Padding: Difference between revisions

{{trope}}

[[File:drydock.jpg|link=Star Trek: The Motion Picture|frame|Imagine seeing this... [[Leave the Camera Running|for five minutes]].]]

 

{{quote|''"Oh! We'll make you a movie''

''Way-hey! Slow the plot down.''

''Just give us a script''

 

 

Most works have to employ some level of this to get to the desired length/running time, but are usually either subtle about it or manage to make the padding itself enjoyable. In other cases, these scenes distract from the plot advancement.

In comics, arcs that could be easily three or four issues long are usually padded out for [[Writing for the Trade|the inevitable trade paperback collection]]. Usually, the default arc length is six issues, as that results in a $20 trade (the typical rate for such a book). This happens at both [[Marvel Comics|Marvel]] and [[DC Comics|DC]], though the former was so notorious for it that it drove writers away from the company.

 

 

Padding is often frequently present in music, too. It can range from parts without the main melody or sudden stop periods. Examples are quite subjective.

 

----

* [[Montages]] can, ironically, be used to achieve this quite easily. Even though montages are designed to compress time, you can always reduce the compression an arbitrary amount, making the montage expand to fit whatever time it needs. Most of the time the viewers won't even realize that this compressed-time sequence is actually ''wasting'' time. An [[A-Team Montage]] or [[Avengers Assemble]] is particularly likely to fall victim to this, since they often show ''every'' character, even if some of them don't have major roles in this episode (filling time and [[Mandatory Line]] requirements in one fell swoop).

* The entirety of the trope [[Contemplate Our Navels]] is basically padding to make an episode last longer.

* [[Exposition]].

* [[Stock Footage]].

* [[Purple Prose]] (common in writing).

* [[Viewers Are Goldfish]]: Hey, let's recap what you just saw 10 minutes ago.

* [[Talking Is a Free Action|Commenting on the fight]]. (Fast moving ninjas use up the animation budget, but [[Show, Don't Tell|slow moving ninjas who stop to explain what they would be doing if they weren't standing there explaining what they're doing]], or how the other side has no chance to win, or cutting away to some guys going "this is a really dangerous situation I hope the hero can win!" will help make that 2 minute fight last several episodes. Popular in anime, so they don't [[Overtook the Manga|overtake the manga]].)

 

* Because [[Lost in Translation|most people outside of Japan are used to shows going on break for about a third of the year]], this often happens with anime. This often happens because they merely try to keep putting up new episodes to keep from [[Overtook the Manga|running out of source material to adapt from]] (and they don't often want to split off in an alternative continuity from the Manga). Not being on every week is akin to being canceled.

* ''[[Steamboy]]'' has a plot that makes a pretty good point about the role of science in the world and warfare...then pretty much spends about a ''third'' of the movie with the latter, and stretches it out by a good 40 or so minutes.

* ''[[Dragonball Z]]'' was infamous for all the padding used to prevent it from [[Overtook the Manga|overtaking the manga]], up to and including ''flashbacks to earlier in the episode''. For further details see [[Inaction Sequence]], a technique the show perfected. In the Freeza arc, Freeza launched an attack at the planet Namek. It didn't destroy it, but it was ''extremely close'' to imploding, about 5 minutes away. 5 minutes which lasted several episodes.

* In the same regard, the modsouls from the [[Filler|Bount Arc]] of ''[[Bleach]]'' have been kept in the anime purely to slow it down. Their scenes have been tacked on in the hopes that the anime won't [[Overtook the Manga|overtake the manga]] ''again''. The [["Previously On..."|recap that starts nearly every episode]]. It wouldn't be padding if they bothered to change it. The recap of the Hueco Mundo arc in Episode 190 takes ''over half the episode'', and is mostly composed of clips from Ichigo vs. Ulquiorra and Ichigo vs. Grimmjow. Then there's Komamura's fight with Poww. After releasing his Bankai, Komamura immediately finishes the fight with one attack. In the anime, it takes ''three minutes'' of Poww attacking it to no effect before he goes in for the kill.

* Other [[Magical Girl]] series, such as [[Ojamajo Doremi]], often abbreviate the [[Transformation Sequence|transformation sequences]], run several in parallel, or even do them off-screen to ''save'' time. This is usually a sign the creators actually care about the story they're telling.

* ''[[Pretty Cure]]'' goes both ways depending on how long this week's plot takes. It's not uncommon that one episode of ''[[Yes! Pretty Cure 5|Yes! Pretty Cure 5GoGo]]'' will make you sit through several minutes of [[Stock Footage]] of the girls transforming, and then the next episode will have the girls all shout [[By the Power of Greyskull|"Metamorphose!"]] in unison, followed immediately by a few representative half-second clips and no mention at all of [[In the Name of the Moon|the power of hope or the light of the future]].

