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Naruto: Want me to have a flashback of what just happened 13 seconds ago?
Everyone: No!
Naruto: Aww...
Sort of like how executives think viewers are stupid, they also think you have the short term memory of a goldfish - all of three seconds. Put to the test by the Mythbusters. Verdict: Busted! They actually have a longer memory span than three seconds. It's more like three months. Possibly longer. Shhh.
Because remembering what happens over the course of a whole thirty minutes or, god forbid, an hour, is too difficult for your general media consumer, there is a handy little device called a Flashback that can be used to rewind, oh, five minutes or so to say, "Hey! This just happened, moron!"
Not to be confused with the repetition of something really cool. That's not a "You're dumb," that's a, "Let's do that again!"
Sometimes a necessity in videogame plots, due to the possibility of the player saving the game, taking a break of, say, two or three months, and then coming back, having forgotten important plot points during that time. In this case, the flashbacks will only seem insulting to the player's intelligence during a non-stop play.
This is very often done as padding due to laziness or budget. Extremely annoying for documentaries when important and/or interesting information is left out of the story and instead they endlessly recap what you were just told 5 minutes ago.
Compare Nohamotyo, where executives believe that they can recycle whole plots due to this short memory.
Examples:
- The Ace Attorney series might as well have a warning: Don't Bother Taking Notes (we'll let you know if something important is said...over and over and over and over and...)
- Pokemon Mystery Dungeon: Time/Darkness uses this a lot more than it should.
- A variation of this in the Lost video game Via Domus: the game is (like the show) split into episodes, and each one starts with a "Previously on Lost" segment recapping the game so far. This would be fine, except that there's no way to quit the game in between episodes, so you're invariably recapping something you've just seen. The previously part does show up again when you reload the game where it might actually be needed, though.
- Also used in Blood Curse: Siren. The episodes are so short you wouldn't normally stop after just one, yet they remind you of what you just did twenty minutes ago.
- The B Movie Future War had a montage of flashbacks, arranged chronologically, while the protagonist was in prison. By the end, the scenes being flashbacked had been shown less than five minutes ago. Mike and the bots did not let this go without comment.
- In Uwe Boll's House of the Dead, a character has a flashback of the entire movie up to that point while standing in the middle of a zombie-filled graveyard.
- WWE's and TNA's Professional Wrestling programs are absolutely peppered with "Moments Ago" replays, usually upon returning from commercial breaks. (In the case of RAW, which is shot live, this will usually be something that happened during the commercial break.)
- Also in the case where a storyline and/or character is quickly chucked out and it's expected that people will simply not remember it or will be nice enough to overlook it. The IWC frequently does neither.
- Noir does this, having a series of flashbacks late into the first episode. However, this seems to be less about them assuming that Viewers Are Morons and more about conserving the budget by repeating the same sequence over and over.
- The very second episode of Clerks The Animated Series did this with its first episode. Though that's the entire point.
- Parodied in the musical version of The Producers, where Max's eleventh-hour solo recaps the entire plot up to that point (including the intermission in the stage version).
- Again Parodied in Clue, in which the Butler recaps every action that has taken place in the movie (including slapping Mrs. Peacock repeatedly!), until the characters yell at him to get on with it already!
- Lampshaded in the Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog episode, Over the Hill Hero. After finally catching Sonic, Dr. Robotnik exclaims that Mobius is his. HIS! His! ALL HIS!! Then, after the commercial break, he announces "With Sonic trapped in the forcefield, Mobius is mine! MINE!" Then, he pauses, scratches his chin, and wonders "Or did I say that already?"
- It's a fairly common joke in comedy cartoons in the 80s and 90s, especially since so many serious cartoons play it straight, repeating the last scene you saw before the commercial break (this is extra funny on releases with no commercials). This Troper remembers the exact joke from Earthworm Jim and The Tick, at least.
- The Metal Gear Solid series can sometimes be guilty of this. Not to mention the fact that Snake repeats everything everyone tells him, but in an inquisitive tone. "The key is made of a shape-memory alloy!" "A shape-memory alloy?!" "Yes! It changes based on the temperature!" "It changes based on the temperature, huh?"
- MythBusters tends to be an offender whenever they don't have enough
TNT material to fill an hour. Segments are usually started by a recap of what happened five minutes ago and ended by a preview of what's coming up next, making about a third of the whole show pure repetition.
- Americas Next Top Model is really bad for this. It's particularly annoying for British viewers, because the advert breaks are arranged differently - a reminder of something that happened ten minutes ago on the show when it is shown in the U.S. may have happened two minutes ago for British viewers.
- Most American documentaries are completely unwatchable due to the constant recapping of the first three minutes, which also leaves little time to impart any actual information.
- It gets even more ridiculous when the BBC's own programs do this, and the obvious implication that they're doing it for the benefit of whichever commercial network ends up buying it can be almost insulting at times. Especially when they show you the same recap/coming soon segment twice in quick succession, either side of the non-existent ad break.
- An instance of this on Sonic X leads to a quite jarring moment when edited by 4Kids, making it seem like Cream just ran out of a room crying twice!
- The quote at the top of the page isn't too much of an exaggeration of the Naruto anime, with whatever happened in the last five minutes of one episode being recapped in the opening five minutes of the next, and whatever happened in the last minute before a commercial being repeated over the next twenty second after. Although the actual purpose of this is more Padding than anything else.
- Disgaea 2 has the infamous scene where Taro falls into a river. The scene is played over three times before the player can regain control, and two of these are completely unskippable. It was likely to segue dialogue, but it also plays during the Next Chapter skit for almost no reason.
