Padding / Western Animation

Padding in Western Animation.

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• Some episodes of Animaniacs do this. Usually it's near the end of the episode, with the various short subjects (one episode had several "Good Idea Bad Idea" segments appearing in a row). A couple or so episodes pad out the show at the beginning of the episode with a longer version of the "Newsreel of the Stars" intro. This was even lampshaded by Wakko in one "Wheel of Morality" segment.
• Dino Squad had at least one early episode that featured a character's transformation sequence repeated in full (sometimes backwards) as he repeatedly transformed from a human into some kind of a ceratopsian over and over again.
• Dora the Explorer uses 5-10 second pauses to compensate for the show's Fake Interactivity. However, the special "Dora's Dance to the Rescue" began with a Framing Device of Dora and Boots dancing and recalling the episode as a flashback, which was not acknowledged for the rest of the episode; said scene might've been added for a few extra seconds to compensate for the running time for double-length episodes.
• Family Guy:
  • The creators admitted that the vaudeville singers Vern and Johnny were added just to fill out time before commercials, and viewers found them so annoying that they were killed off by Stewie in the episode "Saving Private Brian", with him saying that there'll be no further performances by the duo.
  • The most infamous example was the inclusion of a three-minute Conway Twitty music video in "The Juice is Loose".
  • "The Father, the Son, & the Holy Fonz" includes a very long sequence in which Peter, Brian, and Francis just have a Seinfeldian Conversation badmouthing Madonna. The audio commentary admitted this was done because the episode was short.
  • Then there was the scene from "Jerome is the New Black", where Peter complains that without a Token Black Friend, his gang would be as boring as the London Gentlemen's Club, cueing a cutaway of three Englishmen sitting around clearing their throats that ran for maybe a full minute. At least the Conway Twitty scene had a song.
  • One of the bonus clips after "Brian & Stewie" was a deleted scene from "Business Guy" that was almost as long as the Conway Twitty song, almost as uneventful and repetitive as the London Gentlemen's Club scene, and, oh yeah, ripped wholesale from another source (specifically, the "Blues in Hoss's Flat" pantomime sequence from The Errand Boy).
  • "Ocean's Three and a Half", which aired in the wake of Christian Bale's rant at a Terminator Salvation crewmember going viral, included the audio of the rant with Peter's voice dubbed into it and with a simple animation of a tape player to accompany it. Like the bonus clip from "Brian and Stewie", it too was deleted on all subsequent airings and home releases. Platypus Comix notes on that scene, "the cutaway won't make any sense in a few years, and it was shoved into an episode that already had a three-minute Stewie music video. Even for Family Guy, that's some terrible pacing." The scene can be viewed alongside some other rare TV moments here, though it's missing the dialogue setting it up — in the original airing, while going over his plan to rob the Pewterschmidt mansion of potentially $40 million, Peter says, "Look, I'll be honest with you. My father-in-law has treated me like crap... for 20 years, and it's time for a little payback. I tell you, he's treated me worse than that jerk Christian Bale did." In the wide-release version, after Peter says that it's time for payback, Quagmire speaks up and imagines making an action B-movie with his share of the heist money.
  • Even worse, there was a scene "Something, Something, Something Dark Side" that consisted of about a minute of Peter breathing in and out heavily.
  • The overly long "desert skiff reaction shot" gag from "It's a Trap!"
    Judge Smails: Well, we're waiting!
  • Similar to the 3-minute Conway Twitty clip note above, "Foreign Affairs" includes David Bowie and Mick Jagger's music video of "Dancing in the Street" shown in its entirety, introduced cutaway-style by Peter, who claims it's "the gayest music video of all time." Not an animated version of the video, just the music video itself.
    • The same episode also includes an Overly Long Gag cutaway that consists entirely of Joe singing the American Dad! theme song in order to revisit the already not particularly funny gag surrounding how Joe bears resemblance to American Dad lead character Stan Smith.
  • Peter vs the Chicken, especially the later ones that go on for 4 to 6 minutes long.
  • The episode "Wasted Talent" has Peter trip on the sidewalk and hurt his knee, causing him to hold it in pain and loudly wince with labored gasps as he attempts to tough it out for almost 30 seconds. This gets mirrored in "FOX-y Lady" where Lois goes through the same gag, but winds up injuring her boobs.
  • A gag from "Baby, You Knock Me Out" had a scene where Peter gets a birthday card from Cleveland where he records his voice, but apparently got into a run-in with an officer. This was mainly used to save on animation and time. In fact Peter blinked his eyes once during the whole scene.
