The Case of Gravity Falls
As we creep further into the Halloween season, we’re turning our attention to one of our all-time favorite supernatural TV shows. This series has it all, including zombies, ghosts, telepathy, multiverses, and even time travel; all crammed into one mysterious town in Oregon: Gravity Falls.
Gravity Falls is an animated show that aired on The Disney Channel in the early 2010’s. It ran for two planned seasons, and covered one complete story about a pair of twins living with their Great Uncle Stan in a rural Oregon town for the summer. But of course, nothing is as it seems, and these two kids end up spending their summer fighting off gnomes, solving ghostly mysteries, and even battling the weird-pocalypse. So let’s hop on the bus to Gravity Falls and uncover the mystery of how it was made!
Summary
Twins Mabel and Dipper Pines’ parents have shipped them off to Gravity Falls to live with their Great Uncle Stan for the summer. Stan is a local businessman that runs a tourist attraction called “The Mystery Shack,” where he scams people out of their money on a daily basis. At the shack he has employed Soos (the handyman) and Wendy (a local teen).
Just after they arrive, Dipper discovers some strange happenings in the town, and finds a mysterious journal documenting the unknown author’s encounters with multiple supernatural beings. Together, Mabel and Dipper navigate the highs and lows of summer, growing up, and battling monsters (both supernatural and emotional). The longer they stay in Gravity Falls, the more they discover about the journal, the Mystery Shack, and their “Gruncle” Stan; and as it turns out, nothing is ever as it seems.
Gravity Falls was created by Alex Hirsch.
While in school at California Institute of the Arts (CalArts), Hirsch and his friend Adrian Molina started a friendly competition where they would each come up with five ideas for a TV show every day. The first to give up would have to write a 40-page pilot for one of their shows. After about a week, the two friends called a truce. The last show that Hirsch had come up with was called Gravity Falls. The original premise followed a young man that has a nervous breakdown after a break-up and retreats to the small town, only to find that it’s teeming with unexplained phenomena. *We will have the full original synopsis available in our blog for you to read!*
Cal-Arts is famous for producing some of the biggest names in animation. For example, Adrian Molina would go on to co-write and co-direct the beloved PIXAR film Coco.
After graduating college, Hirsch got his first job in the animation industry as a storyboard artist for The Marvelous Misadventure of Flapjack, a Cartoon Network show. He also helped develop the pilot episode for Disney’s show Fish Hooks.
Disney reached out to Hirsch after viewing some of his student work and asked him if he would like to pitch a show. He pitched three series, one of them being Gravity Falls, but with a new premise from the original concept. Hirsch kept the name, though, because he liked the pun-quality of the title. The other shows were about time traveling dolphins and another about time traveling gentlemen. Disney executive Mike Moon could see that Gravity Falls was the one that Hirsch had a strong relationship with, and he knew it could work as a show.
The new premise followed twins that were sent to live with a relative during the summer. This closely resembled Hirsch’s own childhood, where he and his twin sister Ariel would stay with their great aunt in a cabin.
Hirsch describes the show as if The Simpsons and Twin Peaks had a baby and it’s on Disney Channel.
Production
One of the first drawings of how the underground secret lab may have looked and worked.
After the pitch, Hirsch spent about a month storyboarding potential episodes on sticky notes. During this time he developed an 11-minute version of the pilot episode, which he presented to Disney (even performing all the voices!). He wasn’t sure if they liked the show but he could tell they liked him and saw potential.
Disney told Hirsch that the show was likely to be picked up and to start hiring people. He first brought in his former college roommate Ian Worrel as art director. He also picked up his buddy Joe Pitt as character designer. Essentially Hirsch just shoved all his college friends into a room and together they created an amazing show by having fun and goofing around.
Hirsch made a sign for everyone working on the show reminding them that they were “making fun stuff with friends.” It was decorated with little clouds and trees and displayed as an inspirational poster.
The writing room for Gravity Falls wasn’t very big, with only a few writers working at a time. Some of them were Alex Hirsch, Matt Chapman, Jeff Rowe, Josh Weinstein, Timothy McKeon, Zach Paez, and Shion Takeuchi.