- Tru Calling often had flashbacks during the second half of the episode to events from the first half. Probably done because, for much of its run, the show's first half hour aired at the same time as Friends.
- Just over halfway through the anime series Street Fighter II V, Bison has Ken sedated and gets into a fight with Chun Li, ending with him suffocating her. Ken was apparently conscious enough to witness this, because for the next four episodes, he does nothing but have flashbacks of that fight.
- Yu Gi Oh The Movie lampshaded this during the Pegasus Versus Kaiba duel, where Pegasus started to ramble off the effect of his recently-played card (Cost Down) — only for Kaiba to butt in and say that he already knows what the card does (though while this would normally be a subversion, Kaiba goes on to give a Cliffs Notes version of the effect, thus making it a Lampshade Hanging instead).
- Although the volume forms of the manga can be pretty bad about this. While it would make sense to recap the last climactic action in one-chapter-a-week form, when you read them straight, it turns into
"I play my trap card!"
(Next chapter starts)
"I play my trap card!"
- That's fairly standard with most chapter-based manga, really. Naruto and Lunar Legend Tsukihime do the same thing. This is easily explained. Mangas often run in a serial with multiple series, such as Shonen Jump, before they are collected into a volume containing a single series. Serials are normally released monthly format, and thus when a new chapter comes out, it's much easier on the reader to have a quick refresher on something they read a month ago, sometimes more, then it is for them to have to look up last month's issue to remember what happened last time.
- The Yu Gi Oh Anime did the same thing in the Battle City arc, with Marik explaining "Those fools don't realize I am Marik!" in an internal monologue. At least 3 times an episode.
- Roughly every fifth episode of Inu Yasha begins by recapping both what's currently happening and the backstory for most of the characters involved.
- Like many other animes, including Cowboy Bebop, Slayers and Samurai Gun, the anime version of Ranma One Half split each episode in half for their single commercial break. As a result, immediately after the second half's eyecatch, the episode would replay the last scene of the first half. How jarring this was varied between episodes- the episode "Cool Runnings! The Race of the Snowmen" was particularly jarring, repeating as it did a minute-long sequence of Cologne mocking Ranma for being foolish enough to challenge her, and Ranma's defiant retort.
- Digimon did the same thing, sometimes making the repeat trivially different.
- The Strong Bad Email "accent," on the DVD:
Strong Bad: Here's my accent a few years ago.
Flashback Strong Bad: Do joo take of jor face and hands before joo go to bed?
Strong Bad: Here's my accent a few seconds ago.
Flashback Strong Bad: Here's my accent a few years ago.
- Also, the email "vampire", which ends with a flashback memorial in honor of Trevor, who Strong Bad only met 30 seconds ago.
- The Transformers Generation 1 episode "Auto-Bop" has a flashback to something that happened less than a minute before.
- Uncanny X Men # 153 features a helpful sequence of flashback pages that explains how Kitty Pryde ended up in a car with (someone who appeared to be) her arch enemy Emma Frost... but the final panel of the flashback recalls an event that happened only a few pages earlier in the same issue.
- There's a series of rapid flashbacks in Bioshock during the "Would you kindly" reveal, even though the player can hardly have missed seeing it written in red on the bulletin board outside Ryan's apartment.
- Princess Resurrection did a few same episode flashbacks, the most extreme case being episode 8 where they did a flashback to a scene that happened 51 seconds ago. (About 2 to 5 minutes ago for the characters.)
- The Wildest Police Videos series are made almost exclusively of repeated previews and reviews. This may be explained by the fact that this repetition is not for the benefit of the viewers but to somehow stretch less than five minutes of actual footage into an hour long episode.
- Many episodes of Heroes begin by repeating part of the last scene of the previous episode. Sometimes this gives you the impression the continuity editor is a goldfish; in one instance, Claire woke up and declared "Holy shi-" as the credits rolled, but in the next episode, where the scene continued, she instead said "Oh my God". This is not a great instance of thinking ahead, guys.
- This is very common in episodic newspaper comics, but Alley Oop makes an art of it. Sometimes only a single panel will be devoted to advancing the plot that was summarized in the other two.
- Dick Tracy spends every Sunday rehashing the previous week's action.
- CSI does this all the time. First you see the crime scene, then they talk about the evidence, then they process it in the lab and remember collecting it, then they about why it matters and when someone has a Creek Moment, they show you which specific piece of evidence was important.
- In Tales of Symphonia: Dawn of the New World, literally about 80% of the occurrences of anyone saying or Emil remembering Richter's phrase "courage is the magic that turns dreams into reality" follow with a flashback to when he first said it, despite the fact that it was unusual for a guy like him to say that kind of thing it would be impossible to forget he said it even if you tried.
- Spy Hard parodied this when WD-40 meets his old spy buddy. When he reminisces about the good times they had, he remembers only meeting him moments ago.
- Dragonball Z sometimes had this with commercial breaks, but it was more stark when an episode would start by spending at least a couple of minutes repeating what happened in the last episode. Made a little strange and amusing by the fact that the repeat could sometimes be very different than what happened previously. One explanation offered for this was the series changing animation directors often... a new director would show up, decide he wanted someone to emote differently, be positioned differently, or say something different from what the last guy did, and thus essentially Ret Con the last few minutes of the previous episode so as to do it his way.
- The Previously On Battlestar Galactica segments are included in the DVD versions. This gets annoying as you re-watch a scene you just saw, then bizarre as they show scenes that never happened before.
- Fushigi Yuugi was a notoriously frequent offender, in the anime format at least (not in the manga, or at least, not enough to be particularly noticeable). How many times did Tamahome rip up that damn love letter?
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