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"What's that number again?"
— (Stock phrase of any radio commercial)
Sort of like how executives think viewers are stupid, they also think you have the memory of a goldfish, which, according to common legend, lasts about three seconds* actually, real life goldfish have been proven to have actually a longer memory; a study concluded a maximum limit of seven months. And, if you don't buy that, it's also been busted. 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!" *
Executives think viewers are stupid, and they also think you have the memory of a goldfish, which lasts about three seconds. Sometimes a necessity in video game 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, in which case they only have themselves to blame. (Some recent games try to avert this by putting plot summaries or scenes that otherwise show what has happened up to that point in the Loading Screen. Others have a character keep a diary which the player can read to remind themselves of the plot so far.)
Often Viewers Are Goldfish is an excuse for lots of Padding and Stock Footage, to reduce production costs.
Compare Fleeting Demographic Rule, where executives believe that they can recycle whole plots due to this short memory, or Ad Nauseam, where it's presumed viewers will not recall ads they saw in the same commercial break. Also compare Recap Episode, where an entire episode functions as this for a series.
By the way, this trope exists because executives think viewers are stupid. They also think you have the memory of a goldfish which lasts about three seconds. Only it really doesn't, as proved by the MythBusters.
Examples
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Advertising
- There exists a commercial for Nerf guns in which a kids "squad" is gunned down by a lone gunman. Cue action shots of the survivor getting the cool, new Nerf gun and taking out half a dozen kids to get revenge, and as our protagonist finds the one responsible, the commercial FLASHES BACK to the beginning of the THIRTY SECOND COMMERCIAL to remind you why he wanted revenge in the first place.
- Possibly justified, as the description for the commercial makes it sound like a parody of overblown action movies.
- Any of those commercials that include the phrase "act now and you'll also receive [insert product here], absolutely free!" They inevitably list all of the great bargain items you'll be getting if you act now about five times before the commercial ends.
- Radio commercials that repeat phone numbers as many as four times in a row. This might have been effective in the old days, but it's almost become a Discredited Trope, because now people mostly listen to the radio in situations where they can't write a number down (like driving), and the commercials that use it are always for really shady-sounding businesses (get-rich-quick schemes, predatory lenders).
- On the other hand, repeating the phone number means the listener is more likely to memorize it.
- And then not use that product simply out of spite. Or is that just me?
- HeadOn, apply directly to the forehead. HeadOn, apply directly to the forehead. HeadOn, apply directly to the forehead.
- ZomBgone, apply directly to the forehead! ZomBgone, I hate your commercial!
Anime & Manga
Comic Books
- Uncanny X-Men #152 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.
- Batman comics of the 1950s were very big on Telling in addition to Showing, making sure the reader didn't lose track of what was going on. In at least one story, this resulted in Robin recapping information gained earlier on the same page.
- Archie Comics will actually do this, including a recap to the first part of a story... that's in the same book, and was simply broken up by a few gag panel pages. Also present is in just how often the comics reuse the exact same jokes, not simply from issue to issue, or within the same issue, but in at least one case having jokes with identical punchlines in two short comics on the same page. Because obviously reading three more panels was sufficient time for that joke to become funny again.
Comic Strips
- 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.
- E.C. Segar's original Thimble Theater strip, whence Popeye first came, constantly recapped the plot in the first panel during long storylines for those who weren't caught up.
- Dick Tracy spends every Sunday rehashing the previous week's action. The Comics Curmudgeon once congratulated Dick Tracy for going Beyond the Impossible with its recaps; it spent so long in one strip rehashing what happened yesterday that it ended with the plot less advanced than it had been the day before!
- It seems that most newspaper comics that follow a storyline do this a lot. Other offenders are Rex Morgan, M.D., Mary Worth, and The Amazing Spider-Man, all of which spent about two panels actually getting something new done and the rest recapping. Justified somewhat when you realize that many of the newspapers that carry Dick Tracy, Rex Morgan, etc., only carry it in their larger Sunday comics section — the much smaller weekday comics section may not have room for it, therefore the writers create the Sunday episodes so they can be readable without the weekday episodes being available.
- The new Little Orphan Annie is a repeat offender.
