Groundhog Day Loop - Television Tropes & Idioms

Higurashi No Naku Koro Ni is based on a rather dark version of this. Piecing together hints from the various repetitions to figure out what is really going on is an important aspect of the series. The nature of the loop — and who is involved — is not immediately apparent, and the underlying causes aren't fully stated until halfway through the second season (and the 8th installment in the games). Technically, though, it isn't that time is looping; memories are just being copied/overwritten between alternate worlds.
- Something similar is happening in the sequel, Umineko No Naku Koro Ni, only this time, the cause of the loop is identified very early on: A Witch Did It.
In Card Captor Sakura, the Time card keeps the same day repeating indefinitely, until it is caught by Syaoran.
In D.Gray-Man, a town repeats October 28th over and over, until the main characters (not previously caught in the loop, which was a localized phenomenon caused by Innocence) find a way to fix it.
In the manga Tsubasa, the main characters find themselves trapped in the exact same day in the newest arc.
In Jojo's Bizarre Adventure part 4, the villain Yoshikage Kira gains an ability similar to this called "Another One Bites The Dust".
Kimagure Orange Road had Kyosuke repeat Christmas three times, trying to get to the party with the "right" girl (without pissing off Madoka or crushing Hikaru's happiness). No one else was aware of the repeats (though series Butt Monkey Yusaku gets wiped out in increasingly violent accidents each time). This came out in 1987, considerably predating most of the other examples.
Urusei Yatsura: Beautiful Dreamer follows one for the early part of the film.
In "Endless Eight", a short story from The Rampage of Haruhi Suzumiya, the SOS Brigade ends up repeating the same two weeks of August about 15,500 times, causing all but Haruhi to suffer bouts of déjà vu. Only Yuki retains conscious memory of the preceding cycles—594 years of mind-numbing sameness (since no one learns anything from the previous loops). The anime adaptation stretches this out across eight episodes. Now the viewer, too, can feel Yuki's pain.
In an early chapter of Nightmare Inspector, a woman seems to be suffering from a somewhat self-inflicted version of this- in her dreams, she writes 'tomorrow will be exactly the same' on a piece of paper, and it is. She tries to stop the cycle and write something different in her dream, but the 'something different' is 'tomorrow I will stab someone to death'. Freaking out, she goes to Hiruko... and it turns out he's been the one writing 'every day is exactly the same' for her every time, and it's all part of the loop. The customer, as far as we see, never gets out.

The movie Boris & Natasha, a live action Rocky And Bullwinkle movie, has a device which prevents accidents by reversing time by a few seconds any time it is destroyed. This allows sequences in the movie to be repeated until things change.
- The film ends with several hundred being activated at once. As Natasha notes, "Boris, ve haf been blown back to beginink of movie!"
12:01 is a made-for-cable movie on the same subject from 1993. Same year as Groundhog Day, surprise! It was a direct "descendant" of a 1990 short film and a 1973 SF short story by Richard A. Lupoff. The hero was given an electric shock at exactly 12:01 as a nuclear device came on line that causes time to loop. He's the only one who realizes this, and when he's not being killed each day, he tries to figure a way to prevent the nuclear device from going on-line.
- 12:01pm the 1990 short mentioned above is harsher. The main character is the only person who is directly aware of the interstellar event looping time. There's nothing he can do to stop it.
The film A Chinese Odyssey has a sequence where a bandit discovers the magic words of the Monkey King which allow him to travel a short distance backwards in time. He uses them to go back and try to avert the multiple tragedies that have befallen himself and his friends. He winds up having to make multiple trips and run around like mad to keep everyone alive.
Lola rennt (aka Run Lola Run): the eponymous Lola runs through a madcap twenty minutes, attempting to get 100,000 marks to her boyfriend before the mob kills him. Depending on whether her start is fractionally delayed or fractionally faster the results vary wildly; she gets it right on the third try.
And of course, the trope namer, Groundhog Day is the most commonly known version of this trope. One thing not noticed by most people is just how long the loop in the original Groundhog Day went on for — Phil memorizes every book in town, knows the complete backstory of every person in town, becomes an accomplished pianist and sculptor, and goes from being a self-centered ass to universally beloved. An early version of the script suggested that it was on the order of several millennia, but in a DVD special feature the director states it's closer to ten years.
- The temptation for these plots is to reuse footage to pad out a film and save money. Apart from possibly one shot, this film does not do that at all.
  - On the contrary, the director filmed a huge number of repetitive scenes. Of particular note is the one where Phil eats the cake in one huge bite. Apparently Bill Murray actually ate like 10 hunks over the course of as many takes.
The Nickelodeon film The Last Day of Summer has a plot like this. The main character, scared of his first year of middle school, wishes it could be summer forever. He then ends up repeating the last day of summer over and over again. Each reset is actually set off by him getting hit in the head and losing consciousness. Memorizing the day doesn't do him any good, as something else hits him, culminating in him avoiding everything possible, only to be struck by a meteor.
It's implied at the end of Hellraiser: Inferno that this happens to Joseph, forced to relive the same sequence of events forever.
This is often done with Christmas stories:
- The Family Channel's Christmas Every Day (in fact, one of the characters even mentions how his situation is similar to Groundhog Day).
- 12 Days of Christmas Eve, starring Steven Weber and Molly Shannon.
- Christmas Do-Over, also on ABC Family.
Freddy Kreuger uses this device on the protagonists as a trap at one point in A Nightmare On Elm Street IV: Dream Master.
The criminally underrated brit underdog Triangle features an awesome variation with overlapping loops-within-loops, complete with disturbing reminders to the protagonist that she has been doing - and causing - this way more times than she is aware of. PS: watch it, it really is awesome.

