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Oh! We'll make you a movie That's long and immense, Way-hey! Slow the plot down. Just give us a script That makes no friggin' sense — We'll try so hard to slow the plot down! — Joel and the Bots, Mystery Science Theater 3000
Padding is a moment in TV or movies when a scene or scenes could have easily been removed from the plot without affecting the story significantly. Most works have to employ some level of this to get within the desired running time (often with only seconds to spare), but are usually either subtle about it or just make the padding itself enjoyable. In other cases, these scenes likely distract from the overall tension/plot advancement/conclusion.
This is more easily identifiable in television shows, when a scene is obvious padding to get the episode up to sufficient length. In film, it's often entirely a matter of opinion; for instance, many people wonder why the movie Fargo wasted time showing the detective's husband fixing her breakfast when there was a compelling Reverse Whodunnit in the works, whereas the movie's most ardent fans feel that such scenes were the whole point.
All the same, there are some unquestionable and painful moments of padding in films, especially from the 1950s. Roger Corman and Bert I. Gordon are often considered the kings of padding (both have even been credited with inventing the device, though such claims are apocryphal), inserting gratuitous scenes of mountain climbing or characters stumbling around in the dark in order to pad a film to feature-length. They were not even above simply doubling individual frames to add a few extra seconds. Mystery Science Theater 3000 treated this sort of time-filler as the most painful thing a movie could do (it was once presented under the name "Deep Hurting").
Compare with Filler, which is when whole episodes/issues/whatever else in a continuity based serial applies this principle. See also Engaging Chevrons, Inaction Sequence, Leave The Camera Running, Overly Long Gag, Arc Fatigue. Not to be confused with THAT sort of padding.
Styles of padding
- Montages can, ironically, be used to achieve this quite easily. Even though montages are designed to compress time, you can always reduce the compression an arbitrary amount, making the montage expand to fit whatever time it needs. Most of the time the viewers won't even realize that this compressed-time sequence is actually wasting time. An A Team Montage or Avengers Assemble is particularly likely to fall victim to this, since they often show every character, even if some of them don't have major roles in this episode (filling time and Mandatory Line requirements in one fell swoop).
- One of the best examples of this involved the montages in the Stargate SG 1 episode Window Of Opportunity, which is about a time loop. (Time loop episodes themselves are practically half padding anyway.) When O'Neill realizes he can do anything he wants in a loop and not face consequences for it, he gets very creative...
- Lampshaded in Garth Marenghis Darkplace, where Garth comments that they made many scenes that really shouldn't be shot in slo-mo, shot in slo-mo because the episode was short
- The entirety of the trope Contemplate Our Navels is basically padding to make an episode last longer.
- Clips from the next episode.
- What's coming up later in this episode.
- The host delivering inane jokes to camera.
- Exposition.
- Stock Footage.
- Engaging Chevrons
- Viewers Are Goldfish: Hey, let's recap what you just saw 10 minutes ago.
Examples in media
Anime and Manga
- Dragonball Z was infamous for all the padding used to prevent it from overtaking the manga. For details see Inaction Sequence, a technique the show perfected.
- In the same regard, the modsouls from the Bount Arc of 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 overtake the manga again.
- The recap that starts nearly every episode. It 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.
- Some padding isn't bad, for example, Grimmjow punching Ichigo for over a minute.
- Most Magical Girl shows in the Sailor Moon mold. Sailor Moon itself often killed upwards of about three minutes an episode on endlessly recycled Stock Footage of transformation sequences and magical attacks. It wasn't as excessive as many of the imitations would go, the worst of which was probably Wedding Peach.
- Others, such as Ojamajo Doremi, often abreviate the 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.
- Transformers Energon and Cybertron both suffered heavily from overuse of Stock Footage, although eventually Cybertron had characters (the ones that weren't transforming) commenting while the sequence was going on.
- One Piece uses padding for similar reasons to Bleach, often so that each episode covers only a chapter worth of manga material, and often shows what characters who weren't featured in the original chapter were doing at the time, even if they accomplish nothing significant.
- Similarly, the Naruto anime does this when it doesn't just decide to 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 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 spending rather amusing scene in a restaurant). This also serves the purpose of demonstrating Suigetsu's 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.
- Claymores always have to take a page to tell people "a strange man in black will arrive to pick up the money". Apparently even after 2000 years of professional superheroics no one remembered this.
Comic Books
- The Clone Saga.