- In Buckles, every character addresses every other character by name at least once in every strip, as if readers are likely to forget who's who on a day to day basis.
- Mallard Fillmore has very little in terms of actual plot, and yet still manages to abuse this trope by having the first panel recap whatever issue is annoying him this week.
- When Dilbert does multi-day storylines, it will often have either a caption explaining the premise that previous comics have set up or a character explaining what happened in the previous comics in the first panel. This is pretty jarring when you're reading the strip online.
Fan Works
Films — Animation
Films — Live-Action
- Mystery Science Theater 3000
- The B-Movie Future War has a montage of flashbacks, arranged chronologically, while the protagonist is 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.
- Also done on MST3K in the film Laserblast. Aliens watch a clip from earlier in the movie which is so long the bots riff "We've already seen, Laserblast, Sir..."
- It also occurs in The Deadly Bees. When the villain is explaining how he carried off his evil plan, he fully recaps the entire story, up to the moment right before he started his flashback. This wouldn't be so bad if the whole thing had been simple narration, but the filmmakers felt compelled to augment the character's narration with clips of the scenes in question, including those of scenes that had just taken place. The MST3K crew loudly complained, "We just saw this!"
- And again in The Phantom Planet, where the hero flashes back through his experiences in the film, including the previous scene with his love interest. Crow yells, "No fair! You can't flash back to stuff we saw ten seconds ago!" It also had the classic riff, "we didn't like these scenes the first time!"
- In The Asylum's B-Movie mockery Mega Shark Vs Giant Octopus, a title card detailing the location of the marine base where the characters are located pops up multiple times, even when they haven't even left the base. The fact that the same shot of the soldiers is used repeatedly for these title cards does not help at all.
- 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. Worse than that: the character has a flashback to the beginning of the scene he is still in the middle of!
- 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).
- 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!
- 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.
- In Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li, we see a close-up of Gen's spider-web tattoo. Not even five minutes later, Chun-Li is told that the meaning of a map she was given is telling her to find Gen for training. It then shows us the exact-same shot of Gen's spider-web tattoo.
- About half of Silent Night, Deadly Night 2 consists of flashbacks of the previous movie. The other half consists of Ricky either being awesome, narmful, or some combination of the two. GARBAGE DAY! Justified a little because they'd originally intended to make a tamer edit of the film with some new footage to compensate for the edits, then it ended up turning into a half-redundant sequel instead.
- 28 Weeks Later treats us to a recap of the beginning of the movie when the children are reunited with their father, and he tells them what happened to their mother. This is about ten to fifteen minutes after showing it the first time when the movie began, and most of it was opening credits Scenery Gorn. However, the real point of the scene is to show how the father lies to his children about leaving his wife to the zombies.
- The Last Airbender. Even though he expected his viewers to be fully versed in the television series, M. Night Shyamalan decided that he had to repeat the same thing over and over again.
- The makers of There Will Be Blood apparently assumed that viewers would not remember that Daniel Plainview's plan was to cut a deal with Union Oil and lay a pipeline to the coast so that he would no longer have to pay rail-tanker fees to Standard Oil unless this fairly simple plan were explained again and again every five minutes or so for the entire length of the film.
- The Power Rangers Turbo movie was really bad about this. As one parody put it: "you'd think we were brain dead with the amount of exposition in this movie."
Literature
- The Song of Roland — everywhere. When will Charlemagne lose the heart for making war, again?
- The Babysitters Club books would give a rundown of all the characters and how the club worked at the start of every single book.
- This seems quite normal for most book series, as the new books sometimes come after months, if not years. It's just really glaring if you read the books within a few weeks; for example, the Drizzt Do'Urden novels are notorious for it. Also in the War of the Spiderqueen hexalogy which was writen by six different authors under the supervision of seventh one (which wrote the Drizzt novels). One of these books used this even inside itself, sometimes within the same chapter, to the point where it got annoying.
What makes the trope apply notably to this series is not so much that there's a recap, it's that it's done in such excruciating detail that it's like the author is explaining everything from scratch. While it's common for most series to remind us of things, with the BSC it's stated like it's the first time, every time. This is most likely because plots rarely continue from one book to another, so the books don't need to be read in any particular order to be understood. This means that any book in the series could be the first one a new reader reads, so they have to describe the characters' personalitites, backgrounds, relationships, etc.