  • Some of the songs are much longer than they need to be to fill in time as well, like "Mr. Booze" and the football song from "Patriot Games."
  • "Ratings Guy" features a Cutaway Gag of Peter as a voice on NPR with a still shot of a radio for a full minute.
• The Fairly OddParents!:
  • "Country Clubbed" has two subplots: one of Cosmo fighting a gopher, and another of Wanda and Sparky switching bodies. These feel like padding for the already thin main plot, and the latter isn't even resolved by the end of the episode.
  • Abra-Catastrophe! has the whole sequence with Bippy's wish. The real conflict of the special is between Crocker and Timmy, and so the whole Planet of the Apes (1968) parody does nothing but stretch it out to movie-length, and is undone without any lasting effect. All it really does is get Crocker closer to the muffin, which would have happened anyway because he was already in the cafeteria. That said, the sequence does establish that the muffin can do anything, and foreshadows Crocker's own world conquest.
• The latter half of the first season of Gormiti: The Lords of Nature Return extended the already kinda long Transformation Sequences by inserting random Stock Footage of the characters using their special attacks at the end of each of them.
• Kamp Koral:
  • "Helter Shelter" has three Overly Long Gags of the characters crying and a random scene near the start of them acting like cavemen, which goes on for way too long. It takes over half of the episode's runtime for the plot to start.
  • "Hats Off to Space" has a lengthy scene of SpongeBob and Patrick messing around in anti-gravity after the ship takes off. According to one of the staff members, the scene was added in during the editing process because the episode ran a minute short.
• Kevin Spencer:
  • "Hogtown Hogwild" has Kevin thinking about whether or not he should go with his parents to the bus station, which eats up 36 seconds. During which Percy and Anastasia are barely even moving.
  • "Operators Are Standing By" has its musical number, which goes on for 48 seconds seemingly to show Kevin's squeegee skills.
  • "Quest" has a scene in the opening where Kevin needs to steal Percy's money and smokes, which, from the moment Kevin goes into the living room to when he exits the house, takes 3 minutes and 36 seconds. There's also the scene at the end where Kevin and Allen are waiting for an old man to slip and fall over, which eats up 1 minute and 29 seconds before anything happens. At which point Allen points out a couple days have passed.
  • A lot of Percy and Anastasia's conversations, especially in the later episodes where entire scenes consist of them arguing for a good solid minute or more. "Blow Job" takes a conversation and uses it as the opening to the episode, which goes on for 2 minutes and 36 seconds before the plot even starts.
  • "Die a Lot More and Also Once Again" lampshades this and plays it straight, with their conversation lasting a minute and eight seconds:
    Percy: Jesus, it's like this conversation has no purpose and is just some cheap excuse to fill time.
    Anastasia: Well, why the hell would we do that?
    Percy: I don't know, but I will tell you what I do know. Anytime I gotta do somethin' I don't fuckin' wanna do, you can bet your fat ass some dumb cocksucker somewhere is makin' fuckin' money off it.
• A number of Looney Tunes cartoons pad here and there, despite being fairly short anyway. The "Larriva Eleven" (widely considered the nadir of Looney Tunes as a whole) are most noticeable in this regard - while Wile E. Coyote always orders his tools from ACME, those shorts will actually show him fill out and mail the order form in order to use up time.
• The Magic Key: Something around a third to a half of the length of each episode consists of the educational segments at the beginning and end, which don’t contribute to the plot in any way and honestly aren’t really very interesting.
• The Patrick Star Show, to match the style of Patrick's in-universe Variety Show, sometimes cuts away to random, extended sequences that rarely have anything to do with the main plot.
  • "Lost in Couch" opens with a minute of Patrick watching TV, and then a Parody Commercial takes up time later on.
  • In FitzPatrick, we randomly get a fantasy sequence inside a comic that Patrick reads. "Terror at 20,000 Leagues" notably spends more time on Cutaway Gags to Halloween-themed fare like a zombie brain buffet or a werewolf hair salon than on the actual plot.
• Robot Chicken parodies this in the episode "Help Me".
• Given its dirt-cheap production values, the '60s Canadian TV series Rocket Robin Hood is a good example — to the point that, between the overlong opening sequences, the oft-repeated "character profiles" and the show's annoying habit of recapping, at length, what happened before the last commercial break, any given half-hour episode would probably contain no more than five minutes of original animation.
