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"You've seen it all before, folks, and you're seeing it all again!"

A shot or series of shots that are frequently reused in a show. Copies of this footage are kept on hand and spliced into a show as needed.

Almost every show has some degree of Stock Footage involved — establishing shots are the most common of these, along with their kin the Aspect Montage. Some shows, though, rely on it to an extensive degree, and some — like Magical Girl anime — have made its use into an artform.

Stock Footage is used mainly because it is inexpensive — filmed once and used multiple times, it makes for a great return on your investment, as long as you don't care whether or not your audience gets tired of the sequence(s) you recycle.

Sometimes, Stock Footage is used which was not originally shot for the show in which it is used. This appears most often for military footage, when the producers don't have the budget to shoot a convincing battle scene and aren't Backed by the Pentagon. In such cases, the quality of the Stock Footage can be substantially different (and several decades older), making for an especially jarring effect. On the other hand, historical fiction dealing with (for example) World War II or the Vietnam War, may deliberately use period-era footage as stock. As a stylistic choice, it can help with the mood of the story a lot.

There are also various companies and creators that sell or provide stock footage to creators. These clips are often used in commercials and corporate campaigns.

With digital compositing and other effects, one can stretch the stock footage further. A single effects shot can be overlaid into many scenes. In animation, data is often stored in layers, either as original animation cels or digital files, allowing character animation to be re-used on new backgrounds, sometimes reversed.

Occasionally, stock footage from other sources is used in cartoons for comedic effect; a series of stock footage clips are shown, each one more absurd than the last. In the Internet age, the ironic use of library Stock Footage has been used in web videos for humor as well.

Compare Limited Animation, Going Through the Motions, Clip Show and for news reporting, B-Roll. Supertrope to Historical Figures in Archival Media.


Exampl-OH CRUD IT'S THE STOK SQUAD!:

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    Advertising 
  • Health Hotline: The commercial uses some stock footage of people talking on the phone.
  • A North Korean propaganda video depicts a Korean man dreaming of exploring space while New York City is in flames. The Internet became amused when it was noticed that the footage of New York in flames was taken from the Call of Duty series.

    Anime 
  • In general, anime is somewhat notorious for this, as it is (or was) seen in Japan as an acceptable way of keeping budget down, especially in the pre-digital-rendering era. While less ubiquitous now, a lot of classic shows that had otherwise tight budgets tend to use stock footage quite a lot — as outlined below.
  • Sailor Moon and other Magical Girl anime are built upon Stock Footage — transformation sequences and standardized attack routines can easily provide upwards of 25% of the film needed for an episode, reducing production costs dramatically. Sailor Moon's first season was particularly low budget and it showed because more than just the usual transformation, attack, and speech footage got recycled — pretty much anytime you saw a cool shot, you could expect a later episode to rip it out and use it again out of context, and in one early instance, a shot of Sailor Moon dodging a punch just ripped a few seconds out of her transformation sequence. Since this show also had many different animators, it could get jarring to see recycled footage appear because the characters would look completely different. Egregiously, the season's final episode has the entire sequence of Usagi hitting Mamoru in the head with her test paper repeated using mostly the same footage from the first episode. While there was a plot reason for this, the animation quality of the first episode was dramatically lower than the final episode, making it extremely obvious what was being recycled.
  • The 1984 Fist of the North Star anime does this in droves, given its low budget. Any time Kenshiro powers up or numerous mooks explode, you can expect to see the same sequences from Kenshiro's battle with the Z Gang in episode one. Some episodes also feature scenes taken from the opening, most notably in one episode of the Patra arc. Later episodes vary their stock footage for these kinds of scenes somewhat, and as the series progresses, the silhouetted bodily explosions are gradually phased out. This can sometimes lead to astonishing cases of Special Effects Failure; for instance, the third episode of the highly detailed and well-animated Season 4 reusing a shot of Kenshiro cracking his knuckles from Season 1, back when the animation was very stiff & simplistic. The contrast is quite jarring.
  • In Ronin Warriors, the five heroes each have their Transformation Sequence and sure-kill moves, and one hero eventually gets a second set for his Super Mode. Also, the Big Bad's four lieutenants each have stock footage for their own sure-kills.
  • Beautifully averted in Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha and its sequel series. While the series makes some use of the typical transformation sequences, they are quickly shortened over the course of the series and then eventually phased out all together and absolutely nothing about the fight sequences is stock.
    • To specify: Nanoha's transformation sequence was used only five times in the first season. It's shown once again in the first episode of A's. Nanoha, Fate, Hayate and the Wolkenritters' transformation sequences in A's were only used once. And their StrikerS transformation sequences as well as the Unison In sequences were used only once, too (Hayate didn't even get one of them in StrikerS). The Forwards' transformation sequences were used twice, but the second time was shortend.
      • Notably, Nanoha and Fate's transformation sequences in StrikerS were actually shortened. You can see the full version only in the DVD extras.
    • Nanoha and Fate's transformation sequences in the movies are only used once in each movie.
    • ViVid Strike!, a later sequel that spun off Vivid, did use the stock transformation sequences a lot more frequently, seemingly due to a more limited budget.
  • Wedding Peach has the bridal transformations, and the warrior transformations. You could tell how much animation budget was available for an episode depending on whether they did the warrior transformations or not.
  • The first anime season of Slayers had stock footage for some of the spells, as well as Gourry drawing out the Sword of Light. The second and third seasons remarkably avert this, even though all three of the original 1990's seasons had cheap budgets (and it shows at times, especially during the end of the first season and parts of the third). When the series revived in 2008, they, too, averted this.
  • Neon Genesis Evangelion, Revolutionary Girl Utena and (especially) Serial Experiments Lain use Stock Footage to conserve their animation budget for when it's needed most. This is why an episode can go from the same repeated close-up of a telephone line to incredible pyrotechnics.
    • It should be noted that Eva's infamous "elevator sequence" (51 seconds with Asuka and Rei, not speaking) was considered important/intentional enough to show up in its entirety in the "Death" compilation movie. They even reanimated it! (In "Death" and the director's version, Asuka gets a nose twitch at about the 40 second mark).
    • Eva also uses a few bits of Stock Footage all through the series — Misato's beer-guzzling shot, Gendo and Fuyutsuki, and the pilots in their EVA cockpits all jump to mind.
    • The most extreme example of this is Episode 25 of NGE, which contains roughly five seconds of original animation: a four-second sequence, a half-second sequence, and about three dozen individual frames that are variously panned, zoomed, or just held there with a voice-over.
    • Let's not forget the 1 minute+ static scene in episode 24 where Shinji kills Kaworu.
  • The use of the Stock Footage "Lain walking under telephone lines casting creepy shadows" montage in Serial Experiments Lain actually heightens the impact of a sequence in the last episode, in which the same footage is shown without Lain in it after she erases herself from existence.
  • Revolutionary Girl Utena pushed its use of stock footage to new heights when, after viewers had gotten used to seeing footage from early duels re-used in later ones, the animators replaced Utena's hair with another character's so they could use sequences of her losing one of the early duels to depict a completely different character losing a duel.
    • Utena turns this into a fun tradition, having several sequences with reused animation and getting new ones by story arc, giving each episode a rhythmic pattern of recurring scenes. It helps that there tends to be new versions of the scene before the actual part that's being reused.
    • Virtually all of Kunihiko Ikuhara's shows intentionally do this, not just to save on animation, but, like nearly every aspect of his shows, to symbolize the monotony and repetitiveness of living one's life by a set pattern.
  • Parodied in Puni Puni☆Poemi, which reused footage of the Transformation Sequence from the first episode, despite the fact that it (intentionally) only had two episodes to begin with.
  • I'm Gonna Be an Angel! used this trope at the end of the first 12 episodes, with a repeated sequence of Micheal opening the Book of Chaos mystically, then making some generic philosphical statement. It then subverted itself in a later episode, when Raphael interrupted the statement to ask, "Didn't you say that one already?"
  • Lampshaded in one episode of Digimon Data Squad in which two of the protagonists are fighting successive waves of enemy Digimon. Stock footage is re-used for the appearance for every wave, causing one of the protagonists to comment that "they keep showing up the same way like all the others!"
    • The Digimon series in general had this problem with major attacks for the Digimon themselves.
      • That, and all the "Digivolve" sequences. They were shortened a lot of the time in later episodes, but the first series spent a long time re-using the same animations of the main digimon powering up.
      • Digimon Tamers has this to be seen frequently in the early episodes.
    • Notably used in an interesting way in the Savers short film. The usual "Burst Mode" evolution scene is shown, but it has been re-animated and is shown in a more dynamic way, from a different angle.
  • Particularly bad in Macross 7. Almost every space battle was composed of 80% stock footage, to the point that Gavil dodging Gamlin's laser cannon burst to the chest of his Humongous Mecha, a piece of stock footage used to defeat him over a half dozen times before, was simultaneously shocking and mixed with hints of "Why didn't he do that ''before''?"
  • Needless to say, Voltron had 22-minute episodes that consisted of about 16 minutes of original footage and 6 minutes of the Lions leaving their lairs, forming Voltron, etc.
    • Oddly, Voltron also suffered from stock dialogue. Voltron I (Vehicle Voltron) and Voltron III (Lion Voltron) both used the same combination spiel. But Voltron I's head was a separate piece from the torso and piloted by the main character. It doesn't make sense in Voltron III to say "And I'll form the head!" because the head is part of Black Lion... though the neat close-up on the head makes up for it (and that shot is probably why the World Events team thought the mirrored spiel still "worked").
  • Gundam:
    • Mobile Suit Gundam reuses a shot of Dopps swooping in to attack the White Base quite a few times, as well as a shot of a Musai-class ship exploding, and who can forget the classic "Zaku gets shot through the cockpit"? Not only that, but they constantly reuse the shot of Amuro jolting back and forth in his cockpit whenever he is hit. Justified because of the complete lack of budget it had, to the point Tomino himself had to step in and animate when the lead animator collapsed and was hospitalized because they couldn't hire better animators.
    • The high-budget OVAs are mostly exempt, but even Mobile Suit Gundam 0083: Stardust Memory reuses some shots of Gato destroying Salamis-class ships with the Neue Ziel.
    • Gundam ZZ likes to reuse the ZZ's docking sequence whenever Judau decides to dock, although they begin to cut away some parts of the sequence as the show progresses.
    • Victory Gundam managed to avoid using much stock footage for much of its run. In fact, the only really noticeable stock footage is... a brief one-second explosion that takes up the entire screen when transitioning between scenes.
    • As a Super Robot Genre show, G Gundam uses stock footage quite frequently. Several scenes are actually stock footage, with each episode seemingly only 80% new content in many later episodes. Heck, anyone whenever they use their Finishing Moves (Shining Finger, Shining Finger Sword, Bakunetsu God Finger and Sekiha Tenkyoken in Domon's case) are usually re-used footage. Hell, the scene where Domon suits up to pilot Shining Gundam was constantly reused, and even later, God Gundam's "Suit Up" scene was reused several times. This can be seen most easily when, after Domon first acquires the Burning Gundam, he still calls the Shining Gundam. The final episodes also use stock footage from the openings during key scenes (such as the Colony Devil Gundam rising from the clouds) and make many seemingly-insignificant portions (such as Allenby as a fairy) have meaning.
    • Gundam Wing reuses two shots of Heero blowing up Leos with the Wing Gundam's BFG quite a lot, as well as a shot of Duo cutting a Leo up with the Deathscythe's scythe. Wing Zero firing its twin buster rifle (while spinning) is also a sight you'll become familiar with, and they reuse the shit out of footage of Virgo mobile dolls destroying Leos. And, almost every single time Heavyarms is on screen, it's probably one of the same few attack animations. Given that Heavyarms only uses More Dakka, it's expected.
      • A particularly amusing example is the two Leos that Sandrock bisects in its first appearance. One is a command type with shoulder cannons. The only other time you ever see this variation fighting a Gundam is... every other shot where Sandrock does that specific move.
    • ∀ Gundam lacks such transformation sequences and large scale battles, instead having stock footage from older Gundam shows to expose the characters to the Dark History.
    • Gundam SEED seems to reuse heavy amounts of footage from earlier episodes as a way to circumvent the animators still getting used to digital animation, especially in combat scenes. Its sequel, Gundam SEED Destiny, even uses heavy amounts of stock footage from its predecessor, which is odd because Destiny's budget was higher than SEED's. However, in what's too meticulously animated to be unintentional, they animated three separate Gundams blowing up three different grunt Humongous Mecha in the exact same way...despite all participants being different every time.
      • Being digitally animated, SEED and SEED Destiny were able to take stock footage to new levels. The system they used allowed for taking footage from one scene and digitally replacing the mecha in it with different mecha. Thus, stock footage could be created that used the same animation, but depicted different machines. The animators took advantage of this at nearly every opportunity, sometimes resulting in entire battle scenes that are almost frame for frame identical.
      • And Kira switches between Freedom and Strike Freedom in some scenes.
      • Similarly, there's a scene in SEED Destiny where, in the middle of a attack against an enemy mobile suit, Shinn's Impulse Gundam briefly becomes Kira's Strike Gundam from the previous series.
      • In a very odd example, the stock footage of Strike Freedom's Alpha Strike shows it firing all its beams in a single direction...which is always followed by a stock shots of enemy machines being struck by beams from several different angles.
    • Gundam 00 managed to avoid using stock footage for almost the entirety of the first season, with Virtue's transformation into Nadleeh (it only transforms twice in the entire first season, so it's fairly minor) and during the Moralia battle where Patrick's Enact from Episode 1 (thrusting its dagger at Exia) was re-painted as a black Hellion craft. The second season wasn't so lucky, as the 00 and 0-Raiser combining sequence gets used more than a couple of times.
    • Mobile Suit Gundam AGE has a blatant example in Episode 33. A Guncannon Expy is shown outside Rostuloran. A bit later, it's destroyed. And some minutes later, the first shot of the Guncannon is used again, with nary a trace of damage.
  • The anime Akazukin Chacha had stock footage to transform the titular Chacha into a holy princess with a magic bow, having her two friends activate their powers (Shiine kissed his ring and Riiya thrusts his bracer into the air). This was normally fine, except these two could do it at any time, including when under water, trapped in glass prisons, and even once when their arms were tied to their sides with rope.
    • The sequence would get even longer when Chacha got a sword in later episodes, and then another sequence would be added in which Chacha summoned a shield still later on. In the third season of the series, the gimmick would be dropped, however, and the episodes would stop using stock footage.
  • Pokémon: The Series: In the earlier seasons of Pokémon: The Original Series, Ash would turn back his cap over a green action blur, following a closeup of his eye, whenever throwing a Poké Ball. Around the time the show began using computer coloring, this footage stopped appearing.
    • Pokémon still uses Stock Footage, although it's mostly limited to within the episode. If a trainer calls out an attack more than one time in a battle, chances are that it will be the same footage that was used the first time.
      • The main and recurring characters also get this, but each of them has a way bigger set of animations that get recycled throughout the whole series instead.
    • Pokémon the Series: Black & White in particular is notorious for it's overuse of stock footage for Pokémon attacks. Most of them have only one animation.
      • Pokémon the Series: XY got rid of this with a simple solution: recycle the attack footage, but use a different background matching the scenario each time it's used, instead of generic motion lines.
    • The footage from the "Team Rocket vs. Team Plasma" two-parter - where the Relic Castle's mechanism is activated, revealing the Meteonite - was reused for the scene in BW 2-12, in which the Abyssal Ruins are activated to uncover the Reveal Glass.
      • Speaking of Team Rocket, their motto usually recycled scenes for some of their lines from time to time, but since Best Wishes! Season 2: Episode N onwards, the motto is 100% stock footage.
  • Dinosaur King has several attack and transformation sequences used throughout the episodes. The transformation sequences were eventually shortened, since the producers had figured out that the audience didn't need to see the same long transformation sequence a second time.
  • In Transformers: Cybertron, stock footage of transformations and Cyber Key Powerups were essentially used to fill up chunks of time (to the ridiculous extreme that they'd cut to extremely short transformation sequences, flashing backdrop and everything, and then back to the real world). The dubbers did eventually cotton on to how boring this was, however, and had the characters talk ''while'' the stock footage was happening. Its predecessor, Transformers: Energon, while also using the same type of stock footage, was not that bad about it.
    • This is subtly parodied in a DVD extra for Transformers: Animated, where Optimus Prime dramatically turns into his firetruck form in a sequence that directly parallels the stock footage transformations of earlier series. Starscream does this as well, complete with an anime-esque glint on his teeth just at the end.
    • However, Cybertron's stock footage,made more interesting by the dub or otherwise, does have a use. Being a Transformers series, it is Merchandise-Driven, existing to sell toys. Being a post G-1, post Beast Wars series, the character models hew far closer to those toys (Hell, Evac's model shows the push-button that makes his toy's rotor spin). The final instruction sheets packaged with those toys, especially for the American releases, are in some cases done by idiots (Particularly Optimus Prime. The US instructions show his Super Mode with the wings upside-down). The stock footage Transformation Sequences, on the other hand, show the transformations correctly. Ergo, by watching the stock footage you can see how to properly transform the toys.
  • Brilliantly spoofed in The Big O, where, before a Combining Mecha pastiche does its thing, the video fades to black as if it were transitioning to stock footage despite the robot only appearing in one episode.
  • GaoGaiGar has lots: the titular mecha's transformation and attack sequences, along with all the transformations and attacks of various other robot cast members. In fact, later robots' transformations seem to be traced over the originals (as they are newer versions or copies of the same robot). Interestingly, there's slight differences in the footage sometimes: once, during the "Program Drive!" part of Final Fusion, Mikoto pauses to let out a tired sigh right in the middle of her stock footage.
    • Clips of Leo, Uchiyama, and Hyuuma piloting the GaoMachines are also spliced into the Final Fusion sequence when EI-15 destroys the Program Drive and forces GGG to do it manually. In fact, GaoGaiGar is notable for not only using ridiculous amounts of Stock Footage but also for interrupting it on a routine basis.
    • Also, all the stock footage was partially recycled, part reanimated for FINAL. Only Volfogg's combination sequence was completely reanimated, due to his subordinates being slightly redesigned.
  • Any scene where the Dragon Torque comes into play in Noein reuses the same stock shots of it appearing and vanishing. The series does have a nice play on the whole Recap Episode thing though, with the point being trying to work out how the footage differs from its original use.
  • Naruto After the timeskip managed to turn almost every flashback into stock footage, sometimes even the episode after it is revealed.
  • Azumanga Daioh would frequently use the same animation for different parts of conversations or for different scenes altogether. For example, a scene from episode 22 has Kagura open part of her school uniform to show Osaka how tanned she had gotten. A later scene uses the exact same footage for a completely different conversation. Yes, it's easy to notice... and kinda gives the viewer the wrong idea.
  • Almost frustratingly averted in Haruhi Suzumiya, the "Endless Eight" series in the second season. They all depict the (almost) exact same sequence of events, down to dialogue, but the entire episode is completely re-animated each time. And yes, there are eight episodes.
  • Hetalia: Axis Powers has a particularly grating example on one of the episodes where they're stuck on a desert island: About 10% of the footage is reused from the previous desert island episode, and then the rest of the episode is literally footage that repeats twice EXACTLY THE SAME WAY. Fandom has named that island 'That F-ing Island', just to poke fun.
    • Another episode reuses that same sequence but offers a minor punchline change with England having rebuilt Busby's Chair to test on the Axis, only for Russia to sit on it and make it explode. And yet another episode reuses the footage to replace the whole setting of one of the Christmas strips from the manga.
    • Another piece of stock footage that has been reused is an anime-original sequence of Holy Roman Empire waking up in bed to an alarm clock in the 17th century. It was created presumably for the anime producers to explain away the Chibitalia side stories being adapted after the main story was, with them being HRE's "dreams".
  • Monster has a stock montage of images from the red light district, but this only occurs three or four times in the entire run. That said, the amount of flashbacks and repeated sequences within each episode can reach drinking game levels (how often is that girl going to jump off those steps?!).
  • The first few episodes of Yu-Gi-Oh! used stock footage for Yugi's transformation to the Other Yugi. The Japanese version usually showed the shortened version, while 4Kids' dub used the full transformation for the entire first season. Eventually Yugi would start changing his outfit configuration (so to speak) when transforming, and the animators would use a different sequence per episode (or no sequence at all, just the Millenium Puzzle flashing).
  • Powerpuff Girls Z, being a Magical Girl show used stock footage for transformations and the like. There were about 3 or 4 as the girls changed outfits (one even had them in their Pjs) and others had minor errors that got fixed in later episodes (outfit pieces being there when they shouldn't and not being there when the should) There was also the episode where they used the animation from their transformations for dancing....
  • The shifts between each of Haru's swords in Rave Master use this.
  • Fairy Tail uses this for just about any spell the main characters use. Lucy has one for summoning, Gray has one for creating an ice form, Erza has one for changing into her more notable armors, and Natsu has one for everything from his cool fire-breathing spell to his punch
  • In Hell Girl, there are very, very few episodes that don't show the "Ai gearing up" sequence.
  • Mermaid Melody Pichi Pichi Pitch, where they don't limit to using them in transformation and singing sequences...
  • My-HiME and My-Otome are especially good at averting this—Mai-Otome especially. Every girl has a unique transformation sequence, but we only see it twice for each girl, tops.
  • Someday's Dreamers II: Sora has some very conspicuous background characters reappearing throughout the series. Of special note are the exact same two groups of people that pass by during the establishing shots of Sora's Tokyo residence.
  • Used a lot in the Future GPX Cyber Formula series, especially when the cars use their Nitro Boosts and when the cars shift.
  • The shot of Kirby's Warp Star being summoned appears in almost every single episode of Kirby: Right Back at Ya!. While more varied, and occasionally spoofed, Kirby's transformation sequences for his Copy Abilities also count.
  • Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann has stock footage for the Giga Drill Break. A rather egregious offense was in episode 15, after Gurren Lagann got a pair of wings; the old stock footage was used, so the wings vanished for that one move. Also, it is pretty obvious that the stronger Gurren Lagann mechs are vectored over the original footage for their Giga Drill Break attacks.
  • Mon Colle Knights uses so much repeated stock footage every episode that the dub did what it could to make it more entertaining by adding unique humorous conversations during the stock footage in each episode.
  • The Idolmaster - The last episode has this in spades.
  • Though it only happens with one clip, the footage reuse in the first two OVAs of Dominion Tank Police is both highly obvious and rather strange. The scene involves the Tank Police dropping down ropes from an upper floor of the precinct into the tank hanger so they can get in their tanks and head out into the city to fight crime and cause massive amounts of avoidable property damage. This scene makes sense in the first episode, when they are on an upper floor when they get the order to move out. In the second episode, it seems totally nonsensical, because they were already in the hanger when the deploy order came, meaning that between scenes they left their vehicles and climbed up a flight of stairs just so they could slide down a rope to reach the vehicles they had just left behind. The one member of the cast who this action would actually make sense for (Leona, who wasn't in uniform when they got the deploy order, but was in her next scene), isn't in that footage.
  • K uses stock footage both lazily and intelligently. Certain SCEPTER 4 characters have stock sequences of them drawing their swords, used both in the anime's opening sequence and in certain fight scenes. Seri's is the most obvious because it's also gratuitous to the point of Narm. Two scenes in which HOMRA members chant "No Blood, No Bone, No Ash" are also recycled. However, there is one creative use of stock footage of Shiro, and it actually makes the anime quite beautifully cyclical. The sequence in the opening where he smiles and shuts his eyes while falling is reused for his death scene.
  • Sometimes animation is reused during the right scenes in Ginga: Nagareboshi Gin, leading to the same dogs getting killed over and over again. One dalmatian in particular has all the bad luck dying again and again. During the battle with the bears in the last few episodes, Gin and a couple other dogs are shown hanging off a bear when they had already jumped off.
  • D.N.Angel is not usually bad about this trope over all, but Episode 24 has a example of this trope done really badly. Animation of With becoming Dark's wings and attaching to his back is reused. The problem with this is in the reused animation, Dark is hundreds of feet in the sky free falling. Before the reused animation, he was standing on the ground. Dark and With can't jump that far, but they don't even try to pass it off as them jumping, which they could have easily done by having a nearby character comment "what a jump!" or something.
  • Cross Ange has quite a lot of stock footages reused throughout the show, some of it even coming from Mobile Suit Gundam SEED and Mobile Suit Gundam SEED Destiny. In the show itself, it has Vilkiss transitioning from Flight Mode to Assault Mode, how Vivian's Razor throws its boomerang, how Ange sings the Endless Song, and it doesn't even have to be in the mech battles because Sylvia also has the same way of whipping somebody with the exact same animation. It got so bad that a fan made a comparison video between Destiny's opening and Cross Ange's opening and they almost look exactly the same.
  • Barely ever used in City Hunter, but sometimes a particular shot of Ryo loading his pistol and snapping it shut is reused. More noticeably, often when the foreign girl of the week is flying back to her home country (or a local girl is leaving for whatever reason) the same shot of a SUNRISE AIR LINS jet taking off is used. A more noticeable example occurred whenever he had to fight large groups. While the target mooks would be drawn to match the mooks of the episode, Ryo was always depicted using the same five or six attacks (in still frames, no less!), often in the same sequence: among them, a rear kick, elbow to the chest, backfist, uppercut.
  • Happens with Sonic X when the X-Tornado takes off, as well with a few flyby shots reused in multiple episodes.
  • Buso Renkin: As he is a minor character with few scenes, the same animated sequence showing the Alchemist Warrior Ikusabe recomposing his entire body is used three times during his fight with Papillon.
  • Naturally, most of the transformations in Pretty Cure tend to be stock footage of the girls transforming. The show is at least nice enough to group the sequences together so you don’t have to watch each one individually.
  • Time Bokan routinely reused the sequences of the eponymous time machine traveling through time space and the villain's Humongous Mechas going kaboom, the latter to the point of being something of a Running Gag.

