Moderated by Eric Coleman, Senior Vice President of Original Series, Disney Television Animation brought the creative teams and talent from popular series ‘Fish Hooks’ and the upcoming ‘Wander Over Yonder’ to its panel at San Diego Comic-Con, but it was newcomer ‘Gravity Falls’ that quickly dominated the show, as evidenced by the roar of the attending audience at its mere mention, let alone the number of fans dressed as characters from the cartoon.
During the presentation, series creator Alex Hirsch spoke at length behind the inspiration behind some of the show’s main characters: Mabel Pines, inspired by his real-life twin sister; Grunkle Stan, inspired by his Grandfather Stan; and Soos, inspired by friend he knew from college. Also representing the series were Jason Ritter, voice of Dipper Pines and Michael Rianda, the show’s creative director.
On the genesis of the show, Hirsch stated, ‘I have a twin sister, who I grew up with and we had a lot of summers together where we would stay with a relative out in the woods and we would be bored out of our minds and I always thought, you know, on long fishing trips or camping trips wouldn’t it be cool if instead of doing nothing, we were going on awesome adventures. So that’s sort of where the nexus of the show came from. I kind of combined my childhood memories and then fantasy stuff into one kind of stew of ideas and so-forth.. and so on.’
Mabel allows Hirsch to ‘vicariously help his sister live her dreams through’ the show. In an upcoming episode, from which a clip was shown, Mabel wins a pig at a ‘crummy fair’ operated by Grunkle Stan. This was directly inspired by his sister’s childhood obsession with pigs, explaining she would even continue to hang expired calendars featuring the animal. Since he couldn’t give her one in real life, he decided Mabel should have one on the show, although he notes that ‘certain time anomaly events’ will put the pig’s fate into question. It was also because of his sister that an upcoming episode will guest star Lance Bass of ‘N Sync fan. Growing up, Ariel Hirsch was obsessed with all boy bands, according to Hirsch, but Bass was her favorite. So much so that when she learned the show had been picked up, she suggested him as a celebrity guest star. Hirsch joked that now that he was able to allow his sister to meet her childhood idol, she would have to introduce him to Pikachu to even it out, since that was who he was into at the time.
Hirsch also talked about the sweater behind all of Mabel’s sweaters seen on the show. Explaining that the sweater used to be too large on Ariel, it now fit her and so she wore it to the series’ premiere party. The lime-green sweater that began it all features a troll doll, complete with ‘shedding’ hair