* ''[[Transformers Energon]]'' and ''[[Transformers Cybertron|Cybertron]]'' both suffered heavily from overuse of [[Stock Footage]], although eventually Cybertron had characters (the ones that weren't transforming) [[Lampshade Hanging|commenting while the sequence was going on]].

* The ''[[Tsubasa Chronicle]]'' anime has ''one full minute'' of staring between Shaoran and a particular foe.

* ''[[One Piece]]'' uses padding for similar reasons to ''Bleach'', often so that each episode covers only a chapter worth of manga material, and often shows what characters who weren't featured in the original chapter were doing at the time, even if they accomplish nothing significant.

* Similarly, the ''[[Naruto]]'' anime does this when it doesn't just decide to [[Inaction Sequence|fill out episodes with nothing at all]]. For example, when Suigetsu joined Sasuke in the manga they went to the Land of Waves to get {{spoiler|Zabuza's [[BFS]]}} which was right where they expected it to be and it only took up a few pages. But in the anime someone else took it, and the two spend the episode retrieving it, eventually making a game out of it (as well spending [[Rule of Funny|rather amusing]] scene in a restaurant). This also serves the purpose of demonstrating Suigetsu's [[Nigh Invulnerable|abilities]] much earlier than in the manga (where he doesn't get to properly demonstrate his power for nearly fifty chapters). The same thing happened with the other two members of their team, but with flashbacks.

* ''[[Digimon Adventure]]'' had the infamous episode 40, where all the Digimon started the episode in their Baby 2/In-Training stages and evolved up to their Ultimate/Mega levels. Nope, no split-screen, no scene shortening - each one of the 8 main Digimon had their [[Stock Footage|transformation sequences]] shown entirely, one after the other, therefore making [[Stock Footage]] occupy half of the episode's running time.

** A similar thing happens in ''[[Digimon Adventure 02]]'', in the episode with Shakkoumon's debut.

* There are probably more examples from the series, but the scene of [[Neon Genesis Evangelion]] that is the prime candidate for padding is the infamous Kaworu Nagisa {{spoiler|death}} scene. After Shinji grabs Kaworu using the hand of Unit 01, there is a single photograph that stretches on for ''a solid sixty-five seconds'' while Beethoven's Ninth plays in the background. The story goes that most Japanese people watching this thought their televisions froze.

* One of the criticisms launched to ''[[Steamboy]]'' was the massive [[Ending Fatigue]]. About a third of the movie is dedicated solely to its action-packed climax. While interesting to watch with all the [[Technology Porn/Technology Gorn|Technology Porn]] going on, a lot of people started to get bored when one battle lead to another, another machine exploded only for two more to take its place, more and more steam clouds part to reveal more machines joining the battle...the animators and designers ''really'' got a little too carried away.

 

== Comic Books ==

* Gloriously [[Subverted]] in ''[[Nextwave]]'', which was based on the idea "if it doesn't fit in two [[Stuff Blowing Up|explosion-heavy]] books, or it's sane, don't do it."

* Both Marvel and DC tend to pressure writers to "decompress" their stories so that they'll easily fit into a six-issue trade. Marvel was so stringent on this policy that it eventually drove [[Geoff Johns]] away from his [[The Avengers (Comic Book)|Avengers]] run.

* ''[[All Star Batman and Robin]]'' suffers from this. One critic noted the book felt like Miller was spreading 4 issues of story across 20. To put it in perspective, Batman meets Dick Grayson in Issue 1. They arrive at the Batcave in Issue 4. The time in between (the entirety of Issues 2 and 3) is focused on either inner monologue which repeats itself or scenes focusing on other characters (despite this being a book about Batman and Robin). Black Canary's introductory scene takes up half of Issue 3, but all that happens is her getting harassed and her beating up a room full of people.

* ''[[Cerebus]]'' is the longest work by a single artist in Western literature. Its creator, Dave Sim, set out to write the "longest sustained narrative in human history". In the end, it amounted to a massive 300 issue saga. Unfortunately, Sim only had plot for 200 issues.

