Shorts Review: Gravity Falls – TV Shorts 1

Spoilers Below

Unfortunately, it is time to leave behind Soos and his fixin’ show. Instead, we turn to Mabel and Gravity Falls Public Television.

The first thing Mabel sees when she clicks on the ancient television is a commercial for the Mystery Shack. Grunkle Stan, surrounded by the infamous pixelation halo that always accompanies terrible green screen technology, introduces himself as Mr. Mystery. As he advertises the Shack, everything he touches is surrounded by the green screen halo…including the microphone boom when it smashes into his eye. Stan does all the things he usually does: tells everyone that all of the regular things in the Shack are “amazing,” tries to get people to eat dirty food, and generally get people to spend their money on crap. Toward the end of his commercial, Stan introduces a double of himself, which he converses with very badly. It is every single terrible homemade local commercial you have ever seen.

Next up is Soos Says Some Words. Soos is painting the inside wall of a log cabin. He pauses his painting job to turn to us and give us his wise words of wisdom. “If you accidentally eat the prize that comes inside your cereal box, does that make you a specially marked box?” That should be in a fortune cookie.

Finally, we are given Li’l Gideon’s Big House, a reality show where Li’l Gideon shows how he is affecting the lives of the men he is incarcerated with. They show him holding a pillow so a fellow inmate can punch out his emotional issues, posing for another inmate’s painting (even though the inmate is painting flaming skulls instead of Gideon), and sitting on the shoulder of a very muscular inmate as the man pumps iron. Li’l Gideon plugs his show. Yet another inmate, Ghost Eyes, yells at the audience to watch the show before punching through the glass in front of them. The warden’s alarm goes off and Gideon jumps on Ghost Eyes’s back as they run off screen.

The channel goes to a Technical Difficulties screen as the voice-over tells us that the channel will return once they have dealt with the riot.  Mabel clicks off the television, claiming that she remembered it being better.

Just like the other episodes, this one was also shown internationally way before it was aired here in the US. This time it aired in Russia back on December 25, 2013. Sadly, I wish they had begun the week with these shorts. Compared to Fixin’ It With Soos, this short fell short. Most of the Gravity Falls characters work best when they are interacting with other characters. In this episode, everyone is separated from each other. Mabel doesn’t have a lot of screen time, Stan is just grubbing for money, Soos barely speaks, and Gideon is just weird. Separately, this isn’t particularly funny or entertaining. Perhaps the short would be better if Dipper was watching television with Mabel so they could react to the shows together. As it stands, it was just OK.