In Ken Grimwood's novel Replay, the protagonist lives large chunks of his life repeatedly (as do a couple of other characters), waking after dying to find himself back in his college days. However, with each subsequent cycle of death and reawakening, the cycle gets shorter as he wakes up at a later point in his own lifetime.
In The Tunnel Under the World, by Frederik Pohl, Guy Burckhardt lives in a town where June 15th is repeated every day, but the inhabitants don't realize. It is later revealed that everyone in the town is a miniature robot who was imprinted with the mind-pattern of a citizen of the real town, which was destroyed on June 14th. Advertising executives then used them to test various advertising techniques. It makes much more sense than it seems.
This trope is the arc connecting both acts of Waiting for Godot.
In The Dark Tower, the entire plot of all seven novels (excepting a few Flash Back's) is revealed at the very end to be a cycle. How long the cycle has been repeating, and how long it will continue, is left to the reader's imagination.
Two books in the Help! I'm Trapped in _____'s Body! series had the character repeating either the first day of school or of summer camp, until he stopped acting like a jerk.
- Well, the first one did. The second one had an anti-climactic All Just A Dream ending.
The young adult novel Heir Apparent, by Vivian Vande Velde, is about a girl trapped in a full-immersion virtual reality game; every time she dies in the game, the game starts over.
The Cookie Monsters by Vernor Vinge is a particularly unusual example — the protagonists don't have Ripple Effect Proof Memory, but two of them have figured out how to preserve information — they're computer simulations that happen to be sentient, and they can store information in the computer. This means that every single day they're confronted with the Tomato In The Mirror. Not to worry, though — they're not Three Laws Compliant, and they're the "cookie monsters" of the title (a reference to a "cookie" on the Internet.) AIIsACrapshoot, and they're preparing for revenge...
There was even a Sweet Valley Twins book on this (weird as it sounds) where the more selfish of the two twins is forced to relive Christmas Eve day until she figures out it's, well... because she's selfish. Aesop ahoy!
The book All You Need Is Kill is a military-themed version of this. A man is stuck endlessly repeating his first day in combat, going from a green rookie to a seasoned fighter in half a year of constant repetition. Inspired directly by the concept of Save Scumming in real life.

