Given the fact that I work in a public library and the extremely rainy and cool weather we had in New York, I found myself engaged in numerous (read: thousands) mundane conversations about the weather with the elderly (the sole financial support of Danielle Steel & Sandra Brown, no offense).
Eventually, I grew bored with my usual reply “You’ll be complaining about the heat when it comes! Ha Ha” :rolleyes: and for some god forsaken reason, (excellent customer service, I suppose) I figured I would lengthen these conversations and mention a film I recalled seeing on PBS (or another public television station) during my youth. Now I have caused havoc. They all want to see the film and damned if I know the name of it. So, I wrote to PBS and they have no clue what I am talking about and I have searched the Internet.
You’ll have to bear with my memory; my high school shenanigans have altered it a bit. This film aired during the mid to late 70’s and the majority of the cast were children. The plot basically centered on the fact that it rained 364 days of the year. It was gloomy, stark and extremely depressing. The children played indoors all the time and lived in a hospital-like setting. One day a year it stopped raining and the sun came out. Miraculously, within seconds, flowers grew, grass became green and most importantly the children ran in slow motion to play outside, smell the flowers, etc.
I remember someone else on the board talking about this. Isn’t there one girl who really wants to see the sunshine, but some other kids–really mean ones–lock her up in a closet, so that she misses it?
It takes place on Venus, where all the kids in the class but one have lived as long as they can remember under the thickly clouded Venutian sky. The one girl has recently moved there from Earth, and so of course remembers what a clear sky is like.
A video of the movie can be borroweed for free from the Captioned Media Program, funded by the U.S. Department of Education. If you click on the title All Summer Long in a Day on that linked page, you can also get a “Lesson Guide” that includes a script of the movie.
No, not close. That story is Nightfall, which exists in two formats: short story and novel. (The short story was the first, and it was expanded to become a novel. Something similar happened with Clarke’s story The Sentinel when it became 2001.) Nightfall’s major premise was that this planet is part of a complex group of mutually-orbiting stars such that it very rarely experiences a time when there is no sunlight. Once every so often (maybe 1000 years, maybe not), every star is eclipsed and night falls (hence the title), driving everyone quite mad, as nobody can tolerate the darkness.