As they got together, the group would bring up events that happened to them growing up. Hirsch is a big fan of The Simpsons, and he used Matt Groening’s philosophy that there always has to be real emotions behind the plotlines of the show. The writers would come up with the supernatural aspect of the episode, but then use that as a backdrop to what was really happening with the characters and how they were learning about themselves.
The first thing that Hirsch focused on was Dipper and Mabel’s personalities. They had to be a believable sibling duo that got on each others’ nerves, but still liked each other. The next thing they all focused on was the storyline. Writing a mystery is difficult because there is a lot of setup, and you can’t cheat the audience by making the conclusion something that they never could have guessed on their own. Then they focused on the punchlines of the episodes, because keeping it funny made the show more fun to watch.
Hirsch asked his creative director for the name of the funniest person at CalArts. His director gave him the name Michael Rianda, but told him that he was in high demand at the time. So, Hirsch sent him a letter asking him to be part of the team. He promised that it would be more like a TV boot camp than a series, and that they could sharpen their skills together. After Rianda came on board, he and Hirsch got along very well. He challenged Hirsch in a way that no one else would, which made the writing stronger. Both men would write the same scene separately and then meet up to show each other their work. Then they would edit them and combine the best pieces of each scene.
One of the most important parts of the story was that it had a finite ending. It’s far more common for TV shows to continue on as long as the ratings are high, but Alex Hirsch knew that there was only so much story to tell, and his story editor Rob Renzetti understood that too. Renzetti was a driving force behind working toward the show’s endgame, keeping the two seasons as succinct as possible.
Figuring out how to reach the end was a big challenge. The writing team knew how the story would end, but they had to figure out how to get there. After a long brainstorming session, the group broke out into cheers when they finally cracked the code on season 2.
Because Alex Hirsch was adamant that there would only be two seasons, Disney honored his wish instead of forcing the show to continue. In the first season, the main mystery is who wrote the journal that Dipper finds in the first episode. Hirsch knew that once this was solved, the tension would disappear. It was only a matter of time afterward that the show would have to end.
After the writers would create a script, they would do a table read with the storyboard artists. Hirsch would then take all the edits from the storyboard artists and write up a final script for them to illustrate.
After the artists finished creating storyboards, they would post them on the wall and so a walk-through with Hirsch watching. He would make minor adjustments to their work and brought it to Disney executives. He and Mike Moon would then make a mock-up video of the episode with Hirsch performing the voices for the characters
When it was time for the actors to record their lines, Hirsch was in every session, ready to direct them through it.
Once the lines had been recorded, Hirsch would do one final run-through of the audio with the storyboard illustrations to make sure that the images matched the voices. After that, the audio and storyboards were sent to Korea where they were animated.
Story editor Rob Renzetti gave the animators details on how things needed to be animated. For example, he would tell them exactly how long characters needed to scream in certain episodes.
The team would get the animated episode back after 2-3 months, and they would make more adjustments. They could only send it back to Korea so many times to make changes.
Designer Ian Worrel designed key parts of the show, like The Mystery Shack. The shack was a combination of a ship captain’s cabin that Hirsch actually stayed in as a child, and an old victorian house he would visit as a kid. It’s also inspired by the Santa Cruz Mystery Spot, a tourist attraction that Hirsch saw bumper stickers for as a kid.
Artist Andy Gonsalves created the props that characters interacted with. The most important prop he created was the journal. The pages were in Gonsalves’ handwriting and featured his drawings.
Many of the characters in Gravity Falls were inspired by the people in Hirsch’s life.
Mabel was based on Ariel, Hirsch’s twin sister. More specifically, he used his memories of his sister when she was in middle school and was utterly not afraid to be herself. Growing up, both of them were imaginative kids that would sometimes get on each others’ nerves. They spent several summers with their Great Aunt, who lived in a cabin. Without video games or any friends, the twins had to make their own fun and were forced to get along. The show follows the twins over the course of one summer, but this was an amalgamation of all the summers that Alex and Ariel spent together with their Great Aunt.
While designing Mabel, he made sure that she had a big sweater that she flopped around, because it matched a vivid memory that he had of his sister Ariel. The sweater that launched the ideas for a lot of Mabel sweaters was a colorful troll one that his sister had worn as a kid.
