REVIEW: GRAVITY FALLS “TOURIST TRAPPED”

Episode Synopsis: Twins Dipper and Mabel Pines visit their eccentric uncle for a summer in Gravity Falls, Oregon, where he operates the world’s most bizarre museum. In the opener, the twins arrive in Gravity Falls and soon discover something amiss in the remote town. Original Air Date: Jun 15, 2012.

Twins Mable and Dipper Pines get to spend their summer with their Grunkle Stan in a remote but not so desolate town of Gravity Falls. Right off the bat Dipper isn’t crazy about the locale as he finds a book detailing all of the spooky tourist attractions that Gravity Falls has to offer, while twin sister Mable is just looking to snag her first boyfriend. Eventually, she comes across a guy named Norman of whom seems a bit suspicious to Dipper due to his slumping walk, his slurred speech, and ragged looks comes across looking more like a zombie. Despite numerous attempts to warn his sister, Mable goes off like nothing’s the matter, that is until Norman reveals himself to be a bunch of gnomes!

The gnomes look to propose marriage to Mable so that she can become their new Queen, but when she declines the little guys flip out just in time for her brother to show up with their getaway and take off. Trouble ensues when the gnomes turn themselves into pretty much a transformer and go after the twins chasing them all the way back to the cabin. Having no idea how to ward off their would be assailants, Mable agrees to marry the gnomes in exchange for their safety, that is until she introduces them to her trusty leaf blower!

To be honest, when this show started I was expecting to hear”There’s a 104 days of summer vacation…” due to the striking resemblance in plot set up but was pleasantly surprised when Gravity Falls came on…that is until I started watching it. First, lets go through what I like about the show so far, I think the animation was very well done and you can see obvious traces of Hirsch’s other animated series Fish Hooks with the big round eyes and chubby cheeks adoring just about all of the characters, hell even the deadly gnomes I just wanted to take home and put on my mantle! Furthermore, Kristen Schaal lends her voice as Mable which makes sense because  her character reminds me quite a bit of Louise Belcher from Bobs Burgers albeit slightly older and with  dash of Tina Belcher’s personality. Oh yea, Linda Cardellini is in this show too as Wendy and yes even her voice sounds hot.

Aside from all the positives, I felt Gravity Falls was WAY too cliched. With the obvious similarities to Scooby-Doo aside, the plot was a bit winded and Jason Ritter as Dipper wasn’t helping at all, as his “mystery solving” character tries so hard to be Lisa Simpson, and to be honest I watched Freddy vs Jason the other day and Ritter was basically playing the same character with the only difference being at least that movie had two monsters trying to destroy each other so it got in the way of his terrible acting. There were other characters like Soos and Stan(both played by Hirsch), and yea Stan provided a nice break up in humor every now and again but Soos felt a tad out of place providing no real substance.

I usually don’t say this but I think this episode could have been helped along by SOME sort of B-plot maybe involving a bit more of Stan but that might be too much to ask for. Fish Hooks this ain’t, here’s hoping the premier episode on June 29th is a tad better.