Grunkle Stan

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Grunkle Stan
Gravity Falls character
First appearance	"Tourist Trapped" (Season 1, episode 1, 2012)
Last appearance	"Weirdmageddon 3: Take Back The Falls" (Season 2, episode 20, 2016)
Created by	Alex Hirsch
Voiced by	Alex Hirsch Declan J. Krogman (young)[1]
In-universe information
Full name	Stanley "Stan" Pines
Alias	Stanford Pines Steve Pinington Stetson Pinefield Andrew "8-Ball" Alcatraz Hal Forrester S618 (prison number) 061800 (Gravity Falls prison number) 618 (Mystery Shack Address)
Nicknames	Grunkle Stan Mr. Mystery Mr. Pines The Old One
Gender	Male
Occupation	Owner of the Mystery Shack
Family	Stanford Pines (twin brother) Shermie Pines[2] (brother) Filbrick Pines[1] (father) Caryn Pines[3] (mother) Dipper Pines (great-nephew) Mabel Pines (great-niece)
Spouse	Marilyn Rosenstein[2] (ex-wife)
Origin	Glass Shard Beach, New Jersey
Home	Gravity Falls, Oregon
Nationality	American

Stanley "Stan" Pines,^[1] also known as "Grunkle Stan", is one of the main characters of the Disney animated series Gravity Falls, created and voiced by the series creator Alex Hirsch. In an interview, Hirsch claims that Grunkle Stan is loosely based on his grandfather, also named Stan.^[4]

Stan is an older man, and the great-uncle (or "grunkle") of the show's two main protagonists, Dipper and Mabel. The show takes place as they stay at his house during the summertime. He is the owner of the Mystery Shack, a tourist trap (and also his house) presenting creatures and objects of supposedly supernatural origin. He often wears a black suit with a red fez, white shirt and red bolo tie, along with a cane topped by a billiard 8-ball, although at home he generally wears slippers, blue and green-striped boxer shorts, a white sleeveless shirt and a gold necklace.^[5]

At the beginning of the show, Stan, known to all as Stanford Pines, is portrayed as a relatively simple character, whose shady past is mostly used as a joke regarding his many past crimes.^[6] However, as the series goes on, he is gradually revealed to hold deeper secrets; in "Not What He Seems" and "A Tale of Two Stans", it is revealed that for the past thirty years, Stan had secretly been trying to bring his twin brother (and the house's actual owner), the real Stanford Pines, back into their world after he was sucked through an interdimensional portal, and that he is in truth named Stanley.^[7]

The character made an appearance in the 2018 graphic novel, Gravity Falls Lost Legends: 4 All-New Adventures, in an alternative reality as an amphibian version of the character, named Mr. Ponds, appearing in a 2020 episode of Amphibia, with Hirsch reprising his role.

Fictional character biography[]

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Early life[]

According to the Season 2 episode "A Tale of Two Stans", Stanley and his six-fingered twin brother Stanford were born in Glass Shard Beach, New Jersey, children of Filbrick Pines and his wife Caryn.^[8] The twins were raised Jewish but became atheists later in life, according to a secret web-page found in the aforementioned "Lost Legends" book.^[9] Filbrick was a stern pawn shop owner, while Caryn, a pathological liar, worked as a phone psychic. The last name "Pines" was reportedly introduced in Ellis Island, but records of the family's original surname have been lost.^[8] In their earlier adolescent days, Stan and Ford often scoured the beach and went for treasure hunting. One time, they claimed an abandoned ship for themselves, naming it the "Stan-O-War". The twins worked on repairing this boat over time, hoping to sail it around the world one day.

As hinted in the Season 1 episode "Dreamscaperers", the boys were frequent targets of bullies, so Filbrick signed them up for boxing classes. Stan later used his boxing skills to save a woman named Carla McCorkle, nicknamed "Hotpants", from a robber. However, Carla eventually left him for a music-playing hippie.

