During its long Broadway run, Hair had a clipper show.
There are even “clip shows” in Looney Tunes. “This is a Life?” has Bugs Bunny on a TV show reminiscing about this past with Elmer Fudd and Yosemite Sam. There are two other Bugs Bunny cartoons whose titles I don’t recall. In each of them he is talking to his nephew Clyde about all the things he has done.
It’s true that the Looney Tunes TV specials and compilation movies put out in the 70’s and 80’s were almost entirely made up of clips (as did, by the way, Disney for its long-running TV program). However, Warner Brothers also did a few “clip show” cartoons (called “cheaters”) in the 60’s when the costs of having to turn out cartoons on a regular basis increased (e.g., there was a short where an elderly Foghorn Leghorn and the Dog reminisce about the past by way of clips of earlier Foghorn Leghorn cartoons). Still, Warner Brothers was an amateur in “cheaters” department when compared with the post-Fleischer Popeye cartoons put out by Paramount. It started putting out “cheater” cartoons consisting of clips on a regular basis in the 40’s.
Whenever me or my brother could not agree on which film to watch, when we were kids, we would chose “It’s a LOoney, Looney, Bugs bunny movie.” or “Quackbusters”
Clasic cartoons, connected together by brief amounts of new animation. Fantastic.
There were five Warner Bros. feature films with their animated stars (Space Jam and Back in Action don’t count, as they were live-action animation mixes and not a new story linked by animation): The Bugs Bunny-Road Runner Movie (Bugs tells us the history of cartoons and his career through new narration and clips), Friz Freling’s Looney Looney Looney Bugs Bunny Movie (Three acts: Sam attempts to get out of Hell by outsmarting Bugs, Bugs outwits gangsters, and the “Oswald Awards”), Bugs Bunny’s Third Movie: 1001 Rabbit Tales (Booksellers Bugs and Daffy travel to Arabia and meet sultan Sam and his annoying son), Daffy Duck’s Movie: Fantastic Island (Fantasy Island spoof featuring Daffy on a magical island with a wishing well), and Daffy Duck’s Quackbusters (After Daffy inherits a fortune, he sets up an exorcism business- since the stiff is stealing the cash from the afterlife!) The first was directed by Chuck Jones, the middle three by Friz Freling, and the latter by Greg Ford and Terry Lennon. With the exception of Quackbusters, the films (in my opinion) were not very good, since the stories used to balance the new footage with the classic cartoons were weak. Warners also produced a number of TV specials in the same format, featuring new wraparounds for classic cartoons, but other TV specials featured three brand-new cartoons. (All five feature films and most of the TV specials were released on VHS.)
The Three Stooges often recycled plots and footage from earlier films into the later ones. Basically, they remade things and used clips from the ealier film whenever possible. So the concept was already used when TV started using it.
Of course, from a financial POV, Science Fiction series have a lot of incentive to do clip shows. Special effects are expensive and the ability to reuse them saves a lot of money. Of course, many SF series will creatively (and not so creatively) re-use effects to save money, but an entire show of clips has to save a ton.
For those stating that clips aren’t likely to save money because the cast, crew, and writers still get paid, while I don’t doubt that the cast gets their regular salary, I doubt that many of the other people involved have terms that are as generous in their contracts - and those that don’t have a contract at all are probably just told “that’s the way it is.” Besides, there have got to be a lot of other savings for a short week- guest stars, caterers, overtime, electricity, extras, other hourly workers, etc.
Any Hollywood professionals that can give us the inside story?