Repetitive Audio Glitch

Girl, you know it's— Girl, you know it's— Girl, you know it's— Girl, you know it's—

— Milli Vanilli, in the moment that ended their musical careers

Let's-s-s face it, it's funny when-en audio technology goo-oofs up, espec-espec-epsec-especially when it's not supposed to-to; this-this-this-this is the-the-the-the-the Repetitive Audio Glitch and-and-and-and-and it-t-t's al-l-lways good to make-e sure that-that-that-that-that-that-that-that-that-that-that-that-that-that-that-that-that-that-that-that-that-that-that-that-that-that-that-that- (WHAM)

Well, you get the picture.

For old-fashioned records, the loop was usually about 1.3 to 2 seconds (due to disks usually going 45 RPM or 33 RPM). It's much shorter on CDs (less than a third of a second) due to them going at least 210 RPM.

For overly-long repetition not caused by a malfunctioning machine, see Broken Record. If this exposes a performer that's actually using a recording, this becomes That Syncing Feeling. This is one type of Electronic Speech Impediment.

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Examples

Adver-adver-adver-adver (BONK!) Advertising

• "It's new! It's Orbit!" "It's a great tasting, great tasting, great tasting..." (WHACK!) "Sugar-free bubble gum."
• An ad for Winston cigarettes, that ran during The Flintstones, featured Fred and Barney fixing up a record player and ends with a humorous spin on Winston's famous jingle.
  Fred: And as I was saying, Winston tastes good...
  Record: Like a (skip-skip) cigarette should... like a (skip-skip) cigarette should... like a (skip-skip) cigarette should. Like a—
  (Barney gives the player a "pound-pound")
  Record: ... cigarette should.
• An NSPCC spot from the UK features a girl's talking doll telling about how the girl's mother comes into her room "And punches her! — and punches her! — and punches her!''

Comi-Comi-Comi-Comi- (CRUNCH!) Comic Books

• Top 10: There's a brief scene in The Forty-Niners where Private Iron, a robot GI who can only say three or four different sentences, is interrogated at the station because he was somehow implicated in a burglary. A prejudiced cop starts smacking him around, which is explicitly compared to Percussive Maintenance; his audio starts skipping as the beating evidently continues off-panel.
  Private Iron: Hi, friends. Hi, friends. Hi, Hi, Hi...

Com-Com-Com-Com- (POW!) Comic Strips

• The Far Side: One strip has a guy tell his wife to hit their pet bird, it's stuck.
• Garfield: In this strip, Garfield tries to trick John into thinking that he can sing — until the gramophone he's using for the audio gets stuck on repeating one line.
• The Wizard of Id: Played with in a comic featuring the Spook, the long-term resident of the palace dungeon. The sound of singing coming from his cell develops a repetitive audio glitch, and the guard rushes into find the cell empty except for a record player. It turns out that the Spook really was singing, audio glitch and all, and was hiding in the base of the record player with the intention of making his escape once the guard rushed off to report that he'd made an escape.