- To make things clearer: the Clone Saga started as a single issue in 1975 when it was revealed that the villain the Jackal had created a clone of Spider-Man (who then died). Later, in 1994, the writers and editors decided to bring back the storyline and expand it. The climax was supposed to be a four-part crossover of Spider-titles called "Power and Responsibility," except the first issues started selling so well, Marvel (specifically, Marvel's marketing department) decided to expand the storyline, giving the clone (Ben Reilly) half of the Spider-books. This eventually ended up making the storyline become 103 issues (not including one shots like Maximum Clonage). To make this clear: the storyline ran through all four Spider-titles from 1994 to 1996. Which, for a storyline only supposed to last a few issues, meant a whole lot of padding. If you interested in it, try reading The Life of Reilly
 , a 35-part article behind the scenes on the Clone Saga.
- Arcs that could be easily three or four issues long are usually padded out for the inevitable trade paperback collection. Usually, the default arc length is six issues, as that results in a $20 trade (the typical rate for such a book). This happens at both Marvel and DC, though the former was so notorious for it that it drove writers away from the company.
- And then gloriously subverted in Nextwave, which was based on the idea "if it doesn't fit in two explosion-heavy books, or it's sane, don't do it."
Film
- 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.
- Blade Runner had this in the director's cut. The narration added for the theatrical release was gone, but the scenes lasted longer than they needed to. This was fixed in the latest release.
- Manos The Hands Of Fate had several of these, including the opening driving shot, 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 ... if you think about it, Manos is like Thanksgiving at my aunt's house - 80-to-90 percent of that turkey was filling.
- In the 2005 movie version of The War Of The Worlds, 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.
- Star Trek: The Motion Picture, or in some circles, The Motionless Picture. A script for a one-hour pilot for a new Trek series that never came to be was made into a two-hour movie by the addition of a little extra chatter and lot of establishment shots of truly insane length, such as our first look at the new Enterprise, as well as when V'Ger is revealed. This kicks off the tradition of most odd-numbered Trek movies sucking. How bad? 2001: A Space Odyssey moves at light speed by comparison.
- What about the original VHS release? You know, the one that was 12 MINUTES LONGER than the theatrical cut.
- Editing wasn't actually finished when the movie premiered - in fact, the filmmakers were frantically editing to the very last few hours before the premiere, to the point where the film prints were still wet. Editing was completed properly for the Directors Cut, and this makes the movie a decent flick.
- A particularly egregious example (with its own MST 3 K episode, to boot) is Lost Continent, in which...well, Two Words: rock climbing.
- It's so bad that the very mention of the term "rock climbing" terrifies the Satellite of Love's occupants. The sandstorm scene from Hercules Against the Moon Men has a similar effect. This also has Two Words to describe it, deep hurting.
- In the Riff Trax commentaries, "Podrace" is the equivalent codeword, coming from their riffing on Star Wars Episode I.
- Mystery Science Theater 3000 has fun with it when the film is obviously padded out or if the ending is extremely obvious. Some examples:
- Space Mutiny ("And his eyes open...")
- Werewolf ("Okay, movie, we're going to have to call time on this")
- Soultaker ("Just open the door already!")
- Cave Dwellers ("This is the part of the film we call 'She Had To Ask...'.")
- Manos The Hands Of Fate and its lengthy, '''lengthy''' driving sequence.
- Which were cut down in the MST 3 K version.
- "The Bloodwater of Dr. Z". At one point the titular character thinks aloud, "It's been a long fifteen years," and they remark, "Hell, it's been a long fifteen *minutes*."
- Another MST 3 K example of extreme padding would be Sidehackers. 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. Joel and the bots lampshade this in a song in the end of the episode with the refrain "Only love pads the film."
- The Starfighters, 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 giving Mike and the Bots so much time to make refueling jokes that they eventually gave up and just sat quietly for a bit.
- To some extent, most of Akira Kurosawa's films suffer from this.
- Rescue from Gilligan's Island was quite egregious about this, given that the plot was recycled from an episode of the show they never filmed.
- Umberto Eco has an 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.
- Oh, Roger Corman. There's a reason why his original B&W film Little Shop of Horrors is largely overlooked. It didn't need padding, but got it anyway - whole, superfluous, boring, kitchen sink dialogue scenes of it.
Literature
- Left Behind suffers from this greatly; for instance, blogger Fred Clark describes redundant POV as "part of [Jenkins'] secret formula for cramming a 200-page novel into a mere 468 pages."
- The Wheel Of Time books are recognised to suffer from this, especially as the series progresses. "Crossroads of Twilight" especially.
- 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' would kill off at least one, possibly two more.
- The Sword Of Truth series increasingly suffers from this as it progresses. In particular, you could condense the last three or four books of the series into one, simply by removing all of the extraneous dialogue, chapter-long philosophical rants and, dare I say it, yet more chapters of extraneous monologuing.