* A huge amount of [[Countdown to Final Crisis]] is this, with each issue jammed with [[Four Lines, All Waiting|snippets of several different storylines spread across the entire DC universe]] introducing plot points that are forgotten three issues later, with special mention to everything having to do with the Monitors [[Atop the Fourth Wall|("We should do something!" "Should we do something?" "We should do something!" "Should we do something?")]]. Also, many of the events happening in Countdown were completely unrelated to the series' plot lines themselves, and were instead random intersections with all the other (and better) stuff happening in the DC universe at the same time, reducing the event to a series of advertisements for plots in dozens of other comic titles. To top it off, ''Countdown'' was so incredibly bad, nonsensical, confusing, and unpopular that everything that happened in it with the exception of a few plot points was immediately shunted into [[Canon Discontinuity]], and ''[[Final Crisis]]'', the event Countdown was supposed to be, y'know, ''counting down to'', latched on to entirely different events to act as its lead-up, meaning that the [[Shoot the Shaggy Dog|entirety of Countdown wound up as one whole year of padding]] for Final Crisis.

* Done well by Peter O'Donnell in ''[[Modesty Blaise (comic strip)|Modesty Blaise]]''. One newspaper he wrote for was published five days a week, the other six days a week. Therefore every sixth strip is padding, irrelevant to the main plot, but adding seamlessly to the story. Also when one newspaper was on strike he had to write a whole short story to publish in the non-striking newspapers, before getting back to the original story.

 

== Film ==

* [[Le Film Artistique|Art House]] films have often gotten a [[Your Mileage May Vary|love it or hate it]] reputation for their extensive usage of padding. To many, the artistic periods of silence and long shots have been called [[Title Drop|padding]] by most mainstream audiences. To people into the genre, they may serve a purpose. However, chances are looking past the pretentious artsy faux pas, they are most likely just padding.

* ''[[Drive (film)|Drive]]'' would be an hour long if it weren't for all the shots of characters staring off into space for long periods of time.

* ''[[The Night of the Hunter]]'' is hailed by critics as one of the best movies ever made, and rightly so. However, it runs for only 93 minutes, barely feature-length, and that running time includes a 20-minute coda after the main story is over where nothing much happens.

** Tarantino applied this theory to his ''[[Grindhouse]]'' movie ''[[Death Proof]]''. [[Did Not Do the Research|It was widely criticized for having too much dialog and not enough action to be an exploitation film.]]

* ''[[Blade Runner]]'' had this in the first director's cut. The narration [[Executive Meddling|added for the theatrical release]] was gone, but the scenes lasted longer than they needed to. This was fixed in the "Final Cut."

** The opening driving shot was actually supposed to be where the credits went, which would explain why it was so long and pointless. For whatever reason, the credits weren't actually put there.

* ''[[The Sidehackers]]''. This includes overly long images of a couple rolling around in the flowers, a character's dramatic and unnecessary walk through various locations (including what appears to be an ''oil refinery''), ridiculously slow or just plain irrelevant dialogue, and the "sidehacking" itself.

* ''[[The Starfighters]]'', a movie about Air Force pilots training on a new type of jet, featured long sequences of planes simply cruising set to elevator music. At least a few of these sequences were lengthy shots of planes refueling.

* To some extent, most of [[Akira Kurosawa]]'s films suffer from this.

* ''Rescue from [[Gilligan's Island]]'' was quite bad about this, given that the plot was recycled from an episode of the show they never filmed.

* ''[[King Kong]]'' the remake, and ''[[Avatar (film)|Avatar]]'', both have this in way, way too much [[Scenery Porn]]. This creates severe padding, even if [[Visual Effects of Awesome|there's a reason for this]].

* It could be argued that ''[[The Room]]'' has more padding than it does scenes that are actually relevant.

* ''[[Santa and The Ice Cream Bunny]]'' is full of it.

* ''[[Waterworld]]'' is filled with sequences involving mechanisms ([[Rube Goldberg Device|contrived]] or not) which take up most of the movie.

* Most of the first half of ''[[Silent Night, Deadly Night]] Part 2'' is scenes from the ''first movie''.

** Probably the most [[Egregious]] bit is the scene where [[Leave the Camera Running|the camera just sits still for several minutes]] watching an elevator ''slooooooowly'' move downward. There's quite a few similar scenes of spacecraft moving with agonizing sluggishness for minutes at a time.

* [[Judd Apatow]] has made a career out of this. Many of his movies (produced or directed) run over two hours (rare for the comedy genre) and as a result will feature many things that could have easily been cut. A prime offender is ''[[Funny People]]'', which pads its near 150 minute run time with many celebrity cameos and an additional thirty-minute subplot after the main revelation {{spoiler|that Adam Sandler's cancer has gone into remission}}. Supposedly, the film's extended versions are even worse. It's not even the storyline mentioned above that's the most annoying part, that actually makes some sense, it's several useless storylines -namely the entire subplot involving Seth Rogen's love interest as well as his roommate's sitcom career- and scenes -the celebrity cameo festival in the middle film would have been a deleted scene in almost ANY other movie because of how little it has to do with the plot and how long it drags on- that should have ended up on the cutting room floor. Hell, one wonders if there even was a cutting room floor.

