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Naruto: Want me to have a flashback of what just happened 13 seconds ago?
Everyone: No!
Naruto: Aww...

Sort of like how executives think Viewers Are Morons, they also think you have the memory of a goldfish, which, according to an incorrect urban legend, lasts about three seconds. Because remembering what happens over the course of a whole thirty minutes or, god forbid, an hour, is too difficult for your general media consumer, there is a handy little device called a Flashback that can be used to rewind, oh, five minutes or so to say, "Hey! This just happened, moron!" It may also come from an ancient survey that stated that Americans change the channel 20 times every minute on average.

With weekly television, there is a tendency to underestimate the audience. Arguably, this is the reason why network television has historically favored episodic storytelling over more serialized ones; the idea is that the episodes can be shown out of order and that viewers can just watch episodes at random with no need for context outside of the forty-five minute block. It's a bonus if shows like The A-Team explain their setup with a handy voice-over in the opening credits.

Sometimes a necessity in video game plots, due to the possibility of the player saving the game, taking a break of, say, two or three months, and then coming back, having forgotten important plot points during that time. In this case, the flashbacks will only seem insulting to the player's intelligence during a non-stop play. Some games try to avert this by putting plot summaries or scenes that otherwise show what has happened up to that point in the Loading Screen. Others have a character keep a diary which the player can read to remind themselves of the plot so far.

This may also be a justification depending on the format. Sometimes, book series will Call-Back to past events from the previous books when they were intended to be relatively standalone, or in case the viewer read the previous book, then went on to the next one a little while later. TV shows are often written around commercial breaks, to the extent that the first thing after the commercials is often a brief reminder of what happened just before the commercials—so when you view them on DVD or on a channel that does not use commercials (such as the BBC) the repetition seems odd. Serialized newspaper comics have to be written with the assumption that readers are likely to miss a day's installment once in a while. Even novels that were originally published in serialized chunks may seem oddly repetitive when finally printed as a single book.

Often this is an excuse for lots of Padding and Stock Footage, to reduce production costs.

Compare Fleeting Demographic Rule (where executives believe that they can recycle whole plots due to this short memory), Repeating Ad (where it's presumed viewers will not recall ads they saw in the same commercial break) and Recap Episode (where an entire episode functions as this for a series). For characters in-story with memory this bad, see Forgetful Jones.

By the way, this trope exists because executives think viewers are stupid. They also think you have the memory of a goldfish which lasts about three seconds. Only it really doesn't, as proved by the MythBusters.


Examples

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    Advertising 
  • There exists a commercial for Nerf guns in which a kids "squad" is gunned down by a lone gunman. Cue action shots of the survivor getting the cool, new Nerf gun and taking out half a dozen kids to get revenge, and as our protagonist finds the one responsible, the commercial flashes back to the beginning of the thirty second commercial to remind you why he wanted revenge in the first place.
  • Any of those commercials that include the phrase "act now and you'll also receive [insert product here], absolutely free!" They inevitably list all of the great bargain items you'll be getting if you act now about five times before the commercial ends. But Wait, There's More!
  • Radio commercials that repeat phone numbers as many as four times in a row. This might have been effective in the old days, but it's almost become a Discredited Trope, because now people mostly listen to the radio in situations where they can't write a number down (like driving), and the commercials that use it are always for really shady-sounding businesses (get-rich-quick schemes, predatory lenders). On the other hand, repeating the phone number means the listener is more likely to memorize it. Whether they like it or not.
  • HeadOn, apply directly to the forehead. HeadOn, apply directly to the forehead. HeadOn, apply directly to the forehead.
    • Lampshaded in the ads where people interrupt the commercial: "Head-On, I can't stand your commercial, but your product is amazing!"
    • This was also parodied when it was spoofed in Disaster Movie.
  • One commercial for Liberty Mutual opens with the announcer saying, "Liberty Mutual customizes your car insurance, so you only pay for what you need." The announcer goes on about how this is great news, only to be rudely interrupted by a news reporter, who proceeds to repeat the exact same information. The shortened version that occasionally plays on television is significantly less redundant by having the announcer only say, "Great news. Liberty Mutual customize—" before the reporter's interruption.
  • Laser Optics II, a 1989 Pioneer Electronics demonstration LaserDisc, ends every segment saying "Pioneer LaserDisc: It's the best show in town", and showing text saying "You are watching a Laser Disc". Five segments end with "The sharpest picture, the purest sound, and the hottest entertainment to choose from". This happens after one and a half minutes at the shortest, three and a half minutes at the longest, and two minutes on average. The chapters "The Best Show in Town" and "The Hottest Entertainment" are duplicated onto side B as well. This is justified as it was played in electronics stores with potential customers spending little time watching it. At least you get to see Stanley and Stella in: Breaking the Ice in its entirety as a nice break from the repetition.

