Stan Pines

Stanford "Stan" Pines (commonly known as Grunkle Stan) is one of the main characters of the Disney animated series Gravity Falls, created and voiced by series creator Alex Hirsch. Stan is an older man with tenacious stubble, who's never seen by anyone without his fez (and its sometimes-changing symbol). For daily attire, he wears a black suit, white shirt and red bolo tie, along with a cane topped by a billiard 8-ball. He often affects an eye patch when working. When at home he generally wears slippers, blue and green-striped boxer shorts, a white sleeveless shirt and a gold necklace. He's very well known in the town and reasonably well-liked, for all that most people think he's a poor man's P.T. Barnum.

Role in series

Grunkle (short for "Great Uncle") Stan is watching his great-nephew Dipper Pines and great-niece Mabel Pines, 12-year old twins, for the summer. This does not always sit well with him and he sometimes argues with Dipper. Lately, in private moments, Stan admitted to himself that Dipper is headstrong and stubborn... like he is. He likes Mabel tremendously and indulges her as much as he can, but doesn't care as much for her pig Waddles.

Because of his loud scoffing at Dipper's investigating Gravity Falls, Dipper, Mabel, and Stan's employees (handyman Soos and Wendy Corduroy, his teenage part-timer) thought he was unaware of the town's weirdness. However, in the Season 2 premiere episode ("Scary-Oke"), it was revealed that Grunkle Stan knew quite a bit about the town's strange secrets; he claimed he had been trying to keep Dipper and Mabel safe. Though grouchy by nature, he's fiercely protective of his family—he leaped into battle against zombies armed with a baseball bat and brass knuckles to save them—but keeping secrets from the twins has ended up putting them at risk, mostly because Dipper won't give up trying to find answers. He promised Dipper not to keep any more secrets if Dipper would stop investigating; both were lying.

Although presumably old enough to be retired, Stan works nearly every day. He's the cheapskate proprietor of "The Mystery Shack," a cheesy tourist trap he created by building additions onto his own home in the woods near the town. Its notable features: the "S" in the Shack's rooftop sign never stays attached, there's a tall totem pole in the side yard and the roof has a weathervane whose four letters spell out WHAT beneath a question mark. A combination of local "weirdness museum" and gift shop, the Shack offers tours of its exhibits (which most people think are fake) and has a number of truly unusual objects presumably for sale. Stan is always on the lookout for a sucker, a great deal or loose change he can pry from its owner. Uncommonly lazy apart from his zeal to make money, Stan often foists his mundane chores off on Dipper or his handyman Soos. He also keeps "contraband" (that is, anything he confiscates from his family or from troublesome visitors) in his room behind a painting.

One secret Stan keeps is that there is a passageway behind the "broken" vending machine in the Shack's main room. Stan uses this to go underground to a hidden laboratory, where a strange machine exists. This machine required input from all three of the weird journals in Gravity Falls. Stan owned the first, Gideon owned the second and Dipper found the third, presumably by accident. Stan acquired all three and used them to activate the machine, the function of which remains unknown. He later returned the third journal to Dipper. Most recently, it was revealed that the machine is a teleportation device, and that Stan's brother, the author of the journals, was trapped in the destination at some point; Stan's main motivation in operating the device is to allow his brother to return to Earth, which he eventually succeeds at in the mid-season 2 finale, "Not What He Seems".

Keeping secrets seems to have made Stan slightly paranoid. He became furious with Dipper when the boy wanted to work with federal agents to figure out the town's biggest mysteries. It's becoming an open question how much of his public "fast-talking conman" persona is real. No matter how much he might scratch himself inappropriately or haggle over flea market junk, there's much more to Stan than meets the eye.

Stan is based on Alex Hirsch's own grandfather, coincidentally 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.^[1]

Production

Character and concept

Stan originally looked considerably different originally than he does in the show. In 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 also more resembled a puppet than a grizzled old conman.

Along with Dipper and Mabel, Stan has appeared in 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. As he never takes off his sleeveless white T-shirt, nobody knows what this tattoo looks like.

References

External links

• Official website of Gravity Falls characters
• Internet Movie Database