Let's celebrate Groundhog Day! (the movie)

Bow-chicka-wow-wow.

Groundhog Day is nearly upon us begging the question why is it still a thing? Groundhogs suck at predicting things like weather and lotto numbers. According to the intertubes, the success rate for Puxatony Phil is like 39%. Yet despite this, every podunk wannabe Puxatony now keeps a groundhog in a box the other 365 days just so some asshole in a top hat can hoist it up in front of the cameras once a year, pretend to get a weather report and then make out with it.


Cruel right? So much so that PETA once suggested we replace the groundhog with a robot. Normally I'd be all for it, but there are so many other people and things I'd rather see replaced by robots first. In any case I think it's high time we ended this barbaric practice of groundhog prognosticatory slavery and assigned some other meaning to this arbitrary calendar date.

'I predict six more weeks...of doooooom!!!'

I just saved you 2 hours
including the trip to a Redbox.

To that end I propose we retcon Groundhog Day (the day) to be a celebration of Groundhog Day (the movie). For those of us whose neural networks contain more movie knowledge than quaint folk traditions, Groundhog Day will always be a movie about Bill Murray reliving February 2nd over and over again. Sure, it was just an ok movie, but it's entered the language as an expression of dull repetition. Like The Bucket List (a list of things to do before one dies), Pay it Forward (to repay a kindness to an uninvolved third party) or The Beaver (to attract moviegoers with a misleading title), its value as an expression far outweighs its memorability as a film.

Don't agree? Is Groundhog Day a part of the Groundhog Day trilogy? Are there tie-in novels? A gritty reboot? No? Ok then. In every measurable sense the film was a total failure. The least we can do is put aside one day a year to celebrate its contribution to the English language.

Yup, unlike The Human Centipede, Groundhog Day has yet to spark a franchise.
Incidentally, Human Centipede has entered the language as an expression meaning
'Holy shit, what is wrong with you? Why did you watch Human Centipede?'

One question though...

Ebeneeeezeerrr...

You know, ever since I saw this movie as a kid I've been bothered by the pseudo sci-fi element in it. I mean Bill Murray only breaks out of his cycle by sleeping with Andie MacDowell (also by becoming a better person, but mainly by doin' it with one of the stars of St. Elmo's Fire). How does that even work? I mean the movie is a comedy and not a sci-fi so it offers no scientific basis (or even syentific® basis) for the time warp in the first place, but that doesn't mean we don't want some explanation. Was it all a dream? Was it magic? Was there a Ghost of Douchebags Past at work here? What's the deal?

In one episode the timeline was repaired
by shoving Joan Collins into traffic. 

On Star Trek, temporal anomalies were usually solved by going back in time and correcting history or blowing something up with a photon torpedo. Quantum Leap required Sam Beckett to put right what once went wrong. Groundhog Day? Boning. Boning repairs the time space continuum. I'm no physicist, but it seems pretty unlikely that the fabric of the universe would contort itself just to get someone laid. This leaves us with the unsettling conclusion that Andie MacDowell's hootenanny must be home to some sort of quantum singularity.

Above: A 3D representation of Andie MacDowell's hootenanny.