In school, Ford was a straight-A student and a favorite of his teachers, while Stan was a prank-loving slacker who often copied his brother's test answers. On one fateful night, Stan wandered into a science fair hall and accidentally broke his brother's prize-winning perpetual motion machine, ruining Ford's chances of being accepted into the prestigious university West Coast Tech and straining their relationship. Filbrick disowned Stan, refusing to allow him come back home until he could make real money.

Stan first took an interest in sales after seeing a billboard which glamorized the practice. Using various fake names over time, he started countless companies promoting "revolutionary" products that turned out to be dysfunctional and poorly made. He was ultimately chased away by angry mobs each time the flaws in his products were discovered and banned in the majority of American states. He was also once arrested in Colombia and placed on the United States No Fly List, both for reasons unknown.

Arrival in Gravity Falls[]

Stan came to Gravity Falls upon receiving a postcard from Stanford Pines, now with a Ph.D. graduate of the lackluster Backupsmore University, who used his research grants to build a house there and investigate the world's largest concentration of supernatural anomalies. In a dream, the demon Bill Cipher persuaded Ford into building an interdimensional portal with the aid of fellow Backupsmore student Fiddleford McGucket (known in the present as the local hillbilly "Old Man" McGucket) underneath Ford's house. In a test, Fiddleford survived an incident involving a gravity anomaly, leading him to quit the project, construct a ray gun to erase specified memories, and found the Society of the Blind Eye: an underground secret society dedicated to the erasure of memories of townsfolk in Gravity Falls to keep the status quo. When Ford demanded answers, Bill revealed his true intentions, prompting Ford to contact Stan for help.

After Stan arrived, he learned that Ford had hid two of his three journals documenting his supernatural findings and explaining how to operate the portal, entrusting the first book to Stan hoping that he would agree to bury it "as far away as possible". Outraged that Ford did not call him to reconcile, Stan got into an argument with Ford and tried to burn the journal. While fighting, Stan accidentally threw Ford into the activated portal, which then ran out of fuel and deactivated. Stan learned to his dismay that he could not reactivate the portal without all three journals to show him how.

After running out of food, Stan went into town to buy some supplies, but locals mistook him for Ford and requested for a tour of the house, offering money. Stan agreed, adopting the name "Stanford" as his own. He tried to impress them with some of Ford's inventions but, after failure, he then won the tourists attention with his first fake attraction. Stan subsequently converted the house into a tourist trap of fake attractions, calling it initially "The Murder Hut", but later renaming it "The Mystery Shack". He even faked his death as Stanley by staging a car crash to avoid further pursuit from the police and erase his past. For the last 30 years prior to the start of the series, Stan has continued to sneak into the lab at night to try reactivating the portal so he can rescue Ford.

Main series[]

For most of Gravity Falls episodes, Stan is shown as a simple, miserly character who devises mischievous, comical plans to earn money from Mystery Shack tourism. Despite his greed, he is genuinely protective of his great-nephew Dipper and great-niece Mabel, whose parents have asked him to watch the twins for the summer. He also pretends to be unaware of Gravity Falls' supernatural oddities and engages in a bitter rivalry with Gideon Gleeful: the malevolent 10-year-old proprietor of another tourist trap called the "Tent of Telepathy" who attempts in claiming the Mystery Shack for himself. Unbeknownst to Dipper and Mabel, Stan has the first of Ford's journals. By the end of the first season, following Gideon's arrest for causing mass destruction and fooling his tourists in the episode "Gideon Rises", Stan obtains all three journals and tries using them to reactivate the portal. He finally succeeds in reactivating the portal and bringing Ford back to his home dimension near the end of the second season's episode "Not What He Seems". The brothers then tell their story to Dipper and Mabel and struggle to reconnect over subsequent episodes because of the different paths their lives has taken.

In the last few episodes, the prophesied apocalypse called "Weirdmageddon" begins, with Bill Cipher capturing Ford, while Stan takes refuge in the Shack, enchanted by Stanford's unicorn spell. McGucket finds him and invites into the Shack filled with an army of the series' supporting characters. Stan is jealous of Dipper, Mabel, and his employees Soos and Wendy wanting to save him even though he feels responsible for the apocalypse.

