“Happy happy, joy joy”

LOUISE: Ooh, spending the summer at Chilton. Happy happy, joy joy.

Louise is referencing The Ren & Stimpy Show, an animated television show which aired from 1991 to 1995 on Nicktoons, Nickelodeon’s cartoon channel. The show follows the adventures of a short-tempered chihuahua named Ren, and a dim-witted cat named Stimpy, and is notable for its absurdist tone, dark humour, adult jokes, violence, and slapstick. The show received widespread critical acclaim after its run and gained a cult following, becoming highly influential on the development of animated shows.

Happy Happy, Joy Joy is a song used throughout the show, in different contexts, with music by Christopher Reccardi and lyrics by Charlie Brisette and John Kricfalusi. It is one of the best-known songs from the show, and a favourite tag line for Ren & Stimpy fans.

Tears and Laughter: The Joan and Melissa Rivers Story

This 1994 television movie directed by Oz Scott is the movie Lorelai and Rory watch with Dean. It has been previously mentioned as a biographical drama film in which Joan and Melissa Rivers played themselves, recreating key moments in their lives together.

Lorelai mentions some of these, such as the suicide of Melissa’s father, Edgar Rosenberg in 1987; Joan getting banned from The Tonight Show, where she first became famous, in 1986 (she didn’t return until 2014); and Joan forcing Melissa to get a nose job at eighteen which matched her mother’s nose job around 1986.

The film was panned as critics as strange, embarassing and self-indulgent, so Lorelai and Rory are not alone in mocking it. I would imagine they are watching a video of the movie which Lorelai taped off TV.

Rory has just got back with Dean, and he is immediately returned to the status quo of watching movies chosen by his girlfriend and her mother, and doing chores for Lorelai. I guess we’re meant to assume that just being permitted to love a Gilmore girl is so wonderful that you will allow yourself to be treated like a nonentity in sheer gratitude.

Bobby Flay

SOOKIE: Who’s catering?
LORELAI: Um, Bobby Flay?

Robert “Bobby” Flay (born 1964) is an American chef, restaurateur, and television personality. He is the owner of several restaurants, including Bar Americain in New York and at the Mohegan Sun casino in Uncasville, Connecticut. He has hosted numerous TV shows for the Food Network and the Cooking Channel, and Lorelai may have seen Grillin’ and Chillin’, Hot Off the Grill with Bobby Flay, or Food Nation with Bobby Flay, which all began airing in the late 1990s or 2000.

Of course Lorelai is joking, and Sookie immediately takes charge of both the catering and making the wedding cake.

Fame

MICHEL: I figure if I stay alive long enough, these scientists, they will be able to cure anything including death, therefore ensuring my indefinite existence.
SOOKIE: So you’re gonna live forever, like on Fame?

Fame is a 1980 teen musical drama film directed by Alan Parker, and inspired in part by the musical A Chorus Line. It follows the lives of students attending the High School of Performing Arts in New York (now the Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School), from their auditions through four years of high school.

The movie’s theme song, Fame, has a chorus which begins, “I’m gonna live forever, I’m gonna learn how to fly high”. It’s sung by Irene Cara, who had the lead role of Coco Hernandez in the film. The song reached #4 in the charts, and won the Academy Award for Best Original Song, while the entire movie score won another Academy Award.

The movie was successful and well-received critically. It has become a franchise with several television series (one in the early 1980s that Lorelai and Sookie would remember very well), a stage musical, and a remake.

Ranger Bob

LORELAI: Everything about me repulses that man [Luke]. My coffee drinking, my eating habits. Remember when I called him Ranger Bob last week? He hated that!

Lorelai may be referring to Forest Ranger Bob Erickson (Jack De Mave) from the family television series Lassie, which follows the adventures of a long-coated collie dog, and aired from 1954 to 1973.

The show was inspired by the 1943 movie Lassie Come Home, about a dog who travels from Scotland to Yorkshire to be reunited with the boy she loves (Roddy McDowall), based on the 1940 novel of the same name by Eric Knight. Sequels followed, and so did appearances by Pal, the dog who played Lassie, at fairs and rodeos throughout the US in the 1950s. All the subsequent Lassies were played by Pal’s descendants, and like Pal, they were all male.

Ranger Bob was from the years between 1964 and 1970 where Lassie helped the US Forest Service, with Bob Erickson becoming part of the show in 1968 as one of Lassie’s carers. Ranger Bob worked alongside Forest Ranger Scott Turner (Jed Allen), but it would be perhaps too self-referential for Lorelai to call Luke “Ranger Scott”, as Luke is played by Scott Patterson. Calling Luke “Ranger Bob” may have been referencing his healthy outdoor lifestyle and love of camping.

Reruns of Lassie were shown on Nickelodeon from 1984 to 1996, and the show is still on American television today.

All in the Family

LORELAI: You know how on All in the Family when Edith would be yapping about something and Archie would pretend to make a noose and hang himself or shoot himself in the head?
RORY: Yeah?
LORELAI: I don’t know. Something about this moment just made me think of that.

All in the Family, previously mentioned, is an American sit-com which aired 1971-1979, based on the British sit-com Till Death Us Do Part. It stars Carroll O’Connor as Archie Bunker, a blue-collar worker from Queens who is prejudiced, but essentially decent. His wife was Edith Bunker, a sweet and rather naive woman played by Jean Stapleton. Among the most popular television programs of its era (at times the #1 show), it is regarded as one of the greatest sitcoms of all time.