Actor Kristen Schaal voices Mabel. You might recognize her voice from the series Bob’s Burgers where she plays another young girl. When Hirsch was writing the pilot, he could only imagine it in Kristen’s voice. She WAS it. Kristen had a great level of commitment to the role and it helped that she has a lot of energy like Mabel. Kristen said out of all the characters she has played she relates most to Mabel Pines. She had braces when she was younger, she was boy crazy, she would have made a sock puppet play, etc.
Mabel is insane but in a cute lovable way.
Dipper is based on a middle school version of himself. He chose the ages for the kids based on that time in your life when you want to be seen as a grown up, but you’re not quite ready to actually grow up.
Jason Ritter voices Dipper. He has appeared in several shows and films like Kevin Probably Saves the World and Captain Fall. He is also the son of the late actor John Ritter.
Hirsch liked Ritter for the part because he had a nice vulnerability to it and a natural voice crack. When he was younger, Ritter had been told that the voice crack would go away, but it never did.
Hirsch said working with Ritter was like working with Dipper himself because the actor wanted to know what all the codes and symbols meant.
Grunkle Stan was voiced by Alex Hirsch. Hirsch knew he wanted the kids to be with an unreliable narrator character. He considered different personalities for Stan like maybe something similar to Vincent Price. Ultimately he landed on the personality of his own Grandpa Stan whom he did not know well but had become a family legend. Grandpa Stan was infamous for being a pathological liar and messing with people all the time. When Hirsch was a child his uncle tried to convince him that a hotel spoon was the legendary Hirsch family silver. Hirsch’s mom told him to look at the handle where it said the Inn’s name and to not believe him.
A lot of people auditioned for Gruncle Stan, but they would either make him too mean or too old. So they tested it with Hirsch as Stan in the pilot. It worked really well and made his life easier because if he needed to change a line he could easily do that at any point.
Hirsch taught himself to do lots of voices. He started when he was younger to annoy his sister. The characters were so close to his heart and he knew them so well that it did not feel right having someone else voice them.
Hirsch tried a lot of different symbols to place on Stan’s hat, but ultimately chose a simplified version of the symbol on Shriner hats. The Shriners is an international fraternity (according to their website).
Soos (Jesus Ramirez) the handyman was also voiced by Hirsch.
Soos was based on a buddy from CalArts named Jesus Chambrot.
Jesus was an upperclassman that was always trying to help. Each time he would he would make it worse before it got better. If you needed help with a printer, he would break it and then proceed to help you fix the printer he just broke. He was so sweet and kind.
It was difficult for Hirsch to explain Soos in order for actors to give him the right voice. Even Hirsch’s voice was not quite right but it made them all laugh and worked so they kept it. This happened with other characters like Bill, if they liked it they kept it as Hirsch’s voice.
Wendy is played by Linda Cardellini, who has done a lot of voice work including Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3.
Wendy is the cool older girl that Dipper is infatuated with on the show. She works in the Mystery Shack with Soos and the kids and allows the twins to tag along when she hangs out with her friends.
Hirsch grew up watching Freaks and Geeks, the Judd Apatow sitcom starring Cardellini. So, she was the ultimate cool girl for him.
Mabel’s two best friends in town were Candy, voiced by storyboard artist Niki Yang, and Grenda, voiced by Carl Faruolo. The two were good friends and worked next to each other in the office. They had a unique dynamic where Carl would sometimes scream as he spoke, and Niki would respond in her soft voice. You might recognize Niki Yang as the voice of BMO in Adventure Time.
Because English is not her first language, some of the scripts contained words that were difficult for Niki to pronounce. On the spot Hirsch would ask her to try different things, and they would work out the lines together. Yang was born in South Korea, and Candy speaks a line in Korean in the episode Sock Opera.
One of the series’ antagonists is Lil’ Gideon, a young boy who claims to have telepathic powers. Lil’ Gideon has a cult-like following in the town, which allows him to torment Stan and the twins.
He was voiced by Thurop Van Orman, who was a writer on The Marvelous Misadventures of Flapjack and Adventure Time. He tried so hard to sing well in Lil’ Gideon’s first episode, but he just was not keeping on beat. So he was not asked to sing again.
Pacifica Northwest, the somewhat nemesis of Mabel Pines was voiced by writer and producer Jackie Buscarino. It took her forever to sing a song for the show as well, so there are no more songs for her character as well.