Fi-Fi-Fi-Fi- (SMASH!) Film

• Monkey Business: The boys all try to get in the country claiming to be Maurice Chevalier (he was on the ship and they stole his passport). To prove they're Chevalier they sing; Harpo's got a Maurice Chevalier record on a wind-up player strapped to his back, which eventually begins to wind down.
• Who Framed Roger Rabbit: Roger is entertaining the bar patrons by performing to a record of "The Merry-Go-Round Broke Down" (the Looney Tunes theme). The record sticks just as Roger gets to the part where he smashes a plate over his head, so he smashes several until Eddie stops the record.
• Hannah Montana The Movie: Played for laughs with the opening song where Hannah is shooting a music video and the song becomes stuck on 'Best of both... best of both....' until the sound engineer does Percussive Maintenance to get it going again (while the dancers also loop their moves). They finish the song, the director calls cut and says he'll Fix It in Post.
• Singin' in the Rain: At the preview showing of The Dueling Cavalier, a mishap causes the film to lose sync with the soundtrack (early sound films had the soundtrack on a phonograph record; they switched to printing the track directly on the film to avoid this very thing), leading to a scene where the villain and the Damsel in Distress speak each other's lines. This becomes a plot point, as it leads to the idea of having Kathy dub over Lena's nails-on-a-chalkboard voice.
• The Great Mouse Detective: The heroes are strapped into a Death Trap driven by a record player. Fortunately, the record starts skipping, pausing the countdown for a few precious seconds. Unfortunately, Basil is too busy having a Heroic BSoD to take advantage of it.
• Total Recall (1990): The recording of Haauser gets stuck repeating the infamous words "Get your ass to Mars." after the laptop it's on gets shot during the brief second attack on Douglas Quaid. Later, Quaid's animatronic disguise gets stuck saying "two weeks" whenever he tries to talk, blowing his cover.
• A Goofy Movie: Goofy and Max attend a malfunctioning animatronic show at Lester's Possum Park (Max reacts to the show by calling it pathetic). The song ends with the lyrics, "Here at Lester's Po— Po— Po— (BANG!) Possum Park!" (The version included in the official movie soundtrack features the skipping, but not the accompanying banging.)
• Mean Girls: Used when Gretchen accidentally kicks the CD boombox playing "Jingle Bell Rock", causing it to get stuck on "In the fro-fro-fro-fro-fro-fro...". Her attempt at rectifying the situation accidentally results in her boyfriend getting beaned by the boombox.
• Shark Tale: During a conversation, the background music is revealed to be coming from a record player that gets stuck, and an attempt to fix it only causes "Baby Got Back" to start playing.
• Star of Midnight: Dal fools the killer into thinking singer Mary Smith is in the room by playing a record of her singing "Midnight". The ruse goes awry when the record starts to skip.
• SCOOB!: Dynomutt starts glitch-repeating a word while explaining the original Blue Falcon's retirement and replacement with his son Brian as the new Falcon. He pauses to reveal he's doing it intentionally for emphasis before anyone can apply the appropriate corrective action.
  Dynomutt: We still miss him very... very... very... very...
  Brian: Oh, no. He's glitching.
  Dynomutt: ...very- No, I'm not. Let me finish. Very... very... very... much.
• Back to the Future Part II: The computerised-Reagan waiter at the Cafe 80s does this, presumably in imitation of Max Headroom.
  Reagan: Welcome to the Cafe 80s! Where it's always morning in America, even in the afternoo-noo-noon!
• In Turning Red, this is done intentionally for artistic effect in the song "Nobody Like U" with the phrase "like you".
• The Super Mario Bros. Movie has this trope played for drama as it's during a point where Mario is nearly giving up on defeating Bowser. One of the things that regrows his Determinator status is seeing the plumbing commercial play on TV, and since it’s broken, it repeats the words "Save Brooklyn" until it turns off.

Liter-Liter-Liter-Liter (ZAP!) Literature

• The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul: Early in the novel, the reader is treated to a grisly sight, where a person's severed head is on atop a record on a turntable, with the turntable on. The person's head keeps nudging the record needle into the previous groove.
  "Don't pick it up, pick it up, pick it— Don't pick it up, pick it up, pick it— Don't pick it up, pick it up, pick it—"
• In Thief of Time, the adept, when inventing the first Procastrinator, tests his invention by repeatedly skipping backwards in time in a conversation with his adept, so it sounds just like this.