The Star Trek The Next Generation episode "Cause and Effect", in which the ship keeps exploding but also sends the crew back in time a few hours until they figure out how to prevent it. This happened a couple of years before the Groundhog Day movie was created.
- Some airings of the episode also looped the commercial breaks; you've got to wonder how much money the network was giving up to do that...
- It's worth noting that this is different from the typical in that the loop was only internal. In other words, the universe around the Enterprise and the Bozeman kept moving while they looped (The D was stuck for a couple of months, the Bozeman dated from when they had those funky uniform jackets...).
  - Also, none of the characters retained full memory from loop to loop. It was only over time that various members of the crew started to feel like the day was a little too familiar. One wonders why the Bozeman didn't notice this first since they were stuck for a lot longer.
The X Files episode "Monday" came years after this and echoes the plot structure completely, right down to the characters' déjà vu and the explosion before every commercial break. Mulder and Scully keep trying to foil a bank robbery, but the robber has explosives strapped to his body and always ends up killing them all. The only person who can see the loop is the robber's girlfriend, whose repeated efforts to stop events always fail. Eventually she gets killed as well, and it turns out her death is what breaks the cycle.
- The X Files partly subverted the standard format of this trope by having the characters act slightly differently in each repetition. This was said to be due to quantum uncertainty.
The Charmed episode "Déjà Vu All Over Again" where a demon repeats the plan of attack every day until it is perfected so he can finally kill the sisters. One of the sisters has the power of premonition which somehow allows her to have some recollection of what happened/will happen which gets stronger with each additional loop.
Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode "Life Serial" has a Groundhog Day sequence. The characters specifically mention the Star Trek: TNG and X-Files episodes.
- Angel episode "Time Bomb" stuck Illyria in a chaotic version (time is repeating but not in a fixed sequence). Each time it ends with her exploding. Unusually, Illyria is not the perspective character, and we see only a few bits and pieces of loop.
Stargate SG-1 episode "Window of Opportunity". In the episode, the term "Groundhog Day" is used at one point in a partial Lampshade Hanging that implies the characters are aware of the film and its premise, even though the similarity was not actually discussed within the episode.
- Also, when Daniel casually points out that O'Neill and Teal'c can pretty much do anything they want without fear of consequences, Hilarity Ensues.
  - Boy does it ever.
- For years, this was voted SG-1's best episode. Ever.
  - Also used (although much less humorously) in the episode "Gamekeeper," where Daniel and Jack (the others were immune because they had naquada in their blood and the writers couldn't think up an appropriately angsty backstory for them... yet) had to repeat a specific day/moment of their lives over and over. For Jack it was a particular battle gone wrong, for Daniel it was his parents' deaths. Both independently come to the conclusion that they're repeating it until they get it right. Of course, they're not even close, but they figure it out by the end of the episode, and save all the innocent alien types.
Farscape episode "Back and Back and Back to the Future".
Early Edition's "Run, Gary, Run" (itself a parody of the German art film "Run Lola Run"), combines this trope with Set Right What Once Went Wrong.
There is also a Xena: Warrior Princess episode, called "Been There, Done That", where the male half of two Star Crossed Lovers makes a deal with Cupid to have the day repeat itself until he finds a way to keep his lover from killing herself and their families from killing each other. In hopes of resolving it, Cupid let Xena in on the loop since she was in the town at the time, and it nearly drives her crazy before she figures out what's going on.
Gabrielle: We've repeated the day that many times.
Xena: (visibly frustrated) Yes.
Gabrielle: Then I d—
Xena: (looking from Gabrielle to Joxer and back) No, no, yes, no, I tried that, yes both ways, no, I don't know, no again. Are there any more questions? Good.
Give My Head Peace also has such an episode. Uncle Andy has a drunken 11th Night and wakes up on the 12th only to find that a precious Orange Banner depicting the Battle of the Boyne has been destroyed, presumably by the thuggish Scottish bandsmen who drunkenly slept the night off in his house.
Taye Diggs starred in a very short-lived ABC series in 2006 called Daybreak centered around this trope — he's repeatedly framed for the murder of a lawyer, and of course his girlfriend gets caught up in it. His injuries carry over from one repeat to the next.
- Also, "psychological breakthroughs" were also apparently carried across. I.e., if someone had made an exceptional hard choice or had an epiphany, they would actually alter their behavior the next loop, and all subsequent loops, with no outside interference. This mostly keeps the protagonist from having to solve everyone's problems every day, but at sometimes ends up making things worse for him when someone doesn't do something he expects.
Seven Days mixed this with Cuckoo Nest, as Frank was repeatedly sent back to the same series of events by another version of himself until he could save one of his friends without innocents dying in the process.
Tru Calling revolved around a variation of the "reliving days" premise. Tru is asked by the dead to save her, resetting time to allow her the chance. One episode had her going through the same day about four times, each time in response to a different deceased asking for her help.
Lois and Clark: The New Adventures of Superman features a somewhat darker version, in which Mr. Mxyzptlk creates a time loop in which things get a bit worse each time, to eventually result in The End Of The World As We Know It. World War Three is looming by the time Lois and Clark fix things. And this is the Christmas episode, no less...