- It's just not possible to find a Sweet Valley High book that doesn't mention certain information repeatedly — the twins are blonde and blue-eyed, with perfect size-six figures and identical gold lavalieres that their parents gave them on their 16th birthday; they drive a Spider Fiat; their house has a Spanish-style kitchen; their mother is often mistaken for their older sister and their brother looks like a younger version of their father. Considering how many books there are in this series, it borders on the ridiculous.
- Haruki Murakami's 1Q84 is really terrible with this. Have you forgotten what Tengo's ears look like or did you just zone out and not even absorb any of the last ten pages? Don't worry, another summary is coming right up.
- The book series of W.I.T.C.H. also does this, explaining at the beginning of each book how the girls are the guardians of Candracar, have magic elemental powers, etc. It wouldn't be so bad, except its possible to whip through several books in one day.
Live-Action TV
- Watching a TV show released on DVD often makes this occur inadvertently, as a piece of action will occur before a commercial break would appear during a TV airing and then occur again a moment later to bring the viewers back into the action after the non-existent-on-the-DVD commercial break.
- Often occurs in American shows broadcast in the UK. The public-funded BBC channels don't have any advert breaks at all, and even British commercial TV stations don't have as many advert breaks as their US counterparts so the breaks they get don't always match up properly with the points the program-makers were intending breaks to take place.
- Repetition is very common in hour-long documentaries that would otherwise be a half- or quarter-hour. Redundancy helps to fill the hour, because such shows tend to be about subjects that really can be explained in a quarter- or half-hour, and they need filler material in order to fill the entire hour. 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.
- Ghost Hunters. Okay, so imagine this: The TAPS crew are making their way through a room in an old movie theater that's reportally haunted. They move across the stage when they hear a loud clatter. They scream, panic, and enter a title splash screen. Moments later, one of them appears and describes exactly what we just saw about thirty seconds ago. To make sure you totally did not forget the events of thirty seconds ago, there's a scene where the others catch up with the persons in questions who are stammering out what they were doing at the time of the noise.
- Master Chef repeats almost exactly what happened in the previous 20 seconds after every commercial break, leading to a recent episode that counted down the seconds remaining for the Pressure Test twice.
- MythBusters tends to be an offender whenever they don't have enough TNT... hu, 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. Granted, it does mean you can tune in at almost any time and not miss a beat.
- This from the very show that debunked the myth of goldfish only having a three-second memory. OK, so Adam's tank had about a three-second lifespan...
- The BBC edited MythBusters down to 30 minutes when they showed it on their own channels in the UK. (Though the versions shown on the "Quest" channel are a full hour).
- America's 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. The sepia tone, as though they're showing something that happened in the 1920s and not, like, five minutes ago is what really makes it classic on ANTM.
- Stock line on some reality TV shows (and that includes ANTM): "Previously on..."
- 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.
- 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.
- CSI: Crime Scene Investigation 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 talk about why it matters and when someone has a Eureka Moment, they show you which specific piece of evidence was important.
- One Season 3 episode has a bad example where it constantly goes to a Mitochondrial DNA Lab in Norfolk, Virginia. You know this because every time it switches there, they felt the need to have a location stamp with that information. The scenes aren't even that important!
- 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.
- Always done on Medium: Whenever Allison has her ding ding ding! moment, we get a flashback to earlier in the episode so the show can reinforce the connection she's making — even if it just happened 20 minutes ago.
- Very frequently, ESPN's Sportscenter will begin with a recap of the sporting event that the network just televised.
- The dying WB network came with a Previously On stunt that recapped the first half-hour of hourly shows, apparently for the benefit of viewers who were watching other channels for the previous half-hour. Programs subjected to this included Gilmore Girls.
- FlashForward has repeated Mark and Olivia Benford's flashforward at least once per episode, more or less beating the viewer over the head with reminders that he's drinking and she's cheating. Word is that viewers might have Executive Meddling to thank for this. Unsurprisingly, the more popular storylines tend to involve characters whose flashforward was only shown once, or who didn't have one at all.