Live-Live-Live-Live (BAM!) Live-Action TV

• Our Miss Brooks: This happens to the tape recording Stretch patches in "Public Speaker's Nightmare".
• In the final episode of Are You Being Served? Mr. Spooner goes on TV to become a pop idol, but he loses his voice mid-song so they play a reel-to-reel tape they recorded earlier. Problem is, the tape was recorded at half the speed it was played back at.
• Austin & Ally: In "Critics & Confidence", Austin does an Epic Avenger performance of "Better Than This" for a critic who dislikes him, but because of all the actions he does, he lip-syncs instead. Once the song gets to the line "Our bodies dance like the wind over and over again," the track suddenly malfunctions and repeats the "over and over again" part, which is appropriate for the error.
• I Love Lucy: Lucy attempts to woo her husband Ricky about his Cuban origins in the episode "Be a Pal" by dancing to a Cuban song and pretend singing. However, the record she uses suddenly jumps and catches Lucy off guard. Ethel's attempts to fix the record player results in further hilarity as Lucy tries to keep up with the music.
• Episode 24 of Monty Python's Flying Circus, just before and during the opening titles.
  • Episode "How Not to bee Seen", during the Vox Pops, a Gent gets stuck...
  Third City Gent: Well I've been in the city since I was two and I certainly wouldn't say that I was stuck in a rut... stuck in a rut ... stuck in a rut... stuck in a rut...
  Woman: Oh dear, Mr Bulstrode's stuck again.
  (She runs over and gives him a shove.)
  Third City Gent: I certainly wouldn't say that I was stuck in a rut.
• Used as an Oh, Crap! moment in the Doctor Who TV Movie. The song the Doctor's listening to skips on the word "time" just as the Master's remains escape from their can and sabotage the TARDIS console. It comes back at the end of the movie, and the Eighth Doctor says, "Oh, No... Not Again!".
• In an episode of Medium, Allison keeps hearing the same song, over and over, in her head. It eventually starts skipping erratically until she locates the mp3 player of a kidnapped girl.
• An episode of Lost opens with the song on the background skipping and revealing it was a record.
• Power Rangers:
  • In Power Rangers Operation Overdrive, Mack's Robotic Reveal takes place when he malfunctions and starts repeating a single sentence over and over again.
  • Subverted in Power Rangers RPM, when Dr. K is communicating via hologram and Colonel Mason storms out when the transmission starts glitching: "After what I've seen- After what I've seen- After what I've seen- Good, I thought he'd never leave!"
• An early Sesame Street character is Sam the Robot, who would proudly declare that "Machines are perfec-are perfec-are parfec-are perfec-" before getting some Percussive Maintenance.
• In the Shining Time Station episode, "Is Anybody There?", Schemer hosts a radio show from his arcade. He plays some music on his record player while answering a phone call from Mayor Flopdinger regarding his wife's birthday, but the record starts skipping. When Becky, Kara and Dan try to tell Schemer that his record is skipping, Schemer thinks that the name of the person having the birthday is "Skippy Record" and asks the kids what kind of name it is.
• During the later years of The Ed Sullivan Show, a Jim Henson sketch shows an early version of Cookie Monster chomping away at an analytical computer. Roughly halfway through, the machine's audio playback begins hiccuping.
  "If, for any reason, this unit is tampered with, the 90-day warranty on the system is invalidated... system is invalidated... system is invalidated... system is invalidated... auxiliary co-ordinates.
• This is a regular occurrence on Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job!, sometimes leading into a sudden musical remix of the last sentence.
• Max Headroom is an unstable AI TV host whose program tests the technical limitations of the '80s computer hardware hosting it. As such, he frequently stutters and glitch-repeats random parts of his performances. Sometimes on purpose as part of a bit.

