[image id: a digital illustration of Groundhog Day: the Musical depicting the number “Philanthropy.” It is the scene where Phil Connors runs around all of the town of Punxsutawney doing good deeds. A wake of people and things he’s helped float in the upper left corner (such as catching falling cats or a repaired coffee machine), colored blue, and Phil leaps jubilantly forth into the bottom left, colored yellow. Streaks of wind and snow follow him. The word “PHILANTHROPY!” is written in giant red letters in the background. end id]
I’M EXTRAORDINARILY LATE BUT NOT YET TARDY! Happy Groundhog Day!
hellooo it's that one anon again (i have a weird sideblog situation going on that's why i'm always anon). yessss i love your comics thoughts sm,,, a comic adaption of ghd with this stuff would go so hard. also phil vs the panels is a really nice spiritual successor to the stuff tim minchin said about how he's kind of the guy who doesn't want to be in a musical lol. imagining day one phil being partially aware and annoyed by all the comics conventions like the sfx bubbles and getting cut off by the edge of the panels. but then when he ends up drifting outside it with no way back in it starts freaking him out
(No prob anon! I've been on this website for a decade. I know your pain. (Plus this is a sideblog I made to be vaguely anonymous myself, lol.)
Love the way you think. There are a lot of comic conventions I hadn't considered yet, partially because of the fic's text/css elements.
But you're right. Whatever the medium, Phil will find a problem with it. Because the medium is where he is, and he's also in Punxsutawney, and boy howdy does he have problems with Punx.
From the mild annoyances of Day One...
...To realising there's an actual problem in Day Two.
hi sorry it's me again. ik the askblog story is set before act 2 but do you think in a comic version of 'hope' he'd be trying to throw himself off the page. or get squashed in the gutter between panels. or like he's climbing up the margin using all the panels of the townspeople looking on in horror as a ladder. uh
(Oh, the story's set during the intermission - for now. Given Phil's character development hinges on things getting worse before they get better, I do have plans to cover Act 2 in the long run.
Happy to talk about them in more detail if that's a thing people are interested in, but since that leans more towards HTML/CSS than straight comic book, I'll put that aside for the mo.
So: adaptations!)
(What strikes me the most about Hope's staging is how complicated - yet completely low-energy - everything is.
For the first half of the number, Phil barely seems to be paying attention to the fact he's killing himself. Only partial sets are used, and the spotlights give only his current actions visual focus. He doesn't react when the groundhog mascot tries to get his mask back, or to Jonathan's greetings, or to the crowd begging him to come down. Punxsutawney has become meaningless.
Hell, he manages to retrieve the toaster from the kitchen without Ms Lancaster seeing him. It's the logical extreme to stealing the payroll in Philandering - not only does Phil no longer need to put effort into achieving his goals, he can't.
There's no challenge left anywhere. No room for him to improve. He's done. The story can end now, thank you.
And if the lyrics are anything to go by, he either considers his actions a necessity, or what any intelligent person would do in his situation.
All this rambling to say I think the first few deaths would be comparatively uninteresting. Phil's behaviour - and the comic structure - would seem normal at first. Deceptively normal. Mechanically moving through the script, as it were, until suddenly he does some Detective Noirot shit that dominoes through the page and kills him.
What he's doing is still impossible. But he no longer fears it or finds any novelty in it.
I do think things would get more visually chaotic as the cycle continues, and progressively more fourth wall break-y.
A suicide montage is not something you walk off, and Phil later copes by concluding he's a god. The less human he feels, the more sense it makes that he abandons the comic structure. Use those panels as a ladder! Springboard into the abyss! Something's gotta stick.
Which brings me to one of my fav niche bits of staging.
The revival productions of the show don't have a rotating stage, so Phil doesn't pop out of bed after jumping off a roof like he does in the Broadway run.
Instead, the second Phil hits the ground, Andy Karl (Phil's actor) simply turns around, fully dressed and suddenly at the front of the stage. If you don't know the trick is coming, it looks like he's sprung back to life.
And if you do know its coming, you can spot a fully-dressed Phil run into the crowd from stage-left as soon as the Phil in the quilt starts climbing. And then he just stands there.
(*The person who recorded this okayed the use of their footage for tumblr gifs.)
Which has always struck me as kind of eerie.
The implication, however unintentional, is Phil watches himself commit suicide and isn't able to do anything about it.
At some point it became automatic. At some point in the future he'll realise even this isn't sustainable.
But not before the panels have completely fallen apart.
Hi Groundhoggers, the bootleg of Groundhog Day the Musical is currently off of Youtube because the Old Vic copyright claimed it. Well, the Old Vic can copyright claim my ass, so here’s a google drive folder with the whole video, separated into Act I and Act II.
Act II is currently still uploading, but once that’s done both videos should be watchable by anyone with the link. If you have any problems, please tell me and I’ll try to fix them.
This footage does not belong to me, I’m blanking on the name of the channel who uploaded it but I want to say it’s Page Peter (???). So I don’t take credit for it, I’m just sharing it now that it’s been taken down.
Edit: The acts are no longer separated, it’s all one video.
may i ask for some crumbs of ms. lovelett and mr. huxley please?(if you're uh, still taking art requests! it's okay if not!) also i love your art!!! its so pretty!!
I know ms. lovelett talks in verse but I still have trauma from when I was forced to write poems in elementary school (I was very bad so I don't even want to imagine what it would be like trying to do it in english -_-)
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