In the weird coincidence department, I just read a mystery novel by Elisabeth Sanxay Holding, The Innocent Mrs. Duff, when I happened to look at the third issue, Summer 1950, of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction and saw that the lead story was by Elisabeth Sanxay Holding. So I had to read it.
“Friday, the Nineteenth” has the same plot as Groundhog Day. A suburban businessman, totally bored with his wife and marriage, discovers that his best friend’s wife feels the same way. They meet in NYC on Friday, the nineteeth, and make plans to spend Saturday together. But when he wakes up on Saturday morning he finds that it’s Friday, the nineteeth. He goes to NYC and works through his day until he meets the woman, who is also experiencing the day over. Then they do it again the next day, and the next, and the next…
As far as I can tell, no one has ever noticed the similarity before. The story has never been reprinted in English. Holding wrote only two other stories for F&SF; she’s known for her mysteries and has no fantasy credentials except for a YA novel about a talking cat. Still, Groundhog Day is so famous that you’d think a story with the same plot would get some attention. Weird, indeed.
Interesting. I searched for stories having the same plot and that one never came up. It’s not mentioned in the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction’s entry on time loops, or in listings of stories in which lives are repeated. It only got reprinted in one anthology. Another story that you think would be resurrected, or at least referenced, um, repeatedly. Thanks for the cite.
Was curious and while I did not find a good example, I found this curious clip from a 1933 movie called Turn the clock back, it only had one time loop but the interesting bit is that it also featured the original 3 Stooges in a fairly straight role as wedding singers in an uncredited performance.
However, the original 1892 short story “Christmas Every Day” is very different. It’s just a father inventing a story for his little girl about a little girl whose wish came true to have Christmas every day, and how annoying it was for everyone:
There’s also “Shadow Play”, a 1961 episode of The Twilight Zone, in which a man constantly relives the day of his trial, conviction and execution. It was remade for the 1980s series.
Wow, 12:01 came out before GD! I would have swore that it was the other way. I remember thinking while watching 12:01 that the former was a version (ripoff) of the latter (I was not aware of the short story).
What’s interesting to me is that neither Holding nor Jameson nor Howell is mentioned in the time loop article. (That’s the link Kimstu gave from the Encyclopedia of SF that I mentioned in post #3.) Most of the examples there are of people reliving their entire or long stretches of their lives with knowledge of the past, not just a single day. The time loop article also omits The Strange Life of Ivan Osokin by P. D. Ouspensky, which came out in 1915 and has the protagonist reliving his life. The Howell story is not listed in the Internet Speculative Fiction Database either, an even odder omission. (The ISFDB credits *Osokin *to 1947 rather than its original publication. Half my life is spent trying to confirm what’s found in supposedly reliable references.)
Riemann, Howell’s is farther off Groundhog Day to my mind because the entire world experiences the effect, not just the one or two people stuck in an oblivious world. It has the greatest line, though.
It was made into a 1996 TV movie. Christmas Do-Over was a 2006 TV movie with the father alone reliving Christmas over and over. Time loops have gotten popular since GD.
Aside from the examples mentioned, Ken Grimwood’s Replay predated GD by quite a bit, but used the same general idea. A man relives most of his whole life, and makes changes to improve it, but all his efforts are wiped out by the reset. It’s a very good book.
As much as I love GD, it really is beginning to look like it ripped off a lot of other works. (much more than Terminator “ripped off” Ellison (that is, not really at all)). Maybe GD should be prefaced with an acknowledgement of the previous works, like the one Terminator has to carry now. However, GD is still is a good movie.
Ramis was sued for GD. But not by Lupoff, who looked into it but decided he couldn’t win.
Here’s the author’s description of the story:
From a 1981 novel called One Fine Day (also known as The Devil’s Trill) by Leon Arden. Arden v. Columbia Pictures Industries Inc. went to court in 1995. He lost, the judge saying that the idea was similar but the particulars weren’t, and ideas are not copyrightable.
And while I’m digging up new examples, how about this one?
That’s the plot of the radio script “The Man Who Murdered Time” broadcast on The Shadow on January 1, 1939.
I meant to put a question mark at the end of my thread title. “First” is a lot earlier than I thought.
They played it on SiriusXM awhile back. And it was clearly the same plot – one day over and over again. Only the Shadow knew what was going on because of his power to cloud men’s minds, though it would also be known to anyone he touched.