The music in Gravity Falls maintains the mood incredibly well. It’s also a wonderful running gag where the characters sing license free knock-offs of popular songs, like “Taking Over Midnight” is a parody of “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun.”
Brad Breeck composed the music and did an amazing job.
Typical day for him was watching the episode over and over again to try to figure out what music will support what is happening
He paid attention to the emotion of the show and what was happening with the characters.
The one thing that Alex Hirsch feels is perfect is the theme song and animation that goes with it. He would not change a thing about it, unlike how he sees little things wrong throughout the episodes.
We have so many favorite episodes of this show. In fact, we don’t really have any least favorite episodes! We’re going to highlight the ones that we enjoyed the most, but please keep in mind that there are no bad episodes of Gravity Falls. We’re going to try to avoid talking about major plot points in the episodes for those that haven’t seen the show yet, but be warned that there might be a few spoilers.
Tourist Trapped
The pilot episode begins as Mabel and Dipper are fleeing from an unseen monster in the woods. After a freeze-frame and a rewind, this episode sets up the plot of the show and introduces all the main characters.
In this episode, Mabel begins dating a strange boy that Dipper suspects is a…ZOMBIE.
Here we see “The Journal” for the first time, a book that chronicles many of the happenings in Gravity Falls. This episode sets up the relationship dynamic of Dipper and Mabel, and shows the audience how much they care about each other.
The Hand That Rocks the Mabel is the 4th episode of season 1. In this episode, we meet Lil’ Gideon, one of the major antagonists in the show. After the twins visit his tent of telepathy, Gideon falls in love with Mabel and insists that they date. When she turns him down, the twins find out that Gideon is even more powerful than they thought.
The Inconveniencing is the 5th episode of season 1. In this episode, Dipper and Mabel tag along to hangout with Wendy and her friends at a haunted convenience store!
The Time Traveler’s Pig is the 9th episode of season 1. It introduces two important characters for the show, Waddles the pig and Blendin Blandin.
Blendin is a time traveler played by Justin Roiland, known for playing Morty in Rick and Morty, and Lemongrab in Adventure Time.
Fight Fighters is the 10th episode of season 1. In this episode, Dipper and Wendy’s boyfriend Robbie (played by TJ Miller) decide to have a fight. Afraid that he will get hurt, Dipper brings a video game character to life to fight for him.
Summerween is the 12th episode of season 1. In the middle of summer vacation, the town of Gravity Falls celebrates “Summerween,” a Halloween-like holiday where children go trick-or-treating in June.
The children find themselves up against a local legend called The Summerween Trickster who threatens to eat them if they don’t bring him 500 pieces of candy by the end of the night.
Dreamscaperers is the 19th episode and the first part of a two-part season finale. Dipper and Mabel play a game in the attic, while Stan mocks Gideon's commercial. They learn that Gideon plans to destroy the Mystery Shack and replace it with a new Tent of Telepathy. Stan assures them that Gideon will only take over if he breaks in and unlocks his safe. Gideon, angered, pulls out Journal 2 and plans to unleash the journal's greatest weapon, the dream demon Bill Cipher.
Gideon Rises is part 2 of the season 1 finale. Gideon Gleeful steals the Mystery Shack from Stan, forcing Dipper, Mabel, and Grunkle Stan to live with Soos and his grandmother. Grunkle Stan is unsure about taking care of the twins and considers sending them back home. With their summer in Gravity Falls threatened, Mabel and Dipper decide to take on Gideon and win back the shack.
The Golf War is the 3rd episode of season 2. After being belittled by Pacifica one too many times, Mabel challenges her to a miniature golf game which gets a tad out of control when they get too involved in an ongoing war between the mini golf course residents while they attempt to win Mabel’s favor.
Little Gift Shop of Horrors is episode 6 of season 2. This episode is also the second Halloween special of the series. In three distinct stories framed as Stan selling oddities to a visiting tourist, Stan is cursed by a Witch, Waddles eats a bowl of brain-improving goop and becomes so smart he creates a device that gives him the ability to talk, and Mabel confronts her phobia of Claymation.
Blendin’s Game is episode 8 of season 2. In the year 207̃012, Blandin escapes from the Infinetentiary and the Time Paradox Avoidance Enforcement Squadron hunts him down. When they and Time Baby capture him, he invokes Globnar, a futuristic gladiatorial game where the winner of the games receives a time wish. Blandin appoints Mabel and Dipper as tributes to compete against him in the games as his part of his plot for revenge.
