A few years back, I would have said Franz Klammer’s famous downhill run. Back when ABC had the Olympics, they showed more of that than they did live footage.
The big news events of the past generation have had a lot of play time and seem to gain fresh interest with every anniversary:
The Challenger explosion.
The second plane hitting the WTC.
The collapses of the WTC.
The Lee Harvey Oswald assassination.
Tiger Woods’ putt at the Masters got a ton of play, much to the delight of Nike since the swoosh logo appears perfectly.
Bobby Thompson’s pennant-winning HR just might be the #1 baseball clip. For football, I’d go with the Immaculate Reception.
I’ve seen this clip a s**tload of times. I read in a fairly reputable book, whose name unfortunately escapes me, that this footage was actually a Hollywood fake. Something about the equipment they were carrying not being right and some irregularity in the guy being shot. (And what’s more, it wasn’t really a Hollywood fake, since the newsreel company was located in New Jersey.)
^^^If it’s the one I’m thinking off–the footage that so affected George Bernard Shaw–the “dead” soldier can be seen slightly raising his head and looking around, or something like that.
I recall reading that a scene from One Million BC (1940) is the most-used stock footage. It has two iguanas dressed like dinosaurs flipping each other.
In the 70s, pre-Six Million dollar man, they used to show that triangle airplane crashing, at least six million times a day. I think people finally got sick of it after the smdm went off air.
hh
From Fritz Lang’s * Metropolis, * the scene where the evil scientist Rotwang transforms his robot to look like Maria. An awful lot of folks seem to recognize this footage without knowing its source.
I second (or third) all the various footage of Hitler delivering a ranting speech.
Not sure if this counts, but the shower scene in * Psycho * appears to be the single most plagiarized scene in cinematic history.
The pilot, forget his name, actually survived that crash. Reportedly was irritated that SMDM used it, saying he could have done without it being played weekly for millions of viewers. He died of natural causes just a few weeks ago.
“I’m king of the world!” I swear, HBO shows Titanic on one channel or another every single day. What a cheesy scene that is…but people seem to love it.
British soldiers scrambling out of their trench to go “over the top” to almost certain death during WWI.
An Australian example: the dramatic moment on the front steps of Parliament House in Canberra in November 1975 when the GG’s secretary announced the dismissal of Prime Minister Gough Whitlam. Plus Mr Whitlam’s response.