The TV sitcomGilligan’s Island—It appears that nothing the castaways do ever jeopardizes the continuation of the series, as nothing they do actually succeeds in getting them off the island.
Similarly, the premise of The Prisoner necessitates that all of Number Six’s plans to escape the Village, no matter how brilliant, fail.
The supernaturaldramaCharmed—The reset button was constantly used in episodes in which one of the main characters was transformed into some kind of demon or magical creature for the duration of the episode, but returned to normal at the end of the episode.
In the film Superman II, Superman kisses Lois Lane, causing her to forget that she learned his secret identity.
In an episode of the 1950s TV series Adventures of Superman, Clark Kent is kidnapped along with Lois Lane and Jimmy Olson by a villain intent on procuring a memory loss spray. Threatened with death, Clark takes off his glasses and reveals that he is Superman. He later erases his friends’ memories with the spray.
The TV series Smallville—In the episodes when another character discovers Clark Kent’s superhuman abilities, there will be some unforeseen side effect of some element of the episode that causes that character to lose the part of their short term memory, forgetting what they had witnessed.
The Doctor Who episode “Last of the Time Lords”—At the start of this episode, the nefarious Master has conquered 21st-century Earth with the aid of the mutated descendants of humanity from millions of years in the future. To neutralize the obvious time paradox produced by the mutants exterminating their own ancestors, the Master has constructed a “paradox machine.” When the Doctor and his companions succeed in destroying this machine, the flow of time is reset to the point before the Master and his allies invaded Earth. Only they, and the Master, remember the state of things before the “reset button” was hit.
The first Pokemon movie employs the reset button technique in the ending, where Mewtwo reverts almost everything to the way it was before the events in the main plot transpired. This was used as the backdoor to the plot of a later direct-to-video film, Mewtwo Returns.
The animated series The Simpsons—The reset button plot device was often parodied by having Mr. Burns be unable to remember Homer even though Burns’ assistant Smithers reminds him that “all the recent events of [his] life have revolved around [Homer] in some way.” The reset button was also explicitly mocked in a line in “Homer Loves Flanders” in which Lisa advises Bart to wait a week and everything will return to normal; in “Pygmoelian” in which Moe questions why the damage to his cosmetic surgery returned his face to its exact pre-surgery state; and in “Das Bus” in which a quickly-introduced narrator (James Earl Jones) off-handedly assures us that the children were rescued “by...oh...let’s say Moe.” In "The Principal and the Pauper," after it was revealed that Principal Skinner was actually an impostor, the town judge declares that, "And I further decree that everything will be just like it was before all this happened! And no one will ever mention it again... under penalty of torture."
The animated series South Park—Kenny is very frequently killed, only to be brought back to life in an unexplained fashion.