    Asian Animation 
  • Pleasant Goat and Big Big Wolf has at least two examples that are confined to specific episodes having earlier clips from them being reused.
    • Episode 496 has the same clip of Paddi kissing Sparky played twice.
    • Mighty Little Defenders episode 24 features a scene with Wolffy as a dog chasing after his son Wilie. The scene reuses the same clip of Wolffy running after Wilie and sprinting after him four times without any changes to the footage.

    Fan Works 

    Films — Animation 
  • Avoided out of necessity for the Futurama movies. We see some scenes from past episodes in Bender's Big Score but they had to be re-animated due to production shifting to HD.
  • Titanic: The Legend Goes On is a pretty glaring example. Much of the footage is constantly re-used over and over.
  • Many people are somewhat irritated with Disney because some bright light has discovered that they reuse animation from one movie to another, such as any scene when characters are dancing (with Robin Hood obviously being the worst offender). Another is a pair of scenes from The Jungle Book and The Sword in the Stone (which was released only 4 years earlier). In The Sword in the Stone, Arthur/Wart comes home and is promptly tackled by castle dogs Tiger and Talbot, who enthusiastically lick him. The same animation is used in The Jungle Book, though due to the latter film being produced later (and with a noticeably higher budget), the animation is better. Mowgli comes to visit his wolf family and is promptly tackled by two of them, who lick him in much the same manner. Another Jungle Book example would be the scene where Baloo and Bagheera are shown escaping with Mowgli from the Bandar-Log, which reused footage from the climax of The Wind in the Willows segment of The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad.
    • The story goes that Disney was in financial trouble at the time most of these overlapping films (shown in the video and mentioned above) were made, so they needed to do things cheaper and still make memorable movies.
    • The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh is also a pretty big contender, reusing footage from & The Blustery Day in And Tigger Too!, as well as using some footage from The Jungle Book for the epilogue for Many Adventures.
    • It was a different world when these films were made - the home market didn't exist, and the odds that someone would watch The Jungle Book and Sword in the Stone back-to-back (or close enough to recognize the similarities) were minuscule.
    • These films (The Jungle Book, The Sword in the Stone, The Aristocats and Robin Hood etc) are all directed by Wolfgang (Woolie) Reitherman. Reitherman was one of Disney's Nine Old Men of animation who became chief animation director in 1961 with 101 Dalmatians. According to animator Floyd Norman, the reuse of animation had nothing to do with budget constraints and "doing things cheaper" - the reuse of footage was simply one of Reitherman's directorial trademarks.
    • Beauty and the Beast was the last Disney Canon film to reuse footage from an earlier Disney film (in this case, the final scene from Sleeping Beauty).
      • The two scenes are obviously very similar, but given the time gap between them and of course the increased quality, one can make the argument that Beauty's scene was at the very most used as a model to base the scene on, and most likely a homage.
    • There have also been instances where Bambi's mother can be seen grazing (making it the most often re-used stock footage in Disney history).
    • Mary Poppins reuses some of the forest animals from Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs alongside footage of Bambi and Faline.
    • The Lion King (1994) cuts-and-pastes footage of Timon and Pumbaa's introduction from earlier in the film into the climactic battle.
    • A huge amount of Robin Hood was recycled, such as any time crowds are cheering, marching, or dancing. All the mooks are identical - the Rhinos, Elephants and Wolves only have one model for the many of them used. On top of that, Little John is an exact copy of Baloo from Jungle Book. And a lot of poses are re-used for the main characters.
  • A fridge moment was had with Anastasia. A woman was being interviewed and pretending to be the princess for the money had the exact same body and hair as the main character, but had a different face. It was a little unnerving as the way she moved was just as light and floaty as they made the 'real' Anastasia move.
  • From the animated BIONICLE movies:
    • Mask of Light: The puzzled crowd shot from the end of the film is used twice, as is the sequence of the Energized Protodermis ball shooting out of the floor with Takanuva and Makuta jumping after it, as well as Makuta walking up to Takanuva before and after their fight. The last one creates a continuity goof, as the first instance shows Takanuva holding his staff before he gets it out of Hammerspace.
    • Legends of Metru Nui: A group-shot of the Toa standing in the Great Temple with Vakama talking is shown twice, though the second time, it's Nokama who is talking. Many shots of Turaga Dume are likewise reused on the Coliseum's giant projector screens... even if the Mouth Flaps don't line up.
    • Web of Shadows: The awakening of Makuta is represented by a quick series of shots (some ran backwards) from the previous movie with heavy filters applied. The recap at the beginning, of course, is also reused footage.
  • The War to End All Wars – The Movie: Most of the "Lady of the Dark" segment is reused from Yarnhub's earlier music video for the song. Averted with the following "Christmas Truce" segment, which though using some of the same shots as their earlier "Christmas Truce" music video (notably Adolf Hitler getting hit in the head with a soccer ball), was re-animated from scratch to match the art style of the rest of the film.