- Arrested Development, a show praised for being one of the most intelligent on television, succumbed to this later in its run, due to the higher-ups complaining the plot was too convoluted for people to follow. So, generally, in the last season the first half-minute after the commercial break is devoted to the narrator summarizing everything else to happen in that episode at speeds that would make the Rocky and Bullwinkle narrator blush.
- The game show Moment of Truth suffered from this. Every time they came back from commercial break, they would recap half of the embarrassing questions asked of a contestant already. They would also show extended Coming Up Next segments, recap previous shows, and show clips of upcoming shows in commercials. This resulted in 75% of the show being scenes you've seen FIVE TIMES ALREADY.
- NBC loves to do this for Padding in their game shows:
- 'Deal or No Deal'
double triple-dips in this trope, starting off every episode with a flashback to the previous one, then stopping midway through to recap. Plus each contestant usually has some kind of sob story or noble intention for their winnings, which Howie Mandel will usually point towards the beginning and then harp on incessantly throughout the show.
- Minute To Win It takes this Up to Eleven, especially in earlier episodes. First, just like Deal or No Deal, each contestant always has some kind of sob story to tell, which is usually showcased early in the episode. Then the show will usually proceed to incessantly derail itself between games and after commercial breaks to remind the viewers of it at every opportunity possible. And with each game, after the Blueprint video explains the game, Guy Fieri will sometimes recap the rules between the Blueprint and the game, or in a voice-over during the game (although they've gotten better about this variant lately), depending on how much Filler they need to achieve a Commercial Break Cliffhanger. If there's a commercial break before the game ends (and there frequently is), expect another recap after the break. NBC apparently not only think viewers are goldfish, but goldfish with Attention Deficit... Ooh, Shiny!
- The series premiere of Whos Still Standing would cut away after every single round to a graphic with a voice-over (which was obviously clumsily added in post-production) to spend 30 seconds recapping the state of the game. This became even more ridiculous whenever it happened immediately before or after host Ben Bailey did a perfectly good in-studio summary of the same information in only 10 seconds.
- Atleast half of the first season of Dead Like Me started off with a long flashback explaining everything that happened in the first episode.
- Pretty Guardian Sailor Moon does this... not infrequently. Sometimes it seems like a mood-building piece: showing the "Alice learned that Bob had a girlfriend" scene as a short flashback, instead of merely recapping it, slowed the action down and caught the emotion better, perhaps. But it's still annoying, especially when we get to see the same "Alice remembers Carol being extremely rude to her that one time, and that's why they're still on edge around each other, did you forget?" scene in four episodes in a row.
- This was the infamous reason Police Squad! was cancelled — the head of the ABC network thought viewers wouldn't be able to pay attention well enough to get it. It has since become a Cult Classic.
- Bones in season 4 injected some jarring recaps halfway through each episode, which were designed to tell viewers what unfolded merely half and hour ago. Even if, say, a viewer jumped in at that point from watching another program, it still seems stupid, simply because Bones does not take much effort to follow (like any procedural crime drama).
- When ABC wanted to build hype on Lost season 4 after a long eight month break, the executives went a little overboard with jogging viewers' memories. A Best Week Ever commentator lampshaded this with hilarious effect: "So I first watched a re-airing of the Lost season 3 finale. And then I watched a season 3 re-cap of everything I just saw. And then I happened to see a re-cap of the re-cap before the season 4 opening episode. All in all, I watched Charlie drown THREE TIMES!!!"
While mentioning this, the extended episodes of Lost have annoying side comments pop-up every ten seconds which bring up mostly obvious details. While it's sometimes useful for fans who may have forgotten a few subtle details over the long breaks, it mostly sounds like incessant chatter. And that's before these side comments starts mentioning the nicknames the shippers have made for the Jack-Kate or Sawyer-Kate couplings.
- The Spike TV show Deadliest Warrior has a major case of this. After every single part of the analysis of the "warriors", there's a recap of the whole episode up to that point. Then again, the show isn't particularly intellectually challenging in the first place.
