Footnotes to the TV series
MICHEL: If you ask me this union belongs on a public access station.
In the United States, every community that has cable TV access has the right to a public access channel. There are numerous public access channels in Connecticut, usually supplying information from government, colleges, schools, and non-profit organisations. Why a double twin wedding would be featured by one is a mystery to me; it sounds more like a reality TV show.
LORELAI: You don’t care at all, do you?
MICHEL: To me you are the teacher in the Charlie Brown cartoon.
Michel is referring to the popular Peanuts cartoon strip by Charles Shultz, featuring Charlie Brown as the main character. In the original cartoons, adults were referred to but never drawn, and this continued with the first television special.
The 1967 Peanuts television special You’re in Love, Charlie Brown had a classroom scene which had interaction with a teacher named Miss Othmar. Her voice was represented with a wah-wah sound made by a trombone. Since then all adult voices have been represented by the trombone sound.
The reference is made by people to indicate that they’re not listening, or that what they’re hearing is going over their heads. It seems an odd thing for Michel to know about, but perhaps he watched a lot of cartoons when he moved to the US to improve his colloquial English.
EMILY: If Rory goes and has a good time without you, then I win.
LORELAI: OK, Bob Barker.
Bob Barker (born 1923) is a former game show host, best known for hosting The Price is Right from 1972 to 2007.
HEADMASTER: Not Cokie Roberts?
RORY: No.
HEADMASTER: Not Oprah, Rosie, or one of the women from The View?
RORY: No.
Mary Martha Corinne “Cokie” Roberts (born 1943) is a multi-award-winning American journalist. Since 1992 she has been the senior news analyst at National Public Radio (NPR), and since 1988 has been with ABC News as a political commentator.
Oprah Winfrey (born 1954) is an American talk show host, actress, media owner, and philanthroptist. She is best known for her talk show The Oprah Winfrey Show, which ran from 1986 to 2011. The highest-rated talk show in American history, it was extremely influential and won so many Daytime Emmy Awards that Winfrey eventually stopped submitting it so someone else had a chance. Through her media work, Winfrey became a billionaire and a major celebrity in her own right.
Rosie O’Donnell (born 1962) is an American comedian, actress, author and TV personality. Her talk show, The Rosie O’Donnell Show, ran from 1996 to 2002 and won multiple Emmy Awards. During the show’s run she became known for her light-hearted banter with celebrity guests, and for her promotion of Broadway musicals.
The View is an American morning talk show, broadcast since 1997. Its panel of female co-hosts discuss a range of political, social, and pop cultural topics, followed by celebrity interviews. It has won a number of Daytime Emmy Awards. In 2000, panelists on The View were Barbara Walters, Joy Behar, Meredith Vieira, Star Jones, and Lisa Ling.
Headmaster Charleston is questioning the sincerity of Rory’s journalistic aspirations by suggesting she just wants to get her face on television. However Rory corrects him by letting him know she could also write books or articles: as long as she can see the world and be a part of something big.
LORELAI: I look like that chick from The Dukes of Hazzard.
Lorelai is referring to Daisy Duke, a character played by Catherine Bach in the action-comedy television series, The Dukes of Hazzard (1979-1985). Daisy often wore tight cut-off denim shorts, which have become known as “Daisy Dukes”.
LORELAI (referring to Dean): Is he dreamy?
RORY: Oh, that’s so Nick at Nite.
Nick at Nite is the programming block that broadcasts every night on the Nickelodeon channel, appealing to a crossover audience of teens and adults. It is notable for showing reruns of old television programs, several of which are later revealed to be ones that Lorelai and Rory (the target demographic) watch regularly. This may be why Rory connects the 1940s teen slang “dreamy” with Nick at Nite: she may have heard it on old TV shows.
DEAN: My family just moved here from Chicago.
RORY: Chicago. Windy. Oprah.
Chicago is a city in the Midwestern state of Illinois on the shores of Lake Michigan; it is the third-largest city in the United States. It has a massive suburban sprawl, so that Dean could be from a town quite a distance from the city itself, and still claim to be from Chicago. This doesn’t seem unlikely.
Reduced to a babbling state by Dean’s attention, Rory blurts out the only two things she knows about Chicago.
One is that its moniker is The Windy City, even though meteorologists will tell you it’s no windier than any other city in the US. Some say the wind is that which comes off the lake, others that the nickname was an insult from rival cities to mean that citizens of Chicago were full of hot air.
The other fact Rory knows about Chicago is that it’s where The Oprah Winfrey Show is broadcast from. Celebrity talk show host Oprah Winfrey’s television show went from 1986 to 2011, and was the highest-rated daytime TV show in the United States, if not the world.
SOOKIE: Where’s your paté?
LORELAI: At Zsa Zsa Gabor’s house.
Zsa Zsa Gabor (1917-2016) was a Hungarian-American film and television actress and socialite, known for her extravagant Hollywood lifestyle. During the show, Lorelai and Rory would routinely label any behaviour they considered overly fancy or pretentious as being like Zsa Zsa Gabor.
RORY (responding to Lorelai’s offer of cosmetics): God, RuPaul doesn’t need this much makeup.
RuPaul (born RuPaul Charles in 1960) is an American drag queen. In 1993 he found mainstream success with his dance album Supermodel of the World; several of its singles became hits, and two more albums followed in the 1990s. RuPaul was signed as a model with cosmetics company MAC, released his autobiography in 1995, and got his own talk show in 1996.
The owner of the town’s diner was originally meant to be a woman named Daisy, but the network thought the show needed another male character; there was supposedly a direct gender swap with the same dialogue being used.
In the original pilot, the male owner of the diner was named Duke – as a replacement for Daisy, you can see a Dukes of Hazzard reference. Luke was only meant to be a minor character, but after seeing his chemistry with Lorelai he was promoted to main character.
Luke always wears a baseball cap as reference to Scott Patterson’s former career in baseball. Before he was an actor, Patterson was a professional pitcher in the minor leagues from 1980-86.
The Annotated Gilmore Girls 