    Films — Live-Action 
  • Tends to happen in many nature documentaries, particularly if the behavior or animal is rarely seen or unusual.
  • Just about every nuclear detonation on film is stock footage, in large part because it's kinda hard to reproduce in a studio. The Baker test of Operation Crossroads is especially popular.
    • Another popular depiction of a mushroom cloud would be the Grable shot of Operation_Upshot–Knothole
    • Another is the glowing mushroom cloud of Romeo from Operation Castle (commonly mistaken for the infamous Bravo test). Fans of Worms Armageddon will recognise the mushroom cloud at a glance.
  • In the Alien Invasion movie Killers From Space (1954), the climactic underground explosion of the aliens' base is shown via the usual stock nuclear footage — except it's a nuke going off in the ocean.
    • There is a notable exception in Threads, which was an artificial smoke cloud to simulate a mushroom cloud. Scared a lot of locals. The whole thing still scares those who watched it nearly a quarter of a century later (the film did also use stock shots of US nuclear tests, as well as stock demolition footage to simulate the blast effects).
    • Another exception is The Day After in which mushroom clouds were simulated by injecting dye into a water tank and filmed upside down and in slow motion.
      • Though to be fair, the nuclear attack sequence did feature actual stock footage of buildings and objects being demolished in those 1950s nuclear tests in Nevada (most notable is a two-story house being destroyed and several trees being blown over from the blast.)
  • On a similar note is the use of stock footage of Mount St Helen's 1980 eruption in Dante's Peak, a Hawaiian-looking eruption in You Only Live Twice, and so on. This is reasonable considering that for the most part CGI Lava and Pyroclastic Flows don't look very good. Just watch the 1997 film Volcano, set in Los Angeles. The Lava, while obviously Lava, looks rather different to what you would expect.
    • Dante's Peak may be an exception, as most of the eruption footage in the film was created by filming explosions and gas pumps at high camera speeds. The end result was so convincing that several vulcanologists thought the filmmakers had gone out and filmed for real.
  • The 1970 film Myra Breckinridge splices in scenes from other 20th Century Fox movies, mostly from The Golden Age of Hollywood (plus a clip from One Million Years B.C., which featured Raquel Welch, who also stars in this film), to either comment upon the action or serve as a punchline. Due to the usage of clips in the film's notorious dildo rape scene, actress Loretta Young successfully sued to have footage of her taken out, while a clip of Shirley Temple getting sprayed in the face with milk (at the end of an earlier scene involving an orgasm) was taken out after the White House supposedly pressured Fox to do so (the replacement was Oliver Hardy sprayed with champagne). The film even includes the obligatory atomic bomb test footage stock footage in a few scenes.
  • Mystery Science Theater 3000 films, as an embodiment of their production values, often use stock footage in place of original footage, or story in general.
    • Overdrawn at the Memory Bank uses long sequences of nature documentary footage with the main character's voice dubbed in to make it look like he's been turned into an animal. One of the bots notes that this was the only footage in the film shot on 35mm instead of tape.
    • In Riding With Death, a jet suffers technical problems and the pilot must eject, which is shown using stock footage, prompting Mike to comment, "I'm running a film now of a previous pilot ejection."
    • Space Mutiny features footage blatantly taken from Battlestar Galactica (1978), which arguably was the best looking thing in the movie. The box actually brags about "special effects from the team that brought you Star Wars!"
    • The Starfighters features an 80 minutes of fighter plane stock footage, seven minutes of insipid dialogue and three minutes of credits.
    • In Invasion of the Neptune Men, stock footage of explosions from the 1960 nuclear war movie World War III Breaks Out is used. According to Kevin Murphy, their sheer outrage at the use of what they believed to be actual World War II footage in "what is ostensibly a children's film" heavily contributed to it being one of the most brutally mocked movies on the show. During the Mystery Science Theater 3000 interstitial sequences, the bots sing the "Song About Stock Footage."
    • When it came time to reveal a monstrous race living Beneath the Earth, the execrable The Wild World of Batwoman borrowed footage from the classic B-movie The Mole People.
    • The Mole People itself uses stock footage of an avalanche to further its plot, which Mike and the bots also comment on.
      • "Avalanche footage! Run!"
    • In The Leech Woman, scenes of the characters trekking through African jungle are heavily padded with stock footage, prompting one of the bots to remark: "This isn't stock footage, it's stock mileage at this point!" At one point an African elephant turns into an Asian elephant on a sound stage with with fake ears glued onto its head.
    • Stock footage of a snake is used in Manos: The Hands of Fate. It's the highest-quality portion of the film.
    • The Creeping Terror uses footage of a ballistic missile test.
    • In Santa Claus Conquers the Martians, stock footage of military planes (some of it used later for the opening credits of Dr. Strangelove) is used several times to represent the government either searching for the Martians or for Santa Claus after the Martians had kidnapped him (missile footage for space takeoffs is also used), prompting this timeless riff:
    • Missile to the Moon (1959). When the first men on the Moon take off on their return trip to Earth, superimposed stock footage of a V2 launch is used... including the launch gantry. Guess those Moon girls built it for them.
    • Invasion U.S.A. (1952) Invasion, USA uses the real German bombing of London to stand in for a fictional Soviet bombing of New York City.
  • Speaking of Mystery Science Theater 3000-level auteurism, one is hard pressed to think of an Ed Wood movie that doesn't make extensive use of (hopefully) Public Domain archival film.
    • Bride of the Monster: First footage of a snake on a branch is used to make it look like a big rubber one in a tree is alive. Later, footage of moving alligators is used to make it appear as though a character is shooting at them; in the riff, Joel and the robots make comments such as "He's shooting at a different movie!" And of course, stock footage of an octopus underwater is used with scenes of an unmoving obviously fake one.
    • Plan 9 from Outer Space uses obvious stock footage to bring to bear the armed might of at least three of America's armed services against the sinister aliens. Sadly, the USA's jet fighters, rocket artillery and battleships prove ineffective.
  • The second through the seventh Star Trek films all reuse footage from at least one previous film:
    • Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan was made on an especially tight budget, the lowest of any Trek film. Fortunately, its predecessor, the bloated Star Trek: The Motion Picture, was simply filled with endless Leave the Camera Running spaceship scenes for the pickings. In Star Trek II, all footage of the Enterprise in or leaving spacedock, as well as the initial shot of the Enterprise going to warp, was reused from the first movie. Footage of Klingon ships attacking V'ger in The Motion Picture was reused for the Klingon ships in the Kobayashi Maru simulation.
    • Star Trek III: The Search for Spock starts off with a Previously on… segment that obviously consists of footage from the end of Star Trek II. Later on, Kirk actually watches footage from the previous film with the explanation that it was recorded by a Magical Security Cam. The Genesis simulation from the previous film is also replayed.
    • In Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, the Klingons play the Star Trek III footage of the Enterprise being destroyed, which they recorded... somehow. Also, the Genesis simulation from Star Trek II gets replayed for the third time.
    • In Star Trek V: The Final Frontier, the initial establishing shots of the spacedock and the Enterprise are reused from Star Trek IV. Additionally, some shots of the Klingon Bird-of-Prey are from Star Trek III.
    • Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country features the same Enterprise establishing shot from Star Trek IV that had already been reused by Star Trek V.
    • Star Trek: Generations justified the use of footage recycled from Star Trek VI by claiming that a Klingon ship was an antique model their adversaries had bought used. It also uses Klingon ship footage from the first film as well as the Enterprise-B at warp, taken from the Excelsior. You'll notice the bottom doesn't have the extra ridge the Enterprise-B has.
  • Though not exactly an example of this trope, the film Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid by Steve Martin and Carl Reiner is notable: it was based on the concept of making an entirely new movie out of snippets of old movies, cut up and shuffled around, with some new footage (filmed in black-and-white) to tie it all together. The result is a movie starring Steve Martin, and co-starring Humphrey Bogart, Cary Grant, James Cagney, Ingrid Bergman, Lana Turner, and just about every other famous film noir actor ever.
  • Kung Pow! Enter the Fist: Steve Oedekirk inserted himself into a 1976 kung fu movie called Hu hao shuang xing ("Tiger and Crane Fists"). He also added a Gag Dub and a new story involving French aliens.
  • In the film Ed Wood, Johnny Depp's Ed Wood makes a statement about how he could make a whole film from Stock Footage. Ed Wood himself used a lot of stock footage, which led to amusing continuity errors.
  • An example of absurd Stock Footage comes from the Zucker brothers' classic Airplane!! Ted Stryker has continuous flashbacks to his Vietnam experience, which behind the cockpit, which are shown by old-time World War II footage of airplanes being shot down... then, eventually, by pre-Wright Brothers footage of some of man's unsuccessful attempts to fly an airplane, all with the same "plane being shot down in a dogfight" sound effects.
  • The "happy ending" theatrical cut of Blade Runner consists of a helicopter shot of a car driving through the mountains from The Shiningnote  with new voice-over added in. Executive Meddling forced the ending on Ridley Scott, so he did it without having to shoot any new footage. Notably, the scene is absent in the Director's Cut and the later editions, all of which end with the elevator doors closing (Scott's original ending).
  • When 1995 film adaptation of Jane Austen's Persuasion needed a shot of an "Age of Fighting Sail" ship to close the film, they used one from The Bounty to keep costs down. The film was originally supposed to be a TV movie and didn't have much of a budget.
  • Midway used a lot of stock footage, as well as footage "borrowed" from other WW2 films, including Tora! Tora! Tora! and The Battle of Britain, which causes a lot of historical and continuity errors.
  • Several films from the Showa series of Godzilla made use of stock footage. The footage was frequently used to save money for fairly standard scenes of buildings being destroyed by monsters and military attacks on said monsters. King Ghidorah in particular was a favorite subject of this, seeing as he appeared in several movies. As a result, the creators frequently reused the same footage of King Ghidorah soaring over his victim city, raining destruction from above. Another favorite was reusing footage of the army or navy firing shots at Godzilla or other monsters.
    • Godzilla vs. Gigan was one of the worst offenders, as much of the scenes of Gigan and King Ghidorah attacking Tokyo, and the battle between the space monsters and Godzilla and Anguirus (up until the Godzilla building is demolished) is lifted from Destroy All Monsters and darkened considerably to make it appear to be happening at night. You can even briefly spot Mothra in one part of the footage! And the less said about All Monsters Attack, the better.
    • You will always remember those poor three toy tanks that someone took a blowtorch to in Mothra vs. Godzilla. Godzilla melted them again in a later movie, and King Ghidorah and Megalon also had their fun with them.
    • Italian Godzilla King Of The Monsters includes, aside from the obvious footage from Gojira and Godzilla: King of the Monsters!, bits of Godzilla Raids Again and clips from wartime newsreels from World War II. So a lot of the destruction shown in this version of the film wasn't special effects....
  • Toho's 1977 "space opera" film, War in Space, uses stock footage from three other movies in a montage depicting an alien invasion of Earth; Battle in Outer Space (Which was released in 1959!), 1963's The Last War, and the banned-film Prophecies of Nostradamus (1973).
  • Godzilla (2014):
    • The film's opening credits are interspersed with footage from Operation Crossroads's Baker test.
    • Footage from the Castle Bravo nuclear test was used at the beginning of the film.
  • During the credits of Godzilla: King of the Monsters (2019), the shots of Skull Island are taken from the previous film.
  • The Showa Era Gamera movies, generally being considered the poor man's version of Godzilla, were even more guilty of this than their cinematic rival. Often the films would have the same scenes of destruction from prior films even if it was clearly a different time of day or even that the footage from the previous film is black and white and this one is in colour. Other times they'd use the excuse of a flashback to play an entire fight scene from a previous film to pad out the running time.
    • This was taken to an extreme in the final film of the Showa Era, Gamera: Super Monster, where nearly all the footage of Gamera (roughly half the movie's runtime!) is taken from prior films, with almost all the new Gamera footage clearly being a stiff model that can only move its mouth up and down, and nothing else. There's even animated footage taken from Space Battleship Yamato and Galaxy Express 999, which have literally nothing to do with Gamera at all. It's often considered Gamera's equivalent to All Monsters Attack, which is widely considered the worst Godzilla film, and considering Showa Gamera was already seen as inferior to Godzilla... Unsurprisingly, the film was made on No Budget with the production company on the verge of bankruptcy, and killed Gamera both in and out of universe, until he was revived fifteen years later for a much better made and well-received trilogy of films.
  • The Turkish film The Man Who Saves the World stole footage from the original Star Wars (earning this film the internet nickname Turkish Star Wars): The explosion of the Death Star is used to represent the destruction of Earth, and the protagonists are shown piloting TIE fighters. When the protagonists later duck into a café full of aliens, it's quite obvious which of the aliens were from Star Wars and which were original.
  • For Raiders of the Lost Ark, footage of the airplane flying over Nepal was taken from the 1973 version of Lost Horizon and the Establishing Shot of 1930s Washington, D.C. was from The Hindenburg.
  • Back to the Future
    • The opening credits of Back to the Future Part II play over cloud footage from Firefox.
    • In the original Back to the Future, there's a Driving a Desk scene in which Marty says "Okay, McFly, get a grip on yourself. It's all a dream! Just a... very... intense dream..." On the DVD, the filmmakers mention that they think the landscape rolling by outside the window in this shot was pulled from the Universal archives, though they can't remember for sure.
  • Casablanca uses brief stock clips (probably from newsreels) during the opening "refugee trail" montage, and again during the invasion of France. The latter, especially, are noticeably specklier than the rest of the film.
  • Sgt. Kabukiman N.Y.P.D. gives us a car chase scene, which climaxes when a blue sedan strikes another vehicle, flips upside-down 30 feet in the air, lands, and then inexplicably explodes. The same footage has been used in many other films by Troma Entertainment (the same company), including Tromeo and Juliet, Terror Firmer, Poultrygeist: Night of the Chicken Dead, and Citizen Toxie: The Toxic Avenger IV.
  • Cool Runnings uses footage from the real team's bobsleigh runs.
  • Parodied magnificently during the climax of Duck Soup.
  • Parodied in the climax of Texas Across the River, where the same Indian gets shot and falls of his horse no less than three times (by the same character nonetheless - well the third wasn't even a gunshot, he threw his revolver). Then there's a wounded Indian who gets dragged away from the fight by his comrades at least twice. You got to hand it to him. He's a persistent fellow.
  • CGI example in The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers: Peter Jackson realized too late that he needed to show Gollum's reaction to Sam's "because we all fight for something" Aesop, and having no time left to animate it, they took two shots from previous scenes and replaced the background.
  • Hilariously overused in Steven Seagal's vehicle Flight of Fury, where all the flight scenes (secret military jets being vital to the plot) are stock footage from the Cold War. Seems that the story was written around these scenes (like portraying age old aircrafts as still secret prototypes). Quite jarring in a scene when there's a dogfight between a F-117 and a F-16, where the F-117 was flying over snowy mountains and the F-16 was over a desert.
  • Superman IV: The Quest for Peace reuses the same shot of Superman flying towards the camera too many times to count.
  • The first Apocalypse movie, a low budget movie that nonetheless tries to portray a global story of the beginning of the Rapture, uses a lot of stock footage. As if the image quality of the stock footage clips and their own movie don't vary enough, they hillariously use stock footage of large crowds looking at screens and clumsily put their own footage of either their news reporters or The Antichrist holding a speech over the screen.
    Diamanda Hagan: Stock Footage, stock footage, stock footage, stock footage, footage of the stock, oh my something original, stock footage, stock footage...
  • Hitman uses footage from Dark Angel to show 47's childhood. This is an example of Executive Meddling - the near-final script that can be found in the Internet makes no mention of 47's childhood whatsoever.
  • In Sunset Boulevard, the silent movie footage of Norma Desmond in her prime is from Gloria Swanson's 1929 film Queen Kelly.
  • Thirteen Days sets the mood by starting off with footage of nuclear tests shots.
  • Award-winning Apollo documentary For All Mankind consists of nothing but stock footage from beginning to end, overlaid with audio clips of the Apollo astronauts talking about their experiences.
  • In Why We Fight, if it's not an animation, it's probably stock footage. Shots are repeated several times throughout the films.
    Disclaimer:...free use has been made of motion pictures that illustrate this historical background. All other film has been obtained from newsreels, United Nations' films and from captured enemy material.
  • There appears to be a stock Epic Tracking Shot of Ocean Drive, Miami Beach where you feel like you're approaching it from a helicopter, similar if not exact scenes show up in Identity Thief and Pain & Gain
  • Michael Bay has a tendency to reuse footage from his earlier projects in his Transformers Film Series. A shot of an aircraft carrier from Pearl Harbor showed up near the end of Transformers , and a car crash from The Island (2005) was recycled for Transformers: Dark of the Moon.
  • Stanley Kubrick wasn't immune to this either. Dr. Strangelove uses archive footage of atomic bombs exploding near the end of the film. A Clockwork Orange has Alex watch archive footage of the Nazis.
  • Spider-Man repurposes this trippy Mind Screw sequence moment from Sam Raimi's earlier superhero movie Darkman during Peter's transformation, with the addition of crawling spiders being edited in.
  • The 1978 version of Game of Death makes heavy use of this: there are a lot of shots edited from previous Bruce Lee movies, like Way of the Dragon.
  • The Faces of Death films claim to be entirely composed of real-life footage of deaths and accidents, but in reality they all use faked footage to some extent. Exaggerated by The Worst of Faces of Death and the fifth and sixth films, the former of which is mostly footage from the first three films with a different narrator, with the latter two being entirely stock footage with nothing new at all.
  • In the 1985 film Maxie, an exciting 1920s flapper possesses the body of a boring 1980s woman, with Glenn Close playing both parts. The only time we see Maxie in her own time period, it's actually footage of Carole Lombard in The Campus Vamp!
  • Sharknado used a lot of stock footage from shark documentaries that is hilariously out of place, like showing footage of a shark in a wide open ocean when the heroes are fighting sharks in waist-deep water. Also, a montage of the gang driving through a flooding LA is cut with stock footage of monsoon-devastated Asian countries.
  • There are some movies which are frequently used as sources of stock footage, especially for documentaries and suchlike:
  • Philip Seymour Hoffman died with one week of shooting left for The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 2. His character's presence was established in the ending scenes by use of footage from his films, digitally inserted.
  • X-Men: Apocalypse: In his commentary, Bryan Singer confesses that he had included edited footage from The Wolverine (namely the Nagasaki bombing) in Jean Grey's prophetic visions.
  • Ultra Warrior, a 1990 science-fiction action film starring soap opera regular Dack Rambo, is infamous in B-movie circles as little more than an excuse to string together as much stock footage from Roger Corman films as possible with Fauxlosophic Narration. This most notably includes a stock footage sex scene, as despite valiant attempts to avoid showing the actors' heads, the viewer can still notice the man who's supposed to be Dack Rambo's character has completely different hair.
  • Around the mid-80s when the Ultra Series is waning in popularity, comes two movies from the franchise that relies heavily (as in, 80% of the overall runtime) on stock footage.
    • Ultraman Story depicts Ultraman Taro growing up, watching and learning the methods his brothers - Ultraman, Ultraseven, Ultraman Jack and Ultraman Ace - fight as a child, which is depicted with heavy amounts of recycled footage from the four Ultras' respective series. Later on, Ultraman Taro's adventures on Earth recycles fight scenes from his own episode as well... the series even recycles footage from Ultraman Leo and Ultraman 80, two installments which takes place after Taro's adventures on Earth. That being said, the film climaxes with a 12-minute duel where Taro and his brothers does battle with a powerful monster called the Grand King, which is original footage made for the movie.
    • Space Warriors 2000, an unofficial and unlicensed "film" (if you can call it that) made by Thailand's Chaiyo Productions, takes it to the extreme. The Framing Device in the first ten or so minutes is a young boy named Nicholas who received an Ultraman action figure from his father, who inexplicably came to life and decides to narrate his adventures to Nicholas... which is followed by seventy minutes of recycled footage - with plenty of Gag Dub thrown in - from every installment in the series at that point, culminating with the finale of Hanuman vs. 7 Ultraman. The film then ends with Ultraman finishing his story to Nicholas and turning back into a toy. Roll credits.
  • Malevolent (2002) is padded with stock footage from The Corruptor and Marked for Death for two car chases near the beginning and end of the movie. This is especially obvious because Lou Diamond Philips is replaced behind the wheel with Steven Seagal at one point. It's like some exec saw the script and said it needed more action beats, because they're largely out of place with the rest of the film, which is a straightforward crime thriller.
  • In Nadja, the title character is the daughter of Dracula. Her father appears in a flashback by way of footage from an old Bela Lugosi movie. (Interestingly, it's White Zombie rather than any of the times he played Dracula. Could be an artistic choice, could just be that White Zombie was easier to get the rights to.)
  • The Made-for-TV Movie Militia reuses footage from the SWAT scene in Terminator 2: Judgment Day, which they even shown in the trailer.
  • PM Entertainment loves to do this. In the earlier productions, footage from their other movies were used. For example, The Silencers used the parking garage Chase Scene from Cyber Tracker, a movie they released two years prior. Sometime in 1998, Running Red used the bus chase from Red Heat, a movie not made by PM Entertainment.
    • The sequences of a car crashing against another car from the movies Recoil (1998) and Executive Target were used in Land of the Free.
    • A person getting thrown off a window shot from Rage (1995) was reused in Skyscraper and Executive Target respectively.
    • Quiet Fire reused footage of an exploding car from Chance, except that someone blows it up with a rocket launcher.
    • Recoil (1998) reused a shot of policemen shooting with pistols from Executive Target, only it was filmed in a different building.
    • No Escape, No Return reused a car crash from Living to Die.
  • Lethal Weapon 3 does this in the final battle, where the Big Bad's (Jack Travis) Oh, Crap! reaction was used multiple times.
  • As is the Militia example above, Shattered Lies used footage of the nighttime car chase from The Sweeper, which was even shown in the movie's trailer.
  • In the documentary Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse, which chronicles the Troubled Production of Apocalypse Now, stock audio excerpts from Orson Welles' radio broadcast of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness (on which Apocalypse Now was based and from where the documentary obviously takes its title) are used to provide context.
  • In Madhouse (1974), the Dr. Death films the Theme Serial Killer is emulating are represented by clips from earlier films Vincent Price had made for American International Pictures.
  • Twilight Zone: The Movie: Rod Serling's original opening narration from the first season of The Twilight Zone (1959) is heard at the end of the film.
  • Meteor reused avalanche footage from Avalanche.
  • The Atomic Cafe is created entirely from stock footage, the vast majority of which was originally produced by the US government.
  • A montage from Angels with Dirty Faces features a very realistic shot of gangsters bombing a storefront. This shot is actually an alternate angle of the bombing of a store in The Public Enemy (1931), another James Cagney movie.
  • Much of the Apollo 11 launch sequence in First Man used genuine footage from NASA's archivesnote  with some VFX used to fill in the edges to match to the film's aspect ratio.
  • Liane, Jungle Goddess pads out its running time with interminable stock footage of native dancing and African wildlife at the beginning and end of the film.
  • In The Island at the Top of the World, the journey of the Hyperion into the Arctic is padded out by multiple aerial shots of Arctic wildlife; presumably taken from Walt Disney Pictures wildlife documentaries.
  • War of the God Monsters, a kaiju film, uses recycled footage from several Tsuburaya Productions works to depict their onscreen monsters, spliced with few original footage shot with different actors.
  • Most films (and TV shows, and documentaries) set in World War 2 and including submarines will include one or more of some very recognizable stock "submarine" shots:
    • The submarine cruising in very clear water, not far above a bottom that appears covered with either rocks or corals, with rippled bands of light and shadow visible across the entire frame (which shows it was done with models in a wave tank). In reality submarines rarely came into such shallow water. Most of the time they stayed in water many hundreds or even thousands of feet deep.
    • If torpedoes are fired, they will be shown using the same shot of a wake of white bubbles racing toward the target. If the torpedoes are shown hitting their target, it's as likely as not to be a brief clip of a US landing craft being blown apart, even if the ship being fired at was a large freighter.
  • All the shots of Nazi planes in Dad's Army (1971) were taken from Battle of Britain.
  • Pre-existing footage of an LNER A4 Pacific is used in Raising the Wind to show the first viola player's late train.
  • Dumb Money: The members of Congress on the committee at the end of the film are all archival footage from the real-life hearings, with the actors repeating the lines that their characters historically said.
  • Good Night, and Good Luck.: In addition to using recordings of House Un-American Activities Committee hearings, the TV clip of Senator Joseph McCarthy responding to Murrow's punditry segment against him is the actual archival recording of the real McCarthy's response. Some test audiences reportedly thought the actor playing him was badly overacting.