Strange Days at Blake Holsey High used this one with the twist that time will actively oppose any attempts to change the loop: if you decide to avoid bumping into someone by taking a different route, the other person will change their route to counteract this.
The Blood Ties episode "5:55".
The Supernatural episode "Mystery Spot". Sam is the one replaying the same Tuesday over and over. The episode makes direct reference to the movie when Sam tries to explain what's happening to Dean, who responds "Oh, like Groundhog Day." Every. Single. Time. Particularly cruel is that the trigger for the snap back is Dean dying. The loop is stated by Sam to have repeated at least 100 times, and in each one, Dean's deaths start to become exponentially more comical. And at least once, Sam kills him accidentally.
- It's implied that it's been well over a hundred times — probably closer to several thousand, at least. Sam himself says, when asked, that he lost count after "about a hundred and fifteen". Worse, it's also implied that the sheer paranoia of Sam's efforts end up killing Dean at least half the time, either directly or indirectly. The kicker? This is just the Trickster trying to prepare Sam for Dean's eventual death, at the season finale so that he doesn't go completely insane because of it. The events of the episode alone, after Dean dies for the last time, prove that without this preparation, Sam would have gone just as badly off the rails as Dean was doing already — the montage shows him becoming a death-seeking recluse who's just as fanatic as Gordon about hunting anything that seems like it's looking at humanity as prey — and he seems to have started to slide down the slope, as far as morals go, when it comes to trying something to bring Dean back. The Trickster's actions get him to act rationally (or at least, as rationally as either of the Winchester Boys ever does) after the season finale. After Dean comes back, we see that Sam has coped reasonably well with Dean's death, compared to the sheer insanity that would have happened without the loop. Further, we're told/it's implied that Sam hadn't made any efforts to try and bring Dean back — which was one of the Trickster's other lessons for him: "You Winchester boys are so eager to die for each other — and the thing is, the bad guys know it too."
  - Actually, one of the first things Sam tells a revived Dean is that he tried to save him, even to make deals with demons, but never could find a way. So no, Sam didn't get his lesson from the Trickster.
In an episode of The Outer Limits called "Déjà Vu", a time loop occurs due to a failed wormhole experiment. However, at each round the loop gets shorter and shorter, with less time to prevent the impending disaster. The protagonists succeed, with the General Ripper who sabotaged the experiment becoming trapped in a seconds-long version, just enough time for him to see that the triggering explosion is about to happen and cover his face.
An episode of Eureka featured the main character Carter repeating the wedding day of Allison to Jerkass Stark. The day is eventually saved after a Heroic Sacrifice from Stark himself)
- Unusually, time was very much not on Jack's side in this episode. The time loop was unstable and every time it happened Jack arrived in the past with worse and worse physical injuries caused by the backlash. It's a good thing he got down to business right away, because it only even went on for five loops or so but by the last he was arriving in the past with broken ribs and the scientists who had some idea what was going on predicted the universe would probably end if it looped one more time.
Not Surprisingly, Doctor Who has played with this as well. In an early 1980s serial, The Doctor and Romana are caught in a time loop (called a chronic hysteresis) that repeats after only a couple of minutes. Being Time Lords, they fix the loop within 10 minutes and then get on with the rest of that adventure.
- The novel Festival of Death features a race with this as their hat; after they die, they loop around back to the start and remember exactly how they screwed up. They apparently have some form of Prime Directive ensuring that outside history doesn't get screwed over too severely by this.
  - The Doctor has used a Groundhog Day Loop to his benefit, too. In order to prevent a war monger from launching his atomic bombs against an enemy planet, the Doctor uses the Key to Time to create a temporary time loop, buying him enough time to solve the crisis at hand.
- Often employed in the series as a weapon (to trap people, ships and sometimes entire planets) as opposed to the effect being a naturally occuring phenomenon that characters stumble into.
An episode of the Weird Science TV show combined this with the "remote control that controls the world" trope later made famous by the movie Click.
Used in an episode of Power Rangers Lightspeed Rescue in which Carter accidentally loops to prevent the other four Rangers from dying when Olympius nabs their BFG.
In Torchwood, it mentions that Jack Harkness and John Hart were stuck in a two week time loop together for 5 years.
An episode of The Suite Life on Deck had Cody trying to impress Bailey at the school dance yet failing, and suddenly getting stuck in a time loop because of lightning striking the ship as it crossed the International Dateline. The loop is solved when Cody manages to slow down the ship's speed.
One episode of The Twilight Zone is about a man who has the same dream every night, about being convicted for a heinous murder and being executed for it. The Twilight Zone Twist is that it's told from the perspective of the *other* characters. They eventually grow to realize that if the man is put to death, he'll wake up and they will cease to exist.
A ''white'' hole?
- Also used in one of the tie-in books, a themed diary. Kryten suggested quite early on that Lister write himself an explanatory note not to touch the equipment causing the loop again, but failed to remember that Lister's handwriting was so bad that he had to go up and touch it just to see what it said.
Lost has Desmond, whose consciousness has been sent back and forward through time. He essentially relives parts of his entire life, implying that he can predict what will happen. The tragedy is that any drastic changes he tries to make, such as saving Charlie's life, are smoothed out or "course-corrected" by time.

