Wondering where the Film Festival entries have gone? There was too much to work with in the limited time I have to do the topic justice, even when all I was mentioning were the genre films hitting each festival. I am not abandoning the field, because so many of the better Sci-Fi and Fantasy films make the festival rounds while looking for a distributor, and for those that don’t find one there is sometimes no other way to see them. But I do need to rethink my approach to the topic, to deliver useful information about the films without trying to mention every festival in the world that one plays at. Until I decide on a structure that makes sense to me, I will use Tuesdays to mention other venues to appreciate SF.
Today happens to be Groundhogs Day, and I find it appropriate that Ned Ryerson (Stephen Tobolowsky) will be at the real one; it was a truly wonderful movie that pretty much every science fiction TV show did a spin-off of. You should watch your favorite episode, or perhaps even an entire series – Tru Calling would be my first choice, and Daybreak also comes to mind – built on the premise to celebrate!
If your a fan of Eureka, the episode would be I Do Over, while for Xena enthusiasts it’s Been There, Done That, and for X-Files folks it’s Monday. Almost all other Sci-Fi TV shows have an equivalent episode, and I feel confident you know the titles to your own favorites.
Trek of course had a plethora of them, including Time Squared, Cause and Effect, and Future’s End. For me though the one special Groundhogs Day TV episode has to be Stargate SG1’s Window of Opportunity from their 4th season. It was fun watching Anderson force his character to reveal it’s innate native intelligence (Kicking and screaming all the way, since O’Neil took pride in his good-old-boy appearance, but had to escape the time trap he was stuck in solely through his and Teal’cs efforts). But much more fun than that was what they did with the rest of their time. In all of these programs we watch the protagonists try one thing after another to solve the crises they find themselves neck deep in. But only in this episode of this show did we see the same kind of playful experimentation that was such a big part of the original Groundhog Day movie. After all, if you are trapped in time, you have all the time in the world to solve the problem; you might as well smell the roses as you pass by.