- Many chapters in The Protector's War (the second book in the Emberverse series) focus on two characters living in post-Change Britain. The problem here is that the actual plot occurs in the northwestern United States. The characters do eventually end up in the right place and become marginally important, but their roles could have been easily filled by someone else.
- Anne Rice actually mocked herself for this. Queen of the Damned features a character who tried to read the original Interview With A Vampire, but couldn't get past all the lengthy atmospheric descriptions.
- The Lord Of The Rings suffers moderately frequently from this, occasionally devolving into irrelevant side arcs and Purple Prose about a stretch of landscape that is ultimately irrelevant to the ongoing plot. There is also all of the irrelevant walking and eating that could have been time-lapsed easily.
- Charles Dickens was paid by the word, and sometimes it shows.
- Hey did you know that the city of Moscow was like a beehive without a queen after Napolean invaded? Hey did you know that apparently writing 835 fucking words on what a beehive without a queen is like only to end it with "and such was the state of Moscow after Napolean invaded" apparently makes for epic russian novels?
- The Twilight books would've been a lot shorter if Stephenie Meyer had spent less time describing how beautiful Edward was and how much Bella loved him. The fourth book is particularly bad about this.
- How Not To Write A Novel describes a form of padding the writers call "The Second Argument in the Laundromat", where more than one scene is used to establish exactly the same thing.
- Lampshaded in The Princess Bride, where Goldman describes several pages of padding in roughly a page and a half.
- The MST3ked movie, The Starfighters with it's seemingly endless stock footage of jets refueling.
- Ruled Britannia suffers a lot from this in the middle stretch, where Shakespeare mostly rehashes the many, many ways in which his life is a lie that is apt to end horribly, and Lope de Vega mostly chases after women and ruminates on how he's really, truly in love with them all.
Live Action TV
- Many of the two-hour Columbo episodes suffer noticeably from this; since the Lieutentant 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.
- Often suffered by the classic series of Doctor Who, especially in the earlier years when stories would sometimes run for six or seven (and in 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 Jon Pertwee era, entire episodes are given over to a 25 minute chase sequence which doesn't advance the plot at all.
- TV talent show results. Actually announcing who's being kicked off that week takes about a minute. The results show can be up to an hour. The longer the series runs, the worse it gets - as they start to run out of acts to kill time with, but the show never gets any shorter. It has been suggested that presenters are contractually obliged to leave a longer and longer pause after the words "And the winner is..."
- Spoofed on Garth Marenghis Darkplace, as the explanation for their use of slow-mo. The episodes are all said to have come several minutes short, and therefore every bit of footage that wasn't dialogue was considered for slow-mo to pad the episodes out.
- 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.
- Vic Fontaine in the last season of Star Trek Deep Space Nine was given huge chunks of the show to sing Frank Sinatra 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.
- 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 Monty Python's dead parrot sketch.
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.
- All 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.
- However, it's suggested this is to show that it does take (albeit much less in the CSI world) time to do all the evidence analysis.
Theatre
- Older musicals typically would have several short scenes played in front of traveler curtains (typically depicting a corridor or street between somewhere and somewhere else) so that the main sets could be changed efficiently. These scenes contained many plot-irrelevant comic relief opportunities for secondary characters.
- Kiss Me Kate arguably parodies this when the two mobsters are trapped outside the curtain, unable to get back in, and are forced to improvise a song on how Shakespeare is useful for seducin' the ladies - "Brush Up Your Shakespeare," which is probably the most famous song in the show.
Video Games
- This is something that unfortunately Halo: Combat Evolved and its sequels suffer from. When you are in single-player mode, there are many times when you are just repeating what you did before, and backtracking through areas that you had been to before. Single Player is pretty short, so I can only imagine how short it would be if Bungie removed the back-tracking.
- The Phoenix Wright series falls under this for a few cases that don't have any ties to the main plotline.
- This justified in-story for My World My Way. Nero tries to steer the Princess away from the Elven Field because the dungeon he commissioned to have been built hadn't been completed by the time of her arrival in Oasis Town, so the Oasis Town mayor there assigns her several different quests at once to slow her down. And after that, the mayor tries to push her toward Fire Mountain with the promise of "more experience points", though you can choose to go straight to Elven Field beforehand anyway.
- You do a lot of walking and collecting things for the hired help in Neverwinter Nights.
- The Legend Of Zelda The Wind Waker forced the player to sail around from island to island, which was the video game equivalent of when road trip movies have scenes of the car driving along a highway, doing nothing in particular.
