20 Mind-Blowing Facts You Didn’t Know About Groundhog Day

13. It Could Have Been Called "February 29th"

Danny Rubin has said that after his initial idea for the film, he set about choosing a suitable day to loop over and over, initially considering setting it during a leap year, so Phil would be trapped on 29 February - underlining the time hole idea - but eventually landed on Groundhog Day because "it€'s a completely unexploited holiday."

He also thought that because of the limited competition they'd be able to "play it on TV every year like the Charlie Brown specials.€ Infamously, there were at least four different versions of the film (though some were inevitably incomplete): thanks to the filming schedule and Harold Ramis' indecisiveness over how the film should look, he demanded that every film be shot in every weather condition.

"The story is that Harold Ramis had not determined what the repeated day of Groundhog Day would look like. And you have to remember in the movie, the day IS a character. So we shot the outdoor scenes in every weather condition. Sun, gloom, rain, snow. So I joked that in a vault somewhere, there had to be four versions of the film. It created an excitement on the set because no one had a day off. If the clouds parted and there was sunshine, they'd yell out "Everybody on the street! We have time to shoot another street scene!"