All in the Family is still on American television in reruns to this day, and this is another TV show that Lorelai and Rory may have seen on Nick at Nite.

Sally Struthers, who played Babette on Gilmore Girls, played the Bunkers’ married daughter Gloria Stivic, and went on to have her own spin-off show, Gloria, from 1982-1983. Liz Torres, who played Miss Patty on Gilmore Girls, had the role of Theresa Betancourt, a nursing student who rented Gloria’s old room from the Bunkers in Season 7.

“Any other subject in the world for 200”

RORY: Oh! You should walk down the aisle to Frank Sinatra with a huge bouquet of something that smells really good.
LORELAI: Pot roast.
RORY: And you should wear a long veil with your hair up.
LORELAI: Ugh, I’ll take any other subject in the world for 200, Alex.

Lorelai is referring to the game show Jeopardy!, previously discussed. The host is Alex Trebek, and Lorelai mimics the game play of the show, with contestants choosing a particular subject for a certain amount of money (such as $200).

Lauren Graham, who played Lorelai Gilmore, went on Jeopardy! as a contestant in a celebrity episode of the show.

Television Referenced in Season One

Drama

Charlie’s Angels

Dawson’s Creek

General Hospital

Peyton Place

The Waltons

Comedy

All in the Family

The Dick Van Dyke Show

The Donna Reed Show

The Dukes of Hazzard

Get Smart

Happy Days

Joanie Loves Chachi

I Love Lucy

The Mary Tyler Moore Show

Mystery Science Theater 3000

The Odd Couple

Saved by the Bell

Sex and the City

V.I.P.

Science Fiction

Star Trek

Wonder Woman/The New Adventures of Wonder Woman

News

CNN News

Talk Shows

Live With Regis

The Oprah Winfrey Show

The Rosie O’Donnell Show

The View

Variety Shows

Hee Haw

Game Shows

Jeopardy

The Price is Right

Wheel of Fortune

Educational

Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom

Seasame Street

Music

Soul Train

Practical

Iron Chef

Martha Stewart Living

Style With Elsa Klensch

This Old House

Reality

The Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous

Animation

Daria

Looney Tunes

The Yogi Bear Show

You’re in Love, Charlie Brown

Soul Train

LORELAI: Okay, well, did you date like casual nothing type dating, or did you date like get down, Soul Train kind of a dating?
MAX: Well, I wouldn’t have phrased it that way, but to be honest, it was the latter.

Soul Train is an American dance-music television program which aired from 1971 to 2006. The show mainly featured performances by R&B, soul, dance-pop, and hip-hop artists, but with some funk, jazz, disco, and gospel music as well. The long-running show was extremely influential on the development of African-American musical culture.

Judy Garland and Courtney Love

MADELINE: So I’ve decided I’m now completely into Judy Garland. Did you see the TV movie? Pretty intense.
LOUISE: I think they used my mother’s medicine cabinet in that.
MADELINE: She was the Courtney Love of her day.

Judy Garland, born Frances Gumm (1922-1969) was an American singer, actress, and television hostess. She began performing in vaudeville as a child, and signed to Metro-Goldwyn-Meyer as a teenager; she made more than two dozen movies with them, including The Wizard of Oz in 1939, where she starred as Dorothy Gale.

After being released from her contract, she went on to have a highly successful career as a singer, and hosted The Judy Garland Show. She received numerous accolades, including a Juvenile Academy Award, a Cecil B. Mille Lifetime Achievement Award at the Golden Globes, and a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award.

Despite her great success as a performer, the pressure of becoming a star so early in life affected her physical and mental health, and her self-image was poor as she had received so much criticism from movie executives, who thought she was unattractive. As an adult, she suffered from alcohol and substance abuse, as well as financial instability. She died of an accidental dose of sleeping pills, aged 47.

The “TV movie” that Madeline mentions is probably Life With Judy Garland: Me and My Shadows, a two-part, four-hour miniseries directed by Robert Allan Ackerman, and based on the 1998 book Me and My Shadows: A Family Memoir, written by Lorna Luft, Garland’s daughter. The miniseries starred Judy Davis as the adult Judy Garland, and Davis received both an Emmy and a Golden Globe for her performance. The miniseries was first shown on TV in late February 2001, so Madeline has been “completely into” Judy Garland for around two months.

Louise’s comment suggests that her mother, the mysterious adulteress, also has a problem with addiction to prescription medication.

Courtney Love (born Courtney Harrison in 1964) is an American singer, songwriter, actress, and artist. She gained recognition as the lead vocalist of the alternative rock band Hole, formed in 1989, and is perhaps best known for her personal life following her marriage to Kurt Cobain, front man for the grunge rock band Nirvana. She has been very open about her struggles with drug addiction, including to heroin, cocaine, crack cocaine, and prescription drugs such as Rohypnol.

Apart from both having problems with substance abuse, there is no comparison between the lifetime as a major star that Judy Garland had, and Courtney Love’s career, which makes Madeline’s comment seem ignorant, and disrespectful to Garland, that she’s supposedly “completely into”.

Furthermore, Love’s numerous addictions have led to several legal cases, often including assaulting others or disorderly conduct, while Garland’s substance abuse brought more personal misery. Love has declared herself clean since 2007.