    Anime and Manga 
  • Reborn! (2004) has an unnecessary recap at the beginning of each episode that recaps the entire arc so far. In every episode. Sometimes this gets so bad that the actual episode doesn't start until six minutes after the show starts. That's right. They waste a quarter of the entire time block on recap. But wait... it gets worse. In addition to that, there are also entire episodes completely devoted to flashbacking to the start of the present Story Arc, showing a good chunk of everything that happened.
  • The Twelve Kingdoms has several recap episodes. At the end of a 13 episode arc in a complicated world, that's pretty helpful. At the end of a four episode arc, and as the last episode of the whole series, less so.
  • Gintama mocks the tendency of shĂ´nen anime to do this mercilessly by, after recapping the basic premise of the series in the first several episodes, Shinpachi inexplicably decides to do so once more... a hundred or so episodes later. Gintoki yells at him for it, and Shinpachi explains that viewers who've never tuned into Gintama before might be confused about what the series was smoking up till that point. But 1) viewers who have never tuned into Gintama probably shouldn't start trying to watch the series after a hundred or so episodes (though Commitment Anxiety isn't entirely an issue), and 2) this entire scene was likely repeated (with different dialogue) to save up the anime's budget once again. Gintama pulls this trick often by having the voice actors speak over a still of the Yorozuya apartment, oftentimes lampshading or directly stating that they were doing so in the same scene. Though when a serious plot arc comes around, they have a tendency to pull the same stunt other shĂ´nen anime do as well.
  • Fist of the North Star has flashback episodes every time a significant plot arc ends. Sometimes the flashbacks can take up to five episodes to finish.
  • Noir does this, having a series of flashbacks late into the first episode. However, this seems to be less about them assuming that Viewers Are Morons and more about conserving the budget by repeating the same sequence over and over. Also, a certain important sequence of events gets flashbacked every other episode for a reason, as it gradually reveals more and more of a defining moment in pasts of the characters.
  • An instance of this on Sonic X leads to a quite jarring moment when edited by 4Kids, making it seem like Cream just ran out of a room crying twice! Though this was probably just bad editing around commercial breaks, rather than a recap.
  • In the Naruto anime:
    • Whatever happened in the last five minutes of one episode will be recapped in the opening five minutes of the next, and whatever happened in the last minute before a commercial being repeated over the next twenty seconds after. While this can be justified if it happens between manga chapters, which are published once a week before being collected in volumes, and it can be used to show a character's emotional state or thoughts, more often than not it's just padding.
    • The many, many flashbacks. Often to three minutes ago. In one instance, to something that happened seconds before. One of the most painful examples is the Zabuza arc, where there are as many as seven flashbacks per an episode during the final fights — sometimes even to the episode that had just preceded it.
    • Kakashi explains what the Sharingan does and how it works, and repeats it later on in the fight.
    • Shippuden uses flashbacks less often, although the Sasuke and Sai arc frequently reminded viewers that Sasori's last words gave Sakura a tip on where to find one of his spies among Orochimaru's followers. The manga does this from time to time, although often as a way of illustrating what characters are thinking about.
    • It works quite well after Itachi's death, where we get a montage of all the good things he's done and finish with a crying Sasuke (who up until that point, we haven't seen cry outside of a flashback of when he was a child).. Even if these same flashbacks were repeated numerous times.
  • The anime of One Piece is bad for it. Really noticeable post-Time Skip where there is a series recap, opening theme, and then previous episode recap which totals up to about 6 minutes of times, this is because the Anime decides to adapt one chapter per episode and therefore there is more need to pad the episode. In the Dressrosa arc, many flashbacks are done multiple times times, albeit sometimes with minor details added as the story progressed... although it was possible to get the entire gist of the flashback the first time. Also in the same arc is the constant reminder of background stuff happening, cue shots of scenery or background characters giving exposition. Some scenes also drag on or are added on to entice viewers (which can be good or bad). Skipping all of that leaves you with approximately 8-10 mins of episode left.
  • Just over halfway through Street Fighter II V, Bison has Ken sedated and gets into a fight with Chun Li, ending with him suffocating her. Ken was apparently conscious enough to witness this, because for the next four episodes, he does nothing but have flashbacks of that fight.
  • Yu-Gi-Oh!:
    • Yu-Gi-Oh! The Movie: Pyramid of Light lampshaded this during the Pegasus Versus Kaiba duel, where Pegasus started to ramble off the effect of his card (Cost Down) — only for Kaiba to butt in and say that he already knows what the card does (though while this would normally be a subversion, Kaiba goes on to give a CliffsNotes version of the effect anyway, thus making it a Lampshade Hanging instead).
    • Even though you really only need to see one duel to know what the card "Pot of Greed" does, they still say "I activate the Spell Card 'Pot of Greed,' which allows me to draw two new cards from my deck" almost every time the card is played. To be fair, the rules of the actual game state that you must announce each action you take right before you take it — although most players just say "I play X card" and only explain the effect when asked. Then again, real cards also state their effects on them, which at the very least is more than can be said for the card images used in the dub. Mocked to hell and back in Yu-Gi-Oh! The Abridged Series where multiple characters insist no one knows what Pot of Greed does.
    • The volume forms of the manga can be pretty bad with recaps. It is justified in that Yu-Gi-Oh! chapters, like many other manga, are released monthly; thus, when a new chapter comes out, it's much easier on the reader to have a quick refresher on something they read a month ago than it is for them to have to look up last month's issue to remember what happened last time. That said, when you read them straight, it often turns into:
    "I play my trap card!"
    (Next chapter starts)
    "I play my trap card!"
    • In the Battle City arc of Yu-Gi-Oh!, Marik tends to say "Those fools don't realize I am Marik!" in an internal monologue at least three times per episode.
    • In the duels against Arkana and Umbra & Lumis, said characters have to remind their opponents at least once per commercial break that whoever loses will be sent to the Shadow Realm thanks to the spiritual saws/glass. 4Kids really wanted to make its point...
    • The multi-episode duels can be pretty amusing. They start with a slow (usually dialogue-free) pan-up of the battlefield, showing the amount of Life Points and stats that each player and monster has; then the cheerleading squad thoroughly explains the situation and telling on how bad it is for [whichever good guy is dueling]; then [good guy] has an internal monologue reflecting about his situation in detail. After this recapping-the-duel-three-times routine, the episode finally starts moving forward. The dub tends to go one step beyond — dialogue is added in the slow pan-up to explain the game, then the cheerleading squad explains it again, and the monologue (usually more talky than the original one) explains it a third time. Whew.
    • There are a lot of flashbacks to major events that already happened; due to the duels taking up so much time in an episode with not tons happening, there are sometimes more flashbacks than plot.
    • In Yugi's (or rather Yami's) duel with Weevil during the Doma arc, there's a flashback to a scene that happened less then two minutes ago. The time between is only 2:47 to 4:13.
    • The second Italian translation of the manga, which was made for the 3-in-1 release in 2022, has a penchant of reminding the reader via footnotes that the card effects seen in the manga aren't always the exact same as in the real card game. Every single time a card is played. Even if the effect is the same, but the text of the manga version is not an exact match of its real life counterpart. This means that you can be reminded of the exact same thing for like 30 times in a single volume, even for 2-3 consecutive pages.
  • Inuyasha:
    • Roughly every fifth episode begins by recapping both what's currently happening and the backstory for most of the characters involved.
    • If you watch all the episodes all in one go, you get very tired of hearing the story of how Kikyo and Inu-Yasha died... especially since they replay Inu-Yasha's death scene every single episode.
    • In some episodes, the second half of the episode consists largely of flashbacks to the first half of the same episode.
    • Also, from about the third season on, every time a character appears on screen for the first time in an episode, a subtitle shows up telling us their name. This appears even if it's someone who is in every episode, or of their name was just spoken in dialog.
  • The anime version of Ranma ½ splits each episode in half for their single commercial break, resulting in an Ad-Break Double-Take. How jarring this is varies between episodes — the episode "Cool Runnings! The Race of the Snowmen" is particularly jarring, repeating as it does a minute-long sequence of Cologne mocking Ranma for being foolish enough to challenge her, and Ranma's defiant retort. It also makes you sit through them telling you the plot of the show every time, starting on the second season.
  • Digimon often uses the Ad-Break Double-Take, sometimes making the repeat trivially different.
  • Princess Resurrection did a few same episode flashbacks, the most extreme case being episode 8 where they did a flashback to a scene that happened 51 seconds ago. (About 2 to 5 minutes ago for the characters.)
  • X/1999. "There is only one future. Only one future. Two Kamui's, one future. You are Kamui, but there are two Kamui's. Two Kamui's. You and he are Kamui."
  • Dragon Ball Z:
    • The anime sometimes had this with commercial breaks, but it was more stark when an episode would start by spending at least a couple of minutes repeating what happened in the last episode. Made hilarious by the narrator always beginning with "Last time, on Dragon Ball Z!" This made more sense in the original once-a-week schedule in Japan, but in the US it typically aired every weekday and thus felt rather redundant. This would get strange and amusing if the episode itself then opened with the sequence that ended the previous one: every episode used a different animation team, so the exact framing and depiction of the scene would be changed and essentially Retcon the last few minutes of the previous episode.
    • The Portuguese dub was (in)famous because, among many things, they didn't replay the dub they already did in the previous episode when they recapped it, they would re-dub it and, more often than not, change the dialogue completely. Usually they would do a serious version in the original, and a gag dub in the recap. Such as a character replying to a death threat with anger in the first case, and in the recap replying with a laugh and a "Impossible. There are 60 more episodes after this!"
  • Fushigi Yuugi is a notoriously frequent offender, in the anime format at least (not in the manga, or at least, not enough to be particularly noticeable). How many times did Tamahome rip up that damn love letter?
  • Lampshaded in the first episode of Nerima Daikon Brothers, with the scene from before the commercial repeating almost immediately after, and one character commenting, "We already said these lines."
  • Bleach:
    • Like the other ShĂ´nen examples above, done incessantly with this anime, to the point where almost five minutes (out of a 20-minute episode) can be the last moments of the previous episode.
    • And a fair bit of what is left will be flashbacks to things that happened an only an episode ago, or repeated reaction shots of people commenting on events without adding anything new. The padding is ruthless and can make watchers realise the filler wasn't so bad after all.
    • In later seasons, they start flashing back to earlier parts of the same episode. Not just action scenes where someone realizes how his opponent's attacks function, but also normal conversations.
  • Future Diary has the next chapter start off with a slightly abridged version of the last few pages of the previous chapter. This was probably a good thing while being published in serial format but utterly annoying and pointless in the collected volumes. This doesn't just happen in the start of a volume, so the recap is often to something one page away.
  • Many manga translations include footnotes with translations of posters, flags and the like. That's fine. Sometimes they only translate it once (be it the first appearance or in special notes at the end of the volume), but sometimes they translate it more than once. That might be alright if the last note was 100 pages away. However, some translators (Such as GlĂ©nat) put notes EVERY time said poster/flag/whatever pops up, even if they're on facing pages. So you see the footnote, look at the left page, and see the exact same note.
    • This convention was parodied in The Adventures of Dr. McNinja where a character uses the Spanish word for Police (in an otherwise English conversation) four times, and each time is accompanied by a footnote on the English translation, so by the end, there are four separate footnotes all reading "Police" resting at the bottom of the page.
  • The anime version of Tsubasa -RESERVoir CHRoNiCLE- gets ridiculous with flashbacks and previous episode recaps.
  • Phantom ~Requiem for the Phantom~, a 26-episode series, has not one but TWO recap episodes.
  • The PokĂ©mon: The Series anime, especially as of the Black and White series, and particularly with Ash, who cannot seem to stop flashing back to previous episodes or even incidents that happened earlier in the episode. The "Who's that Pokemon?" segments, particularly in the first season and Black and White seasons. 99% of the time, the silhouetted Pokemon will be of the Pokemon that appeared in the episode, as opposed to one chosen at random. You would really have to not be paying attention to get it wrong.
  • Mobile Suit Gundam SEED Destiny is horribly, blatantly guilty of this, with six episodes dedicated entirely to recapping the series and its prequel, Mobile Suit Gundam SEED, and constant flashbacks to events that everyone knows have already taken place — most notably the death of Uzumi Nara Athha, which happens almost every time Cagalli is on screen. Beyond the shadow of a doubt, SEED's Crowning Moment of Flashback is the death of Nicol Amalfi, which gets at least one flashback every episode after it happens for the rest of the series. It even pops up a couple of times in Destiny despite being set two years later and not being remotely as relevant.
    • SEED itself is really no better, and first earned director Fukuda his derisive "Flashback 'Em All" moniker from the fandom. There are flashbacks within nearly every episode, sometimes to things that have happened as recently as the last episode. In SEED's case it sometimes works quite well as a dramatic and sad device. Sometimes it's just cheap and annoying.
  • Uta No Prince-sama - Maji Love 1000% gets really bad about this starting in episode seven; almost all the flashbacks are to material earlier in the episode, and in several cases the scene happened less than two minutes prior to the flashback!
  • One episode of Chargeman Ken! flashes back to an event which occurred thirty seconds before.
  • Kenichi: The Mightiest Disciple has one episode during Kenichi's fight with Takeda where probably half of the entire thing is just a recap, though it could just be said that the last part of the last episode was just repeated exactly.
  • Almost every episode of Code Geass starts with a recap of pretty major plot points that you can't possibly not know unless you haven't watched any previous episodes at all ("Have we mentioned that Britannia is a big evil empire that took over Japan and that Lelouch is trying to defeat it with his mind-controlling eye thingy? Yes, but only, like, twenty times? Well, let's go over it again, in exhaustive detail!") and often re-mentions some recent events from the previous couple of episodes, too.
  • Attack on Titan has a lengthy recap sequence at the beginning of most episodes, and an entire episode halfway through the first 26-episode season dedicated to recap. Factoring in the large amounts of filler in the first half, the show ended up wasting an awful lot of screentime.
  • If you watch any given episode of Speed Racer, you'll quickly cotton on to the fact that Racer X IS Speed's brother! Given that the narration excitedly reveals this plot point every single chance it gets, it's impossible not to know this within minutes of watching.
  • Starting from the second half of My Hero Academia's second season, every single episode reintroduces every character with Boss Subtitles stating their names and Quirks, because in the span of a week between each episode anyone would forget every single character's name. This happens only in the TV/simulcast airing altough, and it's removed in the Blu-ray version which is also used for foreign dubs.
    • Each season also has at least one flashback that gets shown over and over again to the point of tedium: Season 2 has Todoroki's constant flashbacks to his mother scalding him and scarring his face, and Season 4 has Izuku's constant flashbacks to The Reveal of what Overhaul is doing to Eri. Then there's the flashback of Inko tearfully consoling Izuku over his Quirklessness, which has probably been shown about fifteen times as of the end of Season 4.
  • Similarly, Shirobako frequently uses Boss Subtitles to remind people of MusAni employees' names and titles. Granted, it's partly because the majority of the cast comes in at the very beginning, and some of those subtitles introduce the names and titles to the viewer for the first time.
  • The Gag Dub of Duel Masters parodies this trope with one character explaining how at the start of a duel, both players have to build up mana, only for another to state that by episode thirteen, everyone knows already.
  • In some mangas, the start of the second chapter and/or volume will recap the premise of the series. It can be helpful for first-time readers who are reading it in the magazine, but it can be obnoxious for people who are binging the series.
  • In the last episode of the second season of Kaguya-sama: Love Is War, the student council takes turns pumping air into a balloon, with the one who pops it losing. Kaguya offers Fujiwara some tangerines during the latter's turn, so the narrator mentions that tangerines contain limonene, which dissolves rubber (making it an obvious ploy to get Fujiwara to pop the balloon). Fujiwara initially refuses, but decides to eat a tangerine minutes later, resulting in the narrator reminding the viewers about what limonene does before the balloon bursts.
  • In the anime of Tegami Bachi: Letter Bee, many early episodes repeatedly show the flashback in which Zazie tries to give soup to his parents, whose hearts had been eaten by Gaichuu, since it explains why he's so vengeful against the Gaichuu. This may be because Zazie has several appearances in anime-only episodes prior to the Blue Notes Blues arc, in which Connor actually tells Lag about his backstory, requiring the writers to give that bit of exposition beforehand. In the last few episodes, there are repeated flashbacks to Noir saying that the person known as Gauche Suede no longer exists.

