A lot of TV shows relied on reusing the same shots again and again to cut corners in their production budget. While it certainly helped make shoots a little less complicated, it also reeked of laziness, especially when shows went back to the stock footage well so many times that you could see the film degrade with overuse. In honor of this mostly lost form of artlessness, we've compiled a list of the eleven shows that really ran its use of recycled footage into the ground.
TV Shows That Recycled Footage Way Too Often
You can only get away with so much recycled footage before people get wise. We list some shows that know this all too well.
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By Evan Saathoff February 3, 2012 |
Star Trek: Deep Space Nine |
A legacy of over-using recycled footage follows Star Trek through its many television iterations. Even the franchise's biggest structural departure, Deep Space Nine, is guilty of the practice.
The season six episode "Sacrifice of Angles" featured a big, impressive space battle that the show reused bits and pieces of for the rest of its run. The show also relentlessly recycled the same establishing shots for planets and cities. Occasionally producers found a way to use this to their advantage. After seeing the establishing shot of the Cardassian capital over and over again, viewers were in for a shock when a post-attack establishing shot revealed the capital destroyed and smoldering.
Battlestar Galactica |
The new Battlestar Galactica series may be an example of serious long-form television storytelling with good special effects, but the original series was an example of recycled footage run amok.
Viewers of the show quickly became accustomed to the same handful of shots accompanying every space battle. Battlestar Galactica even recycled footage from other sources including the film Silent Running and real ICBM missile test launches. This show had a real dedication to not shooting new material.
MacGyver |
MacGyver, in addition to being the inspiration for MacGruber, was also a big player when it came to using footage from other sources. It took from everybody.
If an episode had a plot similar to the 1954 Charleton Heston film The Naked Jungle, MacGyver would go ahead and use footage from The Naked Jungle as well. If MacGyver needed a big car chase, it would just use the big car chase from The Italian Job. If MacGyver needed establishing shots of Russia, it'd just nab some pre-Cold War establishing shots of Russia, even if they were black and white. No show could get out of a tight corner using only stock footage and raw ingenuity like MacGyver could.
Airwolf |
Few remember the hit 1980s television show Airwolf. It was about a helicopter, and it had Ernest Borgnine in it. That's pretty much all you need to know.
As one can imagine, it's not easy or cheap to fly a tricked-out helicopter all over the place, so producers of the show often relied on footage they'd already shot to depict battle activity. They also reused a lot of the same explosions. But after a significant budget cut in the fourth season, they couldn't afford the helicopter at all. So from that point on, every shot of the helicopter - in this show about a helicopter -was recycled from past shows.
JAG |
JAG was famous for taking almost all of its military combat footage from other sources, leading to lots of funny occurrences of changing opponents and mismatched film stocks. One of the most obvious cases involved use of Harrison Ford's Clear and Present Danger. Initially, the footage was edited so audiences could still blatantly see and recognize Harrison Ford, but producers later trimmed it off for rebroadcasts. Harrison Ford was probably pretty disappointed when he heard he was no longer in the episode.
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