Obituary Montage

• Main
• All Subpages
• Create New

A specialized montage associated with Award Shows, which strings together film clips featuring everyone from the show's specific field of endeavor who died during the previous year. Typically synchronized with a medley of stirring and/or sad music, with theme songs thrown in for good measure when the deceased worked in television or film.

Too often it degrades into a weird sort of popularity contest for the people at home, as the actors and actresses featured inevitably get more applause than the costume designers and writers. You have to wonder why they just don't go for the moment of silence.

Also seen on news/sports shows, usually at the end of a telecast. For example, one segment of NBC's coverage of the 2006 Winter Olympics ended with an Obituary Montage honoring sportscaster Curt Gowdy.

Not to be confused with a Really Dead Montage.

No real life examples, please; Real Life does not have montages.

Examples of Obituary Montage include:

Live-Action TV

• Every broadcast of the Academy Awards, the Grammys and the Emmys includes one.
  • One Emmy telecast also had a parody courtesy of South Park — the montage presented by the boys brought up Kenny again and again, and apparently God died too. And then Kenny died again when a setpiece crushed him.
  • During the 2000 MTV Video Music Awards, this was parodied with a montage of Deader Than Disco performers (i.e., Vanilla Ice) set to Michael Jackson's "Gone Too Soon".
• The US Sunday morning news programs, like This Week, also will have montages of notable deaths during the past seven days.
• One episode of Never Mind the Buzzcocks featured a montage of people "we wish had died in the past year", featuring, among others, Elton John, Robbie Williams, Emma Bunton, and Elton John (again).
• Michael Bluth sat through a Spanish-language one in uncomfortable silence when he attended the Desi Awards ceremony with his brother's girlfriend, Marta.

Western Animation

• In one episode of The Simpsons, there is an Obituary Montage for words that were taken out of the dictionary.
  • In another episode, Homer daydreams about making an acceptance speech and a robot killing him for going over the time limit. The robot then segues into an Obituary Montage, of which the first photo is Homer himself.
• Family Guy satirized it in an episode. A New Year's Eve 2000 news broadcast plays an Obituary Montage of noted people who have passed in the last millennium, including Joan of Arc and, um, Norman Fell.
• Shows up in Robot Chicken, where it cycles past two cast members who apparently died improbable deaths. Seth Green is disappointed in how lame the montage was, and starts murdering other cast members to improve it.