    Literature 
  • Many of the Sector General stories and novels use exactly the same expository paragraph to briefly describe the setting, creating a sort of Opening Narration effect.

    Live-Action TV 
  • Extraterrestrial (2005): A number of CGI shots are reused throughout both episode, either unmodified or mirrored, to save production costs. The first episode repeats shots of the mudpods felling and eating the trees, a gulpog eating a mudpod, the gulpog clan in the forest and the hysteria swarm gathering in the water several times over, while the second does so for the sky whale soaring in the sky, the stalkers in their nest, the stalkers flying through the forest and the stalkers devouring one of the whales.
  • The Greatest American Hero: Possibly the most blatant week to week usage of recycled footage is Ralph's flights, although this had the possibly unintentional effect of parodying the Superman movie's 'you will believe a man can fly' effects.
  • Bonanza: Usually, scenes of the Cartwrights were used in transitional scenes. Most of the footage familiar to viewers was filmed in the summer of 1961 (with most of the updates coming in 1967, when David Canary joined the cast). This footage would be used until 1972, when Dan Blocker passed away; new stock scenes and film of the Cartwrights were filmed for the 14th season.
  • Most live-action Saturday morning programs produced by Sid and Marty Krofft Productions included stock footage, usually in transition scenes.
  • Taken to something of an artform by the production staff of Farscape, and by the end of its run something like 10% of the series was recycled footage from previous episodes. It was usually done intelligently to fit in with the episode, and overall turned out incredibly well, especially since the savings allowed them to produce some of the most elaborate season finales ever made for a tv show.
  • The overhead pan shot of Princeton Plainsboro's exterior in House.
  • The original Battlestar Galactica was infamous for reusing the same five or six shots of space combat over and over and over again, although they did sometimes flip the negative left-for-right in an attempt to provide some variety.
    • They also used stock footage this way for Viper launches, exterior shots to establish which ship the plotline was advancing on for scene changes, and so forth.
    • Additionally, Battlestar Galactica also recycled Stock Footage of ICBM launch tests to represent firings of heavy anti-capital-ship missiles from Battlestar launch tubes, as well as one actual nuclear exchange between less-technologically-advanced nations.
    • They also used clips from the film Silent Running as their "farm ships".
    • Shots of the control stick in the Viper fighters were identical to shots of the control sticks in the space fighters in Buck Rogers in the 25th Century.
    • Basically, in the original Galactica you probably saw every single space-related effect in the first 10 minutes of the opening pilot movie, except the rag tag fleet of ships at the end.
    • More recently, a 2008 commercial for fast-food chain Jack in the Box used stock footage from the series' three-hour pilot Saga of a Star World of the Battlestar Atlantia blowing up to promote their cheesy macaroni bites.
    • The 2003 re-imagining used combat footage from the miniseries for the first regular episode, "33". One interesting fact to note is that after the Galactica is damaged severely in "Exodus, Part II", the stock footage in every episode following reflects the damage on the hull.
    • There was also another shot of zooming in on battle scarred Galactica with Colonial One in shot that first cropped up in season 3 and was repeated constantly for the rest of the series. This is perhaps the most egregious use of this trope in the reimagining.
  • Season 3 of Deadliest Warrior used Stock Footage from BBC specials (Spike TV can't afford to have scenes containing dozens of Hannibal's elephants). The official producers of the show claimed that they didn't have the budget to continue the series anyways. Saddam Hussein and Pol Pot had alot of reallife Stock Footage since they had to make public speeches and propaganda and were also very recent modern warriors (most warriors on the show existed before modern filming and so don't have reallife Stock Footage).
  • Hogan's Heroes uses stock footage for scenes of parachutes dropping, bombing raids, submarines, and so on. However, it appears to actually be WWII-era footage, which fits well with the WWII-set show and probably saves a lot of money on renting fighter planes, anti-aircraft guns, and tanks. However, this led to multiple occasions where Hogan and his men needed a supply drop, only to show a parachutist jumping out of a plane, before being replaced by a parachuting crate in the next shot. The stock footage of every parachute drop is from a C-119 Flying Boxcar. While the Boxcar and its predecessor the C-82 Packet were developed during the war, they did not come into service until after the war.
  • The 1960s show The Time Tunnel relied heavily on Stock Footage from the studio's film vaults for depiction of various historical periods, and also used the same stock footage of the leads returning through the vortex each week. Some Lampshade Hanging was used to explain why they were wearing the same clothes every time.
  • Irwin Allen was a master of using stock footage. He also made sure that anything he filmed in the first season of Lost in Space, that he might want to reuse, was filmed in color so he'd still be able to use it when they switched over to doing the whole series in color.
  • Torchwood has its establishing shots of Cardiff.
  • The Six Million Dollar Man and The Bionic Woman had a few, short standardized sequences for some of their main characters' bionic powers — the closeup on Steve's eye with a sound effect to indicate he was using its special abilities, for example.
  • The Incredible Hulk (1977) was also notorious for using stock footage. One episode where Banner had to pilot a 747 when its pilots were incapacitated used footage from Airport 77. And the episode "Never Give a Trucker an Even Break" stole its plot, and much of its footage, from the Steven Spielberg TV-movie Duel.
  • Similarly, The A-Team had an episode where Murdock, an accomplished military pilot, has to become temporarily sane in order to safely land a 747 into LAX. He succeeds except for running the nose of the plane into the terminal. Since The A-Team didn't have the effects budget to depict that ending, they just borrowed the Airplane! scene where the ground attendant accidentally guided the plane to smash into the terminal.
  • The scene of Gomez blowing up the trains in The Addams Family was only filmed once, but was used every time they had Gomez playing with his train set.
  • Most, if not all of the interstitials for Taxi were filmed in 1978 (the famous Queensboro Bridge "loop" used for the intro was intended as inter-scene footage as well).
  • Used a LOT in 60s/70s episodes of Doctor Who. Here are just a few examples:
    • "The Invasion" uses the exact same footage of missiles pivoting up, then cutting to the behind view, then a single missile rotating across a clear sky, three times in three successive episodes. This wouldn't have been so obvious to the audience watching it week-by-week, but is painful in an Archive Binge (it doesn't help that at least two are Engaging Chevrons sequences).
    • One of the most blatant ever uses of Stock Footage was the episode "Revenge of the Cybermen", where a video of a Saturn V taking off was used to represent the launch of a rocket that looked nothing like it.
    • In "The Five Doctors", because Tom Baker was unavailable for filming, he's included using a scene from the unfinished and unbroadcast story "Shada", showing Four punting on the Cam with Romana Two shortly before being "trapped in the time vortex".
    • In "The Sea Devils", a helicopter changes make and color so that it can blow up via stock footage.
  • In the Donkey Hodie special "A Donkey Hodie Halloween", the footage of the Halloweenarific 3000 making objects is constantly recycled throughout the special. On one occassion, a shortened version of the footage is used.
  • Done routinely on I Dream of Jeannie, which would show three different rockets during a launch.
  • The HBO miniseries of Angels in America uses some of this in the opening scene, when Rabbi Isidor Chemelwitz is talking about the turn-of-the-century Jewish immigrants.
  • The Power Rangers franchise uses footage borrowed from its Japanese counterpart Super Sentai for about 80% of its action sequences. Thanks to the differences in production, for the first eight seasons, the fight scenes looked about twenty years older than the rest of the show (despite the fact that they had only been filmed a year earlier). Such footage often includes Japanese text (or barely-coherent Gratuitous English). To this day it's not rare for a crowd of fleeing civilians to inexplicably become momentarily Asian.
    • Special mention to the Halloween Episode "Trickster Treat" aired as part of Power Rangers Samurai. Not only did it use footage from the Shinkenger DVD movie Shinkenger returns, it used on Super Sentai stock footage from previous and as yet to be aired episodes of the series. The only original footage was a few shots lasting a total of a few seconds.
    • Once in Power Rangers Time Force, when Ransik invades Bio Lab to get more of the serum that keeps his illness at bay and Mirai Sentai Timeranger footage of an indoor attack on a civilian facility is used, rather than jarringly switch between an all-Asian staff and a primarily Caucasian staff, even the American footage shows Mr. Collins to be one of the few non-Asians in an American facility that day.
    • Super Sentai obviously avoids that latter problem, but still suffers from this overall, as 25% of buildings shown exploding use stock footage filmed in the late 80's. It's not uncommon for the "opening chasm" shot US fans will recognize as the Tyrannosaurus Dinozord's entrance reshuffled for earthquakes in later seasons either. Naturally, both shows make heavy use of stock footage for Transformation Sequences, as well as Humongous and Combining Mecha.
    • It's worse when the villains have an air force. Only recently has it become cost-effective to have them move naturally in several scenes, so there'd be a good three or four shots of fighters moving around, and three or four shots of Ranger mecha shooting at them, with one shot apeice of taking hits. It'd be shown over and over in different combinations. It's worse in VR Troopers (whose Japanese footage most certainly did NOT come from the previous year) than in Power Rangers.
  • Star Trek: The Original Series used the same few stock shots of the Enterprise in orbit, but they were blue-screen composited over footage of a different planet in each episode.
    • Planets which were frequently the same planet footage recolored to represent different worlds. If you watch the show in order, you can actually see the degradation of the negative over time.
    • Several details on the Enterprise were changed from the way the ship originally appeared in the two pilot episodes to its appearance in the series proper. Due to budget problems, the producers often wound up using Stock Footage of the prototype model during the series. Take note of scenes were the familiar white spheres on the ends of the nacelles have disappeared with a pattern of holes in their place, as well as unlit frontends of the nacelles with spikes attached, both of which indicate you're seeing the prototype model.
    • Also they used such stock footage for things like firing phasers, photon torpedoes (and sometimes even mixing them up!), which is quite reasonable considering the immense costs of the special effects back then — even if they look rather silly compared to today's standards. Consider that their budget was often low, meaning even the best of 1960s special effects couldn't be brought to bear every week.
    • They also reused establishing shots of the bridge, particularly in the third season when the budgets were stretched very tight. On occasion, the crew in the establishing shot was different from the crew in the episode (the animated series was even worse in this regard).
    • There's also the Guardian of Forever, which shows you history via stock footage from old films.
    • Don't forget how the Romulans and Klingons tended to fly around in the same stock footage, though that is explained In-Universe as the result of a temporary alliance where they shared technology and ship designs (hence two very different races using bird-themed starships and cloaking devices)
      • Actually, the Klingon ships were not bird themed in TOS and the first time we see one, we only know it's Klingon because we're told that the Romulans are using the Klingon design.
    • One particular scene, filmed early in the first season, was a shot showing the left arm of the navigator (who always wore a gold shirt) and a view of Helmsman Lt. Sulu (George Takei) looking down and then back to the camera (POV of the captain) with a "concerned look" on his face.
  • TNG had Industrial Light & Magic create visual effects in the first two episodes, and that footage was milked dry throughout the series. Basically, every series can be counted on to reuse "recurring location floating in space" and "ship flying around" scenes.
    • A couple shots of the Enterprise rendezvousing with an Excelsior-class ship get reused about three times per season.
  • Star Trek: Deep Space Nine's last episode re-used the (coolest) battle scenes of the previous two years to demonstrate the incredible super-epic quadrant-shattering last battle. It was slightly disappointing. Until the plot twist!
    • It also used a lot of Defiant stock footage. Really noticeable, because some episodes mix model Defiant and CGI Defiant footage... and the models look significantly different for no discernible reason.
    • Pretty much every big battle blatantly reused shots from "Sacrifice of Angels". One of the most used was the iconic shot of the Defiant barely breaking through the enemy lines while the other ships in its squadron were blown away, despite the original usage being the only time it made sense.
    • They also had quite a few stock establishing shots of planetary surfaces due to the 'fixed' nature of the show. The shot of the Cardassian capital was used countless times in the final two seasons.
      • Inverted, however, in the series finale. During the course of the episode, the Dominion bomb Cardassia, killing millions of innocents, to make a point to the rebels on the planet. To any viewer who has regularly seen the series, especially the final story arc, and is familiar to said stock footage of the Cardassian capital, it is a shock when, just after the final battle has been won, we get a view of the capital again, but in complete burning ruins.
  • MacGyver (1985) used stock footage often and egregiously. Keep in mind, though, that making a show with the scope of MacGyver was a lot harder in the pre-CGI days. Notable examples include:
    • Thanks to the state of international relations at the time, episodes set in the USSR used Stock Footage from a friendlier time in their establishing shots, sometimes in black and white.
    • The episode "Trumbo's World" liberally lifted footage from The Naked Jungle (1954), as well as its plot. That's right, it was MacGyver vs. the ants instead of Charlton Heston vs. the ants.
    • The episode "Thief of Budapest" reuses the entire car chase from The Italian Job (1969).
    • The episode "GX-1" opened with an aerial dogfight which was made of footage from Top Gun (1986).
    • In the opening of "Deathlock", Mac escapes from East Berlin in what starts off as footage from Funeral in Berlin, but then new footage depicts the coffin being tossed into the river, where it transforms into a jet ski.
  • Stargate SG-1:
    • The spectacular stargate opening "kawoosh" effect was filmed by placing a camera in a pool, and then quickly blasting a jet engine down into it. While they initially had to do new takes for every angle, they soon got the visual effects crew to work around that, also creating a digital effect for the later seasons and spinoffs. As this isn't exactly cheap to do, sometimes the gate will open off-screen, with a blue, wavering lighting effect applied to nearby scenery and characters.
    • Stock footage is almost always used when showing the gate dialing. This creates an issue for seasons 4 and 5, because during those seasons they are using a different gate (the beta gate from Antarctica with a different point of origin). But despite using that different gate, the point of origin for the alpha gate (which is at the bottom of the ocean until recovered by the Russians) is seen due to stock footage.
    • In one episode when Sam (Major Samantha Carter) visits the Air Force Academy, a shot of cadets marching is shown. Unfortunately, the drill sergeant can clearly be heard shouting "kiri, kiri, kiri kanan kiri" and there are statues of garudas in the foreground, leading to the conclusion that the clip is from Indonesia.
    • The establishing shots of Cheyenne Mountain were shot before SG-1 began and were not supplemented with new shots until the season 8. It becomes very noticeable when watching the show on DVD as there were less than a dozen shots, the film was degrading and in one of the most used shots a guard is mysteriously holding his rifle while at the same time having it slung over his back.
    • In the first 25 or so episodes of Stargate Atlantis, the same shot of a jumper flying over a lake was used three times, to introduce three different planets.
    • SG-1 also reused parts of the Stargate movie, specifically the footage of Ra's ship docking with the pyramid to show Ha'Tak of several System Lords dock with the Abydos pyramid, and the wormhole travel effect by itself, which was replaced with a modified version of the Atlantis one in season 9. On a similar note, the musical score of the pilot was very obviously spliced together from the movie soundtrack. Unfortunately, the film's bombastic score didn't quite fit the pilot's tone (this was changed in the Re-Cut).
    • The episode "Reckoning" reused some footage from "Menace" for the Replicator invasion of the SGC. You take tell which Replicator footage was new and which was stock due to the fact that the Replicators from "Menace" looked slightly different.
    • The kawoosh from the pilot episode is reused frequently, especially in the first season. You can always tell when it's being used because all the equipment in the shot aside from the ramp and the gate itself are covered in tarps.
  • The Legend of William Tell Kalem looks into a fire. Kreel looks into his cauldren. Close up on Kalem's eyes. Close up on Kreel's eyes. Kalem throws dust into the fire. Kreel makes vaguely magical hand motions. Sun rise, sun set. Alvar whines. Trees blow. Most episodes will have their own bits of stock footage as well.
  • Airwolf made heavy use of stock footage whenever the helicopter was shown flying or in combat, and a number of air and ground explosions were recycled regularly. Taken to ridiculous heights in the fourth season, when the budget was so badly slashed that the show lost access to the actual flying helicopter used to make new footage. (Not to mention about a quarter of the main cast.) On a few occasions when they absolutely had to produce a completely new shot instead of reusing footage from a previous season, a very obvious model helicopter (probably kitbashed from an Airfix model kit, and not a particularly good kitbash at that) was inserted over aerial footage that was probably recycled from a nature documentary, using incredibly obvious and sloppy Chroma Key.
  • Andromeda used the same footage each time the Nietzschean fleet came out of Slipstream.
    • And with the bulk of its space battles, at least through the first couple seasons. This often got confusing since they made no attempt to keep "minor race x uses ship type y" consistent between episodes.
    • And every single time the Maru ejected anything from its cargo bay.
  • Early seasons of JAG would take all its material of military operations out of various war films.
    • One especially blatant example was a sequence where the team was in a car convoy ambushed by insurgents with rocket launchers: not only the footage but the sequence of events were pulled straight from Clear and Present Danger (though the clip in which you could recognize Harrison Ford was cut from latter rebroadcasts). Such sequences were also often inaccurate, with planes inexplicably changing very visibly from one scene to the next (single-engine, single-tail F16s turning into double-engine, double-tail F18s...). More than once helicopters that were supposed to be shooting their machine guns were instead showed to be shooting dumbfire rockets that, somehow, made characteristic tuk-tuk-tuk machinegun noises.
  • In an episode of The Unit, stock footage of the United Nations appears. However, said footage shows the East German flag.
  • Monty Python's Flying Circus used a large amount of archival footage, a good portion of it for laughs. One piece of Stock Footage, the "Women's Institute Applause", was used as a Running Gag throughout the series, and lampshaded when Graham Chapman insisted "And no more Stock Footage of women applauding!" One piece of footage shot for the show, the Batley Townswomen's Guild's re-enactment of the battle of Pearl Harbor, was used in a different episode for the same ladies' re-enactment of the first heart transplant.
  • S.W.A.T. (1975) commonly used stock footage of the SWAT van responding to a call, among other things. In fact, a couple of episodes even reused the intro scenes from some other episodes.
  • Knight Rider (both 1982 and 2008) live off of stock footage.
    • The 1982 series used it for Turbo Boost (takeoff and landing), and Super Pursuit Mode transformation (to revert to Normal Mode, the transformation sequence was literally played backwards) regularly. There were also a few one-time uses, such as KARR's demise in Trust Doesn't Rust (the actual footage used was from a different TV show filmed years before).
    • The 2008 series uses it for Turbo Boost (the CGI combustion takeoff), as well as when KITT enters and exits the SSC headquarters.
    • Both old and new series use stock footage of Michael and KITT cruising along highway and canyon roads as they drive across the Earth. In fact, one of the criticisms of the new series from the old series fans is that there isn't enough stock footage cruising.
  • The 1960s spy series The Man from U.N.C.L.E. had one favorite clip of stock footage (a clip of a large WWII era bomber, possibly being used after the war as a target drone, being hit by an antiaircraft missile). Whenever the series required an aircraft to be shot down—whether it be a single engined private plane or a multiengined jet aircraft, whether it was shot down by a lucky rifle shot, antiaircraft artillery, or a missile—they would splice in this clip for the inevitable "airplane explodes in midair" scene.
  • UFO (1970): The Sky One interceptors used a multiple-rocket firing pod similar to those used by RAF aircraft, so they could splice-in stock footage of the pods being fired with the model effects.
    • Of course almost all the scenes with the "normal" SHADO vehicles was stock: the lunar Interceptors all launched, flew, and fired in the exact same pattern, the launch of Sky One was the exact same, and so on.
  • Spoofed in the Shaun Mi Callef spy series Roger Explosion, which would use stock footage of a jetplane or rocket with close-up studio scenes filmed in an incredibly bad mockup.
  • Tour of Duty. In one episode, the platoon is forced to attack the same hill again and again (e.g. Hamburger Hill). Spliced in was Vietnam footage of a bomber dropping napalm on a scorched and blackened hill — which seemed jarring as the platoon had spent the entire episode slogging through verdant green jungle.
  • Considering the very high costs of special effects back then, it's not surprising that Space: 1999 used some footage from the moon parts of 2001: A Space Odyssey.
  • In Conan O'Brien's telenovela spoof Conando (performed on both Late Night and The Tonight Show), a Running Gag is the use incongruous stock footage, usually for the incapacitating of Conando's opponents. Typically, it's the same shot of a guy falling out a window repeated for each opponent.
  • Kamen Rider, unlike its sister franchise Super Sentai, mostly averts this by having each and every Transformation Sequence and Finishing Attack be done differently each and every time depending on the context. One exception is Kamen Rider Kiva, where Kiva's transformation into his alternate forms and finishing moves are stock footage or at least looked like stock footage, as this is dropped early on.
    • This is, of course, a more recent thing (as in, the last decade or so). All of the Showa-era Riders (from the original in the early 70s to Black RX in the late 80's) used stock footage transformations, simply because of limited CGI technology available at the time.
  • Another series that literally lived of stock footage is Baa Baa Black Sheep. Many scenes of the planes flying, landing or taking off are reused (they had only five Corsairs to represent a squadron of a dozen), and about all of the dogfights, bombing and ship operations were reels from WWII.
  • Babylon 5 was notable for its repeated use of the same CGI establishing shots for the station and for particular cultures' homeworlds. Subverted when the Minbari Civil War and the bombing of Centauri Prime are depicted by showing the usual establishing shots laid to waste.
  • The Goodies, in the vein of Monty Python, used stock footage all the time for jokes, especially news presentations. For example, footage of shoppers scrambling for bargains was used to show public response to the imminent destruction of Earth.
  • Saturday Night Live did a series of sketches about the fictional assassination of Buckwheat, played by Eddie Murphy. Stock footage was used to make it look like the world was making a ridiculously large deal out of his death, splicing in shots of state funerals and world leaders tearing up or making emotional speeches. See here for a portion.
  • Ice Road Truckers uses the same under-ice shot of a passing truck's wheels in nearly every episode, whenever a trucker moves out onto frozen lakes or seas. If they're building suspense, this is followed by the same clip of a big rig breaking through and sinking, which is especially jarring if the vehicle now in danger looks nothing like the stock-footage vehicle. Even more so, if it looks exactly like the one in danger. Justified, as having divers shoot scenes under such frigid circumstances is too darned dangerous, never mind expensive, to do repeatedly.
  • The Prisoner (1967) used establishing shots of the Village. Towards the end of the series, when money was beginning to run out and access to Portmeirion (where the series was filmed) was minimal to non-existent, the Village would be represented entirely by stock footage, all other scenes being shot indoors and often requiring the story to be taken out of the Village setting by various means.
  • 1960's British Telly show The Baron had an expensive scene where a white Jaguar car drives over a cliff. This was re-used in almost every other adventure show for the next few years made by Lew Grade's ITC Entertainment company (The Saint, The Champions (1968), Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased), Department S, etc.). It got so that as soon as you see the villains get into a white Jag you know what is going to happen, even if the episode is set in a place that does not have any cliffs (such as the middle of London).
  • Used for intentional dramatic effect in one of Losts final episodes: a stock footage scene at the end of "Across the Sea" shows Jack, Kate, and Locke stumbling across the "Adam and Eve" skeletons (from the season 1 episode "House of the Rising Sun") intermixed with Jacob placing his mother and brother's bodies next to each other, revealing the skeletons' identities.
  • Used for comedic effect in Australian Comedy Show All Aussie Adventures, in which closeup shots of the main character Russell Coight shaking hands with people never matched the people in the surrounding scene.
  • The HBO sitcom "Dream On" used stock footage as a running gag. The main character watched excessive TV as a kid and the show would cut to stock footage of classic TV shows to reflect the characters thoughts on a situation.
  • For the Harry Potter skit in "The Children's Party at the Palace", the Establishing Shots of Hogwarts are stock footage from the movies, mostly the first one.
  • The Arkansas Governor's Mansion represented the home of Suzanne Sugarbaker on Designing Women. In 2008, 30 Rock used 1990s-era stock footage of the Arkansas Governor's Mansion, probably filmed for Designing Women, as the home of a character played by Steve Martin.
  • In How I Met Your Mother, Ted's teenage son and daughter haven't filmed new scenes since the start of season 2 (as they are Not Allowed to Grow Up) so the show just reuses a stock shot of them staring straight into the camera... and your soul.
  • In the 1980s, Max Headroom hosted a talk show on Cinemax: The Original Max "Talking" Headroom Show. One skit had Max (allegedly) playing the piano while singing and apparently flirting with a copy of himself, all while a variety of old, black-and-white Stock Footage played on a nearby monitor.
    "Showing film clips that nobody knows;/what a great way of filling a show..."
  • Degrassi tends to use stock footage quite a bit. Most of the time it isn't noticeable, but there was one incident where it just came off truly lazy. In the episode Terri is put into a near-fatal coma by Rick, and they use a far-away shot of Craig walking toward the hospital for location establishment. This would be fine, except for the fact that Craig isn't even in the episode! This turns an otherwise very serious episode temporarily comedic.
  • On the National Geographic documentary series Taboo, they often use clips from one of their early episodes in the intro to an episode. One clip used often is one about an African tribe where the men paint their faces yellow and cross their eyes in order to impress the women.
  • Often played straight, but also subverted in The BBC's Walking with Dinosaurs and its sequels, in which on occasion, prehistoric animals were CGI'd into stock footage taken from older documentaries. In turn, several WWD animations were recycled in later BBC and Discovery Channel docs, although the latter was always more fond of reusing clips from its own dinosaur shows, primarily When Dinosaurs Roamed America and Dinosaur Planet.
  • CSI: Miami: The aerial establishing shots over Miami.
  • CSI: NY:
    • The aerial establishing shots over New York City.
    • There's a shot in season one of a bullet being fired into a water tank. This shot is used quite a number of times throughout the 9-yr run, including a couple of reverse shots of it.
    • The squad cars pulling up in front of the warehouse in "Snow Day" is repeated in a few later episodes.

