Post-credits Scene - History

History

Before stingers, movies frequently ended with a line of text advertising that a sequel was planned. One example is the 1963 James Bond film, From Russia with Love, the first in the series to show the ubiquitous "James Bond will return in..." just before the ending credits. The Beatles' Yellow Submarine features an appearance by band members in a stinger after reversing their initial displeasure with the project. National Lampoon's Animal House (1978) altered the "When in Hollywood, Visit Universal Studios" card by adding "Ask for Babs," a reference to a character who had become a tour guide there.

One of the earliest appearances of a true stinger in a mainstream film was in The Muppet Movie in 1979, and use of such scenes gained popularity throughout the 1980s at the end of comedy films. The Muppet Movie also began a trend of using such stingers to break the fourth wall, even when much of the rest of the movie had kept it intact. The scenes were often used as a form of metafiction, with characters showing an awareness that they were at the end of a movie, and often telling the audience directly to leave the theatre. Films using this technique include Ferris Bueller's Day Off (in which the title character frequently broke the fourth wall during the movie) and Spice World. Stingers also came out on Mystery Science Theater 3000, introduced in episode 205 ("Rocket Attack USA"), continuing until the end of the series. The stingers, with a few exceptions, highlighted moments from the films that were either particularly nonsensical or had simply caught the Brains' attention.

Roger Ebert's Ebert's Little Movie Glossary calls such surprising final scenes a "Monk's Reward," because "it usually takes monk-like devotion to sit through the credits to get to it."