Today, in the newest Pop Culture Theme Time, I’m asking you what you think was the best true clip show TV episode.
Pop Culture Theme Time is a feature where I put a question to you to see what you think about a particular theme. I might later revisit the theme for a future Drawing Crazy Patterns or Top Five.
In the days before DVDs and streaming, it was often difficult to revisit classic TV moments, and as a result, TV shows would capitalize on that fact by frequently doing clip shows, episodes with framing sequences that led to the use of clips of past episodes. This, of course, was a lot cheaper than doing a fully-new episode. The practice has mostly gone away in the last decade or so, but it still occasionally pops up.
Much more common, though, are PARODIES of the concept, like the iconic “The Simpsons 138th Episode Spectacular” from The Simpsons (that used deleted and alternate scenes mostly) and Community‘s “Paradigms of Human Memory” (which used new scenes, just done in a clip show format, with us seeing the “old” scenes for the first time). I AM NOT LOOKING FOR ANY OF THOSE EXAMPLES. I get it, there are good riffs on the typically boring clip show format, but I want legit clip show episodes, episodes built around legit old clips from episodes.
My pick is The Incredible Hulk Season 4’s “Interview With a Hulk,” where a down-on-his-luck reporter, Emerson Fletcher (played by the great Michael Conrad) tracks down David Banner and forces him to give him an interview, and the interview leads to flashbacks to old episodes. Fletcher and Banner’s life stories are similar, and the episode is filled with some strong pathos. It’s much better than a typical clip show episode.
Okay, so that’s my pick. What’s yours? And again, no “Like a clip show, but not a clip show” examples!
Also, feel free to suggest future Pop Culture Theme Time topics to me at my new, much shorter e-mail, brian@poprefs.com!
Does “The Simpsons 138th Episode Spectacular” count? If so, I choose that. If not I choose the series finales of “Leave It To Beaver” and “The Dick Van Dyke Show.”
I dont know if it really qualifies, but Family Guy’s “Back to the Pilot” was a very clever riff on “Back to the Future”. It showed the original animation style with the more polished, modern style. and showed scenes from a different perspective and the same view.
The short lived but amazing Clerks animated did a clip show as one of its first few episodes.
Far Out Space Nuts’ final episode, “Destination Earth,” has Junior and Barney trying to travel back in time to prevent themselves from accidentally launching themselves into space, and end up reliving scenes from past episodes along the way.
I rather liked the clip show episode of Hercules: The Legendary Journies, with the framing sequence of the various supporting actors from the show playing the production staff of the show itself. (I may not like much of anything Alex Kurtzman has done since Hercules and Xena ended, but he did get to be played by Ted Raimi, so I just can’t dislike him. Is that weird?)
The series finale of Boy Meets World was a greatest hits of old clips showing how much the characters had grown throughout the series and how much they all meant to each other. Other series finales also use a lot of clips, but Boy Meets World is the one that made me the most emotional when watching
FRASIER had a few interesting ones, with “Daphne Returns” likely being the best. They show clips from prior episodes with the set up as it being a therapy session between Niles and Frasier where they do commentary on the memories.
GARGOYLES had an interesting one in “Vendettas,” where clips of a random background character are spliced together to reveal the fate of Vinnie Grigori, a dude who happened to be in the background of many Gargoyles episodes who has decided to get revenge since he thinks he’s suffered deliberate ills.