  • As Have I Got News for You has been running for over twenty years some of the short pieces of footage have been reused when in the first round when players have to guess the story. The shot of a man stacking money (seen in the Angus scandal episode) has been used whenever the story involves a lot of money being handled (such as in S44E07). While it is used sparingly, it does happen.
  • The docu-series Paleoworld in its later seasons abused this to no end. By that time, every dinosaur was represented by the same handful of stock shots, even if the clips showed completely different animals.
  • A Running Gag in The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air is when Jazz gets thrown out of the Banks' mansion (usually by Uncle Phil), thanks to his stupidity. The fact that Jazz usually wore the same shirt and jeans made it easier for the creators of the show to use the same footage of him being thrown out for all 6 seasons.
  • The Swamp Fox used stock footage of the horse chases in the pilot and a couple later eps in several other eps.
  • Advertisements for the Military Channel show Commander in Chief make liberal use of news footage - reasonably so, as the show reconstructs historical events from the point of view of the president. Interestingly, however, one clip shows "satellite imagery" that was made up for and recycled from the movie Patriot Games.
  • Criminal Minds has its establishing shots of the FBI office in Quantico. In addition, one episode which featured shots of Guantanamo Bay that were, judging by the quality of the footage, several years older than the film produced for the rest of the series.
  • Varied by The Green Hornet, which used the same stock sequence of the garage floor being flipped to reveal the Black Beauty, but alternated episode-to-episode among several different angles.
  • Batman (1966)'s two part episodes always begin with the footage of the Dynamic Duo arriving in the Batcave, getting into the Batmobile and driving to Gotham City Police Headquarters.
  • Most Extreme Elimination Challenge uses footage from Takeshi's Castle, which is also lampshaded at the end of each episode
  • The Hardy Boys/Nancy Drew Mysteries: the show used stock footage to open many episodes to establish locale, but there were several painfully obvious uses..
    • The Strange Fate of Flight 608: stock footage is used to show the evacuation of the jet after it crashes into the ocean. What makes it really painful? In the episode, the male pilots have all been poisoned & knocked out; the Hardy Boys are the only conscious males on board. Yet the stock footage clearly shows wide-awake male pilots helping passengers crawl out over the wing to the waiting rafts.
    • The Disappearing Floor uses obvious stock footage of a wolf charging to "attack" the Hardy brothers.
    • Mystery of the Jade Kwan Yin also uses stock footage to show a boat explosion in Bayport's harbor...a different make and style of boat, which despite the episode showing it docked, is out at sea in the footage.
    • Voodoo Doll fairs better, using stock footage to show New Orleans on Bourbon Street to open the episode...though the subsequent sets in the episode didn't even try to look like the French Quarter.
  • Classic Albums, a music documentary series, makes use of stock footage, beside new interviews with band members and producers as well.
  • Total Recall 2070: The pilot episode, in which the protagonists go to Mars to rescue a kidnapped boy, re-uses footage from Total Recall (1990) of Quaid's ship landing at the Mars colony spaceport.
  • PBS was forced by inclement weather to resort to this for their 2016 broadcast of A Capitol Fourth. Naturally, quite a few viewers complained, but PBS stuck to their guts and went so far as to note that they showed not only the best fireworks from that show but also from previous shows, calling it "the patriotic thing to do".
  • The List Detroit: This local show from Detroit, Michigan lived on stock footage. Even in episodes presenting new material, a segment providing popular topics will be shown again, reusing the exact same footage from the last time it was shown, no editing, just the same presentation, in the same context, but the bumper monologue would change slightly every time it would show up, and who would be saying it would change, also to note, during these segments, whether it was a local star or a physician giving advice, 45% to 70% of the content shown would be public domain stock footage.
  • Alias Smith and Jones: EVERY episode of the third series ended with the same shots of Smith & Jones (or people dressed like them) riding their horses slowly in the distance in a canyon, while different dialogue is added for their conversation.
  • LA Heat: Almost every episode uses action sequences from various PM Entertainment movies, as well as rescoring the original chases, as is the badly-scored Chase Scene of The Big Fall.
  • Eerie, Indiana: In "Tornado Days", footage of numerous tornadoes is used to represent Old Bob devastating Eerie.
  • Logan's Run reuses footage of the City of Domes and Carousel from the film in various episodes as well as the opening credits.
  • The Twilight Zone (1959):
    • The countdown and launch footage from "I Shot an Arrow into the Air" was reused in "People Are Alike All Over".
    • Footage of the C-57-D from Forbidden Planet appears in some episodes. At the end of "The Monsters are Due on Maple Street", the footage is disguised by being shown upside down and backwards — this was achieved by simply turning the clip upside down before splicing it in. In "To Serve Man", however, although the full-size C-57-D landing ramp is used, the Kanamit spaceship's takeoff is represented by one of the titular spacecraft from Earth vs. the Flying Saucers, animated by Ray Harryhausen.
    • In "Judgement Night", footage of the titular ship from the 1959 film The Wreck of the Mary Deare is used to depict the S.S. Queen of Glasgow.
    • In "The Mighty Casey", footage of crowd scenes from the Polo Grounds and Fenway Park is shown during the montage of the Hoboken Zephyrs' winning streak.
    • The final scene of "The Odyssey of Flight 33" features stock footage of the 1939 New York World's Fair, specifically the Trylon and the Perisphere.
    • In "To Serve Man", the arrival of the Kanamit ambassador's ship is taken from The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951). Later, a clip from Earth vs. the Flying Saucers is used to represent a departing Kanamit ship. Furthermore, footage of a meeting of the United Nations General Assembly is used when the Kanamit ambassador's polygraph test is shown to that body.
    • "The Little People" uses footage from a Mercury Program launch to represent William Fletcher departing.
    • In "No Time Like the Past", footage of Adolf Hitler and Hermann Göring attending a Nazi rally is shown during the scene in which Paul Driscoll attempts to assassinate Hitler.
    • In "The Parallel", footage of a space capsule being launched is used to represent Major Robert Gaines departing aboard the Phoebus 10.
    • In "The Long Morrow", footage of a Mercury launch is used to represent the launch of Commander Douglas Stansfield.
  • The Twilight Zone (1985):
    • In "Chameleon", footage of a NASA space shuttle in orbit, several astronauts on a spacewalk and the shuttle returning to Earth are used to represent the Discovery's mission.
    • In "Private Channel", all of the exterior shots of the plane are taken from Twilight Zone: The Movie.
  • Alien Worlds (2020) was notorious for reusing their animated footage to pad the episode length, sometimes playing the same clip 3 or 4 times.

    Music 
  • Stock Footage of an exploding car is worked into "Sabotage" by Beastie Boys. The "Literal Video Version" faithfully pointed this out.
    Chopping down a door in the cop montage
    Tied up and a bomb in the cop montage
    Kicking down a door in this mock homage
    Blowing up a car with our STOCK FOOTAGE!
  • There are several cases in hip-hop, often after the artist's passing:
    • After The Notorious B.I.G.'s untimely death in 1997, his second and final album Life After Death was released two weeks later. Since Biggie died, he couldn't appear in the music video of his next single Mo Money Mo Problems (featuring Puff Daddy and Mase). In order to make him appear, archive footage of Biggie performing was used and was lip-synced with Biggie's verse. That technique was used in many other music videos.
      • For example, it was used in Puff Daddy's It's All About the Benjamins featuring The LOX, Lil' Kim and The Notorious B.I.G.. Archive footage from Hypnotize (Life After Death's first single) was used in Biggie's verse.
      • Subverted : speaking of Puff Daddy and Biggie, that technique was also used in another Puff Daddy single : Victory (featuring The Notorious B.I.G. and Busta Rhymes) but it was very brief.
      • It was also used in the music video of Nas' Cherry Wine (featuring Amy Winehouse). Footage of Amy Winehouse performing was projected onto the brick walls of the bar during her hook, as she passed away before this song was even recorded (her vocals were taken from another recording session) to begin with.
      • The music videos of 2Pac's and The Notorious B.I.G.'s posthumous singles Changes and Dead Wrong (featuring Eminem) are major examples of this : both are compilations of previous music videos in addition to home videos, interviews and never-before-seen pictures.
      • There's another subverted case : Phife Dawg and his posthumous single Nutshell. Very few archive footage was used, as Phife Diggy was still alive back when the music video was filmed.
  • The video for Queen and David Bowie's song "Under Pressure" is composed entirely of Stock Footage, largely from old silent films, newsreels and Stuff Blowing Up.
  • The music video for Lisa Lougheed's version of "Run With Us" employs stock footage from The Raccoons, which used the song as its theme tune. Unfortunately, the footage used is from the special "The Raccoons and the Lost Star", which predates the writing of the song (let alone the recording of this version in 1987) by about two years.
  • Averted in "Toad Joins the Band" by Starbomb. Toad's voice sounds like it's stock, but it's not. Toad is voiced by Egoraptor.
  • Signature Style for music videos of Polish rock band Kult: scenes of the band performing are interspersed with (often weird) fragments from old Polish newsreels.
  • The video for Utah Saints' "Something Good", which Sampled Up Kate Bush's "Cloudbusting", reuses shots from said song's video.

    Pinballs 
  • Some of the playfield art for Gottlieb's Target Alpha was reused for Solar City (and both games were rethemed versions of their earlier El Dorado). Unfortunately, it's a poor fit, as Target Alpha is about smiling future people target-shooting for fun, while Solar City is about a tribe of alien Native American expies.
  • Spoofed in Austin Powers; if you successfully fire the Big Frickin' Laser at Washington DC, the display shows the White House being destroyed... in a clip from Independence Day.

    Pro Wrestling 
  • In September of 1990, the AWA ran out of original footage and could no longer afford to run TV tapings. They filled their shows by airing old matches with new commentary and pretending that they were new. Luckily no one was watching by this time, or it could have been a huge embarrassment.
  • Sometimes, wrestlers will feud with somebody they've already feuded with before. WWE will often use stock footage of their previous feuds alongside more recent footage in the promo packages. It happened a lot between Triple H and Shawn Michaels who feuded on and off between 2002 and 2004.

    Puppet Shows 
  • The Mr. Potato Head Show: Hilariously lampshaded in the Variety Show episode: there's no studio audience for the Show Within a Show, so Mr. Potato Head splices in stock footage of an applauding audience after each act, instead. At one point, footage plays of a woman working in what looks to be a tomato-canning factory, and Mr. Potato Head shouts "Wrong stock footage!"
  • Thunderbirds involved a large amount of stock footage showing the pilots being conveyed into their craft, the craft to their launchpads and finally the launches themselves (as well as stock flight footage). However, rarely would the entire elaborate sequences be shown in any one episode, and the different parts used were not always the same (so, for example, one episode might show Virgil sliding down the ramp into Thunderbird 2 but would not show the equipment pod being loaded). Also some of the stock shots were actually re-filmed from several angles for variety. This provided variation despite the stock nature. The pitfalls of stock footage still occasonally afflicted the show, however, such as a "night" launch in broad daylight.
    • This meant that every time we saw the extending bridge carrying Scott over to Thunderbird 1 he was wearing the same light-blue jacket. Had he been thinking straight, he might have concluded that every time he put it on, a disaster happened somewhere in the world, and got rid of it.
    • The stock footage launch sequences meant that small errors were repeated every episode, such as the "2" on the side of Thunderbird 2 being a different size during launch than at other times (because a different, smaller model was used for the take-off scene). After the sequences were filmed but before broadcast someone noticed that the Tracy brothers enter their craft in their "civvies", but then are seen wearing their International Rescue uniforms. So they added extra shots of the uniforms on hangers rising out of the floor, after they are sitting in their pilot seats. (Presumably they stand up to put their uniforms on, off-camera, while the swimming pool and palm trees move out of the way).