Mus-Mus-Mus-Mus (WHUMP!) Music

• Milli Vanilli's career blew up in their faces when they were caught lipsyncing during a live concert. "Girl, you know it's--Girl, you know it's--Girl, you know it's--"
• Blur's song "Peach" ends in a manner which is reminiscent of a skipping record.
• Played for laughs in Type O Negative's "Skip It", designed to sound like the CD is jumping.
  • As is Lacuna Coil's "Aeon."
• In Eminem's track 'Under the Influence', guest rapper Bizarre's section includes the following:
  My DJ's in a coma for letting the record ski-
  letting the record ski-
  letting the record ski-
  [rewind sound effect]
• Leroy Anderson's "Classical Juke Box", which is an essential a classical interpretation of Theresa Brewer's "Put Another Nickel In in the Nickelodeon", has the orchestra imitate a record being spun on a jukebox. At one point, the "record" starts skipping, with the wood block representing the skipping sound.
• "Pearl Bomb" by Melvins starts with 30 seconds of a very short loop that sounds exactly like a skipping CD... Then a clearly non-skipping bass guitar starts playing in time with the loop. The loop continues throughout the rest of the song, and basically functions as percussion.
• "Coin-Operated Boy" by The Dresden Dolls has a section that's supposed to resemble one of these. The music video loops with the lyrics, but her expression changes gradually through the looping from one of contentment to one of disgust.
  And I'll never let him go
  And I'll never be alone
  And I'll never let him go
  And I'll never be alone
  go- And I'll never be alone
  go- And I'll never be alone
  go- And I'll never be alone
  And I'll never be alone....
  Not with my coin operated boy
• John Reuben's "Move" features the following:
  'Cause nowadays, music's too political
  And maybe just a bit too predictable
  The repetition <click>
  repetition <click>
  repetition <click>
  Man, I'm just kidding, or am I?
• Orbital's second album opens with a vocal sample of Worf: "There is the theory of the Möbius... a twist in the fabric of space where time becomes looped." The words "time becomes looped" repeat. The left and right channels play at slightly different speeds, so the looped words fall out of synch then back into synch before the track ends. The entire thing was a joke aimed at the fans: Orbital's previous album had opened with the same vocal sample but without the looping; Orbital wanted fans listening to the second album to initially think they had actually bought a glitched copy of the first album.
• The closing track of David Bowie's Diamond Dogs, "Chant of the Ever Circling Skeletal Family", ends with a mechanical voice shouting the first syllable of "brother" over and over. Reportedly, this was the result of an actual technical gaffe — the tape reel locked up during recording, and Bowie liked the result enough to Throw It In!.
• Invoked by some DJs in intentional versions of Broken Record (Fatboy Slim has great examples in both "The Rockafella Skank" and "Praise You").
• Madonna's song "Now I'm Following You (Part 2)" begins with the record skipping, presumably after Part 1 finishes playing if you're listening to the entire album I'm Breathless straight from the CD. Madonna says "Oh, dear" and fixes the record player so that it starts with the playing of Part 2's music.
• From "Ana Ng" by They Might Be Giants:
  And it sticks like a broken record
  Everything sticks like a broken record
  Everything sticks until it goes away
• Rap group clipping. uses this to cap off the CD version of their song "Ends," off CLPPNG—the track itself ends with skipping as though the CD itself were scratched.
• "Stereo Hearts" by Gym Class Heroes uses^* And possibly lampshades this.
  Furthermore, I apologize for any skipping tracks
  It's just the last girl who played me left a couple cracks
  I used to- used to- used to- used to-
  Now I'm over that
• The Nik Launay '79 mix version of M's "Pop Muzik" has the song get briefly stuck skipping on "clear" in "Loud and clear" several times near the end of the song.
• Oneohtrix Point Never's "I Bite Through It" is an entire song based on this trope.
• The central theme of John Hartford's "Don't Leave Your Records In The Sun". "They just won't play just won't play just won't play just won't play..."
• In Avicii's "Silhouettes" video, the surgeon's CD player playing the song skips, and he has to hit it a couple times and jiggle it around before it restarts.
• Protonic Storm deliberately invokes this at the end of "The Emergence".
• Tame Impala's "Let It Happen" has brief glitches built in, followed by a section that starts with several measures of a repetitive glitch; a new melody is then added on top of the glitch before the song reverts to its original beat.
• Lifecycle's Luxury Condominium album intentionally invokes this during the segue from "Icebreaker" to "Acid Reflux".
• Much of The Caretaker's catalogue invokes this trope to illustrate a long-gone past full of forgotten memories.
• The vinyl edition of Heaven 17's Penthouse and Pavement has this intentionally on its last track, "We're Going To Live For a Very Long Time", which ends on a locked groove, repeating the Title Drop indefinitely until the turntable needle is lifted.
• Troublegum by Therapy? ends in a Hidden Track — a brief, deliberately lo-fi sounding cover of "You Are My Sunshine" that starts looping the word "away" like a skipping record after the first refrain, then eventually fades out.
• Stereolab's "Golden Ball" ends this way, repeating part of a riff before abruptly stopping.
• "Dishonest Don Part II" by Les Savy Fav starts with a loop of Tim Harrington singing "this-this-this-this..." for 3 seconds, which continues after the music comes in and makes it clear it isn't a glitch.
• "Sick of Goodbyes" by Sparklehorse opens with a brief guitar lick. It plays five times, panning from right to left while the song's video loops footage of Mark Linkous sliding from left to right in an office chair, before being cut off abruptly while an equally abrupt cut occurs in the video.
• The hidden track on Custard's We Have the Technology ends with a fragmentary backwards vocal loop that is presumably a reversal of the closing refrain "over and over".