** A similar criticism was placed against the first part of ''[[Harry Potter (film)|Harry Potter]] and the Deathly Hallows''. While it keeps pace with the book, the first half of the book could have been compressed easily, resulting in what many find a tedious movie, commonly mocked as ''Harry Potter Goes Camping''.

* ''[[Fire Maidens from Outer Space]]'' barely runs 80 minutes, yet still manages to wear its plot really thinly. Filmmaker Cy Roth had to [[Leave the Camera Running]] in a lot of scenes, and there are endless sequences of the men sitting around and smoking and of the maidens dancing to Borodin.

 

== Game Shows ==

* Some game shows can be pretty bad at this. Usually not the fault of the producers, but due to various factors, such as stalling contestants who take several minutes to make a decision, or a game cut short because of a decisive game that took quicker than expected. In the latter instance, it is because either because the winner was so dominant or the losing contestant was so inept that the game was ended early (i.e., at the point where the trailing contestant could no longer possibly catch the winner) and that playing the game further would add to the loser's humiliation. Examples include ''[[Pyramid]]'' and ''[[Match Game]]''.

* ''[[Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?]]'' during its early runs got real bad when stalling contestants dragged out the show. When they got to the harder questions, they would take 5, 10 minutes or more before making their final answer or using a life line. Usually, most contestants would stall some more after their life line was used in order to think over the results. The newer version of Millionaire adds a time limit to each question, forcing contestants to answer quickly. Harder questions have a longer time limit. Answering questions quickly as you could would add to the clock for the 1 million dollar question so contestants could take longer on the final round. The addition of the timer was most likely added to speed up the game so it would allow more new people to enter the hot seat (More people actually ''can'' nowadays).

** However, that does not excuse pauses for dramatic lighting changes and music stings, nor does it excuse suspenseful reveals of the correct answer. The [[Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?]] webgame moves painfully slowly because it types out the question and each individual answer, then has a music sting between each question, presumably as a breather. But there's nowhere near the tension of the game show, because the producers are not in control.

* ''[[Deal or No Deal]]'' makes ''[[Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?]]'' seem positively ''rushed.'' In any given ten minutes of episode time, there are five minutes of pure stalling and four minutes of the contestant agonizing over "decisions" that are purely luck-based. The remaining minute consists of the banker making offers, which is the only point at which anyone can actually affect the outcome of the game in any way.

** If the contestants were allowed (and smart enough), they could rapid fire their way through all the cases and ignore the banker, cutting their time down to [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hmZFHjQfx-o less than two minutes]- and there would be an absolutely ''absurd'' amount of grand prize winners, which is why this isn't allowed. (Interestingly enough, however, something not all that dissimilar to that format has been adopted for online versions of the game.)

* The second episode of ''[[Greed (TV series)|Greed]]'' was infamous for recapping the progress of the show's first million-dollar winners with ''two separate clip montages'' (which mostly consisted of the right answers to each question being lit up again) towards the end of the show, just to make sure that the decision to play for the $2M question could be put off until next week's show.

* The short-lived NBC show ''Identity'' was a major offender of the genre. In one particular episode, the host made it look like he was preparing to ask the last onstage personality to reveal his identity, only to throw it to commercial. Then they came back from commercial, recapped the whole thing, and ''went to commercial again'' before the host ''finally'' got around to asking the personality to reveal her identity... and we're still subjected to ''[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QybVceekCPo thirty-five seconds]'' of random camera shots before she confirmed her identity. Made worse since the contestant had already used one of her [[Lifelines]] to "Ask The Experts", who all pegged the identity of this final person. Commercials included, this question was padded for over ten minutes.

* TV talent show results. Actually announcing who's being kicked off that week takes less than a minute. The results show can be up to an ''hour'', most of which is filled with unnecessary suspense building or flashbacks to contestant's performances last night. As the season goes on, the padding will inevitably get worse as they start to run out of acts to kill time with.

 

== Literature ==

* [[Anne Rice]] actually mocked herself for this. ''[[Queen of the Damned]]'' features a character who tried to read the original ''[[Interview With a Vampire]]'', but couldn't get past all the lengthy atmospheric descriptions.

* ''[[The Lord of the Rings]]'' suffers fairly frequently from this, occasionally devolving into irrelevant side arcs and [[Purple Prose]] about a stretch of landscape that is ultimately irrelevant to the ongoing plot. There is also all of the irrelevant walking and eating that could have been time-elapsed easily.