- Towards the end of Metal Gear Solid, we're told that the card key (part of a set of 3) to deactivate Metal Gear REX we've had since midway through disc one was actually all three in one. However, using the key three times requires backtracking around the base, which seemed kinda pointless.
- Oh, that's not the most glaring example of padding in this game. Take point A, the Tank Hangar, the first building you come to. Take point B, the Comms tower. You travel from point A to point B. You encounter a sitiuation that you can't deal with without a certain weapon. So you travel from point B to point A, to pick it up. Correctly armed, you head back to point B, and deal with the situation. You are then captured, and dragged... back to point A. Once you escape... then its off to point B. Your game continues as normal from this point. A-B, B-A, A-B again, and A-B a third time. You cover essentially the same territory FOUR times. This is a short ten hour game WITH all the backtracking.
- Pretty much every game involving Level Grinding. I've seen several games described as "Over 100 Hours" but only 20 of those are actually playing through the game, the other ones are level grinding so you don't die at the next Random Encounter.
- The Great Maze in Super Smash Bros Brawl. Many people complained about this final portion of the adventure mode since you're revisiting most of the levels you encountered plus having to fight ALL the boss characters you fought already and ALL of the playable characters before you were allowed to reach the Final Boss. Luckily, the maze is littered with warp points and save points.
- Grinding for money between ranking fights in No More Heroes.
- The entire level leading up to fight with Letz Shake could also be this. It's one long, entirely straight tunnel populated with enemies that takes forever to run through. All leading up to a cutscene of Letz Shake being cut in half and no fight. It's supposed to be a joke but it also allowed the developers be really lazy.
- Many Tales games have, about 2/3 on the game, a Padding Session. It is never the same - sometimes you're required to collect summons, or jewels, but the game will always want you to run through three or more dungeons after small artifacts for the main story to go on.
- An excerpt from the GamerBlog's review of Sonic Rush Adventure:
'''Surely enough, near the endplot, I need three 'hints' to open a door. Oh, dear, says Sonic Rush Adventure, where could these hints be? You'll just have to go around and search the other islands! Too bad you'll have to slog through the stages and mini games first, and still you might not even get to the right island because who really remembers which island is which? Oh ho ho ho ho! No, I said to Sonic Rush Adventure, I will go along with your arbitrary punishment of my curiosity as least I can. I logged on to Game FA Qs.com and looked up the appropriate islands, each of which I had already visited before.
Webcomics
Western Animation
- Family Guy does this a lot. The creators admitted that the vaudeville singers were added just to fill out time before commercials and the absolute worst example was the inclusion of a three-minute Conway Twitty music video in "The Juice Is Loose!" for NO REASON.
- The infamous "Rake Scene" in The Simpsons Episode [9F22] "Cape Feare". The crew even admitted to padding here.
Other
- Some game shows can be pretty bad at this. Usually not the fault of the producers, but due to the contestants who stall for several minutes before making a decision in the game.
- Who Wants To Be A Millionaire during its early runs 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 life line. Usually, most contestants would stall some more after their life line was used in order to think over the results. The newer version of Millionaire adds 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 1 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. The Who Wants To Be A Millionaire webgame moves 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.
- Trite cynical version of Millionaire's padding: To pay out less money and have to write less questions, as well as improve the chances that a channel surfer will randomly wander into a high-paying question, the contestants are told to stall increasingly as the question value increases. Much later, ratings were finally at a low enough point to justify throwing in a timer to boost them.
- Deal Or No Deal makes Who Wants To Be A Millionaire 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 less than two minutes- and there would be an absolutely absurd amount of grand prize winners, which is why this isn't allowed.
- To be fair, just because they're luck based, doesn't mean they're not real decisions. Apparently, they have found the optimal balance between ratings and payouts here, though clearly some people find the padding too greedy to justify watching the show.
- Much the same as the Charles Dickens example above, lawyers used to be paid by the word, and as such went to absurd extremes to remove all possible, conceivable ambiguity from whatever was getting passed into law. This was the subject of a lightbulb joke in which the answer to the question "How many lawyers does it take to screw in a lightbulb?" goes on for THREE PAGES.
- Don't Forget The Lyrics 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.
Radio
- Copious padding is pretty much the only way to hold on to the subject in Just a Minute.
- The Goon Show would occasionally make jokes about stuff being put in to make up the time. (If nothing else, surely there was no dramatic need to have the musical interludes - although Ray Ellington is good enough that it's not really a cause for complaint)
- They didn't really have a choice. BBC sketch shows were usually required to feature musical numbers, especially since they had to have an orchestra there to play the incidental music.
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