• An In-Universe example comes from Rocko's Modern Life. Ralph Bighead wanted to get out of his contract with his studio, so he made an episode that just showed a single image of a jar of mayonnaise for the entire run. The episode became a hit.
• Similar to the Dora example, Shimmer and Shine started production with the Extra-Long Episode "The First Wish" (aka "My Secret Genies"). When the episode ended up being the Season 1 finale, it added in a Framing Device of Shimmer and Shine reading a photo album and reminiscing about the time they became Leah's genies, which was not acknowledged for the rest of the episode.
• The Simpsons:
  • The "Rake Scene" in the episode "Cape Feare". The crew even admitted to padding here. It was supposed to be just one rake: the writers decided to loop Bob's "nhrghghrh" over and over and make it about fifteen rakes when they realized they still needed to fill up time. This actually made the scene about ten times funnier than it would've been with just one rake. The longer-than-average couch gag and the inclusion of an Itchy & Scratchy cartoon were also to eat up time. Despite all that, the episode was still running short. Even Sideshow Bob's performing the libretto to H.M.S. Pinafore, one of the episode's signature scenes, was padded with extra visual gags.
  • Couch gags in general are either padded or shrunk depending on whether or not the rest of the episode plus the commercials fill all 1800 seconds of the 30-minute timeslot. The writers quite enjoy this bit of breathing room.
  • The episode "The D'oh-cial Network" contains both a two minute long "Show's Too Short" short at the end of the episode and an unusually long Couch Gag.
  • "A Tree Grows in Springfield" ends with a Simpsonized parody of Logorama.
  • "The Front" ends with the 30-second "The Adventures of Ned Flanders" skit, in order to pad out the episode.
    Theme Song: Hens love roosters, geese love ganders, everyone else loves Ned Flanders!
    Homer: Not me!
    Theme Song: Everyone who counts loves Ned Flanders!
    (organ music)
    Flanders: Knock that off, you two! It's time to go to church!
    Todd: We're not going to church today.
    Flanders: (gasps) What? You give me one good reason!
    Rod: It's Saturday.
    Flanders: Okely-dokely-do!
    Theme Song: Hens love roosters, geese love ganders, everyone else loves Ned Flanders!
  • Lampshaded at the end of "Homer and Apu". After the family hugs Apu, Homer says, "There's still time left. Let's hug Apu again."
  • "Mathelete's Feat" ends with self-admitted filler, featuring the Simpson family as hillbillies playing jugs.
• Sofia the First: The special "Elena and the Secret of Avalor" added a Framing Device where Elena recounts the episode to Naomi when the spin-off ended up airing early before the special premiered, possibly to add up more time for a crossover special.
• Some Tiny Toon Adventures episodes did this. Two noticeable examples come from two episodes animated by Encore Cartoons: "Strange Tales of Weird Science" opens with a Deleted Scene from "The Looney Beginning" with ADR'd dialogue to make it sound like Elmyra's hounding Buster and Babs Bunny is preventing them from getting the episode properly started, and "Hero Hamton" has a few brief bits animated by Kennedy Cartoons that were added later in the episode's production to pad out the length (most notably a brief bit where Hamton jump-ropes with Babs Bunny, and Hamton freaking out and begging Buster and Babs to help him after Monty challenges Hamton to a fight.)
• The Spider-Man cartoon from the 1960s was loaded with lengthy padding shots of Spidey swinging across New York for several minutes at a time, especially in the second and third seasons, where the budget had been cut immensely and the stories were now 21 minutes long instead of two 10 minute episodes. It should be noted that these seasons were made by the same people who did Rocket Robin Hood, mentioned above.
• SpongeBob SquarePants:
  • For example, in "Pet or Pests," SpongeBob is trying to find a new home for a litter of worms, and when he goes to Mrs. Puff's house, he rings the doorbell for about thirty straight seconds. Even after Mrs. Puff answers and tries to ask him why he's visiting, he still rings the doorbell.
  • "Pineapple Fever" features SpongeBob counting off activities that he, Patrick, and Squidward can do now because a storm has knocked out the power. He lists the same activities over and over, even taking several seconds to drag out individual phrases.
    SpongeBob: C'mon Squidward, it'll be fun! While the elements rage outside, we'll snuggle in here and pass the time by playing board games, and playing Tic-Tac-Toe, and drinkin' hot cocoa, and playing tic-tac-toe, and doing jigsaw puzzles, and watchin' TV, and drinkin' hot cocoa, and doing jigsaw puzzles, and playin' board gaaaaames, and drinkin' hot teeeeeeeaaaa...