    Tabletop Games 
  • The Star Trek: The Next Generation VCR game A Klingon Challenge didn't have anything remotely close to the budget needed to include original visual effects shots, and so incorporated clips from several different episodes throughout the show's run.

    Video Games 
  • The Metal Gear series from Solid onwards will regularly throw in stock footage of JFK, the Hiroshima explosion and previous entries in its own series whenever Kojima wants to establish some backstory or drop an anvil.
  • Assassin's Creed II uses stock footage and photos in "the truth" segments to prove the fact that we've been lied to.
  • LaserDisc-format arcade games had three options: create a film-length animation, shoot a live-action film, or make use of stock footage. Dragon's Lair averted this trope by dedicating a significant portion of the development to putting together an animated film (under Don Bluth). Several of the companies that simply wanted to Follow the Leader, however, hacked together scenes from then-obscure anime hoping that that nobody would notice. Examples include:
  • Atari's 1984 laserdisc game Firefox, which was based on the motion picture, was drawn from almost thirty hours of first-personal flight footage shot especially for the film (as previously mentioned, some of this also ended up in the second Back to the Future film).
  • Many rhythm games that use full-motion video for backgrounds will employ "generic" videos for a number of songs, DanceDanceRevolution and beatmania IIDX being two major examples.
  • Soviet and Nuclear Strike use stock footage a lot for when they need to show video footage of military actions.
  • Deus Ex: Human Revolution uses stock footage to illustrate the closing monologues
  • In Super Smash Bros. Brawl, both times King Dedede revives Bowser (and Bowser's subsequent roar) use the same footage.
  • In Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri, many of the videos that play when a secret project is completed use stock footage. For instance, when you complete a project allowing full scale human cloning, you see video of hundreds of baby chicks being funneled through shafts and into containers, hinting at just what this advancement will look like.
  • In The Ultimate Haunted House, you can watch stock footage of movies like Nosferatu and The Phantom of the Opera (1925) in the mansion's Screening Room.
  • Super Robot Wars V: Some of Ange and Vilkiss's animations during attacks are lifted straight from Cross Ange. Which clash horribly compared to the rest of the game's animations. The same with the Enryugo's ultimate move, which utilizes its in-show CG model for its charging animation.
  • In Medal of Honor: Vanguard, the opening cutscene to each Operation features stock footage from World War Two, with Keegan giving the context to the respective Operation.
  • Leisure Suit Larry 6: Shape Up or Slip Out!: The ending uses highly compressed stock clips from real-life situations like a train entering a tunnel or an oil rig to simulate intercourse. A few clips are even repeated at different speeds or reversed.
  • At the end of every Kingdom Hearts II world's first story run typically, where Sora opens a new Keyhole to travel to further worlds; the only differences are where the scene starts and what item is used to make the respective Keyhole appear. Everyone else present even conveniently disappears during these scenes and then reappears right afterwards.
  • LEGO Legends of Chima Online: Several early trailers for the game have a clip of Laval looking at Mount Cavora in the distance that's reused from his character introduction teaser.

    Web Animation 
  • Pom Pom from Homestar Runner speaks entirely in bubbles, which were made from blowing bubbles into a glass of milk. Only one recording for Pom Pom was ever made, and it is still being used to this day. Additionally most of the character's motions are reused, cutting down on production time.
  • Played for Laughs in Girl Chan In Paradise, which has a few moments of recycled footage (like Yusuke falling down a flight of stairs and his "I'll attack them head on!" pose,) but the most obvious are Kotomaru being seen almost all the time in the exact same "arms crossed, eyes closed, looking slightly irritated" pose (with occasionally an arm holding a gun sticking out) and Kenstar having the same vaguely determined frowny face copy-pasted onto his body in 90% of his appearances. When Green Guy's death is retconned due to the (in-universe) English VA's complaints, he's just sloppy photoshopped into various shots (including on top of Yusuke in one shot.)
  • My Little Pony Meets videos make extensive use of stock sound effects from other sources, the most commonly used being the Wilhelm scream and the iconic scream from Tom and Jerry.

    Web Comics 
  • Homestuck reuses gifs and clips frequently to keep up its rapid update schedule and facilitate longer Flash animations. In one notable example, a shot of a character emerging from a surface and flying towards the camera is usednote  one, two, three, four, five, six, and seven times.