After a battle with Bill's demons using the "Shacktron", a fighting robot built from the Shack itself, the heroes unfreeze the rest of the townsfolk in Bill's fortress, the "Fearamid". To stop Bill, Ford draws on the floor a prophetic diagram bearing ten symbols around a wheel. Each symbol represents something related to one of the major characters of the series. Each individual stands on their symbol except Stan, who demands that Ford thank him. Ford gives him his request, but Ford corrects his grammar shortly after. The brothers fight until Bill finds them, captures the Pines family, and turns everyone else into tapestries. Dipper and Mabel distract Bill and escape their cell while Stan and Ford are locked in another cell, where they finally reconcile.

Ford reveals that Bill needs a secret equation stored in his mind to spread the Weirdmageddon effect all over the world and that luring Bill into his mind, then erasing it with McGucket's memory gun, would erase the demon from existence. However, this is seemingly impossible, as Ford has a metal plate in his skull to stop Bill from accessing his thoughts. Stan volunteers to have his mind erased, and the brothers switch clothes. When Bill returns, the disguised Stan agrees to his plan, tricking Bill into entering the wrong mindscape.^[10] As Ford erases Stan's memory, Bill is punched into non-existence by Stan's mindscape self, who realizes that his purpose in life was to protect his family before he burns in silence.

After Gravity Falls returns to normal, Stan awakens without any memories until his family and friends revive them. On the last day of the summer, Stan and Ford make plans to live out their dream of sailing around the world, this time to find more anomalies. Stan promotes the enthusiastic Soos to manager of the Shack and he is last seen in a flash-forward at sea with Ford as they deal with an anomaly aboard a ship dubbed the "Stan-O-War II".

Amphibia crossover[]

A character similar to Grunkle Stan named Mr. Ponds, though referred to directly as simply The Curator, appears in the television series Amphibia in the episode "Wax Museum", once again voiced by Alex Hirsch. He is an amphibian reimagining of the character, due to the fact that the majority of the characters are frogs and various other amphibians, who runs a wax museum that shares some similarities to the Mystery Shack. Within the episode, the human Anne Boonchuy and the Plantar family arrive in a small town and visit the wax museum where they meet Mr. Ponds. He then shows them various discoveries and wax figures of mysterious creatures. When Anne spots a portable CD player, she demands to buy it from him, only to get turned down. She shows off her human appearance and Mr. Ponds agrees to have her show off for one night to pay for it. However, Mr. Ponds plans were to cover her in wax to be a permanent exhibit in his museum. The Plantars arrive to rescue her and free the wax figures, who turn out to be real monsters coated in wax, and take their revenge on Mr. Ponds by dragging him behind a door into another room. A pool of red liquid appears underneath it, but Mr. Ponds calls through with "Calm down everyone. It's just wax." However in the very next scene, Hop Pop Plantar reveals that Mr. Ponds was indeed killed.^[11]

Production[]

Character and concept[]

Stan is based on Alex Hirsch's own grandfather, also named Stan. Both share the characteristics of being big, barrel-chested guys whose clothes have popped-undone buttons; both also wear a gold chain and gold rings.^[12]

Stan originally looked considerably different than he does in the show. In a conceptual art, Stan was shorter, did not have his shoulder pads, and had a pointy pink nose instead of a big orange one. His face was also resembled more to a puppet than a grizzled old conman.^[13] This version of the character was seen in an unaired unofficial pilot of the show, which was low budget and a pre-production test version based around the aired pilot episode "Tourist Trapped".

Along with Dipper and Mabel, Stan has appeared in almost every episode of the series. He was featured in the Gravity Falls series of shorts entitled "Dipper's Guide to the Unexplained", as well as a short ("Stan's Tattoo") in which the twins investigate the mysterious tattoo on Stan's shoulder. In "A Tale of Two Stans", it's revealed that it was not a tattoo but a burn scar.

References[]

External links[]

• Internet Movie Database