** Tom Bombadil is largely necessary to the book as it was written. For Merry to help Eowyn kill the Witch-king in Return of the King, he used a sword forged by the Númenorean exiles in Arnor specifically empowered to fight him and his servants (Gandalf even specifically points out the importance of this sword: Its magic crippled the Witch-king both physically and magically, enabling Eowyn to deliver the finishing blow). This sword was recovered from the barrow of one of the ancient northern kings after the Hobbits were trapped in the man's barrow by one of the Barrow-wights. Tom Bombadil rescued the Hobbits from the wights, and retrieved the swords for them from the barrow. The Hobbits ended up in the Barrow-downs in the first place because their route through the Old Forest led them to Tom's home, and the road from Tom's home to Bree passed through them. Tom could certainly be removed as was done in the films, but as done in the films it would have required significant changes either to the story, its surrounding mythology, or both (Merry uses a plain-old sword the Manual states was once Théodred's instead of the bad ass Númenorean blade of the book. Meanwhile, the Noldorin daggers given to Merry and Pippin by Galadriel in the films are completely neglected and could have easily stood in as a surrogate for his Barrow-blade). As for the ending, the climax of the book was ''not'' the Ring going into the fire, but actually the confrontation with Saruman in the Shire.

* [[Charles Dickens]] was paid by the word, and sometimes it shows. So were [[Alexandre Dumas]], Leo Tolstoy, and Nathaniel Hawthorne. Which explains why The Scarlet Letter is a 15-page short story shoehorned into 200 pages and begins with ''a chapter-long description of the outside of a church''.

** Not to mention all the step-by-step descriptions of Bella getting up, brushing her teeth, picking out her clothes, making breakfast for her and Charlie, [[Serial Escalation|closing all the pop-up boxes after running her web browser]], etc.

** Removing all the padding from ''Twilight'' would reduce the entire series to about 50 pages. The most extreme example of padding was in the second book (''New Moon''), where there are (literally) ten blank pages in the middle of the book. It essentially goes blank when Edward decides he must remove all traces of his life from Bella's, leading to the [[Unfortunate Implications]] [http://stoney321.livejournal.com/317857.html surmised by one reviewer] that Bella, as a woman, is [[Stay in the Kitchen|nothing without a man in her life]].

* [[Lampshade Hanging|Lampshaded]] in ''[[The Princess Bride (novel)|The Princess Bride]]'', where [[William Goldman]] describes several pages of padding in roughly a page and a half. The book is actually called the abridged version!

* Jaroslav Hašek (best known for his novel, ''The Good Soldier Švejk'') parodied this in a short story, featuring a writer who is paid by lines, so he writes dialogues like this:

* Averted, for once, in the latest translation of Eusebius's Church History. While the original contained the archaic, flowery, and above all padded grammar structure which one would expect from a fourth-century historian, translator Paul L. Maier managed to eliminate excess verbiage and break the longer sentences into smaller, more comprehensible chunks, perhaps thinking of the casual reader who isn't using the book to study for a doctorate.

* The [[Vietnam War]] novel ''War Dogs'' adds an extended fight sequence between a tiger and the black ops group leader (which leads in AND out of a river) after an assassination scene. The fight has utterly zero bearing on the plot and it gets little attention from the group when he returns. There is quite literally no reason for this scene to exist other than to pad the length of the chapter.

 

== Live-Action TV ==

* Spoofed on ''[[Garth Marenghi's Darkplace]]'', as the explanation for their use of slow-mo. The episodes are all said to have come several minutes short, and therefore every bit of footage that wasn't dialogue was considered for slow-mo to pad the episodes out.

* Prevalent to an astonishing degree in Indian soap operas - numerous flashbacks, recaps, and slow-motion reaction shots (the same ones often repeated several times in the course of one conversation) mean that the proportion of new footage in any given episode can often seem rather low.

* This is a popular topic for parody/lampshading/self-referential humor in comedy, especially sketch comedy. For instance, the dead-end trip to "Bolton" in the dead parrot sketch on ''[[Monty Python's Flying Circus]]''.

{{quote|'''Eric Praline:''' Excuse me, this is irrelevant, isn't it?

* ''[[7th Heaven]]'' had what was dubbed by [[Television Without Pity]] the "Opening Credits Timewaster", [[Once an Episode]]. It would usually feature one member of the family performing a mundane chore. Riveting.

* As seen on ''[[Mock the Week]]'':

* Most series of ''[[Power Rangers]]'' live on this trope. Hope you like [[Transformation Sequence|morphing sequences!]] You know when an episode ran short when the full sequence plays instead of the instant, five second and/or split-screen variations. ''[[Power Rangers Samurai|Samurai]]'' is the worst offender with some episodes with multiple "sequences" in full in the same episode.

