(Gilmore Girls fan site)“Either your signature or your brains are going to be on the contract.”
Which Gilmore Girls character said that? In what episode? And what was he talking about? Where does that line come from, anyway? Did you know there are references to that same source in at least a dozen episodes of Gilmore Girls? Do you know what they are? You can find out here.
Tim King,
founder of
Gilmore-ism.com
I’m always becoming obsessed with Gilmore-isms, those Gilmore Girls witticisms. Especially the ones that allude to pop culture. I end up spending hours digging up answers, and I still feel like I’ve missed a lot. And you know what? I usually have.
There are so many references in Gilmore Girls to pop culture, it seems no matter how deep you dig, there’s always another one to find. It’s nothing to go through a single episode and find dozens of them, in just one episode.
So, I thought, wouldn’t it be cool to have a website that had all the Gilmore-isms? And the more I thought about the idea, the more excited I grew. And the bigger the concept grew. And before I knew it, I was facing a grand vision of Gilmore-ism.com, the Gilmore-ism Database Project, the comprehensive Gilmore Girls witticism fan-site.
We’re not quite there yet. But the database is growing, and we’ve already discovered some intriguing Gilmore-isms.
So why am I putting all this effort into Gilmore-ism.com? What’s the catch? What do I get out of it?
Well, the first thing of course is that I get to be an active part of the Gilmore Girls fan community. For years, I was a silent Gilmore Girls fan. I had seen every episode more times than I could remember. And I had deep theories on who the characters were. And I could even tell you what I thought Amy Sherman-Palladino was going to do next. I even had dreams about Gilmore Girls characters.
But I felt disconnected from other Gilmore Girls fans. I wanted someone to talk to, someone with whom to share my enthusiasm about the show. I wanted to be able to say which of the Disney princesses were a girl’s favorite and have someone know what I was talking about. At church music practice, I wanted to sing, “A mighty fortress is our God, a wall ten stories high,” and I wanted someone to chortle, not look at me sideways.
So please leave comments on the site. Please send me e-mail. (You can do that through the contact form or by replying to any message from an e-mail list.) I reply to comments and to e-mail.
There’s more, of course. I hope the site will become self-supporting. There’s advertising on the site. And some of the outgoing links are affiliate links. That is, if Gilmore-ism.com recommends or refers to a product, there may be a link to it. And if you follow that link, and if you buy the product, if it’s an affiliate link, I’ll get a cut of the sale.
But not all the outgoing links are affiliate links. For example, in the episode “Knit, People, Knit!” Lorelai wore a cool skull-and-knitting-needles t-shirt, black with white graphics on it. When I read the story behind this shirt and that you can get your own, I wrote about how to get your own skull-and-knitting-needles t-shirt. And I looked to see whether there was an affiliate link to the online store where you can order one. There wasn’t. But I still put the article up anyhow. I post juicy articles because they’re juicy, not because I can get affiliate commissions on them.
On the other hand, when I decided to buy some yellow daisies for Valentine’s Day, I searched the Internet for a place to get what I wanted. And when I found it, I also checked to see if they had an affiliate program. They did, and this program even offered a discount to visitors of Gilmore-ism.com that follow that link. So I included it when I wrote about it.
I don’t believe in changing my recommendation based on whether there’s an affiliate link on Gilmore-ism.com. In fact, on some of my other sites, I’ve even posted negative reviews of a book or movie or video game. And then next to it, I’ve included an Amazon.com Associate link to the thing. Because how do I know that the very thing about the book that I hate doesn’t make someone else want to buy it even more? Like when a reviewer commented that Lauren Graham’s movie Because I Said So was so bad, it was like someone threw Gilmore Girls and Sex and the City into a computer program that randomly generated the movie script… That just made me want to see the movie even more!
A Gilmore-ism is usually rooted in something a Gilmore Girls character has said. But the concept of “Gilmore-ism” is much more than that.
Gilmore Girls is one of those shows that touches you at a primal level. Its characters are real, so real you believe they actually exist somewhere, in some universe, and not merely in the imagination of their creator. I don’t know how many times I’ve found myself so emotionally involved in Lorelai’s plight, I needed to stop myself and remind myself that she’s actually a fictional character. What happened didn’t actually happen. It wasn’t really Lorelai Gilmore. It was Lauren Graham, a brilliant actress, just playing a part. And I don’t know how many times I’ve become so passionately angry about how some character was behaving, I lost perspective.
The concept of “Gilmore-ism” to me is about that identity, that involvement, that passion. It’s about joining the fictional world to the real one. It’s about more than quotations. It’s about connections.
The core of Gilmore-ism.com, of course, is the Gilmore-ism database. There are three parts to it. On the one hand, you have episodes of our favorite show. On the other hand, you have pop-culture references. Each Gilmore-ism joins one to the other. Every Gilmore-ism added to the database appears on the front page.
But that’s not all. The best Gilmore-isms have a story. They have a subtle connection to the pop-culture reference. They are a metaphor. Like the very first Gilmore-ism, “You’re a regular Jack Kerouac.” That’s from the opening scene of the pilot episode. And you only fully get it if you know who Jack Kerouac was. So each Gilmore-ism in the database has its own page, with a few paragraphs explaining the context, both how it relates to the episode and how it relates to pop culture.
I also have a Gilmore Girls blog here. I post from time to time about Gilmore Girls connections, “Gilmore-ism” in the broader sense. And the blog posts appear on the front page as well. I put effort into every post, and I try to keep them interesting.
At the top of each page are links to some useful features:
To add comments or to submit Gilmore-isms, you need to register with the site. This is completely separate from the email list. To do this, use the “Login/Register” link at the top-left of any page. If you haven’t registered yet, click Create new account. This will allow you to select a username, which will appear on the site and can be a pseudonym. (In other words, it does not need to be your real name.) And you can pick a password. After you first register, you’ll be logged in, and you can add a comment or Gilmore-ism immediately. But the computer will e-mail you a link that you need to click on before you can log in again. All of this is to fend off the spam-bots and other nefarious operators on the Internet. Thanks for understanding.
Once you log into the site, you can access the planning page, whose link appears along the left. This page is a big list of all the episodes, both those already in the database and those not yet in the database. Each episode has an episode plan, which also appears on that episode’s page. The episode plan is just a series of notes describing what we still need to do with that episode. Usually, it’s just a list of Gilmore-isms that need entries in the database. Any registered user can edit any episode plan.
I have a list of features I’d like to see on Gilmore-ism.com. It includes things like Gilmore-isms that refer to multiple pop-culture references. Or a series of “how to” articles with ideas for how to find Gilmore-isms and research what they refer to. Or how about a page that picks a random Gilmore-ism? Or an on-line Gilmore-ism trivia game? Or how about just better indexes for the growing database of content on the site?
Of course, the place to keep up with new features as well as new content is the e-mail list. But regardless of whether you subscribe…
Enjoy!
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