- Scrubs
- An odd bit of seesawing on this trope with Dr. Cox' ex-brother-in-law Ben: At first, half of an entire episode is rehashed in a way that possibly makes every single audience member feel insulted as it turns out to have been All Just a Dream. And then a later episode, which turns out to be at least 70% just a dream, does nothing of the sort and manages a rather jarring and tragic revelation. It's like they learned something!
- Done as a joke later on; J.D. is reminded of incidents that are not percieved as manly. The last flashback is him ordering an Appletini, which happened about fifteen seconds ago.
- The first episode of The Wire features a flashback in its final scene to remind us who the newly discovered dead body is, in a show that typically eschewed any such artificial storytelling techniques. David Simon didn't want to do it but HBO insisted, and it actually is justified: the episode introduces the viewer to so many characters and situations that odds are they actually will have forgotten the dead character, who only appeared briefly in an early scene.
- Every episode of Leverage has a flashback near the end revealing how they pulled off the job by showing a key event that was left out previously (for instance, that when she borrowed his coat, she planted a camera on it). Since these are necessarily framed by repeating the events immediately before and after (her taking the coat and giving it back), they work very poorly if the key event only took place five minutes ago.
- Try to watch an episode of any show that Gordon Ramsay is involved with (like Hell's Kitchen), and know in your heart that half of the show is recapping what just happened. Worst of all is the "Kitchen Nightmares revisited" episodes, where they go back to restaurants from earlier seasons: Ten minutes of old episode footage/recapping, two of Gordon Ramsay actually revisiting.
- Parodied in the 1975 Superman musical TV special It's a Bird, It's a Plane, It's Superman, where Doctor Sedgwick sings a song about how his sole motivation is to get revenge on Superman and Switzerland (for turning him down for the Nobel Prize 10 times). It then cuts out midverse and promises that after the commercial it will reveal what terrible thing the doctor wants to do before he dies, as though everyone just missed or forgot him singing an entire song about how he wants revenge. And tells everyone to stay tuned for Chapter 4: Sedgwick's Revenge.
- Psych uses a variation with it's "clue-vision", zooming in and then HIGHLIGHTING the clue Shawn just noticed (or flashing back on a line of dialogue or flashing back and again HIGHLIGHTING a clue as it is noticed). ALWAYS accompanied by Shawn making his squinty-eyed-I-just-found-a-clue-face (Lamp Shaded as such eventually when Gus points out that, yes, he also saw many of the the same clues but never feel the need to make a silly face)
- Practically every show on the Disney Channel nowadays feels the need to have the show's logo appear in the bottom right corner of the screen after they return from commercial break. 'Cause, you know, we somehow didn't see the "We're back" bumper telling us which show this was. Though that's really more there for if people are recording the show. It's just as annoying, though.
- After Newton, the flashbacks at the opening to each Maddigan's Quest episode repeatedly reminded us that yes, the Fantasia had in fact managed to get hold of the solar converter. Apparently the fact that most of the cast was spending most of their time running around either trying to steal or protect the thing wasn't enough to keep it in our minds.
- Conmen Case Files is horrible about this, at least judging from the "Nick Gage" episode. At least 75% of the running time is taken by the narrator endlessly repeating that Nick Gage is, in fact, a conman, and that he has, in fact, conned people, and that these people have lost money. To this conman. Who conned them. For their money. That were conned away. By Nick Gage the conman.
- The whole premise of the CBS police procedural Unforgettable is that the main character remembers everything. Evidently, they don't trust their viewers to remember this one-sentence premise, because every single commercial for the show has to remind them of this fact.
Pro Wrestling
- 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.
- If a top or upper-midcard wrestler is injured for a substantial period of time, he will ALWAYS come back as a Face. Even if he was the most despicable and dastardly of Heels at the time of his injury. Ironically, Kurt Angle once vocally pointed this out upon Triple H's return from a nasty quad tear and was made out to be a huge jerk for doing so.
- Professional Wrestling of all things subverts this trope. Jim Cornette declared the "Seven Year Rule", which states that after 7 years have passed it's safe to recycle a character, gimmick and/or storyline. For example, Carlito Caribbean Cool's gimmick had a substantial overlap with that of Razor Ramon, but because enough time had passed since Scott Hall quit portraying Razor, Carlito got over.