    Comic Books 
  • Uncanny X-Men #152 features a helpful sequence of flashback pages that explains how Kitty Pryde ended up in a car with (someone who appeared to be) her arch enemy Emma Frost... but the final panel of the flashback recalls an event that happened only a few pages earlier in the same issue.
  • Batman comics of the 1950s were very big on Telling in addition to Showing, making sure the reader didn't lose track of what was going on. In at least one story, this resulted in Robin recapping information gained earlier on the same page.
  • Archie Comics will actually do this, including a recap to the first part of a story... that's in the same book, and was simply broken up by a few gag panel pages. Also present is in just how often the comics reuse the exact same jokes, not simply from issue to issue, or within the same issue, but in at least one case having jokes with identical punchlines in two short comics on the same page. Because obviously reading three more panels was sufficient time for that joke to become funny again.
  • When he was Editor-In-Chief of Marvel Comics, Jim Shooter believed in the edict that "every issue is someone's first issue!" Therefore, it was required that every character be identified by name (usually in a bold font) and their powers briefly described. A good writer could do this in a fairly seamless way... then you had issues of Marvel's first huge Crisis Crossover Secret Wars, where certain pages came across like a Mousketeer Roll Call.
  • The Richie Rich story "The Man Who Has Everything" is about Richie and his friend Jackie Jokers having trouble trying to come up with a birthday present for Mr. Rich. Richie eventually asks Mr. Rich himself, who tells his son that he'll think it over. The comic then pretty much starts over from the beginning, but with Mr. Rich in place of Richie and Jackie, complete with Mr. Rich making the exact same jokes Jackie made (and having the audacity to claim Jackie couldn't make them up himself).
  • Supreme Power: The Hyperion vs. Nighthawk miniseries has a habit of reminding the reader of stuff that happened earlier in the comic at every opportunity, to the extent that one could read only the fourth and final issue and not miss any crucial details of the plot.

    Fan Works 
  • Yu-Gi-Oh! The Abridged Series parodied this in Episode 35, where Kaiba and Yami have flashbacks of the events of the entire Abridged Series up until that point, including the opening of the episode.
    Kaiba: Hey Yugi, remember when this episode began?
  • In Chapter 2 of Sherlock Season 4, the narrator tells us that Watson died in the first episode "in case u cant remember".

    Films — Animation 
  • Titanic: The Legend Goes On abuses this one, mostly because the animators were lazy.
  • Frozen does this. The intro scene, Elsa accidentally injuring Anna in their childhood, is the primary motivation for one character's actions and is flashbacked in less than half an hour later. During the ending, they also make a effort of explicitly stating that an act of true love will heal Anna, during the scene where the spell on her was being broken. Restating this seems redundant, given that it was primary objective of the characters for the last half of the movie, and they've already drilled this in the viewer's head multiple times. Give the audience some credit...

    Films — Live-Action 
  • Matilda: When the title character realizes she can make objects move when she gets angry, she has flashbacks to all the scenes when someone made her angry.
  • Mystery Science Theater 3000:
    • The B-Movie Future War has a Montage of flashbacks, arranged chronologically, while the protagonist is in prison. By the end, the scenes being flashbacked had been shown less than five minutes ago. Mike and the bots did not let this go without comment.
    • Also done in the film Laserblast. Aliens watch a clip from earlier in the movie which is so long the bots riff "We've already seen, Laserblast, Sir..."
    • It also occurs in The Deadly Bees. When the villain is explaining how he carried off his evil plan, he fully recaps the entire story, up to the moment right before he started his flashback. This wouldn't be so bad if the whole thing had been simple narration, but the filmmakers felt compelled to augment the character's narration with clips of the scenes in question, including those of scenes that had just taken place. The MST3K crew loudly complained, "We just saw this!"
    • And again in The Phantom Planet, where the hero flashes back through his experiences in the film, including the previous scene with his love interest. Crow yells, "No fair! You can't flash back to stuff we saw ten seconds ago!" It also had the classic riff, "we didn't like these scenes the first time!"
  • In The Asylum's B-Movie mockery Mega Shark vs. Giant Octopus, a title card detailing the location of the marine base where the characters are located pops up multiple times, even when they haven't even left the base. The fact that the same shot of the soldiers is used repeatedly for these title cards does not help at all.
  • In Uwe Boll's House of the Dead, a character has a flashback of the entire movie up to that point while standing in the middle of a zombie-filled graveyard. Worse than that: the character has a flashback to the beginning of the scene he is still in the middle of!
  • Parodied in the musical version of The Producers, where Max's eleventh-hour solo recaps the entire plot up to that point (including the Intermission in the stage version).
  • Parodied in Clue, in which the Butler recaps every action that has taken place in the movie (including slapping Mrs. Peacock repeatedly!), until the characters yell at him to get on with it.
  • Spy Hard parodied this when WD-40 meets his old spy buddy. When he reminisces about the good times they had, he remembers only meeting him moments ago.
  • In Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li, we see a close-up of Gen's spider-web tattoo. Not even five minutes later, Chun-Li is told that the meaning of a map she was given is telling her to find Gen for training. It then shows us the exact-same shot of Gen's spider-web tattoo.
  • About half of Silent Night, Deadly Night Part 2 consists of flashbacks of the previous movie. The other half consists of Ricky either being awesome, narmful, or some combination of the two. GARBAGE DAY! Justified a little because they'd originally intended to make a tamer edit of the film with some new footage to compensate for the edits, then it ended up turning into a half-redundant sequel instead.
  • The Last Airbender. Even though he expected his viewers to be fully versed in the television series, M. Night Shyamalan decided that he had to repeat the same thing over and over again.
  • The makers of There Will Be Blood apparently assumed that viewers would not remember that Daniel Plainview's plan was to cut a deal with Union Oil and lay a pipeline to the coast so that he would no longer have to pay rail-tanker fees to Standard Oil unless this fairly simple plan were explained again and again every five minutes or so for the entire length of the film.
  • Turbo: A Power Rangers Movie was really bad about this. As one parody put it: "you'd think we were brain dead with the amount of exposition in this movie."
  • In Spider-Man, the eponymous superhero tracks his uncle's killer to an abandoned warehouse, and confronts the shooter. We see the shooter's face, and the movie flashes back to show Spider-Man stepping out of the same criminal's way and letting him escape, which led to Uncle Ben getting shot. Apparently, someone was worried that we wouldn't remember what the guy looked like, despite the fact that the scene in the flashback occurred less than five minutes ago (though it was slightly altered to help the viewer see it from Peter's point of view when he realizes the absolute magnitude of that "Thanks!"). The reboot The Amazing Spider-Man is also guilty of this.
  • The climax of Batman Begins features several cutaways to a pair of sewage technicians who have realized the villain's plan and then keep repeating it over and over.
  • Every scene in Die Hard involving Al Powell and Dwayne T. Robinson is to simply remind audiences that, yes, Al is still the Only Sane Man on the force who believes John McClane is the only hope the hostages have and Robinson is still this movie's example of Police Are Useless by refusing to listen. And there are several scenes with the two discussing the exact same thing, which is the main reason Robinson is The Scrappy; it's enough for him to be an pain-in-the-ass obstructionist, but he has to keep hammering it home in his every scene, to the point that Roger Ebert singled Robinson out as the only thing he didn't enjoy about the film.
  • While Nine Dead does use occasional flashbacks to earlier lines of dialogue when the characters figure something out, two flashbacks to dialogue from the captor appear no less than five minutes after he actually says them.
  • The Room (2003): Let's play a drinking game. Take a shot every time Lisa tells her mother she doesn't love Johnny anymore. Or every time Mark tells Lisa he can't sleep with her because Johnny is his best friend. Or every time someone mentions that Lisa and Johnny are about to get married. Enjoy the hospital visit!
  • In The Dark Crystal, the narration and Jen repeat what we already know a lot.