* Not just Power Rangers, but [[Super Sentai]] as well. Alongside the morphing sequence, there's the roll call, the sentai pose, the combining weapons into a blaster, the summoning the zords, and the megazord formation. It's the use of all this stock footage over and over that kept the budget low and kept the show on the air for nearly 20 years in America and thirty five in Japan.

* ''[[True Blood]]'' season one was described by the movie magazine ''Empire'' as having "more padding than the Michelin man."

* [[Once an Episode|Every episode]] of ''[[The Two Ronnies]]'' featured Ronnie Corbett sitting in a chair telling a joke but going off on no end of humorous tangents and deviations, without which the joke would have taken well under a minute to tell and [[Tropes Are Not Bad|wouldn't have been all that funny anyway]].

* One of the best examples of this involved the montages in the ''[[Stargate SG-1]]'' episode "Window Of Opportunity", which is about a [[Groundhog Day Loop|time loop]] (time loop episodes themselves are practically half padding anyway). The show came in short, so they added scenes where O'Neill and Teal'c realize they can do anything they want in a loop and not face consequences for it, they get very creative...

* [[World's Wildest Police Videos]] and related "Wildest Videos" shows are almost all padding. The incidents are repeated as what is coming up in the next few segments, next segments, and usually at least five times during its actual presentation, usually in slow motion. Each hour-long episode probably consists of less than five minutes of original footage.

* Described as a common criticism of the first half of ''[[The Walking Dead]]'''s second season, partially on account of the setting (a rural farm in Georgia). Due to the isolated nature of the farm, and the characters not having much to do outside of looking for one of their group (who went missing), a majority of each episode is devoted to drawn-out conversations between characters, sometimes repeating the same information two or three times (Rick has a conversation with Herschel Greene about letting them stay on his property once an episode, on average). Meanwhile, the main plot of the early episodes (find Sophia Peletier) is reiterated by at least one character in each episode, while several other story threads (Lori Grimes discovering she's pregnant and trying to keep it a secret, Dale thinking Shane is hiding a dark secret) are rehashed constantly, with little payoff.

 

== Radio ==

* Copious padding is pretty much the only way to hold on to the subject in ''[[Just a Minute]]''.

* ''[[The Goon Show]]'' would occasionally make jokes about stuff being put in to make up the time. (If nothing else, surely there was no dramatic need to have the musical interludes - although Ray Ellington is good enough that it's not really a cause for complaint). They didn't really have a choice. BBC sketch shows were usually [[Executive Meddling|required to feature musical numbers]], especially since they had to have an orchestra there to play the incidental music.

 

== Theatre ==

* French "grand operas" of the 19th century usually contain elaborate ballet sequences that have nothing to do with the plot.

* In [[Richard Wagner]] opera's, people usually take half an hour to die, while singing.

 

== Tabletop RPG ==

** Mocked in ''Book of Oafish Might'' via "Redundant Creature" template (it repeats all this dull stuffing ''twice'').

* As with the laundromat example above, the television-inspired RPG Primetime Adventures strongly encourages players to avoid this.

{{quote|'''Good scene:''' A protagonist expresses grief over the loss of a loved one.

'''Bad scene:''' A protagonist expresses grief over the loss of a loved one ''for the fifth time in the same episode''. }}

 

== Video Games ==

** Towards the end, we're told that the card key (part of a set of 3) to deactivate Metal Gear REX we've had since midway through disc one was actually all three in one. However, using the key three times requires backtracking around the base, which seemed kinda pointless. Luckily, the Gamecube remake has two pipes that, when shot, produce a spray of its chemicals that can instantly heat or freeze the key card, making the return trips a LOT shorter.

** Take point A, the Tank Hangar, the first building you come to. Take point B, the Comms tower. You travel from point A to point B. You encounter a situation that you can't deal with without a certain weapon. So you travel from point B to point A, to pick it up. Correctly armed, you head back to point B, and deal with the situation. You are then captured, and dragged... back to point A. Once you escape... then its off to point B. Your game continues as normal from this point. A-B, B-A, A-B again, and A-B a third time. You cover essentially the same territory FOUR times. This is a short ten hour game WITH all the backtracking.

** The Great Maze in ''Brawl''. Many people complained about this final portion of the adventure mode since you're revisiting most of the levels you encountered plus having to fight ALL the boss characters you fought already and ALL of the playable characters before you were allowed to reach the [[Final Boss]]. Luckily, the maze is littered with warp points and save points.