    Web Videos 

    Western Animation 
  • Van Beuren Studios recycled footage from previous shorts several times, including;
    • A scene of Cubby riding a horse in "The Gay Gaucho", which is reused from Harman and Ising's "Lady, Play Your Mandolin!" (justified, as the cartoon was outsourced to the Harman-Ising cartoon studio).
    • An entire sequence of "Silvery Moon" is retraced animation from "Toy Time".
    • "Noah Knew His Ark" reuses footage from a short released five months before it, "Ship Ahoy".
    • "The Farmarette" reuses an entire sequence, complete with its original soundtrack, from the short "Farm Foolery".
    • "Chinese Jinks" (1932) reuses a sequence from "Laundry Blues" (1930).
    • "Plane Dumb" reuses a brief sequence of blackface skeletons singing from "Wot a Night".
    • The Little King shorts sometimes reused backgrounds from previous shorts, as well as the staircase sequence that's animated in perspective.
    • The 1936 Egyptian cartoon "Mafish Fayda" traces several scenes of animation from the Tom and Jerry shorts "Wot a Night" and "In the Bag".
  • De Avonturen van Varkentje Rund: A scene from "Fris" (Fresh) – the 2nd episode of the series – in which Rund is running on the sidewalk against a fence backdrop, only to eventually stop when he spots Leo, was reused in quite a few subsequent episodes.
  • There is a fair amount of Stock Footage in Blue's Clues in the first couple of seasons:
    • In the earliest episodes, the same clip of Steve grabbing the notebook from Side Table Drawer ("Blue's Clues! I'm so excited!") plays over and over again, leading to some nitpicking when Steve stands up, and in the next shot, his hairstyle is changed.
    • The recycled footage of Steve singing the rules of the game at the beginning of each episode. There were a few versions of this that were used in multiple episodes. In later episodes, the theme starts immediately after Steve receives his notebook.
    • A few Stock Audio Clips were also used of the unseen children, most notably "Notebook!" (at the beginning of each episode) and "No, it's a clue!"
    • The recycled footage of Steve singing the ending theme in the first season only (which starts with him giving a thumbs-up to the kids).
  • Anything made by [adult swim] in-house at Williams Street is bound to have this, to save on money (and frequently rights- they just tend to pull from Hanna-Barbera and other Time Warner/Turner properties as needed):
    • Space Ghost Coast to Coast is made entirely of Stock Footage from Space Ghost & Dino Boy. The most obvious examples are when Space Ghost points at something, or when the Camera zooms in on his head. Also, the Characters hop around rather than walk, basically making them cardboard cutouts of the originals.
    • Sealab 2021 (at least it's better than the original) was also made with Stock Footage at first.
    • Stock Footage is used in some of the Cold Openings of Harvey Birdman, Attorney at Law.
      • And for one entire episode, "Turner Classic Birdman".
    • Aqua Teen Hunger Force used this quite frequently, especially in its earlier years. Footage from two separate episodes of Jonny Quest (made thirty years apart) is used to represent Dr. Weird's asylum base, footage from episode six of Challenge of the Super Friends is used for scenes with MC Pee Pants in hell, even reusing the lava monster from the episode as Satan, and footage from SWAT Kats is used for the city skyline in every episode (along with a few other recycled bits here and there, such as the Powerpuff Mall and the shot of the crowd from "Circus",); then there's fire footage recorded by the animators on a camping trip whenever burning is represented on screen.
  • Several episodes of Drawn Together use a piece of stock footage known as "The Monkey Man", which comes from the 1925 film version of The Lost World. It is often inserted into scenes where a character is supposed to be thinking deeply, or during moments of tension. It was mainly used during the first two seasons.
  • Keeping with the general Animesque feel, The Avengers: United They Stand reused the same lengthy Transformation Sequences in every episode.
  • The Proud Family has several episodes that use the same clip of Trudy trying to make a souffle, but then it collapses. As you'd expect, it is often used in scenes where someone (usually Penny and her friends or Oscar) is making a lot of noise and Trudy is supposed to notice or react to the noise, while giving her a reason to also be angry if she's supposed to be in that scene.
  • He-Man and the Masters of the Universe (1983) features the same footage of Prince Adam transforming into He-Man in front of Castle Greyskull in every episode, regardless of where Adam actually was at the time.
    • Everybody in the show had the same two or three stock footage movements. Man At Arms walking up toward the screen, Orko bouncing up and down like an idiot, etc.
  • Filmation animated series in general use a lot of stock footage. Flash Gordon is a wonderful series, but you do start to feel bad for those same two Hawkmen who get disintegrated by enemy fire every single time the Hawkmen get in a fight.
    • Filmation were notorious in their heyday for using the same animation sequences regardless of what show they were making. One particular shot that was in almost everything they made in the mid-60s to mid-70s period was a charge directly at the camera by a main character immediately prior to a scene change. Superman, Superboy, Aquaman, Batman, Captain Kirk, Spock... they all did it. Same movement, just different characters.
    • Another famous bit, Filmation kept a library of scenes from previous productions. One of their later shows was to feature a dinosaur attack. Word came back, "we don't have any dinosaur footage, can you use elephants?" (Presumably from Tarzan)
  • An especially egregious example comes from the 1970s live-action / animated Saturday morning program Shazam! (1974) Filmation, the production company for the animated segments, only made footage of Billy transforming into Captain Marvel (which, of course, was used once or twice every episode). When they needed to show Captain Marvel changing back into Billy, they just ran the footage backwards. That wouldn't have been so bad, except in both directions the sequence starts with a lightning bolt called by the magic word "Shazam", and they didn't bother to edit out the bolt "un-hitting" Billy at the end of the reversed footage.
  • Lampshade Hanging: In an episode of Dave the Barbarian, Fang goes on a rampage. As she breaks things, the Narrator comments. "And so Fang destroyed a bunch of rocks! And a bunch of larger rocks!" (the image of her smashing the first ones repeats) "And a bunch of rocks that looked the same as the first bunch, but were not the same!"
  • Spider-Man:
    • In the 1960s animated series, several animated cycles of Spidey swinging were used constantly. A couple of episodes also used footage from the (now largely forgotten) Space Opera series Rocket Robin Hood. One of these episodes, "Revolt in the Fifth Dimension", a surreal Formula-Breaking Episode revolving around a Cosmic Horror named Infinata, was pretty danged awesome.
    • The '90s series was notorious for its rampant use of stock footage. They usually made little edits to try and make it less obvious. Many shots were from action scenes with minimal dialogue, and what dialogue there was was spoken by masked characters or was part of Peter's Inner Monologue, so they could re-dub it without having to worry about lip sync. Another technique was mirroring the shot or altering the frame rate. Nonetheless it still often didn't fit the new context due to the incongruous backgrounds, sudden changes in wardrobe, and so on. Most blatantly, the shot of Spidey jumping around on some boxes while evading Doc Ock's tentacles was re-used in an episode in which he's supposed to have lost his powers, so they awkwardly dubbed in the line "Lucky for me, I have a little bit of my Spider agility left".
Also, due to the novelty of CGI at the time it was considered a cool and trendy technology, so they used it as much as they could within the budget, even though the result often looked awful and out-of-place. In particular, the first few seasons used the same stock footage of a poorly-rendered CG model of New York's streets whenever Spidey swung around.
  • Clever subversion, in Megas XLR: in classic Humongous Mecha style, the mega-attack of the week is triggered by a Big Red Button on the dashboard of Megas. Coop pressing the button looks like Stock Footage, but the label on the button changes every time he presses it. It even references this internally; on one occasion the button reads "Save the World", and on another it's "Exactly the same button Coop just used like five minutes ago", after using it only a few minutes before to do something totally different.
  • A military intervention in The Angry Beavers Halloween special was illustrated by stock footage of planes taking off, tanks driving away, navy vessels sailing on the sea, cavalry riding across the screen, sumo warriors struggling, baby turtles running across the beach, and Zulu warriors cheering. In that order.
  • Muppet Babies (1984) used stock footage from old movies and TV shows all the time.
  • Thomas & Friends uses stock footage for the engines puffing across Sodor's railway lines; like Thunderbirds this often caused small continuity problems (in one episode Percy's trucks changed from coal, to slate, to coal again).
  • Code Lyoko: Not only are the transfer scenes reused in pretty much every episode, even the first episode, as they were first made for the pilot (admittedly, they were changed a bit in the second season), but quite often, entire battles will be reused with different dialogue. Season 4 is better about this, showing off the bigger budget by avoiding Stock Footage from the previous seasons during battles (the new outfits of the heroes are making any reuse of scenes from the previous seasons too obvious anyway), although footage from battles earlier in Season 4 is often re-used. There is still plenty of footage reused around the Digital Sea and the Skidbladnir's standard operations, but it is much less jarring.
  • The first two seasons of The Batman have Stock Footage scenes of Batman suiting up, jumping into the Batmobile and driving off. Probably more of a Shout-Out to the Adam West Batman TV series, which went through a similar sequence. By third season the suit-up scene was reduced and later dropped altogether. Also Lampshaded with a split-screen shot of Batman and Catwoman dressing up and driving out/hopping on rooftops to the same spot at the same time to confront the same villain.
  • In the 1990s and 2000s, Kids' WB! made notoriously heavy use of recycled stock footage in their promos. Footage of Pinky (from Pinky and the Brain) and the Warners (from Animaniacs) singing and dancing, Yakko pointing at something, stock shots of Superman and Batman, etc. (all sometimes crudely looped looking) would be used in a Warner Bros. studio lot setting, with new dialog dubbed in to promote whatever the show (or Saturday morning marathon event) of the time dictated. Sometimes actual clips of episodes of these shows (with new dialog dubbed over) would also be used.
  • Used in Freakazoid! to comic effect, including live action shots of bear wrestling, and a man being hit in the belly with a cannon ball. No, it doesn't make much more sense in context.
  • Used to great effect in Trumpton (and Camberwick Green and Chigley). As well as the extended narrated opening sequence, copious use of establishing shots, and the use of closing bandstand performances and the odd square dance, Trumpton Fire Brigade got called out to an emergency in every single episode. As a result, every Briton born between 1963 and 1990 can recite the Trumpton Fire Brigade roll call by heart, and a whole minute of every 15 minute episode was dealt with — they just needed to dub in Captain Flack's half of the phone conversation.
  • The Peanuts specials:
    • A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving uses the same clip of Snoopy handing out food (toast pile noticeably does not lessen until after he finishes handing it out).
    • You're in the Super Bowl, Charlie Brown has three interstitial sketches of Woodstock and his fellow birds curb-stomping oversized opponents, ranging from cats and dogs to bison. The exact same footage is used in all three sketches, only with the opponents replaced each time, resulting in bison who are no bigger than cats.
    • It Was My Best Birthday Ever, Charlie Brown largely features Linus rollerblading for the first third of the special, and the same animations of Linus are frequently repeated; it's rare to see one shot of Linus rollerblading only appear once in the special.
  • Scooby-Doo, Where Are You! often kept reusing animation over and over. You often saw the same animation cycles of the Scooby-Doo gang walking, running, the same poses when the humans are talking, and in one case, even a shot of Scooby-Doo eating something was reused a few times! These animation poses and cycles were also often reused in The New Scooby-Doo Movies and The Scooby-Doo Show.
  • House of Mouse, thanks to its premise as a nightclub showing cartoons, frequently reuses crowd shots, and pads out the length of the episode with shots of the band performing.
  • Robotboy uses the exact same "super-activation" sequence whenever Robotboy turns into his giant fighting robot version (which is at least once per episode). Same goes for his Evil Counterpart Protoboy.
  • Early episodes of KaBlam! would sometimes re-use old Henry and June segments for different episodes, although with the lip-syncing re-done to match the episode's lines.
  • The Super Hero Squad Show reuses the same footage whenever the characters hero up, usually just cutting it to remove any heroes that aren't there.
  • Winx Club:
    • All of the transformations, from regular fairy form to Enchantix and beyond have their own stock transformation sequences, unique for each girl and transformation.
    • Winx wasn't so bad about this in regular scenes until the fourth season. The Frutti Music Bar scenes were constantly and inexplicably reused. The strangest example, however, is a shot from the theme song of the Winx flying in their Enchantix forms. It was used at the end of the last episode, implying that the Winx had returned to those forms, but in the fifth season the Winx are still using Believix, implying it was an error.
  • A few of Disney's Wartime Cartoons reused footage from older shorts and Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.
  • The scenes in between the actual songs in the Disney Sing-Along Songs videos were composed almost entirely of stock footage of mostly-forgotten shorts overdubbed with new voice work, up to and including the iconic opening theme.
  • Dora the Explorer:
    • Map's animation during his song in Season 1 is pretty much used every episode, with one exception being his dancing during "Hic-Boom-Ohhh" being reused in "Wizzle Wishes".
    • The Travel Song animations, basically the first where Dora and Boots are saying where they're going, the "Come on, vamonos..." verse, and where they spin around at the end, have a total of three different animations each used throughout Season 1, the first introduced in "The Legend of the Big Red Chicken", a second introduced in "Hic-Boom-Ohhh", and a third introduced in "Backpack", which are spliced with a fourth animation introduced in "Dora Saves the Prince". The unique animations used in "Wizzle Wishes" in particular are used again in "Little Star" with Little Star taking the Wizzle's place, and the one difference being Dora and Boots jump only once instead of multiple times. In Season 2, the animations from "The Big Storm" are also used in several episodes.
