Tag: Timeline

Prince Charming

LORELAI: Don’t even get me started on your Prince Charming crush, OK? At least my obsessions are alive. You have a thing for a cartoon.
DEAN: Ooh, Prince Charming, huh?
RORY: It was a long time ago. And not the Cinderella one, the Sleeping Beauty one.

Prince Charming is the generic name for the royal male love interest in a fairy tale. Rory tells Dean that her crush was on the prince in the 1959 animated Walt Disney film Sleeping Beauty, whose name is Prince Phillip (it’s the one in Cinderella whose name actually is Prince Charming). Sleeping Beauty was the #2 movie of 1959 and is today considered one of the best animated films ever made, although it was so expensive to make that the Disney studio posted a financial loss that year.

Sleeping Beauty has had several re-releases. It was re-released in theatres in March 1986, when Rory was 17 months old. Although Rory could have been taken to the cinema to see it, it was also released on video that year, and Lorelai (or the grandparents) could have bought it for her. Her crush on the prince could go right back to babyhood, and if they owned the video she might have watched it for years as a toddler and little girl.

Sleeping Beauty was next re-released in 1995, when Rory was aged ten or eleven. It is also possible that this was when she developed her crush on the prince. To me this makes more sense, as she was on the cusp of puberty and more likely to be thinking about boys in a romantic way.

Prince Phillip does very vaguely resemble Dean – or at least a cartoon version of Dean wouldn’t look completely unlike Prince Phillip. The fact that Rory liked the prince because he could dance is a foreshadowing of what is soon to come between her and Dean.

Autumn Festival

Early in the episode it becomes apparent that the town of Stars Hollow is about to celebrate its annual Autumn Festival. This is the first major celebration we see in the town, and like the other town festivals, it demonstrates the change of seasons and the turn of the year, just as the Friday Night Dinners wrap up each week for the Gilmores.

The flow of time is one of the primary themes of Gilmore Girls – take notice of how often clocks, watches, calendars, running late, and being short of time are mentioned. Already Rory has had a late acceptance to Chilton, Lorelai has woken up late for Rory’s first day at school, Rory has missed an important test because she arrived too late, Lorelai has fumbled her first date with Max because of time management problems, and missed a relative’s funeral because of the day of the week, and Jackson has felt a shift in the spacetime continuum (suggesting that time in the show is cosmic in its scale).

It is not possible to tell from this episode when the Autumn Festival is held: just that it is in November before Thanksgiving. However in A Year in the Life, it is confirmed that the Autumn Festival is the first weekend in November. We can feel fairly confident that the main events of the episode occur around that time.

(The pumpkins used to decorate the set for the Autumn Festival scenes ended up rotting and emitting a putrid smell. After that, fake pumpkins were used for any autumnal celebrations in Gilmore Girls).

Yoga class

We learn that Lorelai took a yoga class in 1997, probably at Miss Patty’s, and broke her leg doing a headstand. Emily is shocked to discover that, and as broken legs take several months to heal, it’s another reminder of how long Emily and Richard went between visits. Lorelai’s accident must have have taken place after Easter, and with enough time to be completely healed by Christmas.

Rory’s Childhood

The adult guests at Rory’s birthday party swap stories of Rory as a child. Babette and Morey remember her thinking a toadstool ring was a fairy ring, and waiting for the fairy to arrive. Lorelai says that Rory was “about ten” at the time, but later we learn that Lorelai and Rory didn’t move next door to Babette and Morey until Rory was eleven.

Although eleven is about ten, it’s pretty old to still believe in fairies. This charmingly naive fairy-lover is hard to tally with the intellectually precocious child-Rory we keep hearing about, but does show that the brainy Rory has an imaginative side.

We also learn that Rory took ballet lessons from Miss Patty, and that although she worked hard at her dancing, she wasn’t very good. Only Miss Patty seems to think she had any talent and is disappointed that she stopped. This reminds us of Amy Sherman-Palladino, who trained in ballet. Unlike Rory, she could have turned professional, and Miss Patty’s sadness is a parallel to Amy’s mother’s disappointment when she decided to pursue writing rather than ballet as a career.

Clorox

LORELAI: And I said something at the table about the pâté smelling like Clorox and one thing led to another and I wound up here. I hadn’t told anybody yet about me. And you.

Clorox is an American brand of household cleaning bleach, made by the Clorox Company, founded in 1913.

The pate would have smelled unpalatably bleach-y to Lorelai because she was pregnant; pregnancy can change the way you perceive odours and flavours. As Emily and Richard didn’t know she was pregnant, they probably thought Lorelai was being a rude brat, and sent her upstairs. Could this help explain Lorelai’s disdain for pâté?

Lorelai’s Last Birthday

Rory asks Lorelai if she remembers her last birthday in Richard and Emily’s house, and Lorelai says it was when she was pregnant with Rory, so April 1984. Later we find out that Lorelai didn’t leave home until Rory was almost two years old, so she would have had two more birthdays at her parents’ house.

Maybe she means that it was the last birthday party her parents threw for her, which is rather sad, but understandable – as a teenage mother she would have lost touch with old friends, and not had many opportunities to make new ones yet, quite apart from her parents wanting to keep their situation private. More likely the scriptwriter (Amy Sherman-Palladino) originally imagined that Lorelai left home at sixteen when Rory was a few months old before realising that wasn’t very realistic.

Freaky Friday

RORY: I’m sorry I snapped at Grandma.
LORELAI: Yeah, huh? That was a pretty Freaky Friday moment we had back there.

Freaky Friday is a 1976 fantasy-comedy Walt Disney film about a mother and teenage daughter who switch bodies after wishing that they could trade places; the mother and daughter are played by Barbara Harris and Jodie Foster respectively. The film is based on the 1972 novel of the same name by Mary Rodgers, who wrote the screenplay for the movie.

In the movie, the daughter Annabel gains a new understanding of her mother’s life which brings them closer together, just as in this episode Rory gets an insight into Lorelai’s life growing up with Emily, and how difficult that must have been at times.

Lorelai would have been eight years old when Freaky Friday came out. Walt Disney did a made-for-television remake of the film in 1995 when Rory was eleven, so the movie could easily have been part of both their childhoods.