • The Parent Trap (1961) and The Parent Trap (1998) each have one when the twins give each other information and mannerisms they'll need to remember when visiting the other parent.
  • The first Predator has two of them.
    • Dutch's commando team works together to create a set of traps that they hope will catch the title opponent.
    • Arnold gets another when he's subsequently left to face the Predator by himself.
  • The opening of Primer, and a few other scenes detailing the construction of the box.
  • In The Professional, Leon and Mathilda are seen doing exercises, assembling firearms, and drinking milk.
  • In A Prophet, a development of Maliks drug selling routine in prison is shown in this manner, with the song "Bridging The Gap" by Nas on top.
  • Used twice in Real Genius: Early on, when Mitch is going to classes and studying hard (this sequence ends when he walks into a big lecture hall and finds that not only have all the students disappeared and left tape recorders behind, the professor has too), and later when Chris gets serious.
  • Perhaps one of the most well known examples come from the Rocky series of films, almost all of which include a training montage set to uplifting brass-heavy or eighties rock music, while the titular hero prepares to take on the impossible battle ahead of him.
  • Calvin, the hero of Ruby Sparks, suffers from a Writer's Block. Then he gets into a fit of inspiration and is shown working hours on end on his typewriter, carving out his Magical Girlfriend character on paper.
  • In Scotland, PA, there's a montage detailing the renovation of Duncan's Cafe into McBeth's, and then the booming business at McBeth's.
  • The Secret of Roan Inish has one of Fiona and Eamon cleaning and repairing the family's abandoned houses on Roan Inish in preparation for attempting to convince their grandparents to move back to the island.
  • Seven (1979) has a montage of the Professor, Alexa and Jenny acquiring the vehicles, painting them, fitting them out, assembling the gas gun, etc.
  • The Sound of Music uses "Do-Re-Mi" as this, to trace Maria's progress in teaching the children how to sing.
  • Swordfish featured one for hacking a bank's computer, which consisted of the protagonist sitting at a ridiculously pimped-out computer, hammering away at the keyboard and muttering semi-coherently to himself. Somehow it ended up being one of the better scenes.
  • From This Island Earth, the construction of the interocitor, as noted in the page quote.
  • WarGames: After David discovers that Dr. Stephen Falken had designed the computer system he's been trying to hack into, he spends time at the library learning more about him, accompanied with scenes of him trying to enter possible passwords to the system.
  • One near the end of Watch Your Stern shows Blissworth and Miss Potter improving the Creeper torpedo together.
  • Parodied in Zoolander when Derek tries to help his father and brothers out in the coal mine. He seems to be giving his best, but being a simple-minded dressman means that he is just not cut out for this kind of work, and it shows...

