It was about the actors origins
The Gang Buys a Roller Rink – (The origins of the REAL gang)
This episode wasn’t about the origin of the characters, they went meta and we are looking at the origin of the actors themselves at the creation of the show.
Glenn and Kaitlin came in as trained professional actors with a relatively successful background, where as Charlie and Rob had dabbled in the industry but been unsuccessful early days. Charlie worked super hard, creating content (just like how he’s working hard at the rink) Glenn and Kaitlin came out of the limousine (Hollywood) to meet the other two.
There are some obvious nods to the creation of the show right at the end of the episode, where they walk into the bar and say that they don’t like the name and they will probably change it. If you listen to the first few eps of the podcast they talk about how they didn’t like the name IASIP yet they kept it and it’s stuck. When they walk into the bar, they had a grand idea that they might have made the show different to the pilot ep which was very raw and dirty and they would “gut the place” because it didn’t have the pageantry of the roller rink (commercial comedies like Seinfeld) – fast forward 20 years and it’s still the same original idea they came up with and nothing has changed, nothing needed to change because we all fell in love with it from the start.
This episode is purely made for them and we’re just outsiders like Dee and Frank sitting there at the end watching them live out their dream to create this show.
Other things I picked up:
Opening song: “We’ve come a long long way together, through the hard times and the good”.
Danny De Vito represents Hollywood and Glenn’s dream of being an actor, however his dream of being a star is quickly diminished when he sees what Hollywood is really like. Frank says to him “Didn’t you learn this at school”. It’s well known that Glenn had formal training at Julliard School.
Dee asking for women’s shoes and they only had men’s shoes, at the start of the show they didn’t have a clear direction for a female character until Dee came into her own and they let her loose (her bumping her head)
There is so much more, watch it back and listen to their discussions on the podcast and the episode will truly take a whole new meaning. The episode clearly goes against the canon, but don’t criticize it for that, this is them telling us their story and how they followed their dreams and created a unique show and idea that we all loved, not just another ‘Rink’.