Ra-Ra-Ra (THUMP!) Radio

• The Pick-Up Song round on I'm Sorry I Haven't a Clue involves the panellists singing along to a well-known song which is faded out, then faded back in to see how well they've stuck to it. On more than one occasion, the volume has been turned back up to reveal that the record has got stuck, such as the time Graeme sung a fair chunk of "Nellie the Elephant" (and was seemingly doing a pretty good job) before the volume came back up to "... was never seen again ... was never seen again ... was never seen again ..."

Stand-Stand-Stand-Stand- (WHAP!) Stand-Up Comedy

• The Cheech & Chong sketch "Strawberry Revival Festival" from Los Cochinos has a record player that's constantly skipping in the background.
• Kevin Eldon performed a song called "My CDs Jump", which imitates skipping CDs and the characteristic mechanical glitches of other recording formats.

Thea-Thea-Thea-Thea- (BONK!) Theater

• Not quite the same thing, but in The Musical The Drowsy Chaperone, the Man in Chair is listening to an actual record of a 1920's show, which occasionally skips. Since the show is "appearing" in his living room, the characters have to keep repeating their actions until the record moves on.

Video-Video-Video-Video (WHACK!) Video Games

• While only part electronic, a mechanimal named Diode in The Day the World Broke suffers this while talking, usually getting stuck on part of a word for a few seconds. He admits that it's due to overexposure to magnetism, which is suspicious considering none of the other mechanimals have this affliction.
• In Far Cry, especially the Classic remake, killing an enemy while they're in the middle of shooting will sometimes cause the gunshot sound to endlessly loop.
• When Adrian Shephard hops on one of Black Mesa's trams in Half-Life: Opposing Force, it starts moving and plays its automated announcements, except now they're suffering glitches and repetitions due to the Resonance Cascade that happened not far away from where that tram was.
• A rather infamous example from the LEGO Alpha Team PC game. When ran on Windows XP, all dialogue and music would loop over and over again after only a few seconds. What's worse is that this is potentially a Game-Breaking Bug: unless you turn off dialogue in the setting menu, the game will freeze after the "Trouble Train Depot" level because Tee Vee's speech will keep looping and the game will not progress.^note If you turn dialogue back on afterwards, this bug also applies to "Trouble Sub Rescue" and "The D.O.O.M. Room" for the same reasons.
• LEGO Island features an infamous glitch with the Infomaniac repeating certain lines of his "Do you really want to exit?" speech. The most well-known one is "Green—red brick, you stay." Others include "Are you ready to le—", "If you select the green bri—nd?" and "If you se—leave LEGO Island?"
• Lyril suffers from this in Sierra's Lighthouse: The Dark Being. She's been bound to a life support system in a chair since the age of 4, and by the time the player meets her, Lyril speaks this way nearly 90% of the time. It's implied that this comes from her life support malfunctioning. A holographic recording proves this, as she used to speak more clearly when it was made.
• In Mega Man Battle Network 6: Cybeast Gregar and Cybeast Falzar, finishing the game and pressing Continue will have the intense music from the endgame playing everywhere due to missing a line of code which would've told the game to play the normal music in their respective areas after resuming the game. This was announced to be fixed in the runup to Mega Man Battle Network Legacy Collection.
• Most fans of Metroid Prime would tell you that the boss, Flaahgra's, theme music sucked. However, this is actually due to a glitch in the American release where only the first thirty or so seconds of the song is repeated over and over again. This was corrected in the European/Australian and Trilogy versions of the game. Whether or not the theme sucks now is completely due to personal taste.
• In Pokémon Scarlet and Violet, the Elite Four's battle theme would loop its intro over and over if the player fought them after having the game run for a long time. This was eventually fixed in a post-release patch.
• Near the beginning of Rochard, the lift control computer experiences one in the form of "Failfailfailfail" before lapsing into Gratuitous German.
• In the PC port of Silent Hill 2, the ambient soundtrack suffers from these annoyingly often. Ironically, some of the music tracks are intentionally recorded to sound this way, such as this one in the otherworld hospital.
• A meta example: the Team Fortress 2 announcer repeating "OVERTIME!" over and over in King of the Hill mode was due to a coding error. The error has since been fixed, but the old glitchy behavior can be brought back via a console command.