    Literature 

    Live-Action TV 
  • Parodied by 30 Rock here.
  • The Big Bang Theory had a montage of Sheldon and Rajesh staring intensely at equations on a dry-erase board set to "Eye of the Tiger", with frequent angle changes and so on for the full on montage effect, and interrupted by Raj asking Sheldon where he keeps the aspirin.
  • Black Mirror - "Loch Henry": Davis and Pia get a montage of filming their demo reel of the Iain Adair doc, comprised of shots of interviews, drone flights, editing, and behind-the-scenes fluff.
  • Parodied in Bones. After finding some critical fact, two of the team members comment that Bones will now proceed to stare at the corpse until they talk to her and play Rock Paper Scissors to determine who will baby sit her while she does so.
  • In the live action adaptation of Boys over Flowers, Tsukushi gets a lot of these.
  • Bridgerton: In the first episode of season 2, there are montages between the scenes of Anthony's attempts to search for a wife and the ones where he is seen stressed out from doing his tasks as a viscount.
  • Buffy the Vampire Slayer:
    • Referenced, of course:
      Buffy: I thought it was gonna be like in the movies. You know, inspirational music... a montage, me sharpening my pencils, me reading, writing, falling asleep on a big pile of books with my glasses all crooked ('cause in my montage I have glasses)...
    • Then in "Once More With Feeling"
      Buffy: I'm worried our training's gonna turn into a montage from an '80s movie.
      Giles: If we start to hear inspirational power chords, we'll just lay down until it goes away.
  • Cowboy Bebop (2021). In "Venus Pop", Jet Black gets angry when Spike Spiegel goes off to do his own thing instead of helping hunt down the Mad Bomber. We get a montage of Jet doing a chemical analysis, reading the bomber's manifesto and pruning his bonsai tree. Later we find out the ship's computer did the analysis, while Jet only skimmed the manifesto and actually spent most of the time on his bonsai.
  • CSI does this to show the characters doing the hard work of forensic investigation at the lab. In the episode "I Like to Watch", they do some Lampshade Hanging: Hodges looks forward to a certain test, as he thinks it will be good material for the documentary crew currently in the lab. Nick points out that the test takes six hours, to which Hodges remarks that "When they cut it together, it'll only take thirty seconds." It takes thirty seconds.
  • Used to epic (and heartbreaking) effect in the Doctor Who episode "Heaven Sent," where it's used to show the Doctor punching through a 20 foot thick wall harder than diamond over the course of 4.5 billion years.
  • The Dropout
    • Elizabeth makes the rounds at several venture capitalists' offices, presenting her concept of a revolutionary blood-testing machine. None of them show interest, as she has no working prototype, has yet to meet with pharmaceutical companies, and she dropped out of Stanford as a sophomore.
    • Just before Elizabeth is to present the machine to Novartis in Switzerland, the prototype does not work. She and her team work through the night trying everything to fix it, with everybody contributing blood samples. Nothing they try (heating the machine, cooling the room, food wrappers) works. Finally, she has Rakesh rig the demo so that they call up the good reading they did get in the lab.
  • The Firefly episode "Ariel" has one of these as the crew prepare for their heist for that episode. It includes building a medical shuttle from ship parts found in a junk-yard, getting some med tech uniforms and learning medical jargon.
  • Parodied in Harry and Paul, where the same piece of Stock Footage (sawing wood, hitting thumb with hammer, mixing cement, reading the Racing Post) serves as a Hard-Work Montage for the Ridiculously Fast Construction of all kinds of buildings.
  • The doctors on House do this to signify they're coming up with the right diagnosis after getting it wrong for forty minutes.
  • Lampshaded in iCarly: we don't actually see a montage, but when Spencer sets the assembled builders loose to rebuild Carly's room (which his homemade birthday present for her destroyed), he yells "Montage speed!", clearly referencing this trope.
  • Done at least twice in It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, the notable first is in dual fashion as Charlie gets trained by Mac and Dennis to become an underground fighter, and Sweet Dee's montage at the gym training for an upcoming fight after she started using steroids. The second one is in the fifth season, when Charlie tries to teach Mac how to skate (featuring a short Rocky-like segment where Mac eats a whole drink of yolk before puking vehemently through Gilligan Cut.)
  • The Mandalorian. When he finally gets his ship parts back from the Jawas, the Mandalorian gripes that he still needs a full maintenance facility to repair the damage. Or they can just knuckle down and have a montage of Building Is Welding.
  • Episode 49 of Mimpi Metropolitan has a montage of Topan, Prima, Alan and Bambang spending a night sleepily working on Topan's bachelor thesis.
  • The Christmas special of Misfits opens with a montage showing the team hard at work in their lives beyond community service; because they're the Misfits, none of them seem to make any progress: Kelly is stuck picking up litter and getting mocked by passers-by; Nathan works as a Santa Claus with even less success; Simon trains in Parkour so he can eventually become Superhoodie, only to tumble off a one-story building and bounce off a dumpster, narrowly avoiding serious injury; even Curtis and Nikki aren't doing well, as their attempts to have sex in a pub bathroom end with Nikki accidentally teleporting herself away, leaving a very frustrated Curtis to go back to bartending. Alisha meanwhile, has gotten very interested in a sign advertising "Powers For Cash..."
  • Made famous (along with signature music by Lalo Schifrin) in television by Mission: Impossible... (for which Bruce Geller took some inspiration from the 1964 movie Topkapi.)
  • Used in just about every episode of MythBusters. Especially notable, as it's probably the only example here where they really are doing all that hard work. Man, sometimes its got to suck to be the Build Team. In addition, it's often lampshadeed that there's a great deal of editing involved, sometimes by the hosts, sometimes by the narrator. A couple examples:
    Narrator: But a hop, a skip, and a Jump Cut later....