- Pro wrestling does however, also have the Three Month Rule, which plays this a little straighter. While it won't necessarily repeat things that happened three months ago, it will expect viewers to forget them and consider them out of continuity.
Tabletop Games
- A smart Game Master will recap what happened last play session if it's been more than a week. Otherwise the first hour of play will be wasted with questions like, "Wait, who was the guy in the gray cape and why are we working for him, again?"
Theater
- Lampshaded in Dirty Rotten Scoundrels The Musical. At the beginning of Act Two, the exact last few lines from Act One are repeated, with Freddy then commenting, "Didn't we do this part already?" and Lawrence replying, "I enjoyed it so much the first time."
- Similarly lampshaded in Evil Dead The Musical. Act I ends with a long sun solo consisting of "Die, DIE!" repeated fifteen times — and it lasts for nearly 45 seconds — while he kills his former girlfriend's zombie head, a pile of other zombie bodies in the corner. Act II begins with the exact same solo, but the head is obviously fake, and the place has been cleaned up. When other characters demand to know how this "isn't as bad as it looks", Ash replies: "At least there isn't a pile of bodies in the corner anymore."
Video Games
- Driver San Francisco is a big offender, using television style "previously on" exposition moments. This is fine for players who may take a break between levels, but is particularly silly playing through the first few levels, which are easy to knock out in the space of an hour or two.
- Pokémon FireRed & LeafGreen do this so often that, although it lets you save at any point, it reduces a lot of Fake Longevity by using Save States. One can press the Start button to skip the recaps, thankfully.
- The series in general has a bad habit of this. Want to pick an Apricorn off a tree? Well prepare to be reminded of your actions from shaking the tree, getting the colored Apricorn, being told what colored Apricorn you got, and then having you put it in the bag. It also happens with H Ms like Rock Smash, Strength, or Cut. Weather moves like Rain Dance and Hail remind you of their effects every turn until they fade.
- As of Pokemon Black And White, message boxes for weather ("Rain continues to fall", etc.) appear only once. "'X mon' was buffeted by the Sandstorm", however, wasn't removed.
- Pokemon Mystery Dungeon Explorers Time/Darkness uses this a lot more than it should. Some of the more memorable scenes get flashed back to multiple times in the same cutscene, any time you escape from danger your partner feels the need to tell you what just happened, the ending cutscene is literally a collection of flashbacks, and occasionally your OWN CHARACTER will flash back to what just happened, have an internal monologue about what just happened, tell the partner what just happened, and then the partner will REPEAT IT BACK TO YOU.
- The original game was pretty bad about this too.
- 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.
- And again used in Alan Wake. The episodes, however, are quite long.
- 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?" This actually becomes Fridge Brilliance when you realize Snake doesn't do this to benefit the player, since the player often has no use for the information anyway. He does it so he himself remembers what he is searching for. Not very effective when Snake does this when informed about something he should already know about, such as the sights on a freakin' rifle. Thanks, Nastasha!
- 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.
- 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. If that wasn't enough, there's usually at least one flashback to a different part of that conversation (or the just-after one where you meet Marta) every half an hour of gameplay.
Emil and Marta also keep a diary where they take turns to write every little bit of information involving the story, details of the dialogues included; Marta's parts are in pink while Emil's are in blue. However reading the entries is completely optional and it's a good way to remind what happened to a player who took a break of several months.
- Sigma Star Saga, like Metal Gear, makes heavy use of Parrot Exposition, but unlike in Metal Gear, it's not a character trait. Rather, Recker does it when and only when you're told at the end of an Infodump that advancing the plot will require an action other than killing things. Since he usually uses similar words to the previous speaker, it's not a case of Viewers Are Morons, but since skipping dialogue skips partway through a conversation rather than skipping the entire thing, and since Recker's repetition is always the first thing said after a skip, it apparently caters to those who consider the plot irrelevant.
- In Eternal Sonata, Claves and Jazz have a talk about a traitor in the group. Immediately after, Claves, the traitor, is killed by Rondo for not pinning the blame on another member. It would be somewhat sad if Claves didn't have a 20-minute musing on her life, including a flashback to the scene with Jazz that happened about 2 minutes ago.