    Literature 
  • The Song of Rolandeverywhere. When will Charlemagne lose the heart for making war, again? (Stanzas XL to XLII, which are exactly identical, except rephrased.)
    • Justified in that many of these old stories — Beowulf, Arthurian Legend, and so on — were originally sung ballads from the days when few could read or write, and the repetition helped the person singing the ballad (and the listener, because some of these could be pretty long) remember what happened.
    • In addition, the ballad needed to grab and hold the attention of folk who had come in late, or nipped off for refreshments, and who might have no idea what was happening if not for the repetition.
  • Each and every one of The Baby-Sitters Club books would spend an entire chapter (usually the second one) giving a rundown of all the main characters and how the club worked. The Baby-Sitter's Little Sister spin-off series did the same thing, with Karen having to explain her "two-two" blended families in every single book.
    • What makes the trope apply notably to this series is not so much that there's a recap, it's that it's done in such excruciating detail that it's like the author is explaining everything from scratch. While it's common for most series to remind us of things, with the BSC it's stated like it's the first time, every time. This is most likely because plots rarely continue from one book to another, so the books don't need to be read in any particular order to be understood. This means that any book in the series could be the first one a new reader reads, so they have to describe the characters' personalities, backgrounds, relationships, etc.
  • This seems quite normal for most book series, as the new books sometimes come after months, if not years. It's just really glaring if you read the books within a few weeks; for example, the Drizzt Do'Urden novels are notorious for it. Also in the War of the Spider Queen hexalogy which was written by six different authors under the supervision of seventh one (who wrote the Drizzt novels). One of these books uses this even inside itself, sometimes within the same chapter, to the point where it gets annoying.
  • It's just not possible to find a Sweet Valley High book that doesn't mention certain information repeatedly — the twins are blonde and blue-eyed, with perfect size-six figures and identical gold lavalieres that their parents gave them on their 16th birthday; they drive a Spider Fiat; their house has a Spanish-style kitchen; their mother is often mistaken for their older sister, and their brother looks like a younger version of their father. Considering how many books there are in this series, it borders on the ridiculous.
  • Same goes for Nancy Drew and The Hardy Boys. The same little bits of backstory are repeated endlessly (Nancy's mother died when she was three; Bess and George are cousins, yet polar opposites; Frank is one year older, one inch taller, and slightly leaner than his brother Joe.)
  • 1Q84 has a habit of repeating information when it isn't necessary. For instances where it's Tengo repeating back something Fuka-Eri said, it makes a certain sense since Fuka-Eri's odd speaking style can be difficult to understand exactly what she means. But discriptions of character appearances are given several times within the same section with seemingly no reason other than to pad out the word count.
  • The book series of W.I.T.C.H. also does this, explaining at the beginning of each book how the girls are the guardians of Candracar, have magic elemental powers, etc. It wouldn't be so bad, except its possible to whip through several books in one day.
  • The Twilight Saga is notorious for this - almost every time Edward comes up, his looks get described in full.
  • In Things Fall Apart Chinua Achebe likes to remind us what happened as little as one chapter ago.
  • The two pages in the first chapter of any given Animorphs book will be a recap of the first book.
  • Along with its slide from hard to soft alternate history, Harry Turtledove's Timeline-191 restates characteristics of numerous characters every time they appear. US Navy sailor Sam Carsten is perhaps the most notorious, with every segment where he's the POV character starting with extensive detail about the current status of his sunburn or describing that he can burn even when the sun isn't out.
  • Downplayed in The Dresden Files. At some point early on in each of the first five books, Harry tells the audience that, yes, he really is a bona-fide wizard, followed by a very brief description of the magical world and Extra-Strength Masquerade. Thankfully dropped from Blood Rites on.
  • The early Harry Potter books are pretty bad about this. Rowling liked to remind readers of pretty much anything important that happened in earlier books. Even things like mentioning that Harry is going to school to become a wizard. Arguably the most awkward example is when one of Harry's textbooks reminded him of what a Muggle is. By the fourth book, this has tapered down, and it stops completely around the fifth book.
  • In Maximum Ride, some concepts are hammered in three or four times just in case they didn't sink in the first time.
    • Ari's jealousy of Max.
    • The fact that Iggy is blind.
    • AND in case anyone forgot what Dylan looked like, James Patterson jams in his perfect features in the form of purple prose.
    • The amount of times that the Flock are birdkids is mentioned...
  • George Brown Class Clown repeats the events of the first book in EVERY. SINGLE. BOOK. They don't even change the wording!
  • Charles Dickens wrote a lot of his work originally as serials, which would be anthologized as novels when they were completed. He liked to give his characters catch phrases so readers could remember who was who from one installment to the next. In a serial, this made perfect sense, but in the finished novel, a reader may wonder, "Why does this guy have to say XYZ every time he shows up?"
  • Most of The Berenstain Bears books remind the reader that the title family lives in the big tree house, down a sunny dirt road, deep in Bear Country.