* ''[[No More Heroes]]'':

** Grinding for money between ranking fights in the first game. Removed from ''Desperate Struggle''; now you only need money for the gym, Naomi and (if you want) [[Virtual Paper Doll|Airport 51]].

** The parking lot battle before Rank 4 in ''Desperate Struggle'' goes on for some twenty minutes. And you ''still'' have to fight through the department store afterwards...

* Many [[Tales (series)|Tales]] games have, about 2/3 into the game, a Padding Session. It is never the same - sometimes you're required to collect (usually five) [[Tales of Phantasia|sum]][[Tales of Rebirth|mons]], or jewels, or [[Tales of Legendia|ancient stone tablets]], but the game will always want you to run through four or more dungeons after small artifacts for the main story to go on.

* In ''[[The Elder Scrolls|Morrowind]]'', if you don't get your athletics skill up and have auto-run on, going to towns that aren't covered by silt-striders will ''very'' definitely seem like this.

** Also, if you visit those islands before you've gotten the ''hints'' option, you'll see the hints '''in plain sight'''. The crew will debate them for a bit, then decide to leave them. Tails, Mr. IQ 400, will look back at them as you all walk away, making this into a failed attempt at [[Foreshadowing]].

** Then there's the fact that to get to new zones, you'll need new ships. To make new ships, you'll need to revisit ''old'' zones for the material. And do it repeatedly for all the mission extras.

* Contacting Demons in most ''[[Megami Tensei]]'' and a few ''[[Persona]]'' games. Sometimes it may be somewhat amusing ("Mark Danced Crazy!") but it'd be quite crazy. Especially considering [[Guide Dang It|you probably have no idea what to say to them]] or [[Soup Cans|still need to look at a guide to find who should say what to them despite being told what the demon's traits are]].

* Just about every ''[[Final Fantasy]]'' game has this to some degree, all the moreso if you count sidequests. The biggest offender being ''[[Final Fantasy VIII]]'', wherein you spend a fair chunk of the third disc essentially running around in circles accomplishing nothing (or in grand Squaresoft story tradition, [[Nice Job Breaking It, Hero|making things worse]]).

** ''[[Final Fantasy IX]]'' takes it even further and fills the game with [[Broken Bridge|broken bridges]] and [[Fetch Quest|fetch quests]] after every dungeon from disc two on. Most of disc 3 involves the [[Big Bad]] literally dumping you into the wilderness to wander around and procure a [[MacGuffin]] for him in the process.

* The vast majority of content in every MMO ever made.

* Elevators and Pellerators (Also go sideways) in [[Starship Titanic]], the only padding that can get annoyed at you if treat them badly.

* Games with map/level editors can fall into this if the authors don't make their levels flow smoothly. Some people think making a level long as possible with lots of fluff or have a level with lots of winding paths will keep people entertained, but this can cause players to quickly lose interest and give up playing.

* The ''[[Star Wars]]''-inspired game ''[[Star Wars: Dark Forces|Dark Forces]]'' is programmed so that your least dangerous enemies (Imperial Stormtroopers, mostly) literally come back to life after you've killed them if you stay in a particular area too long. [[All There in the Manual|In the handbook]], it is suggested that the game designers provided for enemy regeneration in order to encourage you not to linger and complete each mission as quickly as possible. A rare instance where Padding on the player's part actually results in ''more'' Padding.

* ''[[Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door]]'' has one near the end of the game. To advance the plot, Mario has to find a certain person and talk to him to get to the next area. When Mario gets to the location where the character was seen last, he is told that he just missed the guy and is somewhere else instead. This repeats several times, making Mario literally travel all over the world until he finds the person sleeping in a bed in a far off place. The character won't wake up until you whack him with your hammer several times. The whole padded trip could have been avoided if the character in question waited a few minutes more for Mario to arrive.

* ''[[Mario Kart]] 7'' has lots of padding for the unlockables. In order to unlock the majority of the parts for your kart, you have to earn coins during races and get enough coins to unlock a part. However, you can only hold 10 coins max in a race and thanks to the [[The Computer Is a Cheating Bastard|cheating AI]], along with the crazy items, it's a nightmare to hold onto your coins. There's over 30+ parts in the game and several parts, if you can't take advantage of the online mode or the Street Pass feature, can force you to collect beyond ''10,000 coins!'' Needless to say, you will be playing this game a lot if you want to get [[One Hundred Percent Completion]].

