Hayride

Lane’s parents arrange for her to attend a local hayride with a Korean-American teenage boy as her date. A hayride is a North American traditional activity where (as the name suggests) people travel in a wagon filled with hay for fun. They are a form of celebrating the harvest season, and may involve other activities associated with the fall.

Rory does not attend the teen hayride, not seeing anything about it she would enjoy (from what we see, the hayride does look pretty lame and boring, as it just goes around the main square in town, rather than through fields). However, in later episodes we learn that Taylor will not allow Rory to skip any town entertainments or functions, not even accepting illness as an excuse.

At this point, Taylor wasn’t a character in the show, although his name is mentioned later in this episode. It is possible that originally Rory was intended to be considerably more detached from the events of the town than she ended up being.

Rory missing the hayride does point to a disdain for teenage activities that seems in keeping with her character – perhaps because they would have meant having a life separate from her mother. This might be why Rory never seems to be popular with her peers, although adored by adults.

Mr. Kim

RORY: When are you going to let your parents know that you listen to the evil rock music? You’re an American teenager, for God’s sake.

Lane has two parents, but her father is never seen during the course of the original show, even at major family events. It is never explained where he is, and Keiko Agena, who played Lane, never asked Amy Sherman-Palladino where Mr. Kim was. Keiko herself felt that he had to travel a lot, and that it might have something to do his religion, such as missionary work of some kind. Perhaps he was always out buying new stock for the antique store. A Year in the Life provides a brief glimpse of Mr. Kim, confirming once and for all that he does exist.

“She’s sixteen”.

When Joey hits on Rory at Luke’s diner, Lorelai scares him off by telling him that Rory is sixteen. In fact she is fifteen, as her birthday is still around six weeks away. Lorelai must be the only mother in the world to put her teenage daughter’s age up when she is approached by an adult male.

Age in the Gilmore Girls is very fluid, and almost meaningless. Lorelai is in her early thirties, but acts like a teenager, yet was a teenager forced to grow up too fast. Rory is a teenager who acts like she’s in her thirties, and often seems completely at sea with normal teenage activities and customs. Characters’ ages are almost never mentioned, and birthdays are rarely talked about or seen celebrated. The age of Stars Hollow itself is something of a mystery, despite the clearly marked sign in the town square.

Time is one of the major themes of Gilmore Girls, with weeks and seasons clearly marked, and yet age as a concept barely exists, as if cycles of time occur and recur without affecting anyone, or as if the characters and towns exist in a sort of ageless dream-time.

Stars Hollow

In the first shot of the pilot, we see a sign with STARS HOLLOW FOUNDED 1779 on it. Stars Hollow is loosely based on the small town of Washington Depot in Connecticut, which incorporated in 1779. In the 19^th century its industrial section was known as Factory Hollow.

However, Rory says that Stars Hollow is 30 minutes drive from Hartford, while Washington Depot is about an hour away from there, so it can’t have the same location. That distance might put it somewhere around the vicinity of the town of Wallingford or the city of Meriden.

The pilot of Gilmore Girls was filmed in Unionville, Ontario, and from then on at Warner Brothers in Burbank, California.