The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask involves repeating the same 3 days over and over, solving puzzles by use of the daily schedules of the NPCs. Strangely, once you actually beat the game, everything you've done seems to have happened despite it usually not being the case — there's not enough time to do everything in the game in a single pass, and there's no duplicate Links running around, so one would assume events from the last cycle would be the only ones to persist. The opposite of No Ontological Inertia is at work.
- It is kind of the universe apology for you for causing you all that trouble.
- To be fair, if the game were actually three days long instead of three hours, this could be done easily.
- There's actually a Self Imposed Challenge floating around the internet that states "You can only play the Song Of Time once", thus kinda/sorta negating the whole Groundhog Day thing. It's pretty damn hard though.
One quest in Dragon Warrior VII sends the heroes to a town that is stuck in an infinite time loop. The heroes themselves are not affected, and have to find the source of the curse. This is also a surprisingly effective justification for Broken Bridge — the bridge will be fixed tomorrow, but tomorrow won't happen until you fix this.
The main story of Grim Grimoire is also based on this trope. The same five days are repeated several times throughout the story, but only Cute Witch Lillet Blan seems to notice (and also seems to be the only one powerful enough to stop it.) And then you find out that the loop has been going on much longer than you think...
The main story of Ephemeral Phantasia. The hero is initially the only one unaffected, but he gradually frees others (who become playable) from the cycle by changing the way events play out.
In Little Busters!, any increase in the protagonist's strength in one playthrough carries over to the next playthrough. It turns out that this is because he is actually in a hospital recovering from a bus crash of which he was the only survivor, and the whole thing is a Lotus Eater Machine replaying the same scenario over and over again until he's strong enough to deal with this fact.
- Could that also fall under New Game Plus?
  - In a very minor sense, considering it's still an integral part of the main game.
  - This trope was the underlying premise of the New Game Plus feature in Chrono Trigger.
The premise of Episode Aigis (The Answer in the US), the epilogue scenario of Updated Rerelease Persona 3: FES. The main characters find themselves trapped inside their dorm house in a one-day time loop, endlessly reliving March the 31st. This is caused by (and representative of) Aigis' inability to move on after the death of the Main Character of Episode Yourself, who sacrificed himself to prevent The End Of The World As We Know It.
Rematch, a TADS text adventure, is based around this idea — the aim of the game is to find the one single command that will prevent you from being killed and break the time loop.
The Tsukihime sequel game Kagetsu Tohya seems to take this form. It has the added trippiness of the fact that, though Shiki repeats the same day over and over, just what sort of day it is can change. Is it a school day? A holiday? The day of the culture festival? A day where, for whatever reason, Shiki wakes up as a cat?
- Type-Moon must like this trope, because they did the same thing in the Fate Stay Night sequel Fate/hollow ataraxia. This time it's the Holy Grail War that keeps repeating, allowing even characters who died in all three routes to reappear.
It's implied that Siren takes place in one of these, and the gameplay also bears this out — you can only fully complete a stage in at least two playthroughs, and a sequence of stages from the start, to one of the endpoints is referred to as a "loop" by the game. In the true ending, the loop is seemingly broken and events resolved.
Shadow Of Destiny. The whole premise is that the main character is trying to change history so that he doesn't die; being killed results in living through the events prior to his death again until he gets it right and survives. Amusingly, in one part of the game it's possible to go through the same conversation for a third time, which results in the main character pre-empting what he knows the NPC he's talking with is about to say.
Though not an exact example, in Episode III of Xenosaga, Wilhelm's plan is revealed to involve preventing the impending collapse of the universe by enacting Eternal Recurrence, which would reset everything in the Lower Domain all the way back to the beginning of time, then repeating the process over and over. It's implied that not everything plays out in exactly the same way each time, since the post-game Database updates say that Wilhelm has successfully enacted Eternal Recurrence before, whereas in the game proper, Shion and co. reject his plan and stop him, electing to find a better way.
The Gameboy Advance game Astro Boy: Omega Factor invokes this when, during your first completion of the main story, you fail to prevent The End Of The World As We Know It, and wind up dead. However, the time-transcending creature known as Phoenix (no, not that Phoenix) saves you, putting you back to the beginning of the game, and giving you the ability to jump freely through time to the various stages (once you've beaten them a second time, mind.) Not everything is exactly the same, however, because the Big Bad is also time-traveling and attempting to sabotage your efforts. Your purpose is to reshape events so that the final doom does not occur. Of course, your foreknowledge leads to a number of amusing incidents when you recognize characters who haven't met you yet, or simply preempt what they're about to say.
In Dissidia: Final Fantasy, it turns out that the war of Dissidia has already happened twelve times before, once for each game in the series, presumably with a new pair of hero and villain being added each time. The loop is something only Chaos, Cosmos, and some of the more cunning villains are aware of. Plus Cid. The heroes manage to break the loop and end the war at the end, however. Or do they?
The time loop in Final Fantasy might be this, maybe. Garland certainly seems to anticipate killing the Light Warriors over, and over, and over again, so maybe it's just a conscious loop for him and the LW.
In Suikoden Tierkreis, the Order of the One True Way can not only predict the future, but promises eternal universal happiness in the One True Way. What is this One True Way? Each individual's favorite day repeated eternally.
A mission in The Elder Scrolls: Shivering Isles, has a bunch of ghost who failed to defend their castle due to various personal flaws or issues be condemned by Sheogorath, the Daedric Prince of Madness, to re-live the battle that destroyed the castle, 24/7, until they could get it right and successfully repel the invaders. However, the twist is that they are unable to make the necessary changes, thus they have to "act" their parts, knowing all too well how it'll end, while being aware of the constant loop. The player has to go around the castle and do whatever he can to break the cycle by finding the cause of each character's failure (usually an item the character needs or that should be destroyed). The mage ran out of mana, so you have to make sure he gets a dagger that will let him replenish it, or a Varla Stone. One knight was too worried about his lover (actually a doll), so you have to either bring the doll to him or destroy it to inspire him to fight out of valor or revenge. The archer ran out of arrows because the Quartermaster is a greedy bastard who was stringy on equipments, so you need to get arrows from him and give them to the archer. You then have to take the place of the Castle's count, who was too proud to join the battle himself, so that the last invader can be slain and the cycle can be broken.
The Gregory Horror Show is set within a hotel in a kind of Limbo. Although it is not the SAME day repeating the crux of the game revolves around learning and plotting out the inhabitants daily routines, after such an extended time they all do the same things at the same time every day and as you piss each of them off over time it becomes essential to know that if you leave a room you won't walk into pychos like nurse Catherine.
Flower Sun And Rain involves one of these... however, the way the day plays out each time is so different that the main character initially doesn't realize it, and writes off the one repeating element as a bad dream.
In Blaz Blue, it's revealed that ALL of the multiple endings are canon due to a time loop. However, the cycle is eventually broken in the game's True End. There are at least two Chessmasters who seem to be throwing out a Thirty Xanatos Pileup trying to break the loop in particular ways. The player never finds out which one "won" in the True End. Waiting on that sequel yet?
Similarly, in Eternal Poison, all five character storylines are revealed to be canon upon unlocking Duphaston's tale, the order in which the several iterations took place somewhat tangible with a bit of thinking. The time loop is also broken in Duphaston's story with the completed Librum Aurora, the death of Lenarshe, and the revival of Izel. The true ending culminates in a final battle between the five main leads and Izel.

