The Addams Family: Several episodes have Manchild Gomez gleefully playing with his toy train set, which inevitably end in him blowing up the locomotives or having them crash into each other. Whenever this happens, a close-up of the trains' impact is shown. Unfortunately, that footage is taken from the first episode, "The Addams Family Goes to School," when a truant officer is visiting the family, and reused in every other instance. As such, it's possible to see two people in the background as the toys explode, even when Gomez is supposed to be the only person in the room.
Frequently parodied in All Aussie Adventures. Most obviously, there's a Running Gag where Russell goes to shake someone's hand, and they cut to a closeup of two obviously different hands shaking. There are also numerous driving shots that were obviously filmed in a different state to the rest of the episode.
The series Arthur C. Clarke's Mysterious World misused film of a Gemini/Titan space launch in a story on an unmanned Mariner mission to Mars.
Stock Starfury launch footage on Babylon 5 continued to show Sinclair's fighter launching well after he had left the show.
Possibly justified in that the fighter was one assigned to the station, and would have been left behind when Sinclair transferred out, although its next pilot would presumably have had the chance to paint different nose art on it.
In the same spirit, a stock CGI model once slipped past them. A shot from the fourth season episode "No Surrender, No Retreat" showed an Earth Alliance warship firing on civilian transports. Since the scene was originally not going to include a closeup of the destroyer, it was given the first set of markings available — those of the "good guy" Agamemnon. Unfortunately, the shot was reframed and the ship's ID was clearly visible in the final version. (This was fixed in later showings; the ship was re-marked as the Pollux.)
Beetleborgs, as a Saban toku adaptation, naturally suffered from this. Most obviously in season 1 with the trio's Sonic Lasers; the US footage had them in a red-and-purple coloration (matching the US toy, which had the color scheme for safety reasons), but the Japanese footage would have it as a realistic-looking black-and-silver coloration. Similar issues cropped up with the A Vs, which would be huge in the Japanese model-based stock footage, but not so much when in US CGI form. (However, in a Fridge Brilliance moment, the issues could easily be explained as being Flabber's magic duplicating the inconsistencies of the in-universe Beetleborgs comic book; it'd be expected for the artist not to draw everything looking the same issue after issue.)
Battlestar Galactica (1978) was bad about this as well. There are 4 shots of Galactica's guns destroying Cylons, about 6 shots of Vipers destroying Cylons, and about 4 shots of Cylons destroying Vipers. This includes the mirror image shots. No wonder Cylons die so easily. They always attack the exact same way. It is blatantly noticeable in same fight scenes in the same episodes.
The Baywatch episode "Lover's Cover" reused footage of a car plunging into the ocean from the Season 2 episode "If Looks Could Kill." The original episode was about a murderer who had a dead guy in her backseat, which means the wrapped up corpse is consequently visible in the "Lover's Cove" scene that contains the recycled shots.
On The Brady Bunch the parents drove Bobby to an ice cream eating contest. They left in a blue convertible and came back in a brown station wagon. Must've been a slow news week, because this managed to get into the National Enquirer.
Buck Rogers in the 25th Century has a particularly noticeable example whenever fighter craft are shown coming into the landing bays on Earth. The series only has two stock-footage shots; one of a single fighter landing, and one of two fighters side-by-side escorting Buck's 20th-century space shuttle (from the pilot episode). Whenever more than one fighter craft is supposed to be landing, they try to cut away from the latter shot before Buck's shuttle is clearly recognizeable on-screen, but don't always succeed.
CSI: NY: "Officer Blue" features a mounted officer's horse having a sniper bullet lodged in its neck. An MRI is taken to determine its exact location. In order to save money AND not traumatize the animal in the episode, stock footage of a horse having the procedure is shown. However, the officer's horse has a deep black coat, while the one shown having the MRI is clearly brown.
