Day 11 - 09/09/2022 - Warner Brothers Studios

Today I went to Stars Hollow. It's not every day that you can say that. Gilmore Girls was my favourite show for many, many years and it remained absolutely unbeatable until Ted Lasso came along. Jessica had to work today, but the Warner Brothers Studios were conveniently located just a few minutes away, so I decided to make a day out of it. I took out my Dad's camera and filmed my way through Stars Hollow, which sadly we weren't allowed to walk through. It was a reminder that what I was visiting was a working set, not a set turned attraction like the Harry Potter Studio Tour in London. Hearing that we liked Gilmore Girls, our guide took our tour group to the set of the restaurant where Luke delivers to Lorelai one of the most romantic lines ever spoken: "This thing we're doing here - me, you. I just want you to know I'm in. I am all in." As a working set, however, it's currently down to its bare bones, having been changed so many times since that episode aired that you would struggle to recognise it as that particular Italian restaurant. This didn't stop one of the other tour members from gasping audibly and jumping up and down as she was informed of its use in Gilmore Girls, making me feel, very uncharacteristically, like I wasn't the most enthusiastic person in the room. I also saw the lake (currently an empty plot of land) Luke throws Jess into, and found out that, when full, its water can be heated for the comfort of the actors, so it's good to know that Milo Ventimiglia probably didn't have a very hard time of it, though I still want to keep imagining that the water was freezing and that Jess did.

After seeing where Luke and Lorelai began a relationship that could have been a lot smoother had Lorelai possessed better taste in men to begin with, or Luke had not discovered he had a daughter that I will forever think of as one of the worst characters to have ever haunted a TV show, we passed by the fountain in Friends on our way to the set for the coach's house in All American, a show I haven't yet watched but now absolutely will. There, I found out about a few money-saving tricks I had no idea TV shows used; the pool wasn't actually a real pool, but only about a foot deep (three weeks in the US and I'm already trying to start understanding this bizarre measuring system), and instead of a set, what you actually see outside the windows is actually a curtain with the drawing of the neighbourhood, which is lit in different ways depending on whether you want to make it look like the daytime or nighttime. We weren't allowed to take any videos or photographs in there, which made it all seem very top secret and me feel very important. For this reason, this was probably my favourite part of the tour, and I very much enjoyed the bizarre feeling of looking around at the photos of Taye Diggs on the bookshelves, an actor I've loved since the days of Ally McBeal and Private Practice, as if he were to come by at any moment. (I didn't realise that he had been married to Idina Menzel until I googled his name to make sure I was spelling it correctly and now I'm blown away by this piece of information).

The tour was divided into three sections. Highlights on the second half of the tour included seeing the original costumes from My Fair Lady, one of my absolute favourite films of all time. After that, you walked into the set of Friends and got to take a photo at the couch in Central Perk, which I was very excited about, since Friends is also one of my favourite shows of all time. The next set was that of the Big Bang Theory and I was a little surprised at how enthusiastic I was at seeing it. While I very much enjoyed the show, it's not one of my favourites, but there was so much detail to the set, with all of the action figures everywhere, that seeing it and sitting in Sheldon's spot on the couch was actually really cool. It was a little awkward navigating this section on my own, as I always needed someone to take my picture, but fortunately there was always someone around able and willing to do it for me.

I must have not been paying very close attention because I hadn't realised there was a third and final section of the tour after the cart took us back to the building through which we had first entered. I absolutely loved the Harry Potter sets in this section, including the cupboard under the stairs, where I actually sat on Harry's bed (I was allowed!). The highlight of this section for me, however, was probably the Batcave, where suitably epic music played as you looked around at Batman's car, motorbike and console. The fact that I enjoyed this area so much was a clear sign to me that my brother's love of the Batman movies is starting to rub off on me. The doors literally closed behind me as I squeezed the very last minute of the day out of my Warner Brothers Studios experience, and I thought it was well worth the, granted, not particularly cheap $70 admission fee. I even got to take a photo with a real Oscar (one day!) and everything!

A replica of the Warner Brothers tower, the first thing you see as you enter the tour.

Sadly BTS didn't jump up from behind the couch like on The Ellen Show...

This was a particularly nice photographer who had me pose like I was helping myself to all of the cakes (which I would have, had they been real).