Forum - View topicAnswerman - What Is The Purpose Of Recap Episodes?
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G S Palmer
 Posts: 246 |
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Darn, you beat me to it.
Funny, that was probably my most-hated recap episode, to the extent that I refused to watch it when rewatching the show with my folks. |
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GoldCrusader
Posts: 1023 |
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My hero academia episode 13.5 was a very fun recap episode. Tons of great small little additions. Loved Deku's drawings and the the way they edited the whole thing. Felt like it was really well thought out.
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DerekL1963
 Subscriber Posts: 1119 Location: Puget Sound |
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True, but YuYuYu's recap was a special case - recapping events from a separate entry in the franchise before proceeding to it's sequel. I wouldn't count it among this season's recaps/special eps myself, like re:Creators it's in a category all it's own. |
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fathomlessblue
 Posts: 377 Location: Manchester, UK |
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Monogatari is a funny example of something being sort of planned. I remember when the second season was announced it was stated that Shaft would be adapting six books (Tsubasa Tiger, Mayoi Jiangshi, Nadeko Medusa, Shinobu Time, Hitagi End and Suruga Devil), but closer to airing it was announced that the last one would be a separate ova. There's a possibility that the staff realised they'd have trouble getting the final arc out on time, but I personally suspect they saw how the release of Neko Black as a one/two day special event didn't hurt blu ray sales, and decided to just do it at a later date, padding out a recap episode between each arc. I found it pretty annoying at the time but there was a crafty logic to it. Also, as a few people have mentioned, Wolf Rain was affected by the SARS outbreak that was hitting most of Asia at the time. That's less a case of production going off the rails, and more freak disaster territory, just like how the final episodes of Madoka were delayed by months due to the 2011 earthquake. You can normally tell if recap footage is deliberate a lot by the placing or inclusion of additional content. FMA:B, Kill la Kill and Re: Creators all had one at the end of a major arc around the mid-point of the show, in order to re-jog your memory before continuing. This allows them to add characterisation, jokes etc. With shows like Kado, Last Exile: Fam (or half a dozen Gonzo shows), which had recaps recaps out nowhere in the middle of an arc, you can tell there were some production difficulties involved. Long running shounen sometimes follows a similar structure, in addition to usually having smaller recaps open the episode for the purpose of padding/time saving. |
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Polycell
 Posts: 4623 |
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Washio Sumi no Shou stood almost entirely on its own; the flashback episode helps keep viewers who managed to get interested in season 2 invested since the second half takes place right after the first season ends. Outside of that, it also does a neat job of stitching the two halves of the season together.
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lostbirdinatree
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On the topic of "favourite recap episode", I'll go with Kekkai Sensen's episode 10.5. The way it was framed as a talk between Leo and a radio host was cool, plus you can never get enough of Studio Bones' animation. That was one of those half-new half-old cases but the finale still had a crazy delay.
Using that as an example, I'd say recap eps aren't as effective as you think they are all the time, but in most cases the extra week of catch-up does allow things to come to completion. My heart only breaks for the animators when I learn of circumstances behind recap episodes, because obviously you can't feel sorry when the recap ep was planned from the beginning (as was the case in Kado, IIRC). |
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relyat08
 Posts: 4125 Location: Northern Virginia |
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I didn't realize what they were getting at exactly until just now, but the reason they can't just air a rerun to fill the time slot for a week is because the block was purchased by the production committee for their specific series. Since production committees are generally created for each series, specifically for that series, they don't have the rights or ability to air anything else but that series. If the TV network was the one who purchased the rights, that would be a different situation, but that is rarely the case with anime, especially late night anime. |
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leafy sea dragon
 Posts: 7163 Location: Another Kingdom |
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Well, I meant reruns of that same show, such as, say, the first episode or something. Of course, the big thing, I'd say, is that viewers are promised a new episode of something, and they'd better put out a new episode. We get the season system here in the United States where animation has a lead time of years (with a few exceptions), but I know Americans will get really angry too if they're expecting a new episode and they get a rerun instead. |
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Sakagami Tomoyo
 Posts: 943 Location: Melbourne, VIC, Australia |
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If a recap episode makes the production look bad, a straight repeat or something else entirely would make the production look worse. A recap episode isn't great, but it at least shows they put some effort into something; not doing it says either they're too cheap/lazy for even that minimum effort or too incompetent to even get that much done. |
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maximilianjenus
Posts: 2891 |
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oh god, GOd eater they ahd so many recaps episodes in the first season that they ran out of stuff to recap, not to mention they ahd to buya second season to air the 4 episodes they misssed in the first one; god bless ufo table.
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relyat08
Posts: 4125 Location: Northern Virginia |
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Oh yeah, I'm with you. Also, most of these cases aren't long running shows, so, it would be pretty confusing to suddenly be served the first episode that you just saw 6 weeks ago over again, before skipping back to the current episode a week later. No real sense in that. With longer running shows I could see it making a little sense, but it would only work with something episodic that you could easily drop in and out of, not something like One Piece, where you generally need to see an arc in its entirety to make any sense of it. |
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zrnzle500
 Posts: 3768 |
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Detective Conan actually does air reruns of older episodes not infrequently. Not that we see them outside Japan. The show does seem like a good fit for that though. |
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relyat08
Posts: 4125 Location: Northern Virginia |
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^Yeah, that, or something like Sazae-san is what I was thinking of exactly. It makes a lot of sense in that situation. Especially since you could literally go back a decade or more to grab an episode that many of your current viewers likely have never seen.
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Daizo
Posts: 139 |
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Anyone remember KareKano? If you tally up all the recap bits (and episodes), they probably make up at least a quarter of the entire series...
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Blood-
Bargain Hunter Posts: 24013 |
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I wonder how many completed episodes the average show has when it starts broadcast. I've long heard about the ragged anime production process and, of course, Shirobako was all about that. It makes me wonder why production committees don't plan it so that there are sufficient episodes already in the can before broadcast starts so that the pipeline literally can't get backed up. I don't watch many North American animation TV shows, but my impression is that they don't suffer from the recap disease.
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