In the machinima series Red Vs Blue, the antagonistic mercenary Wyoming has the ability to rewind little segments of time, essentially making him impossible to defeat: whenever something doesn't go to plan, he simply backtracks a few moments into the past and takes steps to avoid being beaten down by the protagonists. He’s only foiled when one character's Deus Ex Machina allows him to keep his memory during rewinds and kills him before he has a chance to activate his power.

Featured in an episode of The Angry Beavers, "Same Time Last Week", where Dagget keeps getting literally knocked into last week by Norbert for annoying him all week.
In Code Lyoko episode "A Great Day", XANA took control of the time reset device the kids use to fix things after each attack and continues to turn back time to the start of the same day until the heroes can regain control.
- The series also features evidence that Franz Hopper intentionally relived the same day over two thousand times to give him the time he needed to program Lyoko and XANA before the MIB came for him and his daughter. He might have also lost his marbles during this scenario.
- Most episodes have a Groundhogs day reset, this is a show where the heroes have control over the reset. Ulrich even has the "tired of doing this all over again" feelings when Xana makes an attack every day for a week.
Pepper Ann subverted this trope; the cycle was only broken by doing everything completely wrong.
- And then the next day, she has to fix everything she did wrong (cleaning and fixing up stuff), goes to bed exhausted...and wakes up to find out she's in another loop.
One episode of Disney's Aladdin had the main characters getting stuck, one by one, in a constantly repeating showdown between a band of adventurers and a gang of rogues, until they managed to prevent the crystal the adventurers were carrying from breaking and thus acting as a Reset Button.
Featured (and parodied) in Sealab 2021, "Lost In Time", where Quinn and Stormy are repeatedly blown back 15 minutes in time by an explosion that destroys Sealab, and keep getting mistaken for doppelgangers and thrown in the brig when they try to warn Captain Murphy.
- Making it even funnier, the time repeat keeps duplicating them, so by the end there are dozens of Dr. Quinns and Stormys, all in the brig together.
In Stickin' Around, Stacy and Bradley keep getting sent back 15 minutes whenever gym class ends, until Bradley takes full blame for something he did instead of letting everyone share the punishment. Then again...
Disney's animated Christmas special featuring Mickey, Donald and Goofy in three mini-stories centered around X-mas themes. The Donald Duck feature had the triplets Huey, Dewey and Louie wish that is was "Christmas every day"; it ended in a case of the aforementioned trope.
The Fairly Oddparents had a Christmas special where Timmy wished it was Christmas every day like Huey, Dewey and Louie above. It culminated in physical representations of all the other holidays heading to the North Pole to take out Santa, ending Christmas once and for all.
The Batman has Francis Grey in the episode "Seconds", who can "rewind" time by a few seconds whenever he wants, without anyone else aware of it. He still can't be in two places at once, of course, which is how he's defeated... and the end result is that, when it really counts, he finally manages to rewind time all the way back to when he first became a criminal, but he chooses differently.
The Animated Adaptation of The Mask has Stanley Ipkiss trapped in a loop of a few hours by a time-manipulating villainess. After the first few loops, he starts running to his apartment and getting the Mask on in order to hunt for her. Eventually, he discovers it's because of a watch-like device on his arm. The villainess is using the loops to put herself in a different spot each time, forming a geomantric array that will let her control time. During their final battle, the Mask gets the device off of himself, resets it, and slaps it on her. Then he drops a grandfather clock on her face. The loop was changed to a few seconds, so it happens over and over and over... When the villainess reappears later, she reveals that subjectively, it took a thousand years for her to get out.
Totally Spies had "Deja Cruise" (which probably means that this trope is somebody's fetish). In the episode, the girls take a vacation on the WOOHP cruise ship, which gets hijacked by bad guys and eventually ends up sinking somehow, after which the girls wake up in their room and start the loop over. They break the loop by learning to co-operate with their fellow agents on board instead of telling everyone to stand back while they handled it. The whole thing was, of course, a training exercise set up by Jerry, and the entire ship was in on it.

http://improveverywhere.com/2003/03/22/the-moebius/ A group of improv agents acted out a moebius loop in a Starbucks. Every five minutes they repeated their actions, for an hour. A couple argues, a guy spills coffee, another guy dances through with his own boombox. To the patrons of the Starbucks, it at first looked like a really clumsy guy and a couple fighting and making back up, but by the third loop they began to realize all was not what it seemed.

