''Oh, the weather outside is frightful, / But the fire is so delightful. / And since we've no place to go, / Let It Snow! Let It Snow! Let It Snow!
—"Let It Snow! Let It Snow! Let It Snow!".
An easy way to
isolate a place. A frequent manifestation is the snow day. Sometimes this is any snow at all, sometimes you'll at least require that the roads be blocked with it. Used in a wide variety of situations:
Locked Room Mystery,
Locked In A Room (especially—duh!—
Locked In A Freezer),
A House Divided,
The Siege,
Whack A Mole,
And Then There Were None...
On a lighter note, if a couple (or
potential couple) happen to get
Snowed In together somewhere cozy, remember that
Snow Means Love... (especially if
There Is Only One Bed).
Mild
Truth In Television: in the more southern parts of both Europe and North America, a small amount of snow can bring a city to a halt, mostly out of confusion and rarity (school districts in Texas have been known to declare a snow day for one inch of precipitation). Further north, and it takes actual serious buildup to have an effect.
Rarer variations include heavy rain or similarly extreme weather conditions.
Examples:
- A blizzard isolates the Overlook Hotel in The Shining.
- Calvin And Hobbes and similar strips/series frequently have the character wish for a snow day:
- As Calvin once said, "Getting an inch of snow is like winning 10 cents in the lottery."
- An episode of Hey Arnold.
- Dexters Laboratory.
- The Simpsons did this on several occasions.
- Snow Day, one of those
awful Nickelodeon live-action movies, had this as its central premise, complete with evil snowplow man whose goal is to plow the streets and force kids to go to school.
- The webcomic Perry Bible Fellowship had something like this, but with a twist
◊.
- Home Alone 3 had the villains taking advantage of a snowstorm to isolate the street.
- The ending of Look Who's Talking Too.
- Preposterously overdone in The Day After Tomorrow.
- Done in an episode of South Park. Cannibalism ensued.
- This troper remembers an episode of Good Eats that started with "...Three inches of snow paralyzed Atlanta."
- It was supposed to be a "documentary" episode taking place just after Thanksgiving, and the three inches of snow ended up forcing the cast inside and sending most of the production crew into a "Good Eats starved" frenzy, from which they were appeased by Thanksgiving leftovers until Emeril came by in a V-22 Osprey. I'm not making that up.
- The Daria episode "Antisocial Climbers".
- Episode 7 of Kanokon used this plot. The snow was caused by a yuki-onna (snow woman) as part of a test on Kouta and Chizuru's relationship. Also, there were semi-sentient ninja snowmen.
- Murder On The Orient Express
- As an example of the contrast, this troper was born on the Canadian prairies and spent part of her childhood in the North. She didn't get a snow day until her third year of university - on the West Coast, where it snows an average of five inches a year.
- In To Kill A Mockingbird, the kids get the day off from school because of a light snowfall, a rarity in Alabama.
- This Troper can attest that this is a Truth In Television. A slight flurry shuts down the state.
- Truth in television to some extent in the UK, where even a light snowfall tends to lead to massive disruption to everything in the country
- The song "Let It Snow!", shown at the top of the page, has a surprising amount of sexual implication for a Christmas song. "The lights are turned way down low", for example.
