Headscratchers / Recess: School's Out

• The big bad wanted to create a year-round school by creating a perpetual winter, ignoring, you know, a shit ton of snow days the kids would be having.
  • Which TJ even points out. "We'll just ride our bikes through the snow! We'll play kickball in the slush! We'll go camp out in igloos!"
  • Ask any Canadian; if there's always a lot of snow, the standards for snow days get much higher.
    • Ask any Alaskan; there's approximately only one snow day in a decade. If you're lucky.
    • And you can still go on vacation in the winter. I mean really, Some kids find winter more fun.
  • Although the easy way to answer this is he's not a mentally well man.
    • Well duh, he thought that altering the climate would get him elected president instead of executed or sentenced to life in prison for crimes against humanity (assuming the lynch mob didn't get him first).
  • I always thought that was part of the whole joke.
• There's also the fact that before the movie was released there was an episode where the Government experimented with actually canceling recess that resulted in lower test scores in the long term, was he not aware?
• There's also the fact that a colder summer doesn't translate to no summer vacation. They even have summer vacation in Barrow, Alaska, which has summer temperatures akin to a Nashville, Tennessee type of winter.
• As mentioned below, this is in a Shared Universe with other shows. Wouldn't something that could have taken out the moon's orbit get Wade's attention or at least Jumba's in Kouai. The moon is a singular object, so someone else should have noticed. At least NASA or something like that could have alerted someone who has experience with insanity like this.
  • It's possible that everyone else was busy with something else long enough for the movie's plot to happen. Of course, that means there are lots of facepalms ensuing over how they missed it.
  • Actually, the show (despite having run for a few years in real-time) still only takes place within the 1997-99 period- so it would in fact take place before all the other shows would've started, so their protagonists would've been totally clueless. (But then that throws the logistics of the crossover into question, so a bit of timeline fudging could mean the above explanation still applies.)
  • Most of the movie takes place over a few days, and the serious tests don't start until over a week into summer vacation. The other characters probably DID notice but didn't have time to pinpoint what was causing it before Benedict was defeated.
• On another note... shouldn't someone living or working directly nearby the school be noticing the giant dish coming out of the roof and firing a green beam into the sky? Surely someone (besides the kids) would've picked up on the noise they were making, and the green beam probably would've been visible for a good radius...
  • It's not a perfect explanation by any means, but you'd be surprised what people are willing to ignore as "someone else's problem". As long as nothing obviously illegal is going on, a lot of people would probably just write it off as a science experiment or something, since it is taking place at a school.
• The school is closed for the summer, hence why Phillium Benedict uses it to perform his experiment on getting rid of recess. Where do kids who have summer school go?
  • Possibly the kids who had summer school went to a different school for that, if they even hold summer school at all. Many districts just send all the summer school kids to one school.
  • Wouldn't there at least be custodians working throughout the summer?
    • Presumably they do but less regularly than during school, since there are no children to clean up after, and the place wouldn't need day-to-day maintenance. The Prickly impostor may have dismissed them for the summer with whatever excuse Benedict could think of.
• Given the way the tractor beam system works, how were they even able to operate it without blowing all the fuses in the breaker box? Given how old the school is, it's likely the amount of power needed would've not only overwhelmed the school's wiring system but possibly caused some sort of strain/overload on the local power grid.
  • Benedict stole the tractor beam from the military, it almost certainly has its own power supply. There's no way a normal, suburban power grid could provide enough electricity.
• The school is closed for the summer, hence why Phillium Benedict uses it to perform his experiment on getting rid of recess. Where do kids who have summer school go?
  • Possibly the kids who had summer school went to a different school for that, if they even hold summer school at all. Many districts just send all the summer school kids to one school.
  • Wouldn't there at least be custodians working throughout the summer?
    • Presumably they do but less regularly than during school, since there are no children to clean up after, and the place wouldn't need day to day maintenance. The Prickly impostor may have dismissed them for the summer with whatever excuse Benedict could think of.
• The kids are so worried about their futures and such, and say on several occasions "This is the last chance we get to be kids!"? They're only in 4th grade, which makes them around 10 years old. Who on Earth told them that they'd all be adults before they were 11? I love the movie, but that part always struck me as silly.
  • It's a mix between Fridge Brilliance and Hilarious in Hindsight as elementary school kids today have much more responsibilities than kids of thirty years ago, elementary school students when the show aired, as well as kids starting puberty at a younger age. My niece looked like she was 16 when she was 12.
  • What do kids starting puberty earlier got to do with worrying about the future? As to the original headscratcher, teachers do ask 10-year-old children to try and figure out what they want to do with their lives so they can prepare for it easier now whilst they are young.
• It's simply because kids today, even during the 90s and early 00's when the movie was made, have a very different and difficult journey to prepare for due to how complicated the world has become. Many parents begin preparing their children in preschool because they want them to have a bigger chance at getting into prestigious colleges and careers for which competition has never been stiffer.