A rather localized variation crops up in one issue of Lucifer, where Erishad gains a kind of immortality by her body reliving one day over and over. Unfortunately, that happens to be the day she miscarried.
Hourman was once trapped in a place called "the timepoint" in which he and his friends were stuck reliving a five-minute slice of time on the day JFK was assassinated. Different in that the timepoint is a physical place which mimics this point in time, and not actually the time itself (though the effect is basically the same for those trapped inside).
Johnny Alpha in Strontium Dog occasionally punishes a criminal by using a time drode to send them two seconds back in time, at which point the drode reactivates... for all eternity.
The Mighty Thor discovered that his father Odin and the fire demon Surtur go through this in the afterlife. The only way to break the loop is if Surtur manages to escape back to the living world. Odin now eternally guards the exit, stalling until he either beats Surtur or the loop repeats.

50 First Dates employs a man-made Groundhog Day. The lead female character was in a car crash years ago and since then suffered from short-term memory loss. Everyday she would wake up believing it to be the same day over and over again. To avoid causing her emotional trauma, her family decided to allow her to live that day over and over again. Then and everyone else in town acts the exact same way around her everyday to keep up the charade. They even make sure everything appears the same, going as far as recording the stuff that aired on TV that day and playing it all the time and setting out the same newspaper each morning. Adam Sandler's character breaks her out of it, using video recordings to fill her in on what's happened since they met.

A short story depicted a kid who was really not looking forward to playing in a football game the next day, so he went to bed wishing it was already Sunday. He woke up on Sunday but his mother was so angry with him that he went to bed wondering what had happened on Saturday. After living through Saturday he knew what happened, but luckily, everything was resolved by Monday morning.
In Terry Pratchett's Thief of Time, all Yetis are able to rewind their existences a few minutes to prevent themselves from dying. Near the end of the book, Lu-Tze manages to do this to distract the Auditors of Reality. The author's early comments reveal that Yetis have developed "Save Game" and "Load Game" functions.
- On a related note, Yetis have gone extinct several times. Just not for very long.
A science-fiction short featured a man who lived his life out of sequence. Most of his childhood was intact, with only a few future-self bits, but after adolescence his existence became totally nonlinear; whenever he went to sleep, he risked waking in another part of his life, so long as he hadn't yet lived it. Eventually he discovered that his first wife, who died young, had the same condition, and was able to change history so that she lived, erasing all the parts of his life after her death and letting them live them over together.
- "If This Is Winnetka, You Must Be Judy" by F. M. Busby.

Star Trek Enterprise had Captain Archer be infected with strange alternate dimension parasites in his brain that made it so he could not create any new long-term memories, so he would wake up the next day believing it was immediately following the event where he was infected. He would frequently present a new idea he just had only for those around him to mention that he presented the same idea weeks ago. The nature of the parasites gave them a handy reset button for the episode as well.
Stargate SG 1 has an episode in which Teal'c is stuck in what basically amounts to a video game. Each time he fails, it resets, forcing him to start from the beginning. (And it adapts to his tactics and adds new threats each time, becoming worse with each go-around. The Computer Is A Cheating Bastard.)

On The Other Wiki, some joker once edited the "Infinite regression" page so that the first entry in the "See Also" list was "Infinite regression".
- That's hilarious.
Try a Google search for "recursion"!

Rosencrantz And Guildenstern Are Dead can be interpreted this way: the two are forced to perform the same actions over and over during every performance of Hamlet, possessing just enough instinct to know their lines, but being completely in the dark about who they are and what their purpose is during the scenes they're not in. It's... complicated.

