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Black Yale

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Clarissa

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So I’m watching Gilmore Girls again, and since I saw it many times before, I started concentrating on the background, just to mix things up.

And I noticed something weird.

In the scenes that take place at Yale, at least 80% of people moving silently in the background are black. They never say anything, never participate in the action, their presence is never replicated in the classes Rory takes, people she hangs out with, her coworkers on the paper, etc. The black people just hover around noiselessly. And then disappear.

I’m guessing the show was trying to offset its all-white cast in this very bizarre way.

4 responses to “Black Yale”

  1. Dreidel Avatar
    Dreidel

    My comment has nothing to do with the “Gilmore Girls” or Yale, but I think it’s an interesting coincidence about black people in a background scene:

    I just saw the computer-colorized version of the 1942 B&W James Cagney movie “Yankee Doodle Dandy,” which was the first-ever colorized motion-picture. There’s a scene where black actors are in the background, and the black actors — and only the black actors — aren’t colorized like everything and everybody else in the scene. They’re left in monotone grey, and that makes them stand out very unnaturally.

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    1. Clarissa Avatar
      Clarissa

      That sounds very freaky.

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  2. cliff arroyo Avatar
    cliff arroyo

    Was it really filmed at Yale? Maybe they filmed those scenes at a historically black college to stand in for Yale.

    Lots of movies are filmed in places different from where the movie is supposed to take place (lots of movies set in New York are filmed in Toronto and Helsinki used to stand in for Moscow when westerners could film there).

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    1. Clarissa Avatar
      Clarissa

      It definitely doesn’t look anything like the Yale student body.

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A conservative literary critic and college professor

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