    Patrick: I thought it was cocoa!
    SpongeBob: Oh, yeah. Hot cocoaaaaaaaaaa... we'll be drinkiiiiiiiiiiiing...
  • Many episodes that take place in the Krusty Krab feature sequences of SpongeBob elaborately preparing Krabby Patties before the episode's actual conflict begins.
  • In "The Masterpiece," there is a sequence of SpongeBob revving up the grill, slicing cheese, opening the restaurant, and Squidward watching a soap opera before Mr. Krabs sees the Sea Chicken Shack commercial that sets the plot in motion. There's then a scene of SpongeBob showing off his spy gadgets to Mr. Krabs, even though he only uses one of them. And then there's a scene of SpongeBob inside the Sea Chicken Shack before getting kicked out and noticing the statue that gives Mr. Krabs an idea to build his own. There's minutes of mundane conversation before Squidward agrees to build the statue. Not helping is that the episode has Overly Long Gags throughout (SpongeBob going "oh!" and raising his hand, Krabs pacing around looking for an artist).
  • In "Penny Foolish", Mr. Krabs watches SpongeBob walk down the street and pick up a penny. Just a few seconds after, he comments, "I can remember it as if it happened a moment ago!", and then we see the exact same scene playing out in his memory.
  • "Kracked Krabs" starts with SpongeBob making fries in a rather long sequence.
  • "The Executive Treatment" starts with Patrick going to the Krusty Krab, Krabs verifying that his money is legit, him waiting in line and hearing about a sandwich, then he and Squidward having a tedious conversation about it. It takes almost four minutes for Patrick to arrive at the office that he spends the rest of the episode in, and the plot is so simple (Patrick wants a popular sandwich that's only for business executives) that it really shouldn't take that long to set up.
  • "The Card" starts with a minute and a half of SpongeBob withdrawing money at the bank. While he does spend it, the scene could easily be cut from the episode without losing any plot, because exactly where SpongeBob gets the money from isn't relevant.
  • "Hide and Then What Happens?" has a lot of filler. It starts with SpongeBob and Patrick just staring and blinking at each other, then multiple demonstrations on how hide-and-seek works.
  • In "Gramma's Secret Recipe", we see Plankton's plan to get the secret formula: dress up as an old lady, ask Krabs for the list of ingredients (so none of them trip up his health conditions), and then take it. This scene proves pointless and irrelevant, as he instead goes straight to SpongeBob's house and pretends to be his grandma so he'll take him to his work station.
  • The "SpongeBob's Runaway Roadtrip" episodes (aka the vacation miniseries) each began with a Forgotten Framing Device of whoever is having the vacation presenting a slideshow of how it went, leading into a Whole Episode Flashback; said scene was never seen again at the end.
  • "SpongeBob You're Fired" has a straight minute of SpongeBob crying, which isn't funny and goes on for way too long.
  • "Captain Pipsqueak" is notable for its overuse of Overly Long Gags: the Robot Mantis destroying instruments, Plankton's Costume-Test Montage, the Terrible Interviewees Montage, Plankton watching Mermaid Man and then cutting back to explain what's happening on it... It takes half the episode for the plot of Plankton joining EVIL to begin.
• The Imagine Spots in Ultimate Spider-Man can come across this way, given that when they're used to give out exposition, the stuff tends to have been explained just a moment ago, and even when Spidey does explain it when it hasn't been explained before, it's sometimes explained afterward in a manner that's much more simple and to the point, making the necessity of the exposition via Imagine Spot questionable. When they're done for humor, they take time away from the episode and in some cases, ruin the pacing due to just how out-of-the-moment they are.
• The Wander over Yonder episode "The Battle Royale" features the villain, Something the So-and-So, hemming and hawing over what to do with the Ring of Invincibility after claiming it. Word of God states that this was literally time filler after the episode came in a minute short during production.
  • An In-Universe example occurs in "The Cartoon" where Lord Hater watches a cartoon about himself and during a scene that features an Overly Long Gag of Cartoon!Hater and Cartoon!Wander dueling each other, Lord Hater lampshades this and the Watchdogs explain that the cartoon ran short and had to pad it out for 15 seconds.
• The Challenge of the Super Friends episode "Conquerors of the Future" begins with the Legion of Doom pretending that they've decided to fight crime instead of committing it. This is completely forgotten when the main plot (the Legion time-travels and conquers future Earth) kicks in.

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