In the episode of Dark Matters: Twisted But True about Dr. James Van Allen, the Stock Footage shot of a rocket launch used to represent the Starfish Prime exoatmospheric nuclear test is accompanied by audio (overlapped by the narrator's dialogue, yet still quite coherent) that mentions the International Space Station. Starfish Prime took place in 1962; the first component of the ISS went into orbit in 1998.
In "The Romans", Ian is taken to fight in the arena, and peers out of the bars of his cell to see what it is he's going to fight. What follows is a poorly-edited sequence of lots of different lions in clearly very different zoos, none of which look remotely Roman.
Happens in-universe in "The Space Museum", when the Doctor is hooked up to a mind-reading machine so his captor can find out where his companions are using pictures extracted from his memory. The footage extracted this way is useless because it shows where the companions were when he left them a long while ago, not where they are now. By this time, he's figured out a Psychic Block Defense and so, when pressed harder, the screen starts producing deliberately ridiculous stock footage of sea lions, etcetera.
Originally, "The Time Meddler" included a very poor quality looking shot of the viking ship approaching. The restoration team used a new scan of the stock footage for the DVD, but found that (by going from a multi-generational 16mm TV recording to a 35mm newsreel extract) the restored stock footage looked too high quality. In the end, artificial grain and softness was added to make the stock footage look like the rest of the episode.
Subverted in "The Ark", which starts with a bunch of shots of live animals framed and filmed in a way to resemble stock footage, having Dodo point out an elephant by cutting between a shot of the elephant alone in the frame and Dodo looking at it from the reverse angle... and then walking forward, into the frame with the elephant and touching it.
In "The War Machines", WOTAN orders his slaves to make a machine. Splice in stock footage of welders, in completely different lighting, and who (even with the masks on) look absolutely nothing like the slaves.
Subverted in "Doctor Who and the Silurians". We're shown footage of a helicopter which cuts back to soldiers travelling about on the hills. Obvious stock footage... until we cut back to the helicopter and we realise it has UNIT written on the side. And then it swerves past the hillside, appearing in the same shot with an actor, as if to say 'ha, look, we CAN afford it'.
In the 1970s serial "Revenge of the Cybermen", the launch of a missile on an alien planet is represented by stock footage of a NASA rocket launch, with the rocket's official markings in English clearly visible. This case became far more amusing a decade later, in that it's the same stock footage that early MTV used in its hourly station identification clips, which video-loving American viewers of a certain age have seen hundreds if not thousands of times.
It gets even worse when you consider that the rocket in the footage is a Saturn V, quite possibly the most famous rocket ever built, best known for launching the Apollo missions to the Moon. While this enormous rocket was certainly imposing, it was never even remotely in consideration for use as a missile.
"Turn Left" is set in a crapsack alternate timeline where the Doctor died because he never met Donna. The episode goes through The Stations of the Canon about various present-day episodes. When it gets to this timeline's version of the Adipose incident from "Partners in Crime", footage from the episode of the Adipose marching through the streets of London is obviously recycled in a TV news bulletin... despite the alternate version having occurred in the US due to London having been destroyed at this point.
"The Name of the Doctor" cuts between stock footage of the Second Doctor and scenes of him recorded with a double from behind. The double doesn't even try to match his movement to the stock footage, especially with the distinctive running style of the character in the footage.
The Fifth Doctor's hair changes completely in colour, texture and style from the behind shot to the face shot (which had his face pasted onto the body of a double, covering up the ridiculously unconvincing wig).
Even The Movie in 1965, Dr. Who and the Daleks, could not escape this despite being in an entirely different continuity. In the final scene, Ian opens the Tardis (as distinct from the TARDIS from the TV series) door to reveal that instead of being back in The '60s, they're in the path of advancing legionaries in Ancient Rome. The dodgy Chroma Key and total lack of reaction from the legionaries to a blue box magically appearing out of thin air in front of them would be awkward enough, but the most impressive part is that the footage doesn't match the angle of the Tardis interior - Ian and the Tardis door are shot head-on, but the legionaries are shot from below, making it look like either the Tardis is now 18 inches tall or the next adventure would have been Dr Who and the Attack of the Giant Romans if it hadn't been Daleks' Invasion Earth: 2150 A.D..