    Narrator: With the car frame exposed and the trunk tower support system Time Lapsed into place....
  • Property Brothers: Especially if they're trying to get back on schedule.
  • Royal Pains: After showing us how shortcuts will cause your heart to stop Hank and Divya are shown going through the more grueling and painful version of a detox instead of the instant one promised by the sketchy brochure.
  • Lampshaded in Stargate SG-1. When SG-1 is sent to guard an engineering team while they repair an alien ship, the non-technical members of the team find themselves with very little to do. O'Neill and Jackson are shown in the montage to be passing the time by watching the glowing crystals and outright sleeping.
  • In the episode "Trial And Error" of Supernatural, Kevin's daily routine (alarm goes off at 5 a.m., drinks coffee, studies tablet, fries hotdogs, takes aspirin, goes to bed in the early morning) repeated as he crosses off days of the calendar starting with January 13, 2013, and ending with February 7, 2013.
  • Many competitive cooking shows (Top Chef, Chopped, etc.) involving multiple contestants creating dishes under a time limit feature montages of frenetic chopping, stirring, dashing back and forth to collect ingredients and equipment, etc.
  • Top Gear (UK):
    • Appears as well, in much the same spirit — usually in the context of something automotive, like prepping for a race or assembling a Caterham 7 kit car. Expect a lot of friendly (?) verbal repartee: the presenters quite like taking digs at each other.
    • Ruthlessly parodied in the Bolivian Special, when the presenters pull a deliberate caricature of one of these showing them hacking their way through a rainforest; afterwards, Clarkson realizes that he left his cellphone back at the river and walks back to get it. That takes about twenty seconds.
  • Quite obviously every single episode of Trading Spaces.
  • The Wire: One of the best examples of this comes in the season 2 episode "Storm Warnings". It opens with Prez trying to straighten out the Big Board while we see the rest of the Major Crimes Unit doing surveillance on their target (while also seeing them watch Prez at work), all set to Johnny Cash's "I Walk the Line". At the end, at night, we see Prez has organized everything neatly.
    Prez: Fuckin' A.
  • Occasionally used on The X-Files when agents Mulder and Scully needed to do some research on the case or had to investigate.
    • "Squeeze": Mulder and Scully need to find something on Eugene Victor Tooms who Mulder believes is a mutant Serial Killer. They are shown to be going through the information for hours. All the find is an address of the investigating officer of his previous murders from 1933.
    • "The Grotesque": Mulder goes to the library and studies about gargoyles.

    Music and Music Videos 
  • In the music video for "Dancing On My Own Ground" by Lawrence Gowan (currently the lead singer of Styx), clips of him and his band playing the song within a luggage case are intercut with a woman returning to an empty housenote  and gradually restoring it to a habitable state by getting rid of dust and squatters' junk, restoring furniture and drapery, and shovelling snow outside.
  • Cat Hairballs is almost entirely a hard work montage, where Stimpy is forced to continuously hwarf hairballs onto a productionline while Ren stamps them with approval. By the end, Stimpy is naked and totally hwarfed out. Which results in Stimpy falling unconscious on the conveyor belt and getting stamped right on the ass.

    Puppet Shows 
  • Lampshaded in The Muppets (2011).
    Walter: Don't you remember? You guys are the Muppets! You do this kind of thing to music! (cue "We Built This City")
  • Team America: World Police has a very literal song about a montage while Gary is training to fight Kim Jong Il.

    Theater 
  • In the Broadway musical Xanadu, there is a montage of all of the characters breaking ground and constructing the club Xanadu, set to the song "All Over The World" by ELO. Because this sequence also appears in the film version, they even hang a lampshade over this!