Web-Web-Web-Web-Web- (KICK!) Webcomics

• Homestuck includes the track "Nannaquin", which sounds like "Harlequin" as played on an old, failing record player. Near the end, it glitches this way, only put to an end by a Record Needle Scratch. The song in [S]Flip also does this at the end.

Web-Web-Web-Web-Web-(THWACK!) Web Animation

• In The Amazing Digital Circus, the theme song ominously repeats a verse as it introduces the players, hinting at how trapped the cast is.
  Day after day after day after day after day we fly
  Past the Moon and the Sun and we don't know why!

Web-Web-Web-Web-Web- (PUNCH!) Web Video

• One of the stock jokes in YouTube Poop.
  • The VeggieTales YTP "SillySongs.MP4" features a recreation of a real-life CD glitch: "Jump in your car, drive into the city, buy a jug of milk for your na-na-na-na-na-…"
• Caddicarus has fun with this when reviewing a video game adaptation of Chicken Run and the game skips:
  Caddy: Ah yes, haven't seen this problem in a while. Yeah, these kind of things tend to happen when your PS1 disc has a scratchscratchscratchscratchscratchscratchscratch—
  (dots appear in the middle of the screen as if the video is buffering)
  Caddy: I got you, didn't I?
  • And again during a retrospective of the PlayStation Magazine UK Demo Discs, this time with a piece of music in one of the games skipping. It then cuts to a similarly looping image of Caddy spreading out his arms with a smile.
• Doggans in his video about The Wizarding World of Harry Potter:
  Doggans: Isn't that right glitchy editing?glitchy editingglitchy editingglitchy editingglitchy edi-
• In the fourth Don't Hug Me I'm Scared video, the teacher (a 1990's style PC) teleports the three main characters to his digital world, which is very glitchy. Two parts stand out: when Red Guy exclaims "wow" while "admiring" the digital world, and when the computer tells the characters that there are over three things to do in his world. This also crosses into "Groundhog Day" Loop territory.
• Roahm Mythril encountered one of these in his LP of the original Silent Hill, thanks to his emulator.
  Harry: Cheryl? Is that Cheryl-Cheryl-Cheryl-Cheryl-
  Roahm: [laughs] Oh, bloody skipping.
• Technology Connections used this effect in the first minute of one of his videos on RCA's Capacitance Electronic Disc (CED) system, which was itself prone to this problem.
  Alec: Anyway, let's get on with th- on with - sh - sh - on with - on - sh - sh - sh - sh - show - on with - sh - sh - sh - sh - show - sh - on with - on with - *THUD* - on with the show.
• This can happen in one form or another on any given Vinesauce corruption stream, in addition to all the other (sometimes far less pleasant) audio errors the corruptions tend to produce.
• Due to a glitch in his systems, Robo-Frieza from Dragon Ball Z Abridged occasionally locks up when speaking, causing certain syllables to repeat for a moment until he terminates that process. He freezes up when he screams as Trunks slices him in half, and stays stuck like that as he is promptly diced and atomized.
• Played for Drama in Sword Art Online Abridged with Sachi living in an area with a terrible internet connection that causes her to glitch and lag within the game. Because of this; she has a well-founded fear that her Lag will cause all of her friends to die. It's not her Lag that kills her friends, but rather she sets an NPC in her party to Auto-Loot which triggered a trap that eventually killed her. Sachi's death hits Kirito hard that her last words become a Trauma Button that instigates his Chronic Hero Syndrome.

  Sachi: Kirito, this isn't your fault-your fault-your fault-your fault-your fault- (heavily distorted) yoooouuuuur faaaauuuult- (shatters)

• Mario Party DS Anti Piracy has the music stutter when the "Exception occurred" message appears.
• Video Games Awesome! encounters a glitch like this while playing DuckTales: Remastered, possibly caused by multiple sound buffers gone awry.

