Why do cartoons have "clip shows," what do they accomplish?

S

sweet but sour

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Why do cartoons have clip shows?

Is it because they run out of funding and want to produce a "new" ep cheaply, so they simply make it a clip show without having to produce whole new animation to fill out a season order of 26 eps?

Or do they do it because they feel kids forget what happens in early eps/seasons, so they do it as a "refresher," to bring people up to speed?

Why do clip shows exist?
 
In the case of "The Simpsons", I know FOX ordered the clip shows as a way to get more episodes for less money. Naturally, the writers took every opportunity to make fun of the network's mentality - "Another Simpsons Clip Show" is basically a half-hour "screw you" to the FOX executives who ordered it.
 
Clip shows have nothing to do with "bringing people up to speed" or "networks feeling that kids are forgetting what happens in earlier episodes". The average kid has a better memory than a goldfish. Anyone who's been following a series regularly should have no problem recalling the episodes. Also, the suits don't have that kind of concern for viewers.

Clip shows are enforced by studios (for theatrical shorts) and later by networks solely for the purposes of saving money and filling out episode counts.

That said, I find clip shows to be creatively bankrupt and I have no affection for them, save for the few clever ones that manage to get laughs out of the premise by going meta and poking fun at the sheer cheapness and ridiculousness of them.

This reminds me of something the character Duke Phillips said on The Critic's obligatory clip show: He said something along the lines of, "Why spend money on a new show when we can just run a bunch of old clips?" It should be noted that Duke was generally characterized as the embodiment of soulless capitalism.
 
There was also an episode of "South Park" who spoofed clip shows/flashback episode by telling a different ending of the original clip like Kenny killing Death instead of Kenny being killed by Death and even a clip who spoof Happy Days with Fonzie on his bike jumping a couple of buses and hit Kenny.

Also, some cartoons use the clip show/flashback episode as an ending to the series, the 1967-70 Spider-man did that.
 
Episode 2 of Clerks: TAS also spoofed clip shows, with the characters repeatedly flashing back to the same scene from the first episode or earlier scenes from that current episode or clips from nonexistent episodes.

Dante: "Why are we walking like this?"
 
I actually believe clip shows can be good if done right, like the first Simpsons Clip Show (which is great). It's just Clip Shows seem to have little effort in them for the most part, so finding a good one is rare.
 
Clip Shows in cartoons tend to be better since the shows are more likely to be punchy or satirical about the whole thing. Duckman's Clip Job is another very meta and very funny example.
 
I actually liked Avatar: The Last Airbender's take on the clip show. Despite it being in Season 3, it was pretty well done by doing a parody/satire on the series leading up to the finale, by being Fire Nation Propaganda and casting the characters and portraying them as some sort of miscasting, like making Aang a girl, Katara an emotional trainwreck, Sokka was still himself, Toph was a man, etc. Along with tackling various plot points used in the show itself.

As for why we have Clip Shows, I always assumed it was an easy way to pad out episode count without having to spend the average amount of money on making a new episode.
 
I actually used to like the Simpsons clip shows because I didn't see all of the episodes when they first came out. But now that we have DVD's and the like, I can't stand them.
 
A good clip show I can think of, is from War Planets / Shadow Raiders, where the main character is doubting his leadership and not only do we get clips that show that he was, but we see an original clip of the loss of his brother.

Overall, I always thought clip shows were meant to look back at the better moments of a series. Personally I don't really hate them that much.
 
I think most clip shows are a waste of time, but if they are tastefully done, then I like them.

I agree with 'Ember Island Players' from Avatar. It was kind of a recap episode , but it had new animation, and it added a lot of humor into the episode.
 
I was just reading something last night about clip shows, and it said they're very common in cartoons. Yet I can't recall any animated series that I've seen that featuref a clip show episode. I've definitely seen more clip shows in live-action series than I have animated.
 
I really like clip shows. I feel they have the same appeal as a crossover episode.

I have read a few things that imply that clip shows give the writers a vacation from writing new material (though somebody had to write the linking footage). But of course many shows have many writers, and I'm sure on most shows the same writers don't contribute to every episode, so they very well could get frequent vacation time from the shows.
 
Why do cartoons have "clip shows," what do they accomplish?

I tend to dislike it when animated programs that don?t need clip-show episodes get clip-show episodes. 101 Dalmatians: The Series, despite having no continuity outside of a few references to previous episodes, had two clip-show episodes: Horace & Jasper?s Big Career Move and Humanitarian Of The Year, both of which were full-length episodes that took up both segments. They had a tiny bit of new content, but both episodes were just pointless and children wouldn?t have been brought up to speed by anything they showed, not that they needed to be brought up to speed for such a series in the first place.

Granted, 101 Dalmatians: The Series was amongst the last animated programs to get a sixty-five episode order right away, so perhaps the clip-show episodes didn?t take too much away from the series in the grand scheme of things.
 
Clip show episodes aren't that bad when you're watching a show once a week on the air and they remind you of stuff you haven't seen in a while or might have missed, but if you're watching a series on DVD and watching a lot of episodes in a row they're intolerable, it feels like they're showing you stuff you've just seen. I know it's live action but Friends does this and I always skipped through them.
 
It was always funny when The Simpsons used their clip shows to make fun of the very concept of clip shows.

I think there was one that handwaved away stuff from the episode the footage was from (In the Valentines episode, they show Springfield being nice and warm with green grass, despite it being February and previous episodes showing Springfield to snow in the winter, and Lisa saying it was an unusually warm February in that clip show).
 
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