    Live-Action TV 
  • The ABC news in Australia used to finish their flagship 7pm news bulletin with a "now, recapping our top stories" 1 minute summary.
  • Alfred Hitchcock Presents had a 3-part storyline during its second season. For parts 2 and 3, it recapped the events of the previous episode not once but twice at the beginning each time.
  • America's Next Top Model tends to overuse recaps It's particularly annoying for British viewers, because the advert breaks are arranged differently — a reminder of something that happened ten minutes ago on the show when it is shown in the U.S. may have happened two minutes ago for British viewers. The sepia tone, as though they're showing something that happened in the 1920s and not, like, five minutes ago is what really makes it classic on ANTM.
  • Arrested Development uses recaps a lot later in the run the higher-ups complaining the plot was too convoluted for people to follow. So, generally, in the last season the first half-minute after the commercial break is devoted to the narrator summarizing everything else to happen in that episode at speeds that would make the Rocky and Bullwinkle narrator blush.
  • Battlestar Galactica (2003): The Previously on… segments are included in the DVD versions. This gets annoying as you re-watch a scene you just saw, then bizarre as they show scenes that never happened before.
  • Billy the Exterminator: There are times it seems like they don't know how the episodes are being put together, and just film each segment to paste together later. This means that Billy will explain the dangers of each insect over and over (mahogany wasps and cockroaches seem to be the worst in Louisiana), alongside explaining what the chemicals he uses are, and how they work.
  • Bones starts injecting some jarring recaps halfway through each episode in season 4, which were designed to tell viewers what unfolded merely half and hour ago. Even if, say, a viewer jumped in at that point from watching another program, it still seems stupid, simply because Bones does not take much effort to follow (like any procedural crime drama).
  • Conmen Case Files: At least 75% of the running time is taken by the narrator endlessly repeating that Nick Gage is, in fact, a conman, and that he has, in fact, conned people, and that these people have lost money. To this conman. Who conned them. For their money. That were conned away. By Nick Gage the conman.
  • CSI:
    • First you see the crime scene, then they talk about the evidence, then they process it in the lab and remember collecting it, then they talk about why it matters and when someone has a "Eureka!" Moment, they show you which specific piece of evidence was important.
    • One Season 3 episode has a bad example where it constantly goes to a Mitochondrial DNA Lab in Norfolk, Virginia. You know this because every time it switches there, they felt the need to have a location stamp with that information. The scenes aren't even that important!
  • Deadliest Warrior has a major case of this. After every single part of the analysis of the "warriors", there's a recap of the whole episode up to that point. Then again, the show isn't particularly intellectually challenging in the first place.
  • Dead Like Me: At least half of the first season started off with a long flashback explaining everything that happened in the first episode.
  • Disney Channel often feels the need to have the show's logo appear in the bottom right corner of the screen after they return from commercial break. 'Cause, you know, we somehow didn't see the "We're back" bumper telling us which show this was. Though that's really more there for if people are recording the show. It's just as annoying, though.
  • Doctor Who does this in its series 8 premiere. When Clara is trapped among the cyborgs, she recalls the Doctor's words from literally just a few minutes ago: "They're not breathing...how long can you hold your breath?" in order to let viewers know why she suddenly takes a deep breath and holds it.
  • FlashForward (2009) repeats Mark and Olivia Benford's flashforward at least once per episode, more or less beating the viewer over the head with reminders that he's drinking and she's cheating. Word is that viewers might have Executive Meddling to thank for this. Unsurprisingly, the more popular storylines tend to involve characters whose flashforward was only shown once, or who didn't have one at all.
  • In game shows, the host will frequently explain the game's objectives and requirements to win, even though viewers may know them by heart (especially if the show has been on for a long time); likely, this is a Standards and Practices requirement.
    • Family Feud: The 1977 syndicated debut had host Richard Dawson explain the rules just as he did during the earliest days of the ABC network version. He said that even though the contestants by now knew exactly how to play the game, he was doing the extended rules spiel for the benefit of viewers who had maybe never seen the daytime show and were, thus, tuning in for the first time.
  • Forever: "The Art of Murder" is a serious offender, showing clips from earlier scenes every time something from the flashback is relevant to the case, often the same clip multiple times.
  • Ghost Hunters: Okay, so imagine this: The TAPS crew are making their way through a room in an old movie theater that's reportedly haunted. They move across the stage when they hear a loud clatter. They scream, panic, and enter a title splash screen. Moments later, one of them appears and describes exactly what we just saw about thirty seconds ago. To make sure you did not forget the events of thirty seconds ago, there's a scene where the others catch up with the persons in questions who are stammering out what they were doing at the time of the noise.
  • Gilmore Girls came with a Previously on… stunt that recapped the first half-hour, apparently for the benefit of viewers who were watching other channels for the previous half-hour.
  • Girl Code: Between the opening that shows clips from throughout the show, commercial breaks that show multiple talking heads before each break, and a recap at the end of each episode, about half of each episode is shown twice.
  • Hannah Montana uses recaps in the To Be Continued hour-long specials such as "Jakey Breaky Heart" and "Should I Neigh or Should I Go?" Justifiable, however, in one regular episode, because it was from the second or third season, and Miley was having a flashback from the beginning of the first season.
  • Heroes: Many episodes begin by repeating part of the last scene of the previous episode. Sometimes this gives you the impression the continuity editor is a goldfish; in one instance, Claire woke up and declared "Holy shi—" as the credits rolled, but in the next episode, where the scene continued, she instead said "Oh my God". This is not a great instance of thinking ahead, guys.
  • Horatio Hornblower: "The Duel" (aka "The Even Chance") has a minor example from the script, as the writing had its hits and misses. Archie Kennedy is constantly shown as Horatio's particular friend among the midshipmen. It's a first episode and Say My Name didn't achieve the highest numbers as in subsequent parts, but it clearly established that Archie Kennedy and Horatio are friends. Archie's lost during a Boarding Party because the villain of the story untied the boat he was in. When Horatio and said villain duel to death, Jack boasts that he's gonna kill him, just as he killed his little pal Archie. Horatio just wrinkles his forehead, asking: "Kennedy?" Instead of being angry or demanding that they arrest him for confessing to murder. Hornblower and writers, we remember Archie!
  • Jason King lampshades this in the first episode. King is pitching his TV adaptation to an American network executive, who insists that he repeat an exposition scene (with the plot discussed by the heroes, then the villains) in case the audience didn't get it the first time.
  • Leverage: Every episode has a flashback near the end revealing how they pulled off the job by showing a key event that was left out previously (for instance, that when she borrowed his coat, she planted a camera on it). Since these are necessarily framed by repeating the events immediately before and after (her taking the coat and giving it back), they work very poorly if the key event only took place five minutes ago.
  • Lost:
    • Eloise Hawking is brought up briefly in one episode two seasons before she actually becomes important. The Previously on… segments shows clips from that episode in the one she reappears in.
    • The extended episodes have annoying side comments pop-up every ten seconds, bringing up mostly obvious details. While it's sometimes useful for fans who forgot a few subtle details over the long breaks, the comments are mostly incessant chatter...and that's before they start mentioning the nicknames shippers made for the Jack-Kate or Sawyer-Kate couplings.
    • When ABC wanted to build hype on season 4 after a very long eight month break, the executives went overboard with jogging viewers' memories. A Best Week Ever comedian lampshaded this: "So I first watched the re-airing of the Lost season 3 finale. And then I watched a season 3 re-cap of everything I just watched. And then I happened to see a re-cap of the re-cap before the season 4 opening episode. Altogether, I got to see Charlie drown three times!"
  • Maddigan's Quest: After "Newton", the flashbacks at the opening to each episode repeatedly remind us that yes, the Fantasia have in fact managed to get hold of the solar converter. Apparently the fact that most of the cast is spending most of their time running around either trying to steal or protect the thing isn't enough to keep it in our minds.
  • MasterChef repeats almost exactly what happened in the previous 20 seconds after every commercial break, leading to an episode that counts down the seconds remaining for the Pressure Test twice.
  • Medium: Whenever Allison has her ding ding ding! moment, we get a flashback to earlier in the episode so the show can reinforce the connection she's making — even if it just happened 20 minutes ago.
  • Milf Manor: During the Bad Date between Stefany and Harrison in episode 3, twice Harrison negatively compares his date to the other women on the show in the span of about 10 seconds. In both instances, the show uses the same Reaction Shot of Stefany downing a drink. While reality shows are generally known for their Manipulative Editing, this is a bit on the nose even for that genre.
  • Moment of Truth: Every time the show comes back from commercial break, they recap half of the embarrassing questions asked of a contestant already. They also show extended Coming Up Next segments, recap previous shows, and show clips of upcoming shows in commercials. This results in 75% of the show being scenes you've seen five times already
  • MythBusters:
    • The show tends to resort to overbearing recaps whenever they don't have enough TNT... uh, material to fill an hour. Segments are usually started by a recap of what happened five minutes ago and ended by a preview of what's coming up next, making about a third of the whole show pure repetition. Granted, it does mean you can tune in at almost any time and not miss a beat, but it also makes the show exceedingly hard to watch on a streaming service. It got especially bad in later seasons, as there began to be fewer myths per episode and therefore more padding was needed to fill out the episode. This from the very show that debunked the myth of goldfish only having a three-second memory. OK, so Adam's tank had about a three-second lifespan....
    • The BBC edited MythBusters down to 30 minutes when they showed it on their own channels in the UK. (Though the versions shown on the "Quest" channel are a full hour).
  • NBC loves to do this for Padding in their game shows:
    • Deal or No Deal triple-dips recaps, starting off every episode with a flashback to the previous one, then stopping midway through to recap. Plus each contestant usually has some kind of sob story or noble intention for their winnings, which Howie Mandel will usually point towards the beginning and then harp on incessantly throughout the show.
    • Minute to Win It takes this up a notch in the GSN version, especially in earlier episodes. First, just like Deal or No Deal, each contestant always has some kind of sob story to tell, which is usually showcased early in the episode. Then the show will usually proceed to incessantly derail itself between games and after commercial breaks to remind the viewers of it at every opportunity possible. And with each game, after the Blueprint video explains the game, the host will sometimes recap the rules between the Blueprint and the game, or in a voice-over during the game (although they've gotten better about this variant lately), depending on how much Filler they need to achieve a Commercial Break Cliffhanger. If there's a commercial break before the game ends (and there frequently is), expect another recap after the break. GSN apparently not only think viewers are goldfish, but goldfish with Attention Deficit... Ooh, Shiny!. At least the NBC version kept everything exciting all the time so sob stories felt a little more enjoyable. They also related to the game, not some random story that the viewers will forget right after they hear it because they want to watch the game. They also had them coming back from a commercial break, meaning you'll learn about the contestant for about 30 seconds, then get back to the game.
    • The series premiere of Who's Still Standing? would cut away after every single round to a graphic with a voice-over (which was obviously clumsily added in post-production) to spend 30 seconds recapping the state of the game. This became even more ridiculous whenever it happened immediately before or after host Ben Bailey did a perfectly good in-studio summary of the same information in only 10 seconds.
  • NCIS has a habit of having one of the characters conspicuously summarize the plot, right after the half-way point of the show. It seems like DiNozzo got the job more often than others, but McGee gets it a lot, too. They're usually talking to Gibbs.
  • Police Squad! was infamously canceled for this very reason — the head of the ABC network thought viewers wouldn't be able to pay attention well enough to get it. It has since become a Cult Classic.
  • Pretty Guardian Sailor Moon uses recaps... not infrequently not infrequently. Sometimes it seems like a mood-building piece: showing the "Alice learned that Bob had a girlfriend" scene as a short flashback, instead of merely recapping it, slowed the action down and caught the emotion better, perhaps. But it's still annoying, especially when we get to see the same "Alice remembers Carol being extremely rude to her that one time, and that's why they're still on edge around each other, did you forget?" scene in four episodes in a row.
  • Psych uses a variation with its "clue-vision", zooming in and then highlighting the clue Shawn just noticed (or flashing back on a line of dialogue or flashing back, and again highlighting a clue as it is noticed). Always accompanied by Shawn making his squinty-eyed-I-just-found-a-clue-face (Lampshaded as such eventually when Gus points out that, yes, he also saw many of the same clues but never feel the need to make a silly face).
  • Hell's Kitchen: Try to watch any episode and know in your heart that half of the show is recapping what just happened.
  • The Kitchen Nightmares "Revisited" episode, where they go back to restaurants from earlier seasons: Ten minutes of old episode footage/recapping, two of Gordon Ramsay actually revisiting.
  • Scrubs uses a recap as a joke later on; J.D. is reminded of incidents that are not perceived as manly. The last flashback is him ordering an Appletini, which happened about fifteen seconds ago.
  • Smallville uses recaps to get away with blatant retcons. Early-season plots are dropped and forgotten without ever being addressed, such as the fact Jor-El had seemingly sent Clark to conquer Earth; later when Brainiac tries to gaslight Clark by claiming Jor-El was a dictator, Clark acts with disbelief, forgetting that until this point he thought Jor-El was evil. Likewise, the show would sometimes try to slip in new wrinkles in the backstory, such as the introduction of Veritas, which cannot fit at all with previously established events, but figured that fans just wouldn't remember (making things very awkward when binge-watching the boxset). On a smaller scale, this would even apply in-between episodes, where they would often set up for a cliffhanger of Clark having royally pissed off Lana, Chloe, Lex, or anyone not involved in the Masquerade, in such a way it seems this is setting up for long-term hostilities, but its instead all completely forgotten about later.
  • Sportscenter very frequently begins with a recap of the sporting event that the network just televised.
  • Star Trek frequently uses the Ad-Break Double-Take throughout the earlier days of the franchise, where an ad break will be followed by the Captain's Log explaining what just happened before the break.
  • The 1975 musical TV special It's a Bird, It's a Plane, It's Superman'' parodies this when Doctor Sedgwick sings a song about how his sole motivation is to get revenge on Superman and Switzerland (for turning him down for the Nobel Prize 10 times). It then cuts out midverse and promises that after the commercial it will reveal what terrible thing the doctor wants to do before he dies, as though everyone just missed or forgot him singing a song about how he wants revenge. And tells everyone to stay tuned for "Chapter 4: Sedgwick's Revenge".
  • Teletubbies: After the "watching the screen on one of the Teletubbies' stomachs" segment, the Teletubbies always shout "Again, again again!" The creators invariably bow to their wishes. Explainable (and arguably justifiable) by the intended target audience being under two years old; some of the research the show was based on suggests the only thing its viewers are expected to take away from it is a vague lifelong sense of familiarity with some of the advertisers' logos.
  • Tru Calling often has flashbacks during the second half of the episode to events from the first half. Probably done because, for much of its run, the show's first half hour aired at the same time as Friends.
  • Unforgettable: The entire premise of the show is that the main character remembers everything. Evidently, they don't trust their viewers to remember this one-sentence premise, because every single commercial for the show has to remind them of this fact.
  • Veronica Mars uses recaps quite often, though it is somewhat justified in that its large cast means that characters will fade in and out of view with irritating regularity, leading casual viewers to be reminded of their existence. Add to that that the plot is often so thick with so many sub-plots and red herrings crossing each other that the plot can get very confusing at times. On the other hand, the overly long Previously on… sequences that occur in every single episode except the first make this trope laughable when marathoning the show on DVD, as the Previously on… will remind viewers of plot points brought up a single episode ago. This is especially true when it reminds you of the ending of the previous episode, which you just saw. This is especially infuriating when the same clip is used over and over to remind you of a single plot point.
  • The Wire: The first episode features a flashback in its final scene to remind us who the newly discovered dead body is, in a show that typically eschewed any such artificial storytelling techniques. David Simon didn't want to do it but HBO insisted, and it actually is justified: the episode introduces the viewer to so many characters and situations that odds are they actually will have forgotten the dead character, who only appeared briefly in an early scene.