West-West-West-West- (BOP!) Western Animation

• Arthur used this as an exposé for their literal Fake Band Binky, where the title character accidentally thinks a key component of the band's hologram generator is a trash can and throws a banana peel in it. You can guess what happened next.
• Looney Tunes:
  • In one short, "Pigs in a Polka", the Big Bad Wolf tries to fool The Three Little Pigs by disguising himself as a Gypsy woman playing the violin. One of the pigs discovers the record player hidden behind his back and switches the record over to an upbeat polka, causing the wolf to literally dance out of his costume.
  • One Looney Tunes short called "Daffy's Inn Trouble" features the trope. In one scene, Daffy (in drag) decides to mime to a song on a record to lure patrons into his new inn, only for the record to start skipping. Once he's caught, Daffy attempts to do a quick dance before the would-be customers began throwing produce at him.
  • In "(blooper) Bunny!", the first of the bloopers shown behind the scenes of Bugs Bunny's 51st & 1/2 Anniversary Spectacular involves the record for the background music skipping.
  Bugs: (indignantly) Eh, what's up, doc?
  (The crew laughs as Bugs walks off.)
  Bugs: Monotonous, isn't it?
• Phineas and Ferb: Perry is undercover masquerading as scientist Dr. Lloyd Wexler at an evil science convention in Britain, but when Doofenshmirtz makes Perry read from his autobiography, he almost gets caught since platypi can't speak (in anything but that growling noise Perry usually makes). Thankfully he just happened to have a CD player and an audiobook version of said autobiography to lip sync to, until it randomly started skipping.
  The malevolent path is one trod without the cumbersome shackles of sentimental introspec-spec-spec-spec-spec-spec-spec-spec-spec-spec-spec-spec-spec-(slam)
  Doofenshmirtz: Hmm, that's funny. I don't remember you saying "spec" so many times.
• Spongebob Squarepants:
  • In "Gary Takes a Bath", Gary plants a record player with a shadow similar to himself on a tree with his meowing playing on it. When Spongebob pours water on it, it breaks and starts skipping.
  • "Pressure", when Sandy and Spongebob were about to race to the Krusty Krab:
    Spongebob: Think you can a fair race in that clunky tin tube?
    Sandy: Why don't use ask my behind! That is, if you can catch it! (cut to a closeup of Sandy) What do you think of that, HydroPants?
    Spongebob: I'd say, I'm already halfway there!-halfway there!- (cut to a wider shot showing a record player in Spongebob's place) halfway there!-halfway there!
• Part of a gag in Animaniacs where the Warners are chasing down the Wally Llama to ask him something:
  WL: GO AWAY! I'm missing Baywatch.
  Wakko: But we have a very very very very very very very (Yakko thumps him) important question to ask you.
• The 1938 Looney Tunes / Merrie Melodies cartoon "The Major Lied Til Dawn" had some African natives, stereotypically big-lipped, then the music starts skipping. A female native opens her mouth to show a record with the needle skipping on it. She replaces the needle, the music resumes normally, and she walks on.
• An early 60s Paramount Modern Madcap dealt with a Russian marriage broker who gets a robot alien as a client. The robot is smitten with a jukebox playing a female singer with the tag line "I love you" (Robot: "She loves me!"). He later returns the jukebox because the record skips on "I love you" persistently, the robot saying she just won't shut up.
• The Show Within a Show All my Circuits on Futurama had one of its robot actors break down in this way, opening up the door for Bender to audition on the show.
  • In a meta-example, the Hypnotoad sound effect was produced this way.
• From Hanna-Barbera's The Tom and Jerry Show episode "Cosmic Cat And Meteor Mouse", Tom and Jerry both disguise themselves as the titular superheroes and visit the bulldog whose beauty sleep is being interrupted by their watching the titular show, with both characters lip-syncing to a record playing out the voices of the superheroes. The bulldog catches on that he's being duped when the record player hidden behind Tom's back skips on "Cosmic Zinger", and so he decides to fix them by having the record player speed up so that Tom and Jerry are lip-syncing faster and at a higher pitch..
• In The Jetsons episode "Uniblab", the titular robot gets stuck repeating "Spacely's a stupe" (one of the things it recorded George Jetson saying) while Spacely was showing off the robot to a few businessmen.
• The Tom Terrific story arc "The Everlasting Birthday Party" is all about this. Crabby Appleton has a specially created record that deliberately skips on the same groove so he'll be able to celebrate his birthday in perpetuity.
• Soupe Opéra: This happened to the opera singer's voice one time.
• Dexter's Laboratory: In "The Big Cheese", Dexter invents a machine so he can cram for a French test at school in his sleep, but his record skips, and when he wakes up in the morning all he is able to say is "Omelette du fromage".
• Jakers! The Adventures of Piggley Winks: This happens in the episode "Rock Around the Cluck" when Piggley lip-synchs to a song during the talent show.
• Pluto's Blue Note: Having discovered that his tail can be used as a record player's needle, Pluto uses his newfound discovery to serenade a group of female dogs, lip-synching to the song, but keeping the record player just out of view in his doghouse. However, as he "sings", the record starts skipping. Pluto peeks into his doghouse to discreetly adjust his tail on the record to fix the problem and finish his song.
• Mister Go: One short has the titular character entering a singing contest, and trying to cheat by recording a song in a cassette player that he hides in his pocket. Naturally, the tape starts skipping at the worst possible moment, exposing him as a cheater and getting him disqualified immediately.
• A Single Life: A variation on this trope. A young woman has a record player that is actually a time machine which allows her to skip backward and forwards in time by moving where the needle is on the record. The record winds up in a repetitive audio glitch, constantly skipping backwards, and thus trapping the woman in what might have been a never-ending time loop. She only breaks out of it when she falls out of the chair she's sitting in.

