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"Big men sticking screwdrivers into things, and turning them! And adjusting them!"
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.
This includes the A Team Montage, the Gonna Fly Now Montage, and any montage in which somebody does a lot of construction, communication, travel, martial arts training, or scouring many books and files.
Examples
Anime and Manga
Comic Books
Films
- In The Blind Side, Miss Sue tutoring Michael in academics. (This film also has a Gonna Fly Now Montage involving Michael and SJ.)
- In Predator, the commando team works together to create a set of traps that they hope will catch the title opponent.
- 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.
- 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.
- Combined with Lost Love Montage in DEBS as the villainess works hard to prove to her lover that she can change.
- The opening of Primer, and a few other scenes detailing the construction of the box.
- 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.
- 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.
- Thao making amends for attempting to steal the Gran Torino
- Used twice in the geek favorite movie 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.
Live-Action TV
- 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.
- In this editor's house, that's the "Microscope montage".
- The doctors on House do this to signify they're coming up with the right diagnosis after getting it wrong for forty minutes.
- 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.
- The Firefly episode Ariel has one of these as the crew prepare for their heist for that episode.
- Used in just about every episode of Mythbusters.
- Which is 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.
- It's just a high speed camera, playing at, a high speed. They've said on-screen several times that they could show all of the work, just like the other, less explosive experiments they do, but they would be boring.
- Appears on Top Gear 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.
- 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.
- Quite obviously every single episode of "Trading Spaces."
- 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.
- Referenced, of course, by Buffy:
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)...
- The Big Bang Theory had a montage of Sheldon and Rajesh staring intensely at equations on a dryboard 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.
Toys
Video and Computer Games
Webcomic
- Spoofed by Order Of The Stick. While training to be a Dashing Swordsman
 , Elan goes through what appears to be a typical training montage, but then the following exchange occurs:
Elan: How come we've only been doing this for twenty minutes, but you've already changed the backdrop five times and gone through three costumes?
Captain Scoundrél: Elan, never underestimate the value of a good Training Scene Montage. It could save your life someday.
- Homestar Runner. "Guts. Guts and might. / Liftin' weights and feelin' all right / It's a showdown going downtown / You're gonna mess around showdown / Put your nose down showdown"
- One strip in How I Killed Your Master covers 29 days of the narrator running to get in shape.
Western Animation
- South Park satirized this 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.
- In anything, if you want to go from just a beginner to a pro... you need a montage!
- Even Rocky had a montage.
- 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.
- Spoofed in the Sealab 2021 episode "Sharko's Machine", where Sharko performs a variety of bizarre tasks to prepare for a citizenship test.
- Spoofed on Family Guy in the episode "Don't Make Me Over", in which Peter and his buddies clean up the bar to an 80's beat. ...well, they make an effort, anyway.
- Spoofed in another episode where Brian needs to study to pass a college test, 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.
- Meet the Robinsons makes use of this example during the sequence in which Lewis builds the Memory Scanner.
- Subverted by The Venture Bros. 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.
- The construction of the rocket in Wallace And Gromit: A Grand Day Out.
- 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."
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