    • The close-up of the dancing fish during Boots' "I Love My Boots" song in "Big River" are used again during the Triumphant Reprise and a third time during "We Did It".
    • Some of Swiper's "Oh, man!" animations in Season 1 are used again later in the season.
  • The Hot-Dog dance from Mickey Mouse Clubhouse. With the exception of special episodes, it does not matter which guest characters were in the episode or which main characters aren't in the episode or even how far they are from the clubhouse. It always shows just the main characters suddenly entering the clubhouse and dancing.
  • The Simpsons:
    • Before the show switched to HD, the same shot of kids cheering for Krusty was reused in several episodes. Other scenes were repeated occasionally too, like outside shots of the nuclear power plant or the Simpsons' house.
    • Parodied in "Another Simpsons Clip Show" when Bart and Lisa watch an Itchy and Scratchy cartoon that we as an audience have seen in a previous episode, causing Marge to ask them 'how many times they can watch that particular cartoon'? They lampshade by answering that it's a new episode made from stock footage. This is also selfreferential comedy because the entire episode itself is made from stock footage from previous Simpsons episodes, only with occasional new dialogue spliced over them.
    • Played straight in "Radio Bart" where the police notify Homer and Marge of Bart being trapped in the well. The footage is taken from the previous season's "Bart vs. Thanksgiving".
  • You know Looney Tunes absolutely loves Stuff Blowing Up when they reuse the exact same explosion animation in multiple shorts.
    • " The Three Little Bops" in particular brings this practice to its natural conclusion. In fact, it does recycle a lot of stock footage within itself, mostly of the Three Pigs playing their instruments and the Wolf playing his trumpet.
    • "See Ya Later, Gladiator" reuses the exact same clip of Daffy walking to a window twice. Mind you: he was in a completely different building both times!
  • Batfink. Seriously, about 80% of the episodes were stock footage!
  • Used egregiously in The Archies' Funhouse, where the same clips of animation would be used over and over with the only difference being the characters' clothes... and sometimes, not even that!
  • Despite Phineas and Ferb being one of the more well animated cartoons and thus rarely ever using Stock Footage, in "Rollercoaster: The Musical!" there are scenes when the kids are riding the rollercoaster that clearly shows that the animators just reused scenes from the original Rollercoaster episode. In the original it was background characters riding, while in the musical it's the Fireside Girls, Baljeet, and Buford. They switch between characters at certain parts. A few of the scenes between Doofenshmirtz and Perry were also reused, but it is slightly justified since they are only remaking the episode as a musical and most of their parts are the same.
    • The shot of Perry using a secret door to enter his lair from "Rollercoaster" is reused in both "...The Musical", and "Last Day of Summer".
    • Some animation of Phineas and the gang playing instruments from "Save Summer" is reused in "Last Day of Summer".
  • The training course in Rollbots, though in 09:F9:11, it was spliced with a scene of Daso chanting to create a chilling effect.
  • In the music video segments for Beavis and Butt-Head would often reuse the same footage from different episodes, such as shots of them snickering, head banging, dancing, throwing stuff at the TV, fighting,etc.
  • Played for laughs in an episode of The Amazing World of Gumball, in which Gumball and Darwin are learning how to channel their rage into a violent vocal release. Darwin attempts to do so, only to create a giant bubble of "fish-gas". Their teacher then pops it, cuing black-and-white footage of a house caught in the middle of a nuclear bomb test.
  • Spoofed in Futurama, in a segment parodying Anime, there's a scene where a squad of flying cars are defending Earth from alien ships, the sequence where they are destroyed are played twice, as well as the audio ("Launch all missiles!").
    • Also spoofed in the episode "Saturday Morning Fun Pit" in a segment parodying Scooby-Doo. A shot showing the Planet Express headquarters pans down to reveal the words "establishing shot, reuse in every episode" written below the drawing.
  • Jimmy Two-Shoes barely uses stock footage, except for one blatant case in the episode "Heinous vs. Clown" where, early in the episode, Samy fell off the roof of a building as Jimmy and Beezy were walking out of an alley dressed as clowns. Later during a fight scene, a clown gets hit off the screen and the same exact clip of Samy falling off the roof was used. One had to wonder whether it was intentional or not.
  • This happens twice with Hun during his last battle with the turtles in Turtles Forever. Not being very happy with his Metamorphosis into a mutant turtle, there are 2 occasions of the same footage where Hun's face is up-close to the screen as he complains about becoming what he hates the most... MUTANT! TURTLE! FILTH!!! It can be seen here at 57:43, then at 58:12.
  • Animaniacs reused footage many times, the most common being "Wakko doing drum roll." Also notable in the "Yakko's Universe Song," where they reused footage from the planets song (particularly blatant, since Yakko goes from flying around in a saucer to a rocket during those bits).
    • "You Risk Your Life" features stock footage of an audience clapping.
  • South Park does this from time to time, most notably in the earlier episodes. Two of the greatest examples would be:
    • In "An Elephant Makes Love to a Pig", they re-used footage from "Cartman Gets an Anal Probe" when they are talking to Pip at the cafeteria. To be fair, this is a scene that was not used in the version of "Cartman Gets An Anal Probe" that aired on television. However, given that CGAAP is (to this day) the only episode of South Park to actually be made with construction paper, the difference in animation between this scene and the remainder of "An Elephant Makes Love To A Pig" is pretty jarring.
    • In "Starvin Marvin in Space", when Stan, Kyle, Cartman, and Marvin go through the wormhole again, they simply rehashed footage from earlier on in the episode. Notice how Kenny appears with them on the ship, even though we saw him frozen in carbonite on Sally Struthers' ship earlier.
  • The Rugrats episode "Autumn Leaves" recycles animation of Tommy pulling the red tab from the box of leaves, the babies playing in the leaves afterward, and Stu walking into the yard only to be shocked by the dozens of leaves everywhere.
    • At the end of the episode, Chuckie jumps in the leaves about 6 times.
  • Although sometimes it isn't as apparent in the earlier episodes, Superjail! utilizes a lot of stock footage, in part due to being done in Flash, where character models and animations can be easily saved and recycled when needed. Season 3 seemed to rely a little more on recycling, having re-used background and specific animations from previous episodes in the run (or even earlier) for the later portion.
    • There's one case in "Oedipus Mess" where footage from the pre-credits sequences of two previous episodes get recycled, when showing Jacknife's past crimes that he's committed.
  • Breadwinners. It sometimes reuses animation, like when Sway-Sway tries to wake Buhdeuce up, and when the two summon the Bread Maker.
  • Dinosquad abuses the Transformation Sequence so much you'd think it was a magical girl anime.
  • A lot of the Tom and Jerry cartoon "Advance And Be Mechanized" is made up of footage from "Guided Mouse-ille or Science On A Wet Afternoon." Since both were produced by Chuck Jones, the animation is at least in the same style - it helps that both were released in 1967. The previous year's "Matinee Mouse," on the other hand, features new animation alongside footage from T&J cartoons from the '40s and '50s. Suffice to say they don't mesh terribly well.
  • The episodes of The Beatles animated at TVC London (with some farmed out to Group Two Studios in seasons 2 and 3) had stock animation of the boys playing their instruments during the episodes' songs.
  • Los Trotamúsicos: In this adaptation of The Bremen Town Musicians the makers re-used the same shots of the band playing, the animals running away, the robbers driving across the road, the robbers running away again and again in every episode.
  • Ozzy & Drix would occasionally use clips from the film it spinned off from, Osmosis Jones. This was extremely noticeable, as the animated film footage was significantly more complex and higher quality than the animation made for the show.
  • Super Why! since a lot of scenes are the same in each episode, the animation is recycled. In the fourth season it gets updated for Woofster.
  • Spartakus and the Sun Beneath the Sea has two song and dance sequences: the Pirate's Dance which is usually played whenever the Pirates of the Seas show up and introduces the members of the crew, and Bic and Bac's song Flashbic. At least one of the two is featured in most episodes.
  • The animated shorts made for The New 3 Stooges in the '60s, on top of having incredibly Limited Animation even for the time, were pretty bad about recycling their own shots. For example:
    • In "Safari So Good", the same animation of Moe, Larry, and Curly being beaten up by a lion, gorilla, and elephant respectively is used twice, and is especially blatant the second time since Moe is shown being grabbed by an elephant, only to still be shown being punched by the same lion.
    • In another short, "Tin Horn Dude", the same shot of a train pulling up to a train station is used twice. What makes it especially obvious is the fact that the shot has the Stooges and a sheriff standing on the platform, and the first time it's used, the Stooges are supposed to only just be arriving in town, and the second time it's played, none of them are actually supposed to be there. (They're all hiding.)
    • In "The Noisy Silent Movie", multiple shots of the Stooges operating a giant pipe organ are all used several times throughout the short if you look closely.
  • Both Disney shows from Noah Z. Jones rely heavily on this, although it's inverted between both shows. Fish Hooks uses Stock Footage solely for non-aquatic characters, while Pickle and Peanut uses this for titular duo, while everybody else is traditionally animated.
  • Kaeloo: Kaeloo's Growing Muscles Sequence, which is used Once an Episode in the first two seasons.
  • A good chunk of original cartoons by D'Ocon Films Productions (such as The Fruitties, Scruff, etc.) are infamous for constantly recycling animation. One exception is The Frog Show; D'Ocon Films co-producing that cartoon with French company Ellipsanime may have something to do with it.
  • Schoolhouse Rock! is also for recycling animation. For Example: Them Not-So-Dry Bones also re-used the Scenes were The Skeleton gets out of the short mustache barbershop quartet and falls like a blob, The Baseballplayer Boy gets Bonked by the Baseball on the Head and The Baseballplayer Boy Knocking his head at the end of the song.
  • On Poppy Cat, The scene were Poppy removes her Bandana Neck tie after she says "But First..." is re-used in some episodes.
    • Also the scene were Poppy waves to the viewers is also re-used at the end of some episodes.
  • At the end of some several episodes of Angelmouse, the part were Angelmouse get his Halo while someone said "You're an angel, Angelmouse!" is Re-used at this point.
  • Ready Jet Go!:
    • Because the series has access to NASA's archives, they can use certain footage, like when Face 9000 showed the Apollo 11 launch in "Earth Mission to Moon", and when the kids watched the video of David Scott dropping a hammer and a feather on the moon at the same time in "A Hammer and a Feather".
    • The show reuses the same footage of the kids buckling up when they're about to go into space over and over, though it gets changed whenever Carrot and/or Mindy come with them.
    • In "Commander Cressida Story Contest", stock footage from when Sydney told the story of "Goldilocks and the Three Bears" in "Just the Right Distance From the Sun" is used to pad out the runtime and explain how Earth's water is "just right".
  • Miraculous Ladybug uses stock footage for most of the Once an Episode moments - Hawk Moth sending out his Akuma, Ladybug capturing it, Ladybug and Cat Noir's Transformation Sequences, and activating Lucky Charm or Cataclysm. However, there are multiple variants of the transformation sequence depending on the clothes they're wearing, as well as versions with a more serious facial expression when Marinette or Adrien are particularly angry or worried about the situation. As the show goes on, the transformation sequences are skipped more often, and a few characters are Akumatized offscreen.
  • Ben 10 has the transformation sequences for individual aliens that show up in most episodes, though not for every alien transformation used in said episode.
  • Star Trek: Prodigy: A non-video example. For the episode "Kobayashi," when Dal recreates famous officers on the holodeck, the recreations of Spock, Scotty, Odo, and Uhura are voiced by audio clips of Leonard Nimoy, James Doohan, and René Auberjonois (who had died) and Nichelle Nichols (who was chronically ill with dementia) from a variety of past episodes. The audio quality was... variable, but fans were willing to overlook this for the homage. Gates McFadden, for her part, provided new voice work for Dr. Crusher.
  • Galactik Football often used stock footage during the football matches to pad out the matches while saving on animation costs. The most prominent examples are the special moves used by the Snow Kids (Ahito's saves, Rocket's aerial manoeuvres, D'Jok's attempts on the goal), some of the regular manoeuvres (one of the characters bypassing / outplaying an opponent) and even some of the other teams' special moves (the Rykers' "Metal Yell", the Cyclops' charge, the Shadow's teleportation, the Technoid's spinning kick), which were often used several times per game. This was to be expected, seeing that the series used 3D motion-capture for their animation.
  • The Justice League episode Paradise Lost Part 2 has a truly weird example of this right after Flash says "Now you see me now you don't" to taunt Felix Faust. For only about 1 second we get a clip of Flash in a laboratory somewhere running straight at the camera. It sticks out like a sore thumb because it's inserted into a battle on the Ancient Greek-inspired Themascyra, the color saturation is way off, and it even appears to be a lower resolution than the rest of the episode. It can be seen here. The animators must have been utterly desperate to pad the episode length out as long as possible.

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Sgt. Kabukiman N.Y.P.D.

The famous car-flipping scene that would later be reused in various other Troma films.

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Main / StockFootage

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