Northwest Mansion Mystery, also listed as "Northwest Mansion Noir," is the 10th episode of season 2. The Northwest family is getting ready to host their annual party with the rich and influential. Leaving the rest of the town out to dry. Sins of the past finally come back to bite them as a spirit wrecks havoc in a quest for justice. Pacifica enlists Dipper's help to rid the Northwest Mansion of the ghost before he wreaks havoc on the fancy party.
A Tale of Two Stans is episode 12. After a long ongoing tease, we finally find out the purpose of the strange things Stan has been up to behind the vending machine. Cornered underneath the Mystery Shack, Stan must finally reveal the secrets of his past and his mysterious portal to Dipper and Mabel. Rescuing his long lost twin brother, also Stan.
Weirdmageddon is the 4 part series finale of Gravity Falls. When Dipper accidentally reveals his plans to stay in Gravity Falls and be Ford’s apprentice, Mable becomes extremely upset and runs away. In her quick exit, she grabs the wrong bag with the sealed dimensional rift inside. She runs into Blandin, who tells her that he can make summer last forever in exchange for the device. She agrees but it turns out it was Bill Cypher in disguise! He destroys the device, releasing the dimensional rift that allows him to enter the real world and become the weirdness overlord of the universe.
Fun Facts
The fake image of Old Man McGucket that was circulated by Alex Hirsch secretly to throw people of the true writer of the journals.
Old Man McGucket was originally going to be named Hootenanny McGucket.
If you look carefully, the symbol on Stan’s hat changes halfway through the first season. This happened because Hirsch became concerned that it too closely resembled the Shriners hat symbol and they could get in legal trouble. When Gravity Falls came to Disney+, they removed the symbol from the hat for streaming. Hirsch fought this and the hat’s symbol has been restored.
Halfway through the show, a fan correctly guessed who the author was and their connection to Gruncle Stan. So Hirsch and his team created a fake image of Old Man McGucket (the town inventor and eccentric) with six fingers. They knew this might fool some fans because whoever created the journal had six fingers. The image spread online.
Awards and Reception
The Cipher Hunt
As the show was ending, Alex Hirsch decided there was one last thing he needed to do. He needed to have a real life Bill Cipher in the world. So he had a plexiglass version made of Bill. He and Ian Worrel then crafted a treasure hunt for the fans which started with a brief video of the statue at the end of the final episode. We will link to the info about the entire hunt on our blog for those that are interested!
Many people absolutely love this show. Both seasons of Gravity Falls hold a 100% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes with an almost perfect audience score as well.
Gravity Falls has been ranked by various publications, including Uproxx, IndieWire, Yardbarker, IGN, and The A.V. Club, as 3rd on the Current Kids Cartoons that adults should watch, 12th on The 50 Best Animated Series of All Time, and 48th on The 100 Best TV Shows of the 2010s.
It was Disney XD's top animated series of 2015 and drew in an average of 1.8 million viewers per episode, ranking as the third animated cable TV series in ages 9-14.
The show was nominated for 49 awards across the industry and won 13 of them. This includes two back-to-back primetime Emmys for Outstanding Individual Achievement in Animation. Also an Annie award for Best Animated TV/Broadcast Production for Children's Audience. Additionally, J.K. Simmons won two people’s choice awards for his work on the show.
Conclusion
It’s rare to find a show like Gravity Falls. On the surface it may appear to be like any other wacky children’s cartoon, with funny characters and silly plots. But from the very first episode it’s easy to see that this series is something special. It focuses on impossible plots, played out by characters that show real emotion. For the children watching, characters like Mabel will inspire them to be themselves, while Dipper reminds them how thrilling it can be to use your imagination. For the adults, Gravity Falls is a reminder. It pulls us back to a time when summer was the most magical time, and when the idea of growing up was the most exciting–yet terrifying–thing.
This series is a complete story that is jam-packed with lore and world-building, but also enough “monster of the week” episodes to let the audience breathe. The characters are genuine, the stories are creative, and the lessons are important for all ages. So if you’re interested, don’t wait to visit or revisit Gravity Falls. The mysteries are waiting…