    Video Games 
  • In Grow Valley the designer can be seen working furiously on his projects at his desk also before you win the game there are several tiny montage showing all the different experts working on their domains.
  • LEGO Dimensions has BA Baracus engage in this whenever he uses his Master Build ability, with his show's theme song playing over shots of him using various tools to build a new model (in contrast with the game's other Master Builders, who just jump around and quickly assemble the pieces together).
  • Red Dead Redemption 2 features an interactive montage, complete with music, in the building of a house.
  • Done in more tragic fashion in Xenoblade Chronicles 3 with a montage of most of the party struggling in futility to break out of a prison cell after having been depowered as Mio's last month of life passes by.

    Web Animation 
  • One of the 2002 BIONICLE flash animations showed the construction of the Boxor machine with a Hard-Work Montage of preparation, welding and so forth — well, mostly a Hard-Work Montage. Taipu just dances around holding a Bohrok headplate over his head, pretending to be a Bohrok.
  • Lampshaded in a Strong Bad Email
    Strong Bad: Digging is hard, man! Did you ever try to dig a hole? It's not all wipes and montages like in the movies. It takes forever!
  • Played for laughs in the episode, "Hammer and Fail of Eddsworld. After Matt returns with "anything that isn't nails", Tom asks Edd what's next on the checklist. He looks and states that's the "Obligatory Building Montage". Then Tom sighs and heads off to go get the music started.

    Webcomics 

    Web Original 
  • Baumgartner Restoration: A bit downplayed as Baumgartner allows of time to show and explain the details of each step of the process, but still compresses days of painstaking restoration work into half an hour or so.
  • Lampshaded then parodied in this episode of BuzzFeed Unsolved.
  • Martial arts training montage is spoofed in a CollegeHumor video.
  • Empires: the Musical: The song "Prismarine" focuses on Lizzie's early efforts to build her Ocean Empire from scratch, from her first Lily-Pad Platform to the Prisma Palace.
  • Spoofed in the final episode of Fighterpedia (a Two Best Friends Play spinoff). Woolie sees that he's scheduled to face the legendary Daigo in the very first round of the EVO fighting game tournament. This is followed by a montage of Daigo practicing the game and reading up on strategy, interspersed with scenes of Woolie sitting on his butt, eating junk food, and surfing the internet.
  • SMPLive: When Travis dies to a drowned while AFK and has to redo all his progress, he does it in a montage, complete with inspirational rock music.

