Just noticed this in both seasons of Gravity Falls.

When Dipper screwed up in a major way while with Stan or Ford, the episode ended with them both having a Pitt Cola and him being cheered up and motivated by them.

It happened at the end of Boyz Crazy after Dipper ruined Wendy and Robbie's relationship and angered Wendy...

And again at the end of The Last Mabelcorn when he nearly memory wiped Ford and broke the machine.

IDK about you, but I just love this small little bonding thing he has with them. Nothing like an S&P approved drink and some Grunkle motivation to get you going again!

he's watching you...

"When there is no cops around, anything is legal." - Stanley Pines (while pretending to be Stanford Pines), Gravity Falls Season 1 Episode 9 (The Time Traveler's Pig)

I miss fun TV shows with ragtag friend groups getting into wacky hijinks. Like yeah fine they save the world or whatever but more importantly, they crack jokes and get into shenanigans and take care of each other. Miss the hell out of that shit.

This video single-handedly got me to start watching Gravity Falls.

Day in Fandom History: March 1…

As Dipper, Mabel, Stan, and Soos are trapped in a bottomless pit, they decide to tell stories to pass the time with Dipper having a new voice, the Pines Twins and Soos trapped in a pinball game, and Mabel wanting Stan to be honest through an object that she found from the journal. “Bottomless Pit” premiered on this day, 11 Years Ago.

It's midnight so I'm gonna ramble again but about animation/cartoons as a whole included with my lack of knowledge about the industry

A few weeks ago, I remember watching some video about Cartoon Network or something and the guy doing the essay mentioned something like "With the rise of streaming and online as a whole, there is a loss of connection with parents and their kids because back then, you could watch the same cartoon with your kids and recognize who that is". They absolutely did not say those exact words but something along the lines of it, and it's stuck to me for days because it's true! Like I don't think kids nowadays have that kind of connection other than theatrical kids movies, which sucks I think moments like these are precious to have.

Another thing is that I think people kind of underestimate how popular cartoon/2d/3d shows are with adults? Especially young adults because the people who grew up with like, 1990s-2010s shows are probably mostly grown adults now. Probably the best recent example of this is Adventure time and how (I think) big Fionna and Cake is. Like I could go on Twitter and be spoiled hell and back on the newest episodes LOL. How about Owl House and Infinity Train? Bluuey too?? I don't know, but with the writers strike and how swept under the rug animation is, especially on streaming, it just kind of sucks where the current state of animation is right now for everyone as a whole

love it when I find That Episode that pulls me headfirst down a fandom rabbithole I never saw coming

OKAY.

So.

I was on a call with my parents today.

We were talking about the Inside Job cancellation, because I’ve been really upset about it and they were actually the ones who got me into the show in the first place. I was saying how weird and unfair it was that it just got pulled out of the blue, when my dad chimed in with something along the lines of, “yeah, but it’s not as though this kind of thing hasn’t happened to the show before. Remember that episode from the end of Part 1 that Netflix ended up taking down?”

And I was immediately like

And my mom and dad were like, “yeah, you don’t remember? That episode at the end of the first part of Season 1. The one with Reagan’s childhood friend that Rand erased from her memory.”

I said, yeah, the part where Reagan goes into her own mind and discovers that she had a friend named Orrin that Rand made her forget. At the end of the episode, she goes back to the present and uses his name as the password to shut down Bear-O and save her friends. That episode is still on Netflix. It didn’t go anywhere.

They were like, “no, but then there’s another episode AFTER that. The one where we find out what actually HAPPENED to Orrin.”

According to them, there was a lost eleventh episode after Inside Reagan. This episode revealed that Rand had trapped Orrin in a cartoon-inspired play land where he had been stuck for the last twenty years. Everyone in the real world thought he had died, and his dad had turned into a broken-down shell of a man over the loss of his son. Reagan and Rand ended up going into the cartoon world to try to save him, and they found out that Orrin had been surviving the whole time by breeding with the cartoon creatures and eating their offspring. They said that they were really confused when they went back to rewatch the first season and the episode wasn’t there, but they could also understand why it had been taken down, because it was honestly one of the most disturbing pieces of television that they had ever seen.

At this point in the conversation, I just assumed that they were messing with me. It’s not like they don’t have a history of pulling twisted shit like this (for context: my dad told me to start watching Inside Job in the first place because he relates to Rand and thought I’d relate to Reagan, and he was 100% right), so I asked them straight-up if they were trying to play some kind of prank. A “ha-ha, you made your own Mandela-effect-style conspiracy” type of prank. They swore up and down that they weren’t lying, and that they both distinctly remembered watching this episode together. They were shocked that I had never seen it, and the entire time over the past year and a half that we’ve been talking about the show, they had thought that this was a part of our shared experience.

