Stephen Tobolowsky Brings His Groundhog Day Scene-Stealer to Blu-ray

Posted on 09. Feb, 2009 by Administrator in Film/TV

by Brent Simon

No, Bill Murray fans aren’t experiencing deja vu – 1993’s Groundhog Day has come to home video before. Exclusive to its Blu-ray debut, however, is a special intermittent picture-in-picture bonus track narrated by Stephen Tobolowsky, who memorably plays Ned Ryerson, an enthusiastically deranged insurance salesman and old high-school classmate of Murray’s sardonic, stuck-in-a-time-loop weatherman.

The good-natured, 57-year-old character actor pops up (in character) throughout the film and narrates “weatherman style”, offering up trivia tidbits and quizzing viewers on their own knowledge of the film. Tobolowsky didn’t need much prodding, either. “I kept interrupting the process saying, ‘But wait, I’ve got even better trivia!’ There were a few things that I knew happened on the film that even the people who were doing the trivia questions didn’t,” he says.

Tobolowsky is a natural fit for this sort of Blu-ray add-on, as the reminiscences come warm, fast, and engaging. Since director Harold Ramis hadn’t decided what the weather was going to be like on the day during which the movie was set, Tobolowsky spent a lot of his three-plus weeks on set in Woodstock, Illinois, just miles from the Wisconsin border, loitering about, on a “will notify” basis. “Because of the fact that we shot in the sun, rain and clouds, there’s actually probably four or five different versions of the movie,” he shares. “Another thing that made it unique was that every time we shot the scenes, Harold did it in a slightly different manner. One time we did it as a dolly tracking shot, one time with a steadicam, one time was hand-held.”

Years later, even people who’ve only seen Groundhog Day once can recall his character with unerring clarity. So what contributes to Ned’s memorableness? Tobolowsky has some concrete theories. “The first thing is that Ned is the archetypal boor that we all know in our lives,” he says. “The second thing is that the script is brilliantly structured – the morning is repeated in the first third of the movie, lunch in the middle third, and night in the final third, and I think the fact that Ned’s is in the morning makes him very memorable. Having a character as broadly comedic as Ned just sets the plate of joy for the rest of the movie.” Groundhog Day on Blu-ray is currently available via Sony Pictures Home Entertainment for a SRP of $28.95.)

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