- Mostly averted by Sonic Adventure 2. You get a very stylish scrolling text segment explaining what's going on in the plot at the time if you save your game, quit, and come back later. This, of course, prevents them from having to explain anything in the cutscenes again.
- The Legend of Zelda
- For Twilight Princess, Nintendo must've believed the players were incapable of remembering or re-figuring the values of the different colored rupees. Every time you start a new session (i.e., resume a saved game or start a new one), for each non-green rupee you pick up, the game will tell you the value of it. Amusingly, it's actually the game that has the memory of a goldfish. The rupee-value dialogue coming on each time you load up the game is triggered by a slight error with the programming. Basically, when you save the game, it does not save the fact that you've been told on first pick-up how much a given color of rupee is worth. So when you power down the system and load up the game again, it "forgets" that you ever picked up any rupees other than the standard one-rupee value green ones, and reminds you again.
- Majora's Mask did this as well for all rupees above the one valued at ten.
- Skyward Sword doesn't have this problem with rupees, but it does with insects and collectibles. And infuriatingly shows the item going into your inventory every time.
- Star Control 2 averts this and demonstrates why it exists. Fortunately, most of the background exposition can be reviewed. Unfortunately, some very vital information can't be, including homeworld coordinates and the location of the final boss. You are advised to take notes.
- The Nancy Drew games are known for this whenever Nancy calls someone back home. Sometimes you can avoid calling the stock characters like Ned, Bess, or George, but there are a few games where you can't move forward without their assistance. So if you've been holding off on calling and suddenly have no choice, what follows is a Character Filibuster where Nancy recaps every. Single. Event. Thus. Far. Try to have a book or some knitting handy when you play.
- Ar tonelico. After the hero crashes his airship, he recounts how he crashed his airship, then goes into a flashback of the events of getting to the airship and the dialogue around it, which happened a minute ago. Additionally, when they run into the airship bay, he exclaims "This... is the airship!" as though he's surprised to find it there. Maybe it's the hero who's a goldfish...
- Ar tonelico 2 has a couple of series of flashbacks that end with one of these. Particularly egregious when Cocona tells you to Dive into her to stop Hibernation, causing a series of flashbacks that end with one of Cocona telling you to Dive into her to stop Hibernation
causing a series of flashbacks...
Visual Novels
- 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...) On the other hand, considering it's a Nintendo DS game, and many gamers will only play parts of a case at a time, it's actually quite useful to recap those things. It can be hours or days since the last time you picked it up, and unlike other games, this sort of information is required to be able to figure out what to do next. And even with this, it still has Moon Logic Puzzle (and Guide Dang It) moments. Most egregious is the last case in Justice for All when you're trying to get one last critical piece of information out of DeKiller. Anyone with the memory of a goldfish at that point is screwed.
- Particularly bad in Apollo Justice. Did you like Lamiroir's song? You damn well better, considering you get to see the scene of it about 20 bazillion times. Another contender is in the third case in Apollo Justice, which doubles as a Wacky Wayside Tribe moment. At one point, the entire case gets derailed because the judge insists on knowing how an illusion was performed, and all of the people who know how it was done refuse to tell. Apollo has to figure it out himself, which at one point reduces the player to presenting evidence at random to find the solution due to a Moon Logic Puzzle. The especially frustrating thing is that you can still lose the game during this scene, causing your client to be judged guilty, over something that has nothing at all to do with the murder trial you're supposed to be in the middle of. No wonder Phoenix reveals in the next case that he's been working on an overhaul of the justice system.
Web Animation
Web Comics
Web Original
- The Irate Gamer
- One video set up a leaking gas pipe, and to make sure we see this, he shows it again and again and again and again to make sure we know there's a leaking gas pipe.
- In the same episode, he is reviewing the educational Super Mario games in two different timelines. Each time the video switches between the two timelines, Bores reminds us which of the two games he is talking about.
Western Animation
- It's a fairly common joke in comedy cartoons in the '80s and '90s to have a character wondering "didn't I said that already?", 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.)
- Clerks: The Animated Series
- The very second episode does this with its first episode. Though that's the entire point.