A Running Gag in The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air has Jazz getting thrown out of the house. The footage of the act in question is always the same, but they've avoided this trope by having Jazz wear the same shirt in scenes where he's about to get thrown out.
Eleventh Hour would use stock footage of a hospital whenever one featured in an episode. Fair enough, but, more often than not, the hospital in question was Kingdom Hospital...
Because a lot of the flight scenes on The Greatest American Hero reused shots from older episodes, Ralph's hair length would sometimes inexplicably change when he started flying.
How I Met Your Mother: A brief Establishing Shot in the Season 6 episode "Baby Talk" ostensibly shows Marshall's old high school in Minnesota, but the flag flying outside is clearly Quebec's.
A common situation on I Dream of Jeannie, where the rocket shown on the pad would be different from the rocket later shown lifting off, which was not the same as the rocket seen in the sky. None of the three would match the capsule shown in orbit.
An episode of Knight Rider featured KITT'sEvil Twin KARR being forced off a cliff; the footage used for this was lifted from the 1977 Horror film The Car featuring a vehicle which does not even begin to resemble a Trans Am. At least it was black... The show also tended to reuse footage from previous episodes in places that didn't make much sense. In the same episode with KARR, a shot that was supposed to show KARR breaking into some building is obviously KITT with silver star decals from a previous episode stuck on him.
The title hero was based on Kamen Rider BLACK RX, but some scenes taken from Kamen Rider ZO and Kamen Rider J had the suit noticeably change. How? Well, Black RX's suit was mostly green, but had lots of black too. ZO and J's are both entirely green. Noticeably barely begins to cover this.
Also, due to some crossed wires when editing out Riderman, when the former Riders (Masked Rider Warriors here) introduced themselves, all but ZX gave the wrong names, leading to the fandom's "I AM AMAZON" meme, where "Amazon" was actually Skyrider.
Even Kamen Rider Dragon Knight isn't completely immune. The differences between Kamen Rider Ryuki's Alternative and Alternative Zero are extremely minor, but they're there. The Advent Master has been known to switch back and forth.
It's also pretty obvious when KRDK switches from American footage to Japanese footage, since the early-2000s KR series, including Kamen Rider Ryuki (this show's basis) had this weird videotape-esque filter over the image.
Retroactive example. When the ship returns in Series VIII, it has a different design which is alluded to by the characters. The brief appearance at the end of Series VII (a few seconds of ship footage from which were repeated in Series VIII) used stock footage of the model ship that was filmed during series 1 and 2.
In "Meltdown", footage from Gappa, The Colossal Beast is used to represent waxwork dinosaurs, which prompts:
Kryten: I can't tell you how feeble and improbable those creatures were, sir. I've seen more convincing dinosaurs given away free with a packet of Wheaty Flakes.
Saturday Night Live has a potentially invoked example regarding their "The Rock Obama" sketches. When Barack ObamaHulks out into The Rock, the Transformation Sequence shows his shirt and his shoes tearing open. However, later sketches show The Rock Obama wearing a torn shirt, but seemingly un-torn shoes. After Jay Pharaoh replaced Fred Armisen in the role of Barack, the sketches also have him wear a dress jacket that disappears when the transformation begins.
Star Trek: The Original Series uses the same shuttlecraft footage every time. This is most egregious in "Let That Be Your Last Battlefield", when the shuttlecraft stolen from a Starbase bears the ID number "1701/7". That is, rather than coming from a Starbase, it is a shuttlecraft of NCC-1701, the Enterprise itself! Either that, or every Federation shuttlecraft is the Galileo.