    Western Animation 
  • Avatar: The Last Airbender: In the Book 3 episode "Sokka's Master" when Sokka makes his own sword.
  • The Christmas Tree: Judy builds a swing set and a slide during a montage. She places them around Mrs. Hopewell, a pine tree in which the orphans love.
  • Family Guy:
    • Spoofed in the episode "Don't Make Me Over", in which Peter and his buddies clean up the bar to an '80s beat. ...well, they make an effort, anyway.
    • Spoofed in "Brian Goes Back to College" where Brian needs to study to pass an exam, so he and Stewie have a montage of ... jogging and lifting weights. When they realize there's only twenty minutes left till the test, Brian says, "Crap, all we've done is work out." Actually a spoof of the training montage from Rocky IV when the titular character trains in Siberia, complete with the same music and the odd farm implement training method.
    • Also in "Wasted Talent", where Peter performs several complex science experiments involving lasers and such to figure out that 4-1=3.
  • The entirety of the Happy Harmonies short "To Spring" is built around this.
  • About halfway through the pilot episode of House of Mouse we get to see a montage of Donald Duck making an attempt to replace the sign near the entrance with one that reads "House of Duck," but instead he gets signs that end with words that rhyme with "duck." Toward the end of the montage, the sign is replaced with one that reads "House of Pancakes" before finally switching to the correct one.
  • King of the Hill episode "No Bobby Left Behind" has this. The montage shows the less experienced middle school students being taught efficiently in order to get them ready for the standardized test. Before, they were sent to special needs class where they were exempt from taking the test.
  • My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic:
    • The episode "Winter Wrap-Up" uses two of these, one as a Crowd Song and another as the climax.
    • "It's About Time" has a montage of the citizens of Ponyville disaster-proofing their town.
    • There's another in "Apple Family Reunion" with the song "Raise This Barn", in which the Apple family raises their new barn.
    • Yet another song version is done in "Castle Sweet Castle", showing Twilight's friends working hard to decorate her new home, only to show at the end that they've turned the place into a cluttered mess. There's later a reprise showing the five making another renovation: a chandelier fashioned from the root of Twilight's old tree home, adorned with gems containing her memories with them.
    • Season 9's "The Summer Sun Setback" features this near the end, as Twilight, her friends, the princesses, all the ponies, and even Discord work together to undo all the disasters caused to Canterlot, in preparation for the last Summer Sun Celebration ever.
  • Spoofed in one episode of The Penguins of Madagascar, where they decide to fix a broken robot. After the montage, Skipper says, "Well, now that we fixed the coffee machine, let's get working on that robot."
    • Also spoofed in another episode, where the penguins build a submarine. Then they realize they can't get the sub outside, so the montage runs in reverse as they dismantle it to rebuild it outside.
  • Phineas and Ferb: "It usually takes us at least a montage."
  • Robot Chicken has the superhero Montage. He helps others do a lot in a short amount of time. He can also age someone by several decades within mere seconds.
  • Spoofed in the Sealab 2021 episode "Sharko's Machine", where Sharko performs a variety of bizarre tasks to prepare for a citizenship test.
  • In The Simpsons episode "Flamin' Moe", Moe's closes for renovations, with a sign outside reading "Closed for 'Hard Work' Montage". The montage itself is just shots of the outside while Moe talks about what he's doing.
  • Sonic Boom parodies this in at least two instances. In the first, the episode "Hedgehog Day" has Robotnik furiously going over all of the math he can think of in order to deduce how to end his "Groundhog Day" Loop. We see complex equations scroll across the air as he goes, only for him to turn and tell Cubot to stop messing with his hologram projector. Cubot shuts it off, and the floating equations go away. In a later episode, Battle of the Boy Bands, the group starts a montage to learn a dance routine which takes all of a few seconds. They decide to use the rest of their "montage time" to come up with a name, which proves far harder than learning to dance. It ends when calendar pages fly across the screen, implicating time passing, when in reality it's just Knuckles tearing apart the calendar for no logical reason.
  • South Park:
    • Satirized in the episode "Asspen", with a montage song, played over... well, a montage. The lyrics of this song are pretty apt, but may not be appropriate to post here. The same song with minor lyric changes was later used in Team America: World Police.
    • Another South Park montage, and more of a parody of CSI's montages. In "Cartman's Incredible Gift", the detective goes to killer's house and notices his wall of left hands, but dismisses it because they are palms down, while he looks at his left hand palms up. It does raise his suspicions, and under goes a CSI-like lab work (even forgetting half way through the scene, and where the music stop temporarily) to discover the equivalence between hands palms up and hands palms down.
    • There was a montage set to The Monkees' "I'm a Believer" in which Randy and the boys raced to find a solution to the problem of farting and global warming, but it turned out to be All Just a Dream of Randy's and they had actually bared started.
    • The end of "Goobacks" is another example.
  • On SpongeBob SquarePants one such montage actually gets an introduction. In "Home Sweet Pineapple", when SpongeBob's pineapple get eaten by nematodes he and Patrick go through one of these to rebuild it. When the montage ends, the result is only large enough to fit on SpongeBob's head, then it falls apart.
  • Subverted by The Venture Brothers It looks like Dr. Venture, Billy Quizboy, and Pete White are working hard to fix a shrinking ray when really, they're writing a top 10 guilty pleasures list.


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Thai Culture Cram

With a little help from Scratch, Molly learns all she can about Thai culture so she can better connect with her family.

How well does it match the trope?

4 (4 votes)

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Main / HardWorkMontage

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