- And parodied it in the first episode. "Last time on Clerks: *cue test pattern* "
- Adventures Of Sonic The Hedgehog
- Lampshaded in the 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?"
- The Chaos Emerald four parter had Sonic getting a new time travel gizmo in each part, and is told each time that they'll "enable him to circle the planet at the speed of light and enter the time warp". A little more grating in the sense that the audio for the line was pretty much recycled for the other episodes. This YouTube Poop flat out shows it (Skip to 1:04)
- The Transformers Generation 1 episode "Auto-Bop" has a flashback to something that happened less than a minute before.
- Parodied in a Family Guy flashback: after Peter rejects a free boat in favor of a Mystery Box, he responds to Lois' complaint thus:
Peter: Come on Lois, you're acting like this is the first time I've ever done something stupid. Remember the time I was supposed to get that boat?
(cue flashback to Peter choosing the box over the boat)
Lois: Peter, that happened ten minutes ago.
:: And closer to fifteen seconds in the show itself. Not to mention that of course that was the exact thing they were arguing about. Making this also an in-universe example for Peter.
- Wolverine And The X-Men's constant recaps of the first couple of episodes in almost every single episode's Previously On sequence. It... didn't take us months to come to the gripping realization that mutant-hunters are bad and the X-Men being back together is good. No, really, it didn't.
- The entirety of Dora The Explorer. The show treats the viewers as if they have the memories of a goldfish and repeats a phrase so often that if you're older than a toddler and are not allowed to change the channel for whatever reason, you'd be wishing that someone take out a gun and put you out of your misery after watching a few minutes into the show. Unless, of course, you're high on something. Justified, because the target audience really does have the attention span of a goldfish, and you shouldn't be watching it if you're older than five. That would be Attention Deficit... Ooh, Shiny! tho. All the repetition in the world will not be able to help there since it's a different trope altogether. It's shown that keeping the child attracted via interactivity (ie. no fourth wall) helps more, but then Dora actually has both.
- Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles has an episode once where it flashes back to a scientist explaining what his invention did, then he broke the fourth wall and said he hates flashbacks as much as the viewer.
- The reality TV version was parodied on the "Crippled Summer" episode of South Park, with title cards appearing constantly explaining things that had just happened. This includes explaining the Looney Tunes-style humour of the B-plot in great detail.
"Mimsy was supposed to blow the shark mating whistle while he was still in the water. There appears to have been a fundamental misunderstanding."
Real Life
- Averted, ironically enough, for actual goldfish. MythBusters proved this trope busted. Which may have been already mentionned earlier....
- Basic essay writing with a thesis-introduction-body-conclusion format, especially at the high school level. Three of those are normally used to say what the paper is about.
- As Dale Carnegie put it — "Tell the audience what you're going to say, say it; then tell them what you've said."
- This is actually used, in a much more sensible format, in writing scientific papers. The abstract, which is equivalent to a thesis, is what people reading through papers read to decide if they do care and often the part you get for absolutely free when looking through a search, and the conclusion is often what will be looked for if the reader is not, in fact, as interested in the 'how' as the 'what' of the experiment you're talking about. For example, if you're only after how long a goldfish's memory is, you are likely to skip entirely the procedure and the details of the results in favor of the conclusion which gives you the nice, short version of the answer and what this actually means.
- It's easier to list political ads that don't rely on this trope to appeal to the masses. Though that's probably more to use the "repeat it enough and they'll believe it" theory, than because they thought the viewers forgot it.
- Standard advice for seminary students on giving a sermon: "Tell 'em what you're gonna tell 'em. Tell 'em. Then tell 'em what you told 'em."
- Although short-term memory loss is often associated with conditions like dementia and Alzheimer's in eldery people, there are certain conditions that can occur even in younger people involving short-term memory loss. Some people have suffered it as a result of trauma or a stroke, they literally forget things immediately after ceasing to think of them and must write everything down to be able to do daily tasks or things like taking a bus or going someplace, and rely on a caregiver for help. Interestingly, long-term memories, things from before the trauma, may not always be affected, though it can.
This was an article about treating viewers like they have the memory of a goldfish, which lasts about three seconds.
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