    Newspaper Comics 
  • This is very common in episodic newspaper comics, but Alley Oop makes an art of it. Sometimes only a single panel will be devoted to advancing the plot that was summarized in the other two.
  • E.C. Segar's original Thimble Theater strip, whence Popeye first came, constantly recapped the plot in the first panel during long storylines for those who weren't caught up.
  • Dick Tracy spends every Sunday rehashing the previous week's action. The Comics Curmudgeon once congratulated Dick Tracy for going up a notch with its recaps; it spent so long in one strip rehashing what happened yesterday that it ended with the plot less advanced than it had been the day before!
  • It seems that most newspaper comics that follow a storyline do this a lot. Other offenders are Rex Morgan, M.D., Mary Worth, and The Amazing Spider-Man, all of which spent about two panels actually getting something new done and the rest recapping. Justified somewhat when you realize that many of the newspapers that carry Dick Tracy, Rex Morgan, etc., only carry it in their larger Sunday comics section — the much smaller weekday comics section may not have room for it, therefore the writers create the Sunday episodes so they can be readable without the weekday episodes being available.
  • The new Little Orphan Annie is a repeat offender.
  • In Buckles, every character addresses every other character by name at least once in every strip, as if readers are likely to forget who's who on a day to day basis.
  • The Jim Scancarelli era of Gasoline Alley also features characters constantly referring to each other by name, sometimes multiple times in the same day. Some characters (Boog in particular) wear T-shirts with their name in huge letters across the front in a weird attempt to avoid this.
  • Mallard Fillmore has very little in terms of actual plot, and yet still manages to abuse this trope by having the first panel recap whatever issue is annoying him this week.
  • When Dilbert does multi-day storylines, it will often have either a caption explaining the premise that previous comics have set up or a character explaining what happened in the previous comics in the first panel. This is pretty jarring when you're reading the strip online.

    Professional Wrestling 
  • WWE's and TNA's Professional Wrestling programs are absolutely peppered with "Moments Ago" replays, usually upon returning from commercial breaks. (In the case of RAW, which is shot live, this will usually be something that happened during the commercial break.) Also in the case where an angle (storyline) and/or gimmick (character) is quickly chucked out and it's expected that people will simply not remember it or will be nice enough to overlook it. The IWC frequently does neither. You're supposed to give the fans three months before things can be dropped.
  • If a top or upper-midcard wrestler is injured for a substantial period of time, he will ALWAYS come back as a Face. Even if he was the most despicable and dastardly of Heels at the time of his injury. Ironically, Kurt Angle once vocally pointed this out upon Triple H's return from a nasty quad tear, and was made out to be a huge jerk for doing so.
  • Professional wrestling subverts this trope. Jim Cornette declared the "Seven Year Rule", which states that after 7 years have passed it's safe to recycle a character, gimmick and/or storyline. For example, Carlito Caribbean Cool's gimmick had a substantial overlap with that of Razor Ramon, but because enough time had passed since Scott Hall quit portraying Razor, Carlito got over. However, pro wrestling also has the Three Month Rule, which plays this a little straighter. While it won't necessarily repeat things that happened three months ago, it will expect viewers to forget them and consider them out of continuity.
  • This is a frequent criticism of Vince Russo's booking. If Russo wrote Game of Thrones, Ned would get killed, Jon Snow would attack Rob and the Red Wedding would happen all in the first episode.

    Radio 
  • American Top 40 and American Country Countdown: Especially with the classic shows, at the top of one of the hours, the host will announce new affiliates and sometimes afterward he'll state, "If you're joining us for the first time, this is (name of show), where we count down the top 40 hits of the week, from 40 all the way to No. 1." This was, again, for the benefit of listeners who may have actually be listening one of the shows for the first time.

    Tabletop Games 
  • A smart Game Master will recap what happened last play session if it's been more than a week. Otherwise the first hour of play will be wasted with questions like, "Wait, who was the guy in the gray cape and why are we working for him, again?"

    Theater 
  • Lampshaded in Dirty Rotten Scoundrels The Musical. At the beginning of Act Two, the exact last few lines from Act One are repeated, with Freddy then commenting, "Didn't we do this part already?" and Lawrence replying, "I enjoyed it so much the first time."
  • Similarly lampshaded in Evil Dead: The Musical. Act I ends with a long sun solo consisting of "Die, DIE!" repeated fifteen times — and it lasts for nearly 45 seconds — while he kills his former girlfriend's zombie head, a pile of other zombie bodies in the corner. Act II begins with the exact same solo, but the head is obviously fake, and the place has been cleaned up. When other characters demand to know how this "isn't as bad as it looks", Ash replies: "At least there isn't a pile of bodies in the corner anymore."
  • Romeo and Juliet has no fewer than three instances where a character has a long monologue recapping the action we just saw on stage.

    Video Games 
  • Driver: San Francisco is a big offender, using television style "previously on" exposition moments. This is fine for players who may take a break between levels, but is particularly silly playing through the first few levels, which are easy to knock out in the space of an hour or two. Driver 2 also featured abridged recaps in the cutscenes throughout replays of the story when you started a new playing session, regardless of where you were in the story.
  • PokĂ©mon in general has a bad habit of this. Want to pick an Apricorn off a tree? Well, prepare to be reminded of your actions from shaking the tree, getting the colored Apricorn, being told what colored Apricorn you got, and then having you put it in the bag. Berries play out much the same way; the player is told what kind of berry's on the tree, how many of (X) berry they got, and then that they put (X) berry in the bag... every single time. It also happens with HMs like Rock Smash, Strength, or Cut. Weather moves like Rain Dance and Hail remind you of their effects every turn until they fade. As for game-specific examples:
    • PokĂ©mon FireRed & LeafGreen do this with a recap of what you did every time you load your file. One can press the Start button to skip the recaps, thankfully.
    • As of PokĂ©mon Black and White, message boxes for weather ("Rain continues to fall", etc.) appear only once. "'X 'mon was buffeted by the Sandstorm", however, wasn't removed.
    • On multiple occasions in PokĂ©mon Mystery Dungeon: Rescue Team, the player will have a meaningful dream, wake up, wonder what that dream was about, flash back to the dream, and then wonder some more. There is no time in between where the player is allowed to save, so the player is guaranteed to experience all of these events in one sitting. That is, unless you experience the dream, let your character wake up, and then leave your handheld to charge for a few days; but it is doubtful the developers were expecting every single player to do this.
    • PokĂ©mon Mystery Dungeon: Explorers of Time/Darkness:
      • The game often flashes back to a given scene multiple times in the same cutscene, any time you escape from danger your partner feels the need to tell you what just happened, the ending cutscene is a collection of flashbacks, and occasionally your own character will flash back to what just happened, have an internal monologue about what just happened, tell the partner what just happened, and then the partner will repeat it back to you.
      • The longer cutscenes have a break or two in them so you can save between segments. The game assumes that you saved at each break and forgot everything that happened prior. Kind of hilarious when you see your partner reminisce about what happened a few seconds ago in a black-and-white flashback.
  • A variation of this in the Lost video game Via Domus: the game is (like the show) split into episodes, and each one starts with a "Previously on Lost" segment recapping the game so far. This would be fine, except that there's no way to quit the game in between episodes, so you're invariably recapping something you've just seen. The previously part does show up again when you reload the game where it might actually be needed, though.
  • Also used in Siren: Blood Curse. The episodes are so short you wouldn't normally stop after just one, yet they remind you of what you just did twenty minutes ago. Now if you were playing the episodes as they came out, this was mildly helpful and made sense, but if you're playing the boxed console release today it can get annoying.
  • And again used in Alan Wake. The episodes, however, are quite long. Granted, Alan Wake is designed to emulate a TV Mini-series, to the extent that each of the game's six episodes has a "Previously on… Alan Wake" segment at the beginning. It's also useful for those who quit playing at the end of the previous episode to catch-up.
  • The Metal Gear series can sometimes be guilty of this. Snake repeats everything everyone tells him, but in an inquisitive tone. "The key is made of a shape-memory alloy!" "A shape-memory alloy?!" "Yes! It changes based on the temperature!" "It changes based on the temperature, huh?" This actually becomes Fridge Brilliance when you realize Snake doesn't do this to benefit the player, since the player often has no use for the information anyway. He does it so he himself remembers what he is searching for. Not very effective when Snake does this when informed about something he should already know about, such as the sights on a freakin' rifle. Thanks, Nastasha!
  • Disgaea 2 has the infamous scene where Taro falls into a river. The scene is played over three times before the player can regain control, and two of these are completely unskippable. It was likely to segue dialogue, but it also plays during the Next Chapter skit for almost no reason.
  • Disgaea 5 drones on too long during the cutscenes because of this trope. Party members will constantly parrot or lengthen their questioning when given any topic they don't know about, rather than use emotes or single words to replace many of the extremely simple-worded questions, and some of the flashbacks are a whole minute long when they could have been briefly summarized with plain text in five seconds.
  • In Tales of Symphonia: Dawn of the New World, about 80% of the occurrences of anyone saying or Emil remembering Richter's phrase "courage is the magic that turns dreams into reality" follow with a flashback to when he first said it, despite the fact that it was unusual for a guy like him to say that kind of thing it would be impossible to forget he said it even if you tried. If that wasn't enough, there's usually at least one flashback to a different part of that conversation (or the just-after one where you meet Marta) every half an hour of gameplay.