Star Trek: Deep Space Nine uses this on occasion during the Dominion War arc, being cheaper to reuse old battle footage than produce new footage for each battle. Sometimes they alter and re-render the footage: for example, several shots in "Call to Arms" reuse clips from "The Way of the Warrior" with Cardassian Hideki-class ships or Jem'Hadar attack ships swapped in for Klingon birds-of-prey. However, after the USS Defiant is destroyed and replaced near the end of the series, the new Defiant sports the previous ship's registry number: Ron Moore said the new Defiant was supposed to be NCC-74205-A rather than NX-74205, but they didn't have the budget to redo every shot featuring the ship for a single episode, even the Grand Finale.
Storm Chasers: A lot of the travel shots of the vehicles are Stock Footage and it starts to get noticeable after a while. In particular, season 4 has a couple of Series Continuity Errors where the Jolly Roger that Sean hangs from TIV2 in episode 7 is clearly visible several episodes before it actually happens.
The Swamp Fox had a huge problem with this. It was often very obvious they were re-using horseback chase scenes from earlier episodes.
The Time Tunnel episode "One Way to the Moon" mixed shots of a real Atlas rocket with scenes lifted from Destination Moon. It didn't even fool a seven-year-old in 1966.
The HBO film Tuskegee Airmen used actual WWII footage filmed from dogfights to represent the characters' own. This wouldn't be so bad, except the footage isn't meant to represent a filmed engagement but a live occurring one, and since WWII film quality wasn't exactly the greatest, the outside cuts and windshield shots of dogfights look unbelievably grainy.
Even for a Saban show made in the 90's, VR Troopers has a surprising amount of Stock Footage Failures:
The footage of Grimlord's palace (and the Metalder footage in general) always looks fuzzier, darker, and more low quality than the rest of the show, making it very obvious when the footage switches from Japanese to American.
Adapting two different Metal Hero shows meant that JB and Katlin never fight with Ryan when battling a monster (outside of battle grid mode). With 92 total episodes, this becomes more and more obvious through the course of the series, resulting in a very disjointed feel to the action.
Due to the limited amount of footage of Grimlord's lair, the amount of soldiers visible in any scene usually fluctuates; sometimes Grimlord would only be addressing the four generals, and the next shot would have the rest of his army suddenly appear.
In the first season, the goons seen in Grimlord's court were all monsters who'd eventually get to be the monster of an episode. Since stock footage was used for some villains' base scenes, previously defeated monsters were often right there to greet Grimlord as he arrived, just like last week... and some would do battle again, with or without their past demises Handwaved. Many monsters were seen multiple times, with his personal favorites kept into the second season. The most egregious example is Air Striker. This helicopter-based monster was sent nearly every episode, destroyed nearly every episode, and always came back for more. Of course, given the fact that they're computer-generated creations, he can simply recreate any monster he likes.
The air battles footage is even more limited, with virtually the same sequence of shots being used for every battle; if you've seen one, you've seen them all.
In "The Great Brain Robbery", when Snowbot is attacking Katlyn and JB with his flamethrower and frost gun, another fighter can be seen next to them (which is the third warrior from Jikuu Senshi Spielban, Helen Lady). Katlin would later get the ability to create a mirror clone of herself, probably written to prevent any more inconsistencies.
In "Three Strikes", the look of the apartment rapidly changes between the Japanese and American footage, with the floor and wall changing colors.
In "Game Over", Despera suddenly becomes a man when fighting Ryan.
Wonder Woman: Fans of Space: 1999 were no doubt left puzzled as to why a future earth city shown in an episode looked like Moonbase Alpha, due to the US show borrowing an establishing shot from the then-still-recent UK-made series. Counts as a fail because in 1977-78, when the episode in question aired, Space: 1999 was still in wide syndication and still a current series.
In one episode of The Substitute (a Nickelodeon show), when talking about the special effect artists' many movie projects, a The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie poster is shown, which is clearly an edited poster made for a Pooh's Adventures project, as shown by the various random characters edited into it. Pointed out here. This was later noticed and the Pooh's Adventure poster got replaced by this actual poster◊ for the film.
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