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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 memory of a goldfish; about three seconds. 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!"
Sort of like how executives think viewers are stupid, they also think you have the memory of a goldfish; about three seconds. 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.
Compare Nohamotyo, where executives believe that they can recycle whole plots due to this short memory.
Sort of like how executives think viewers are stupid, they also think you have the memory of a goldfish; about three seconds.
Examples
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Anime and Manga
Comic Books
- 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.
- Are you sure it's on #153? I have it, and Emma Frost doesn't even appear on it.
Film
- 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.
- 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.
Live Action TV
- 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.
- 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 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 Eureka Moment, they show you which specific piece of evidence was 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 it's run, due to the higher-ups complaining the plot was too conviluted for people to follow. So, generally, in the last season the first half-minute after the commerical break is devoted to the narrator summerizing everything else to happen in that episode at speeds that would make the Rocky And Bullwinkle narrator blush.
Newspaper Comics
- 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.
Professional 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.
- 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.
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Role Playing Games
- A smart Dungeon 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."
Video Games
- 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...)
- 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.
- 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.
- Pokemon 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.
- 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 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?"
- 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.
- 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.
- 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...
- 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.
- An inversion, in Chrono Cross, if you put down the game and come back later, you will have no way to know what's going on or what you should even be doing.
Web Original
Western Animation
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