    Emil and Marta also keep a diary where they take turns to write every little bit of information involving the story, details of the dialogues included; Marta's parts are in pink while Emil's are in blue. However reading the entries is optional and it's a good way to remind what happened to a player who took a break of several months.
  • Sigma Star Saga, like Metal Gear, makes heavy use of Parrot Exposition, but unlike in Metal Gear, it's not a character trait. Rather, Recker does it when and only when you're told at the end of an Infodump that advancing the plot will require an action other than killing things. Since he usually uses similar words to the previous speaker, it's not a case of Viewers Are Morons, but since skipping dialogue skips partway through a conversation rather than skipping the entire thing, and since Recker's repetition is always the first thing said after a skip, it apparently caters to those who consider the plot irrelevant.
  • In Eternal Sonata, Claves and Jazz have a talk about a traitor in the group. Immediately after, Claves, the traitor, is killed by Rondo for not pinning the blame on another member. It would be somewhat sad if Claves didn't have a 20-minute musing on her life, including a flashback to the scene with Jazz that happened about 2 minutes ago.
  • Mostly averted by Sonic Adventure 2. You get a very stylish scrolling text segment explaining what's going on in the plot at the time if you save your game, quit, and come back later. This prevents them from having to explain anything in the cutscenes again.
  • Originally having been made for the Nintendo 3DS where it makes sense for such recaps if players ever put the game down, Resident Evil: Revelations has "Previously On" segments at the beginning of every single chapter that recap everything leading up to the probable Cliffhanger that the next chapter then starts off from (if the narrative doesn't swap to another character, anyway). When the game got an Updated Re-release for consoles, however, this was not mended at all despite the systems owing to longer play sessions. Thankfully they're skippable.
  • The Legend of Zelda:
    • For The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess, it seems like Nintendo thought players would be incapable of remembering the values of the different colored rupees, since every time you turn the game on, the first time you pick up any given color of rupee except green, the game will act like it's your first one of that color ever and tell you the value of it. However, it's actually the game that has the memory of a goldfish. There was a bit of code accidentally left out of the game that caused the flags for the rupee messages to not save when the game did, so when you turn the game off, it "forgets" that it ever told you what the rupees were worth, and does so again. It's possible to hack your save file to add the missing code and fix the problem, and it's fixed in the Wii U Updated Re-release as well.
    • The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword doesn't have this problem with rupees, but it does with insects and collectibles. And infuriatingly shows the item going into your inventory every time. The HD remaster thankfully only shows the description the first time you get the item in question, except for Gratitude Crystals.
  • Star Control II averts this and demonstrates why it exists. Fortunately, most of the background exposition can be reviewed. Unfortunately, some very vital information can't be, including homeworld coordinates and the location of the final boss. You are advised to take notes.
  • The Nancy Drew games are known for this whenever Nancy calls someone back home. Sometimes you can avoid calling the stock characters like Ned, Bess, or George, but there are a few games where you can't move forward without their assistance. So if you've been holding off on calling and suddenly have no choice, what follows is a Character Filibuster where Nancy recaps every. Single. Event. Thus. Far. Try to have a book or some knitting handy when you play.
  • EXA_PICO:
    • Ar tonelico: Melody of Elemia. After the hero crashes his airship, he recounts how he crashed his airship, then goes into a flashback of the events of getting to the airship and the dialogue around it, which happened a minute ago. Additionally, when they run into the airship bay, he exclaims "This... is the airship!" as though he's surprised to find it there. Maybe it's the hero who's a goldfish...
    • Ar tonelico II: Melody of Metafalica has a couple of series of flashbacks that end with one of these. Particularly egregious when Cocona tells you to Dive into her to stop Hibernation, causing a series of flashbacks that end with one of Cocona telling you to Dive into her to stop Hibernation causing a series of flashbacks... Justified though, as you're watching the remains of her memories as her mind is slowly being erased.
  • Fire Emblem usually averts this, not even bothering to show recaps of things that happened hours ago, even when they're set up to happen in the story. However, that doesn't stop Radiant Dawn from having a somewhat lengthy flashback to a scene that happened one chapter ago near the end of Part I. The chapter in between is also a filler chapter.
  • The Walking Dead and The Wolf Among Us may be examples of this depending on how you play them. They're episodic titles, with a new bite sized episode getting released every two months or so. Because the chances are you'll have forgotten some of the plot points by the time you pick up a new episode, each segment opens with a flashback not unlike the ones you see at the start of TV shows. However, the kicker comes when you start playing episodes back to back, meaning each episode opens with a lengthy segment on what you just did a few minutes ago.
  • Averted with Game Dev Story: If you release too many games with the same genre and type, your fanbase will notice and stop buying your games.
  • At times, Shin Megami Tensei IV: Apocalypse seems more concerned with making sure that the players don't get lost as opposed to telling a narrative with characters and the game itself repeating obvious facts that, in some cases, where elaborated on mere three sentences prior.
  • Eternal Darkness has reminders about the game's magickal Elemental Rock-Paper-Scissors built into the scenery in nearly every chapter. Helpful when you're playing as Anthony (the first character to practice spellcasting); a bit on the condescending side by the time you're playing as Michael Edwards (the character directly preceding the end of the game).
  • Rise of the Tomb Raider's tutorial messages never let up. You could be in The Very Definitely Final Dungeon and the game will still refuse to believe that your dumb goldfish ass can remember what button makes arrows on your own. You learn how to make arrows in the very first area, by the way.
  • The Last Guardian, like Rise of the Tomb Raider above, also keeps the contextual control tips throughout the entire length of the game. They're actually somewhat helpful because the game's controls are rather unorthodox, but of course the better solution would have been to not have confusing controls in the first place!
  • Played With in God of War (2018). Whenever the main characters wonder how to defeat the antagonist (who can't be physically harmed), one of them always reminds the others that "Baldur is blessed with invulnerability to all threats, physical or magical". Eventually the characters themselves realize the guy is repeating himself and it turns out it's the result of magically induced amnesia and mental blocks, triggered by the mere idea of Baldur having a weakness. Basically, the guy doing the exposition is the goldfish!

    Visual Novels 
  • The Ace Attorney series plays this straight a lot, but subversions are not unheard of either. The games flash back to previous scenes many times, sometimes even to scenes from only minutes ago. However, it also expects the player to remember facts from quite a bit ago. Many contradictions require you to present evidence that doesn't have contradictory text/content in the evidence screen information. Rather you have to remember a specific detail that was stated about the evidence beforehand, yet that's not been put into the evidence information.
    • Notable straight plays:
      • Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney has Lamiroir's performance and the scene with the victim's last words replayed near a dozen of times, with the repeats sometimes less than a minute apart! You could argue that it's done for dramatic effect, but even so, it can pretty easily get annoying.
      • Spirit of Justice has an over-the-top example where Phoenix recalls Nahyuta saying X earlier followed by a brief flashback to Nahyuta saying X.
    • Subversions:
      • At the end of case 2-4, you must use the available evidence to take down Matt Engarde while still saving Maya at the same time. You only get one change to present one piece of evidence and there is only one piece of evidence that can do this, plus you are given no help or hints as to what to do. Anyone who can't remember that De Killer, the assassin who has kidnapped Maya, said his bond of trust is one of the keys to his operations with clients, as well as the fact that Matt Engarde stated in a brief encounter that the video tape he had was his "insurance" against De Killer is well and truly screwed at this point.
      • Case 1-4 features a newspaper article about a giant monster that has been reported spotted in a lake. At one point you must present this article to prove that a witness was at said lake looking for the monster. The proof is that the article says the monster made a "BANG!" noise and that the witnesses camera was set to respond to loud bangs. This fact is however not stated in the evidence screen so it is something that the player must remember on their own.
      • While possible to guess solely through the process of elimination, In 3-5, the correct reason to suspect the killer involves remembering that his mask glows red in the dark, which is only really shown through a brief gag two cases prior.
  • Danganronpa:
    • In Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc, flashbacks to not even a full scene ago happen fairly often, with one flashback showing something that happened roughly thirty seconds beforehand. In particular, flashbacks to the scene where Kyoko first informs Makoto of Mukuro's existence happen on a near-constant basis during Chapter 5.
    • During the second trial of Danganronpa 2: Goodbye Despair, the game once flashes back to something Fuyuhiko said earlier in the trial. It's a fairly significant line, but it seems that the game has no faith in the players' ability to remember something Fuyuhiko said less than an hour ago.

    Web Animation 
  • Homestar Runner:
    • The Strong Bad Email "accent," on the DVD:
      Strong Bad: Here's my accent a few years ago.
      Flashback Strong Bad: Do joo take of jor face and hands before joo go to bed?
      Strong Bad: Here's my accent a few seconds ago.
      Flashback Strong Bad: Here's my accent a few years ago.
    • Also, the email "trevor the vampire", which ends with a flashback memorial in honor of Trevor, who Strong Bad only met 30 seconds ago.

    Web Comics 

    Web Original 
  • Skawo made a counter, the Orly?! (As in a sarcastic "Oh, really?!") Counter points out how much a game does this. Whenever the game tells you something you already know, whether it's because you were already told or it was obvious, the counter goes up by one (for the record the highest count was a 100% Completion for Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door at 619).
  • The Irate Gamer:
    • One video set up a leaking gas pipe, and to make sure we see this, he shows it again and again and again and again to make sure we know there's a leaking gas pipe.
    • In the same episode, he is reviewing the educational Super Mario games in two different timelines. Each time the video switches between the two timelines, Bores reminds us which of the two games he is talking about.
    • The Irate Gamer NEO episode for Kirby's Epic Yarn opens with a Previously on… of clips of him in earlier episodes making remarks about the game being disappointing, and the actual episode opens with him declaring he's going to explain why he thought the game was disappointing.
  • A big offender of this are the countless "The X most Y Zs" countdowns found on YouTube. When you finally reach number 2: "Here's a recap of what you've seen so far!", fifteen minutes is often not even the case with the standard 10-minute limit on uploads.

