Welcome to the cKotch.Com blog. I’m Christopher Kotcher, and this is one great cartoon.
How I Enjoy Cartoons
Unlike many people, I never grew out of cartoons.
Great stuff has been made using animation. Why deny that just to look cool and mature in all the wrong ways?
True, bad cartoons exist. So do bad videogames, bad movies, and even bad books. The existence of bad work in an artistic medium does not negate the value of every other work in that medium.
In fact, many of my favorite cartoons have actually started in my adulthood. We Bare Bears, Steven Universe, Star Wars Rebels, Star Vs. The Forces of Evil. All great shows. All worth an eventual blog post. (I’ll be sure to leave links here when that day comes.)
Still, one modern cartoon stands above all others for me. This show is cartoonist Alex Hirsch’s Simpsons-Twin Peaks fusion (his own description). This is Gravity Falls.
A Process of Discovery
The forty-episode run of Gravity Falls lasted across two seasons and two networks from June 2012 to February 2016.
I did not see the show until 2015.
It was a Disney Channel cartoon eventually moved to its sister network Disney XD. I was one of the people who stopped watching Disney Channel after Wizards of Waverly Place ended (another show I should discuss sometime).
All I thought I knew about Gravity Falls came from glimpses at characters in commercials and online.
The two main characters are the Pines Twins, Dipper and Mable. One look at them, and I thought the show was about a summer camp. Dipper had a pine tree hat, and Mable’s crazy sweaters screamed, “Arts and Crafts Girl”
Other characters seemed to confirm my theories. A lumberjack girl with a fur hat to be a camp counselor, an old man with a fez to be an eccentric camp master, and a pet pig perfect for a camp mascot.
Thing is, about the only thing I got right was that the show takes place during summer.
I started learning about Gravity Falls from cartoon reviewers on YouTube.
Biggest influence there was Mysterious Mr. Enter’s review of the episode “Land Before Swine” when dinosaurs kidnapped the pet pig Waddles.
Enter praised the show’s smart handling of flawed characters making up for their mistakes.
The greedy old man with the fez, Stan, lost the pig in the first place but risks everything to save it. The screwup repairman Soos reassures the twins in a dangerous situation and notices solutions they do not.
This seemed to be a smart show that knew what it was doing with its characters. I wanted to check it out.
Plus, another of my favorite YouTubers, Doug Walker (The Nostalgia Critic/Channel Awesome), had been doing vlogs on each episode. If I did not like the show, then I could still enjoy Walker’s commentary.
I just needed a good chance to catch up on the 32 episodes which had already aired. That chance would come one fine August a few years into the show’s run.
Finally a Fan
There would be a marathon. A marathon of the whole show leading to the premiere of episode 33, “Dungeons, Dungeons, and More Dungeons,” a parody of Dungeons and Dragons featuring Weird Al as an evil math wizard.
I recorded the whole marathon to ensure I did not miss this chance. The whole next week became my catch up after three years of missing out.
No other show had ever grabbed me like this one did.
I do not binge shows. Gravity Falls is the one exception.
On my few breaks between episodes, I would watch those Doug Walker commentaries on my phone. When I finished those, I looked for anything Gravity Falls I could find.
I took in years upon years of fandom content in the span of one week. Almost felt as if I had never even waited to finally watch the show.
Why I Loved It
So, how did this show grab me so much?
It was not another show about a summer camp. It was a show about family and about summer vacation.
Dipper and Mable were no campers. They were spending the summer with their Great Uncle, or Grunkle, Stan.
Stan owns a cheap roadside tourist trap called The Mystery Shack. The lumberjack girl Wendy is his cashier, and the repairman Soos works there too.
The town of Gravity Falls, Oregon, is known for weird happenings. They include the dinosaurs mentioned earlier as well as psychics, cursed videogame characters, and gnomes.
(The gnomes are the ones you really do not want to mess with. You learn that as soon as Episode 1.)
All the town’s oddities are recorded in a journal discovered by Dipper. The first season and half of the second season center around the mystery of the journal’s author. And trust me, the reveal does not disappoint.
As the show ends, focus shifts to defeating a final foe from another dimension. Wider mysteries also surface regarding the source of Gravity Fall’s weirdness. Many of these questions are left unresolved, but I find them unresolved in the best possible ways.
The final villain’s defeat has got to be one of the best villain defeats ever devised. It is quite the mind game.
Of course, Hirsch and staff’s writing deserves some extra mention. They are talents with both serious suspenseful mysteries and supernatural slice-of-life comedies.
Best example is the season one episode “The Deep End.”
On a hot summer day, the Pines family goes to the community pool. Stan fights for the best lawn chair, Wendy works as a lifeguard, Dipper becomes a junior lifeguard to be with Wendy, Soos liberates pool floaties from captivity, and Mable falls for a merman trapped in the pool.
All this happens under the watch of a pool owner so uptight he chews his whistles to pieces just to calm down.
On my end, the show’s summer setting relates to many of my own summer vacations.
I speak of trips to “Up North” Michigan, especially Traverse City and Ludington. While I went with my parents instead of going to a relative’s house, these places do share a few things with good old Gravity Falls.
The setting is very natural. Towns feel small and spread out. Legends abound.
You have classic Native American myths like the origin of Sleeping Bear Dunes and the Manitou Islands. In this one, a mother bear longed for her two cubs lost in the Great Lakes. Over time, she became the dunes, and her cubs became the islands.
And you have more modern myths like the Michigan Dog Man. Our very own local werewolf, though Wisconsin likes to claim him too.
I have even been to roadside wax museums and tourist traps which serve as Michigan’s own mystery shacks.
Gravity of the Inspiration
Like many of my favorite things, Gravity Falls has had a clear impact on my writing.
Effects are most clear in my lifelong literary project Story Chronicles. Specifically, my Cubey and Liney stories.
I have incorporated a few extra elements of supernatural mystery into those tales. The stories now begin as a search for Liney’s brother. This search then ties to larger mysteries about the surrounding city and world. A few of Cubey and Liney’s later enemies can even be compared to the many of the freakish final monsters in Gravity Falls.
Considering Liney is a spirit who befriends the young Cubey, these changes are actually natural enhancements to my stories.
I even aim to honor the creator of Gravity Falls, Alex Hirsch, with a character named after him in some of the other stories of Story Chronicles. That is an honor I never give lightly.
Kotcher’s Call to Action
I would like to link to the video review most responsible for making me a fan of Gravity Falls. Thought I will give a brief warning. The video is from Mysterious Mr. Enter’s earlier days on YouTube. Despite the good points, there is some swearing, and the video’s editing can be rough. Please note he has since toned down his language and hired more skilled video editors. Mysterious Mr. Enter: Land Before Swine Review.
Also, I wish to link to the best joke from “The Deep End.” I did not want to spoil it in my post, but I also want it to give you a good laugh. Please enjoy.
Finally, if you like my content and wish to see more, then you have a few options.
You could check out my book Five Strange Stories on Amazon. Five Strange Stories is enrolled in the Kindle Matchbook program, so anyone who buys the paperback can also get the eBook for free.
You can also check my Essential Posts page for links to some of my greatest posts to the cKotch.Com blog.
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