Harold Ramis Responds on Groundhog Day

On the DVD, there's an interview with Ramis where he says that, in the original draft, Murray was supposed to have spent thousands of years trapped on Groundhog Day. However, they scaled it back in the subsequent drafts, but the feeling I got from the interview was that they scaled it back to a hundred or so years; definitely not under ten.

Way to suck up to your fan base, Harold...

Gail Pink, I'd never thought about what the world outside Punxsutawney might be doing during all of this. I ran this one past my husband (we're both fond of this movie and both have geek tendencies). His take on it, which makes sense to me, is that at the reset point (apparently at or shortly before 6am), Phil is pulled out of the flow of time and dropped back in at the beginning of the loop 24 hours earlier. To everyone else in the world, time just flows along as one continuous stream, with Phil being the only one for whom there's anything unusual.

"... a fantasy phenomena ..."

A phenomenon + a phenomenon = phenomena.

Yeah, the character himself would lose track of time, and even very smart people would be unable to remember how long it was (unless it was a short period of time).

In any case, when the writer of a fiction story says "this is what happened", that's what happened.