    Western Animation 
  • Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog
    • Lampshaded in the episode, "Over the Hill Hero". After finally catching Sonic, Dr. Robotnik exclaims that Mobius is his. HIS! His! ALL HIS! Then, after the commercial break, he announces "Mobius is mine! MINE!" Then, he pauses, scratches his chin, and wonders "Did I say that already?"
    • The Chaos Emerald four-parter had Sonic getting a new time travel gizmo in each part, and is told each time that they'll "enable him to circle the planet at the speed of light and enter the time warp". A little more grating in the sense that the audio for the line was recycled for the other episodes. This YouTube Poop flat out shows it (skip to 1:04)
  • Dora the Explorer, hence using Fake Interactivity. Dora even acts like she didn't hear the viewer at some points ("Do you see it?...Where?" "Say arriba!...Louder!"); it's to the point a blue cursor has to click on the correct item so she sees it. This got toned down in the newer seasons.
  • It's a fairly common joke in comedy cartoons in the '80s and '90s to have a character wondering "didn't I say that already?", especially since so many serious cartoons play it straight, repeating the last scene you saw before the commercial break. (This is extra funny on releases with no commercials.)
  • Clerks: The Animated Series
    • The very second episode does this with its first episode. Though that's the entire point.
    • And parodied it in the first episode. "Last time on Clerks: *cue test pattern* "
  • The Transformers episode "Auto-Bop" has a flashback to something that happened less than a minute before.
  • Parodied in a Family Guy flashback: after Peter rejects a free boat in favor of a Mystery Box, he responds to Lois' complaint thus:
    Peter: Come on Lois, you're acting like this is the first time I've ever done something stupid. Remember the time I was supposed to get that boat?
    (cue flashback to Peter choosing the box over the boat)
    Lois: Peter, that happened ten minutes ago.
And closer to fifteen seconds in the show itself. Not to mention that of course that was the exact thing they were arguing about. Making this also an in-universe example for Peter.
  • Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (1987) has an episode once where it flashes back to a scientist explaining what his invention did, then he broke the fourth wall and said he hates flashbacks as much as the viewer.
  • South Park:
    • The reality TV version was parodied on the "Crippled Summer" episode, with title cards appearing constantly explaining things that had just happened. This includes explaining the Looney Tunes-style humour of the B-plot in great detail.
      "Mimsy was supposed to blow the shark mating whistle while he was still in the water. There appears to have been a fundamental misunderstanding."
    • In-Universe in the Multi-Part Episode "Cartoon Wars" with Family Guy, which always mentioned what's happening in the actual plot after their signature cutaways.
      Lois: Peter, I can't believe you invited your old high-school sweetheart over for dinner.
      Peter: You think that's bad? Remember when I auditioned to be David Hasselhoff's car?
      (Insert Cutaway Gag here.)
      Chris: Yeah. But Dad, why would you invite an ex-girlfriend to dinner?
      Stewie: Perhaps he wants to make our mother nervous.
      Peter: Nervous? Like when I had to sell pancakes to the school soccer captain?
      (Insert Cutaway Gag here.)
      Lois: But Peter, I don't wanna cook dinner for your ex-girlfriend.
      Peter: Well, maybe we can just have tea.
      Brian: You mean like the time you had tea with Muhammad, the prophet of the Muslim faith?
      (Insert Cutaway Gag here.)
      Peter: Oh boy, was that ever weird. Anyway, I can't believe I invited my old sweetheart to dinner. Huh.
  • The Simpsons...
    • ...apparently has the majority of Springfield being this. In "Krusty Gets Kancelled," Bart turns on the station's camera just as Gabbo is saying that "all the children in Springfield are SOBs", on live television, which, going by Kent Brockman's story, a lot of people were upset by. However, Gabbo ended up still being number one, only because the people's fury was redirected to Kent Brockman for making the exact same gaffe on the air and thus forgot all about Gabbo's use of the word. It didn't help that Brockman was a huge hypocrite, condemning Gabbo for using the term at all and then, two seconds later, muttering it jokingly under his breath, forgetting that the audience could still hear him.
    • Bart can't remember when his father was a Grammy Award-winning musician with the Be Sharps. (In his defense, he was barely out of diapers at the time, while his sister Lisa was still in them.)
      Homer: It only happened eight years ago!
      Bart: Dad, thanks to television, I can't remember what happened eight minutes ago.
  • Used in the 1990s X-Men: The Animated Series cartoon. Justified originally in that it was a Saturday show. Later on, recaps continued to use the early episode clips, while adding ones from later events. This often resulted in only a breath of time being given to the last two to four weeks combined. They also had post-commercial scene replay, which didn't always mirror what had just happened!
  • The Avengers: Earth's Mightiest Heroes got pretty bad at this during its second season. The redone opening is way more expository, the previews go out of their way to remind viewers of the simplest facts from previous episodes and the first ten minutes are a recap of the team to the person who most wouldn't need it.
  • In the "Wanted: Wade" episode of U.S. Acres, before "What Harm Can It Do?" starts, a frame showing Wade heads spinning around plays. It plays again right after the song ends.
  • Despite airing sequentially, the two-parter episodes of My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic begin with a recap of the previous episode.
  • The Hub's cut of My Little Pony: Equestria Girls plays the scene where Twilight screams upon finding out she is a human twice, once before a commercial break and once after a commercial break.
  • In-universe example in Magic Adventures of Mumfie. In the "Sparks In The Dark" episode, Electric Eel says she hates pirates because they stuff them in jam jars. She repeats the same thing when approaching their ship a few minutes later.
  • SpongeBob SquarePants:
    • In "Sea-Man Sponge Haters Club", SpongeBob mentions "my home" and then the episode cuts away to an exterior shot of his house before returning to the scene. Its only purpose seems to be reminding the viewer what his house looks like, even though not only is it in the theme song, the opening of the episode has him leaving it.
    • The first seven minutes of "We Heart Hoops" are mainly characters restating plot points. For example, after the viewer is introduced to Ajax on the TV show, SpongeBob sees him a couple minutes later and asks "Ajax? Isn't he that mean kid from the Kelpbed Kids show?" Then the episode shows a cut-in of kid Ajax alongside present day Ajax.

    Real Life 
  • Averted, ironically enough, for actual goldfish. MythBusters proved this trope busted.
  • Basic essay writing with a thesis-introduction-body-conclusion format, especially at the high school level. Three of those are normally used to say what the paper is about. As Dale Carnegie put it — "Tell the audience what you're going to say, say it; then tell them what you've said."
  • This is actually used, in a much more sensible format, in writing scientific papers. The abstract, which is equivalent to a thesis, is what people reading through papers read to decide if they do care and often the part you get for absolutely free when looking through a search, and the conclusion is often what will be looked for if the reader is not, in fact, as interested in the 'how' as the 'what' of the experiment you're talking about. For example, if you're only after how long a goldfish's memory is, you are likely to skip entirely the procedure and the details of the results in favor of the conclusion which gives you the nice, short version of the answer and what this actually means.
  • Students are often told by teachers when writing other essays (especially for arts and humanities such as History or English Literature) to link back every point they make to the original question - essentially, the exam board is made out to be a collective of goldfish.
  • Newspaper and magazine writers will often re-introduce a character in a story every few paragraphs, just to remind readers who they are. Even TV news does this a fair bit, particularly on longer stories. For example, on first reference, "Joe Hackenmueller, who works at the hospital, says he saw the killer escape." Then a couple references to "Hackenmueller said..." or "Hackenmueller did..." followed by "Hackenmueller, the hospital worker..."
  • It's easier to list political ads that don't rely on this trope to appeal to the masses. Though that's probably more to use the "repeat it enough and they'll believe it" theory, than because they thought the viewers forgot it.
  • Standard advice for seminary students on giving a sermon: "Tell 'em what you're gonna tell 'em. Tell 'em. Then tell 'em what you told 'em."
  • Although short-term memory loss is often associated with conditions like dementia and Alzheimer's in elderly people, there are certain conditions that can occur even in younger people involving short-term memory loss. Some people have suffered it as a result of trauma or a stroke, they literally forget things immediately after ceasing to think of them and must write everything down to be able to do daily tasks or things like taking a bus or going someplace, and rely on a caregiver for help. Interestingly, long-term memories, things from before the trauma, may not always be affected, though it can.
    • This is called anterograde amnesia, problems forming new memories. In some cases, it's particularly bad.
    • Despite anterograde amnesia being colloquially called short-term memory loss, actual short-term memory is usually unaffected in people with the disorder. Actual short-term memory loss is a symptom of numerous disorders though, where while not gone it's restricted beyond what most people have. People with this condition may need to be reminded of things frequently not because their short-term memory span was exceeded (EVERYONE'S short term memory span would have been exceeded at that point), but as a consequence of their short term memory being shorter they may be more likely to have failed to have encoded something they were exposed to into long-term memory.
  • The trope is however partially excused by the fact that, while not having impaired memory, our brain has a habit of glossing over information and never actually storing it as memory if it doesn't see as vital. It's called selective attention, and you might have already seen the most famous example. Thus, while some play this trope insultingly straight, it's not inherently negative or useless.
  • Human memory in general is far more feeble than most people think. Most people can't hold more than about seven items (digits, letters, words, etc) in short term memory. In addition, try to visualize a familiar place (such as your bedroom) where you currently aren't. While you can probably can picture the major objects (such as furniture) and what they look like, can you remember, for example, what all the books on the top shelf of your bookshelf are? Not bloody likely.

This was an article about treating viewers like they have the memory of a goldfish which lasts about three seconds.

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