 

== Web Comics ==

** Spoofed in the [[All Just a Dream]] fake ending: "That dream was like 80% filler."

** The finale reveals that {{spoiler|all of the comic from after the battle with lich until Chaos shows up was essentially padding, just the characters going on pointless quests that in the end had no effect on the plot.}}

* The "yellow musk creeper" storyline from [[Goblins]] didn't really accomplish anything except get the heroes to second level.

* The "Grace's Birthday Party" arc of ''[[El Goonish Shive]]'' is 90% Dan Shive [[Author Appeal|drawing with one hand]] and 10% "Nanase and Ellen hook up". It has gotten better eventually, particularly once the job of [[Mr. Exposition]] was removed as a general trait and given almost entirely to a single character.

 

== Web Original ==

 

== Western Animation ==

** Then there was the scene of the Englishmen sitting around clearing their throats that ran for maybe a full minute. At least the Conway Twitty scene had a song.

** One of the bonus clips after "Brian & Stewie" was a deleted scene from an earlier episode of that season that was almost as long as the Conway Twitty song, almost as uneventful and repetitive as the Englishmen-clearing-their-throats scene, and, oh yeah, ''ripped wholesale from another source''. Thank God they had the sense to delete it... and yet, they decided they had to air it anyway later on. A better written show would not have even bothered to put a scene like this on the DVD. No, wait, scratch that. A better written show wouldn't have been ''able'' to put it on the DVD, because they'd have dropped it ''before'' the show was sent to the animators.

** Similar to the 3-minute Conway Twitty clip note above, "Foreign Affairs" includes David Bowie and Mick Jagger's music video of "Dancing in the Street" shown in its entirety, introduced [[Cutaway Gag|cutaway-style]] by Peter, who claims it's "the gayest music video of all time." Not an animated version of the video, just the music video itself.

** Peter vs the Chicken, especially the later ones that go on for 4 to 6 minutes long.

** The episode "Wasted Talent" has Peter trip on the sidewalk and hurt his knee, causing him to hold it pain and tough it out for almost 30 seconds. This gets mirrored in another episode several seasons later where Lois goes through the same gag, but winds up injuring ''her boobs''.

** A gag from "Baby You Knock Me Out" had a scene where Peter gets a birthday card from Cleveland where he records his voice, but apparently got into a [[Police Brutality|run-in with an officer]]. This was mainly used to save on animation and time. In fact Peter blinked his eyes '''once''' during the whole scene.

** The episode "The D'oh-cial Network" contains both a two minute long [[Lampshade Hanging|"Show's Too Short"]] short at the end of the episode ''and'' an unusually long [[Couch Gag]].

** Couch gags in general are either padded or shrunk depending on whether or not the rest of the episode plus the commercials fill all 1800 seconds of the 30-minute timeslot. The writers quite enjoy this bit of breathing room.

* ''[[Robot Chicken]]'' parodies this in the episode "Help Me".

* The ending musical number of ''[[Care Bears Movie II: A New Generation]]'' lasts for six minutes, and has nothing to do with the plot.

 

== Others ==

* If you do this during any form of [[Role Playing]], be it freeform or Tabletop, it's a ''very'' good way to start annoying the other players. Yes long and descriptive posts help, and the [["Stop Having Fun!" Guys]] will demand nothing but (Mileage may vary, of course), and telling us what's important helps before you have to railroad us, but that doesn't mean you really shouldn't take so dang long describing it that we have to ask you to pause for bathroom breaks or wade through pages of text to find what's actually ''relevant'' in the short novel that is your post. An easy way to tell if someone will do this is by teling them you only have two hours to be online. If they seem disappointed, they're going to pad like the dickens.

{{quote|''Albert J. Sorenson of Hamhank, Mich. is a very, very, very, very fine rose grower. He has won many, many, many, many prizes for his extremely lovely and beautiful blossoms including first prize in his division in the Wayne Country Fair, which is held annually each year in June near Detroit a large city in Michigan which is the best known for the manufacture of automobiles but also has other industries.''}}

* Critics of [[Yes]]’ ''Tales From Topographic Oceans'' album ([[Creator Backlash|including Rick Wakeman)]] point to its contrived format (a double album with [[Epic Rocking|one 20-ish minute epic per album side]]), requiring lots of [[Your Mileage May Vary|superfluous material]] to maintain the format.

* Any college student knows that, when a writing assignment requires a minimum length, at least one page of that paper will be nothing but padding to stretch it out to the required length.

* [[NaNoWriMo]] is a contest to write a 50,000 word novel. To achieve 50,000 words, one might make the characters quote entire songs or poems, just to add some words. Same goes for [[Script Frenzy]].

 

{{reflist}}

[[Category:Short Story Long]]

[[Category:Pacing Problems]]

[[Category:YMMV Trope]]