Back to Front: Difference between revisions

 

Also see [[How We Got Here]], where the last scene comes first and everything else is in order; [[Anachronic Order]], where scenes are presented out of any chronological order at all, aka [[Non Linear Storytelling]]. Compare [[Unstuck in Time]].

 

== Animation Western ==

* ''[[Sealab 2021]]'', the "Shrabster" episode. It also parodied the ''[[Superfriends]]'' narrator, who would describe the temporal relationships of the scenes with glib prepositions. "Meanwhile!"

* In the 1931 Kaufman & Hart play ''Merrily We Roll Along'', each scene takes place in an earlier year than the previous one, opening in 1934 and ending in 1916. ''Merrily We Roll Along'' was loosely adapted into a [[Merrily We Roll Along|musical]] by [[Stephen Sondheim]] and and George Furth in 1981, with a [[Setting Update]]; voices from the [[Greek Chorus]] count the years of [[The Seventies]] and [[The Sixties]] going backwards during the scene changes.

* The musical ''[[The Last Five Years]]'' chronicles the doomed courtship/marriage of Jamie and Cathy, employing this trope selectively: her songs and side of the story go backward in time, while his go forward. They only sing two duets in the entire show. The first is at their wedding when their timelines meet, and at the end, where Cathy is saying goodbye at the end of their first date while Jamie says goodbye for good.

 

 

 

== Music ==

* [[Pet Shop Boys]]' "One Thing Leads to Another" starts with a man's death and goes back through the tragic series of events that caused his fatal car crash; it all starts when the man's girlfriend leaves him and he falls into alcoholism and deep depression.

* [[Weird Al]]'s "Amish Paradise" has a reverse section with Al lip-syncing to the forward music.

* This happens twice in-universe in ''[[The Wheel of Time]]''. Both times, it's because the character is being tested by the strange ter'angreal in Rhuidean. The first time, it's Rand in book 4, who sees the Aiel people's past, working backwards all the way to the War of Power in the Age of Legends. The second time, it's Aviendha in book 13, who sees {{spoiler|the future of the Aiel}}. Both times, this leads to shocking revelations for both the character and the reader.

* The children's book ''The Day Jimmy's Boa Ate the Wash'' opens with a little girl named Meggie telling her mother about a class trip to the farm, and how things didn't get interesting until the cow started crying... because the farmer knocked a hay bale onto it... because he was distracted by the sight of his pigs climbing onto the school bus to eat the kids' lunches... and so on. There were three sequels, ''Jimmy's Boa Bounces Back'', ''Jimmy's Boa and the Big Splash Birthday Bash'', and ''Jimmy's Boa and the Bungee Jump Slam Dunk'' that featured the same girl telling similar backwards stories about a string of [[Disaster Dominoes]] started by Jimmy and his pet snake.

 

 

* The film ''[[Memento]]'', which spawned a number of [[Parody|parodies]]/[[homage]]s/[[Follow the Leader|ripoffs]].

** The Back to Front scenes (in color) alternate with shorter front-to-back scenes (in black and white), until they meet mid-timeline at the climax.

* ''5 x 2'' begins with the end of a marriage and ends with the beginning of the relationship. Reportedly, another edition that uses normal chronology is called ''2 x 5''.

* A video artist took ''[[The Andromeda Strain]]'' and cut it so every shot appears in reverse order. The resulting piece was entitled ''[[Sdrawkcab Name|Strain Andromeda The]]''.

 

 

 

 

* ''[[Touka Gettan]]'' keeps this up over the course of a full 26-episode [[Anime]] series, airing the episodes in reverse order.

* [[Osamu Tezuka]]'s seminal manga ''Hi no Tori'' (''[[Phoenix]]''), which was also adapted into an [[Anime]] series, starts at the dawn of humanity, then skips to the end of the world in the second chapter, then back to early history, and skips back and forth from there, with half told Back to Front, and half proceeding slowly forwards from the beginning. Regrettably, Tezuka died before getting to the chapter in present-day Japan that would have tied everything together.

 

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[[Category:Flashbacks and Chronology]]

[[Category:Self-Demonstrating Article]]