Truth-Truth-Truth-Truth (CRACK!) Truth In Television

• This was an issue that radio stations had to watch for back in the days when everything was on phonograph records with systems that automatically changed turntables. There is a too-good-to-be-true story passed around in the radio industry about a DJ who set up several records to go off one-after-another live and went down to the cafeteria for lunch. The speakers in the cafeteria was playing the station and when he got there a commercial for an audio version of Moby-Dick was playing but the record was skipping going "dick.. dick.. dick.. dick.. dick.. dick..". The DJ rushed up the stairs to the station and upon entering the studio slapped at the record player in a panic. The record player went "dick.. dick - [Record Needle Scratch] THAR SHE BLOWS!"
• A story is told about a deejay for a Christian radio station who thought he could get away with an unauthorized break. The vinyl record he set up was a religious sermon that got stuck on exactly the most embarrassing point possible. His furious boss tracked him down and ordered him back to the studio. "Get back in there and listen to what's going on. When you get done fixing the problem, you're fired!" The deejay went back to the studio and found the recorded message, playing over the airwaves, stuck at "go to hell... go to hell... go to hell... go to hell...."
• A more modern example is that most video games, when they crash, will get stuck playing the last half-second^note It depends on the size of the buffer, which could be any size, but half a second seems to be the most common of audio again and again. This is due to the way "circular buffering" works; without any new data coming in, the audio hardware winds up reading the old data over and over and over again. In old cartridge-based consoles such as SEGA's Master System, the same would happen if you moved the cartridge or removed it while playing a game.
• If you're playing an online game and happen to get quite a big lag spike as a sound is playing, this may happen for a few seconds. This can be either amusing, or extremely annoying; an example of the former would be in Team Fortress 2, where you might be serenaded by an Overly Long Scream from one of the classes!
• The early days of FMV in CD-based games had similar problems - if you had a sufficiently low-speed CD-ROM drive (say a 2x), you might find data rendering faster than it could load, resulting in looping while it span up the next bit. "The Br-Br-Br-otherhood Of N-Nod", indeed...
• Also common on PC games in general (plus some mobile platforms), often due to a wide range of hardware specs and games' inability to manage background processes. Loading anything demanding on a blocking thread makes skips a common occurrence for PC gamers, while a resource eater in the background can cause routine gameplay freezes and accompanying audio skips.
• Audio will stutter on computers without enough RAM. This is common with iTunes because it's a RAM hog in itself.
• Any toy or desk-sitter that plays a sound when you push a button or jostle it can do this when the batteries are low, the button or sensor is stuck, or the contacts are corroding- smacking it can in fact temporarily fix it the latter two cases.
• RCA's Capacitance Electronic Disc (CED) system is essentially video stored on a vinyl record^note It does not store the video signal with height or width modulation, as the needle would be too suceptible to "jumping". Instead, the needle measures the capacitance of the immediate area, hence the name.. The system is more vulnurable to repetition than normal vinyl audio records, as the tone arm is motorized, rather than passive like on normal records, and is capable of getting stuck. Though the players usually have an electromagnet to get the needle out of a locked groove situation.

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that-that-that-that-that-that- (WHAM)