Web comic Wapsi Square features a plotline where an ancient Mayan calendar is in reality a broken time machine. In 2011, this machine will reset all of time back to when the machine was first activated. Only one immortal character, Jin, retains memories of this event. She has lived over one hundred thousand years, living through the same looping time period, trying to fix the machine and end the loop. All the other characters in the comic are known to her, and she has been friends, enemies, maybe even lovers with each of them during the endless cycles of time she has lived through.
- This trope did the math: the time loop has been active for about 81,200 years.
Legostar Galactica parodies this when the USS Muffin enters a time loop, with first officer Marty pointing out that to preserve it they ought to go back, while the Captain just wants to get out, getting sufficiently annoyed by the third repitition to smack Marty in the mouth when he suggests going back in.
Used hilariously in a series of Sluggy Freelance strips, starting here: [1]
The Ends is set in a post-apocalyptic wasteland where a massive nuclear explosion has apparently distorted time, forcing the survivors into an endless cycle of death and rebirth.
Used in The Adventures of Dr McNinja to defeat the villain Sparklelord, who is sent back in time and doomed to repeat the sequence of events leading him to be sent back, ad infinitum. Distinct from typical versions of this trope in that his memory also undergoes a Snap Back, making it impossible for him to escape. Might also be a Stable Time Loop, given that the removal of his memory is what prompts the repeat of events, Your Milage May Vary.

A similar situation to that of the Supernatural episode above happened in the Jumanji animated series: Alan is suddenly killed near the beginning of the episode, but the boys manage to rescue him thanks to a "Chrono Time Repeater", a device obtained from Trader Slick capable of sending them back in time to the moment they last entered Jumanji. Unfortunately, this seems to be a rather unlucky day for Alan, seeing as he keeps dying in several ways, only for Judy and Peter to keep rescuing him until the device breaks, though they manage to survive the final crisis of the day. Though this may seem like a Set Right What Once Went Wrong plot, it has several Groundhog Day elements, such as the repeated lines and footage, as well as the characters growing frustration with all the repetition (the most visible example being the beginning of the "loop", where they are suddenly confronted with a swarm of giant ants heading towards them: though they were pretty scared at first, they start dealing with the problem with increased apathy as the "loop" repeats, culminating in the last repetition where, when faced with the ants, they simply sidestep out of the way with the most deadpan expression on their faces).
One episode of The Adventures of Jimmy Neutron has Jimmy hypnotizing his parents into having his birthday party early. Unfortunately, he told them that his birthday was "tomorrow", meaning another birthday party the day after that, and then the day after that, and so on. Unlike the other examples, everyone but Jimmy's folks is aware of the repetition. They later reveal that the hypnosis broke sooner than it appeared to, but they kept going through the motions to teach Jimmy a lesson.
Mighty Max Seems to end on this trope. In the last episode Armageddon enveloped the world, a giant spider kills Max's guardian Norman, Skullmaster kills Virgil and takes the portal-making hat, which turns into a crown. At the very last second Max grabs Skullmaster and takes control... and ends up at the very moment he opened the package with the hat in it, and knows he's starting over again.
Not an exact use of this trope, but in The Simpsons, on a trip to Itchy and Scratchy Land, Homer and Marge go to a restaurant where New Year's is celebrated every fifteen minutes or so. Marge actually remarks to one of the servers that it must be fun to celebrate New Years Day all the time, to which the despondent man replies, "Kill me."
- Probably based on one club at Walt Disney World's Pleasure Island that celebrated New Year's every night.
Ruby Gloom has an episode where Ruby is in charge of the Gloomsville World's Fair. The day doesn't stop repeating until the World's Fair goes right. Played with when Ruby forgets something she was going to say and leaves to take a short nap in order to remember. No one remembers her leaving.
An episode of Johnny Test features a self-inflicted loop. After wasting a whole Saturday being forced to watch ballet on TV with Sissy and Missy, Johnny and Dukey get a device from Mary and Susan that will allow them to repeat the day as many times as they wish. They try to avoid watching the ballet with Sissy by force, but when that repeatedly fails to work, they decide to be nice to Sissy and Missy to see if that will work. This results in them all having the best Saturday ever. In most instances, this would mean the end of the loop, but instead the trope is subverted when Johnny's dad points out that Johnny is falling in love with Sissy. Wanting to have nothing to do with that, Johnny presses the reset button again and proceeds to be mean to Sissy the next time around.

A variation of this is used in some web-based games to keep them interesting to the players by offering different bonuses by recycling back to the beginning and changing a beginning characteristic. Said alteration will also change how you play the game, as the differences change how fast you can proceed, what abilities you can get, and also will offer different rewards for completing portions of the game. Also, frequently the "looper" will retain certain items from previous plays for in-game status or bonuses.

Many fanfics of completed anime series have one or another character looping back to the beginning of the series "To put right what once went wrong". A few are even completed.
- Jeff Wong's "Just Won't Die" does this at least twice (I believe), plus a passing reference to an earlier occurrence, and some instances of "putting right" other things in a variety of bizarre ways.
Used in the Naruto fanfic Chuunin Exam Day by Perfect Lionheart. It's not a fixfic and is held in high regard on the site, despite it's subpar quality writing.
Also used by Innortal for Ranma One Half, Neon Genesis Evangelion, Harry Potter, Naruto, and Bleach. Many others have played in these universes over on The Fanfiction Forum. Other universes involved with these loops include Slayers, Star Wars, Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha, Sailor Moon and Buffy The Vampire Slayer. There's even crossovers between the various universes.

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