Overused Plots in Movies and TV

[Beauregard]

Maybe a play that Zoe is putting on, "Rocko Horror Picture Show"?

 

[Super Scooter]

HA! nice.

"Look! See? Rocko's already got his dress picked out."

 

[StreetScenes]

I HATE when shows hide the fact that a cast member is pregnant in real life by making the character fat on the TV show.

...or the alternative device, making that character the surrogate mother for someone else. they did that in law & order criminal intent and star trek deep space 9. good for sonia manzano for avoiding this by writing pregnancy into her character.

and i don't think anyone's mentioned the jane austen plot of girl wants attractive guy, is just friends with shy guy. girl gets burned because attractive guy is an idiot, but shy guy is a good friend even though she rejected him, so they end up together. (note: shy guy must also be played by an attractive guy...like colin firth. put him in a bad sweater and pretend that means nobody notices his dashing good looks...)

 

[APRena]

I don't know if it's been mentioned, but TV Tropes has a lot of them listed and include examples of EVERYTHING in the universe to have used it. (plots, character types and pretty much everthing. Quite often hilarious.)

 

[Drtooth]

I'm sure someone already mentioned amnesia... but I think I should bring it up in case anyone forgets.




AH SAY, That's a JOKE, son!

 

[D'Snowth]

If there's one excuse behind why amnesia episodes are done, it's because of "budget problems".

"We ran out of money, and couldn't afford to shoot another complete episode, so we did an amnesia episode with flashbacks of previous episodes."

 

[Drtooth]

Clip shows don't ALWAYS need the amnesia excuse to stretch the budget farther. They can be watching home movies, or randomly recounting old events for no reason.

I HATE clip shows with a passion. Only time someone actually did something fun with it was when they had to do 2 clip shows at the second season of Mighty Mouse: The New Adventures. This time, they redubbed clips and made Mighty Mouse look like a bad guy. Then there was the one where they actually were watching home movies and commenting on them, even leading to a hair to be stuck on the camera lens... to which they super imposed a live action silhouette of hands grabbing at the hair.

You know what they had to do the previous season? Use actual clips of old Terrytoons. And 2 times they had to do very bad music videos that seemed alien to the whacked out humor of the show. But then they had one where the footage of old cartoons is cut up viciously, and Scrappy (not Scrappy Doo.. Mighty Mouse Scrappy... Good Scrappy) commented on them. My favorite line was "How come Farmer Al Falfa always looks so guilty?"

If clip shows did something CLEVER like the MMTNA staff did, then I wouldn't complain. Even the Simpsons writers can't do anything that clever with the footage. Just redub the footage and MST3K the heck out of it. That would keep me from changing the channel.

 

[D'Snowth]

Clip shows don't ALWAYS need the amnesia excuse to stretch the budget farther.

Well, there's a difference between clip shows and amnesia episodes that feature flashbacks, but most of the time, budget problems ARE an excuse for that.

I HATE clip shows with a passion.

Really? I like them myself, but then again, I like reflecting a lot.

 

[Drtooth]

Clip shows seem to be for people too lazy to see the reruns. All I can say. Do something clever with the clips if you're gonna make us sit through the same stuff we've already seen.

I DO however like fake clip shows that have clips of episodes that didn't really happen. Powerpuff Girls and Sam and Max did a wonderful spin on this. That's something I wouldn't mind people using over and over.

 

[dwmckim]

Dinosaurs actually had intertaining clips shows...they actually were some of the series' highlights because of the fun ways they presented them.

And One Life to Live typically does a clip show when they have a major anniversary or landmark (like episode 10,000) and they're always well done (daytime soaps are a little different since there are so many shows a year and are almost never reran while presenting a continuing story, older clips are often VERY appreciated by its viewers). My favorite would probably be a tie between the 25th anniversary when Megan was in the hospital dying of lupus and she asked her friends and family visited her in the hospital to tell them stories about their pasts (she grew up not knowing her mother's side of the family) and the 30th anniversary when the show's two historical rivals, Viki and Dorian accidentally get locked in a wine cellar and hash out the various parts of their decades long feud.

Another great one was when the Buchanan patriarch, Asa was presumed dead (he wasn't at that time; the 10,000th episode was centered around his actual death). Asa Buchanan i believe holds the record for most marriages of any soap character so all his living ex-wives were at his funeral and sharing memories. Not only was that a great set-up for clips but the best one was Blair Cramer's flashback. The actress who originated the role was Mia Korf, a dark "dragon lady" type Eurasian (think of an Asian version of Nia Peeples) who was recast a few years later with a blond Caucasian (Kassie DePaive who's played the role for over 15 years since the recast). It was during Mia's tenure as Blair that she was married to Asa so that was the actress in the flashback. When the clip ended and we returned to the present, they showed Kassie's Blair looking at herself in her compact mirror with the most puzzled confused look on her face! Absolutely hysterical in-joke!