So commenced the weirdest Googling spree that I have ever been a part of. I looked for “Inside Job lost episode”, “Inside Job episode 11”, and then a lot of stuff like, “kid gets trapped in cartoon world and mates with creatures to eat their offspring” (which provided a LOT of results, but nothing useful for any purpose except probably for sending the FBI to my house). My parents kept searching for stuff based on details that they could recall from the episode (for example: they remembered a specific moment where Reagan jumped off a cliff and discovered that the ground was bouncy), but they couldn’t find anything on their end. I asked them if they were absolutely sure that this was part of Inside Job, and they weren’t just mixing it up with another show. They were both completely certain that it had been Inside Job, and my parents don’t watch that much animation, so it would have been pretty hard for them to draw on anything else. I went through the Tumblr tag for Orrin Carthwait again, and it was all speculation about what COULD have happened to him, which meant that nobody else had seen this mystery episode, either. Besides, I love this show, and I practically live on Inside Job Tumblr, so if a lost episode existed somewhere, I have a really hard time believing that I wouldn’t have come across it. We’ve been on the phone for an hour at this point. My parents are going through their Netflix history trying to figure out what the fuck they watched. Meanwhile, I’m just lying face-down on the floor having a meltdown because I’m convinced that my parents and I live in different realities. The thing was, it wasn’t a totally impossible scenario? The story did seem to fit together fairly well with the parts of the show that I knew. Also, there’s an episode of Gravity Falls (which was made by a lot of the same people who made Inside Job, and contains a lot of similar themes) where Mabel gets trapped in a cartoonish fantasy land that sounds fairly similar:

So, maybe it was possible that Inside Job contained the more adult version? There’s also the fact that Alex Hirsch did that thing where he basically long-form gaslit the GF fandom back in the day by releasing fake footage of a nonexistent spoiler to throw people off the trail when theories started getting too accurate (I’m too lazy to find a post to link; just look it up if you don’t know about this). Maybe the creators were trying to mess with people by releasing an episode to only a handful of viewers and then yanking it, thus creating a conspiracy about the show in itself? Still, it wouldn’t make sense that EVERY trace of the episode would be wiped from existence. You’d think somebody would be talking about it somewhere. I started wondering if maybe it was possible that I HAD actually seen it, and just didn’t remember it. The thing was, it did actually sound really familiar, and some of the details my parents were describing felt way too clear in my mind. Did I just block it out? Where was it, then? I was absolutely losing my fucking mind at this point, so I started a last-ditch effort to just go through any adult animation shows I could think of and read the synopses of every single episode to see if one matched the description. And finally, FINALLY,

I found the bitch.

It’s Rick and Morty, Season 3, Episode 9: “The ABCs of Beth.”

It’s been a long time since I’ve seen it, so I guess I forgot most of the details. Rewatching it back, though, it’s undoubtedly the same story that my parents were describing. The episode is about Beth discovering that Rick trapped her childhood friend, Tommy, in a fantasy play land of his own design called “Froopyland”. She goes back to try to save him, and discovers that he’s been surviving there the whole time by mating with the Froopyland creatures and then eating their kids. The story is basically about Beth coming to terms with the fact that, while her dad is a really fucked-up person, she isn’t entirely unlike him (for better or worse). Honestly, I can understand why my parents’ minds conflated this episode with the ending of Inside Job. The design of Tommy:

Could conceivably be an adult Orrin:

And a lot of the themes about dysfunctional family and fucked-up childhoods (including missing childhood friends) are actually incredibly similar.

Still, I can’t believe that I was actually briefly led to think that there was a lost episode of my favorite show that I had never seen, which was either purged from the collective consciousness or deleted from my own personal memory. This is the worst thing that my parents have ever done. If I ever go to a therapist, they’ll be hearing about this first.

Round 1, Stage 2

Former Gravity Falls Director Joe Pitt posted a bunch of Behind the Scenes photos and videos from the Gravity Falls offices during season 1 on Instagram! Given how many he posted, I've archived them all over on Imgur. So, if you wanna take a look at what the people behind our favourite show were doing while making it, link's below!

Behind the Scenes Gallery

Watching The Owl House with @monkeymindscream and dissecting it and fully realizing how much I love media analysis and critique.

AKA I might try and write my thoughts out on here for shows I watch 😬

Dipper: Mabel, last night an owl tried to eat my tongue.

Mabel: That's great!

-From Gravity Falls Season 1 Episode 16 (Carpet Diem)

I don't even know what to think.

I'm an ADULT I dont go to sleep watching Gravity Falls anymore 😤

I go to sleep watching Mark play fnaf sb episode 1 😤

Gravity Falls 1.16 Carpet Diem

You tell me about it !!!