Grunkle Stan

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 sometimes he argues with Dipper. Lately, in private moments, Stan admitted to himself that Dipper is headstrong and stubborn, like himself. 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, Stanford, 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.

Stanley and his six-fingered twin brother Stanford were born in Glass Shard Beach, New Jersey to Filbrick Pines and his unnamed wife who took residence in a pawn shop. Filbrick was hard to impress and his wife was a pathological liar and phone psychic (which may have been where Stan inherited his lying ability). As children, Stan and Ford would scour the beach and go treasure hunting, searching for objects of value. One time, they came across an abandoned ship which they claimed for themselves, even using their T-shirts as flags, and called it the "Stan-O-War." Despite their strong sibling bond, they were frequent targets of bullies when at the playground or at the beach, especially of a boy named Crampelter who insulted their ship and teased Ford for his sixth finger. To toughen them up, Filbrick signed them up for wrestling classes which proved to be quite helpful for both of them, especially Stan, who used his new knowledge of wrestling to save a woman named Carla "Hotpants" McCorkle from getting robbed when waiting in line to see his favorite movie, "Grandpa The Kid." They would go to their favorite 50's-themed bar called Juke Joint to dance in the style of the time but she eventually left him for a hippie playing hypnotic music.

In school, the two proved themselves. Ford had an intense love of the science fiction genre while Stan liked to goof off occasionally (his mother called this "personality"). Ford was a straight-A student and a favorite of his teachers while Stan on the other hand liked to goof off in class, throwing spitballs and eat toffee peanuts in class, being forced to copy off his brother's test papers to make it to the next grade. Ford got lots of golden trophies and awards for his science projects, especially one particular science project called the Perpetual Motion Machine, which earned the attention of West Coast Tech. Ford was called to the principal's office but was surprised to find both of his parents there and when he learned about West Coast Tech, he couldn't refuse. Stan, who the principal claimed would be "lucky to graduate high school" and who was listening outside, was crushed because over the years, the two had been fixing up the Stan-O-War for international travel and treasure hunting. When wandering the science fair hall with a toffee peanut bag at nighttime, Stan throws a temper tantrum, accidentally destroying the Perpetual Motion Machine and causing Stan to drop his toffee peanut bag. He tries to fix it and hides it behind a curtain.

The machine is destroyed when Ford comes and the strict and stern judges of West Coast Tech are not impressed and do not allow him to enter. Ford finds the toffee peanut bag that Stan accidentally dropped that night and realizes that Stan destroyed his machine. He talks about it to Stan that night and their sibling bond becomes strained. Filbrick, who had been overhearing their conversation, disowns Stan, refusing to allow him back until he could make real money. Stan tries wandering the beach with a metal detector to search for treasure but decided to take an interest in sales, after seeing a billboard which honey-coated the practice. He starts his own company which produced house supply materials, called Stan Co. Enterprises. He produces his own line of pitchforks and his own brand of towels called the Sham Total, which he lies about being made from the same substance astronauts used to clean themselves on the moon. The Sham Total only made stains worse and he was chased out of New Jersey by an angry mob, barely escaping because the mob was using Stan Co. Enterprises pitchforks. He resettled in Pennsylvania, under the alias Steve Pinington, selling his own brand of band-aids he called the Rip Off, because they were easy to take off. However, the Rip Off gave its users rashes and he was once again chased out of the state by an angry mob. He traveled all over the country, and sometimes out of it, using aliases like Stetson Pinefield, Hal Forrester, and Andrew "8-Ball" Alcatraz. He once tried locally selling his own brand of vacuums called Stan Vac but made the mistake of using the catchphrase "sucks more than anything." He was arrested for unknown reasons in Colombia, where he befriended his cellmates, Jorge and Rico. He was offered shelter by Rico in Dead End Flats, New Mexico, as long as he paid Rico's goons within the deadline, which he struggled to do.

One day, he received a postcard from his brother, who was in Gravity Falls, Oregon, studying anomalies. After his chances of attending West Coast Tech had been blown, he was forced to attend Backupsmore University, where they made up for their lack of prestige with bug-free dorms, where he befriended fellow genius Fiddleford Hardon McGucket. The two graduated with the level of PhD, being offered huge sums of money for their hard work. Ford decided he was going to study anomalies after being teased for his anomalous sixth finger and after careful research, he concluded that the place with the most anomalies was a small lumberjack town in Oregon called Gravity Falls. He used his grant money to build a shack there and decided to record his findings in three journals with gold, six-fingered hands on their cover with their numbers written on them. He scoured the forests and climbed the mountains, recording the anomalies he found, such as eye-bats, unnaturally shifting mountain paths, and talking gnomes. When searching for the source of the weirdness, he came across a cave with an incantation inscribed on the wall. Despite warnings not to, he recited the inscribed incantation. That night as he slept, he met a supernatural being called Bill Cipher, who seemed to be very friendly and told him that the source of the anomalies was another dimension of weirdness. Ford wanted to build a portal to access that dimension and Bill gave him the schematics and so, Ford contacted McGucket, who was wasting his time building his own computers.

The two built the machine that would allow them access to the weirdness dimension in a secret lab underneath the Shack. The strange lights emitted from the machine aroused curiosity among the locals. When they tested the machine, Fiddleford got sucked by a gravity anomaly in the machine but Ford rescued him. When he was pulled out, he recited, "When Gravity Falls and Earth becomes sky, fear the beast with just one eye." Fearful of the machine, Fiddleford tells Ford to destroy it, but when Ford refuses, claiming it is his life's work, Fiddleford quits the project, constructing a machine that would erase specified memories in order to forget what he saw and founding a society called the Society of the Blind Eye to wipe the memories of the residents of Gravity Falls who came across such anomalies. Ford contacted Bill in the Spirit World, demanding to know where the machine really lead to. Bill reveals his true colors and Ford realizes that he should never have built that portal. He decided to contact someone he could trust, his twin brother Stanley.

When he explained everything to him, showing him his secret lab and the shut down machine, he explained that he had hid two of the journals which explained how to operate it and was entrusting the final journal, the first one, to Stan. Stanley, upset that Ford did not call him there to reconcile, starts throwing a fit and in his anger, decides to burn the journal. The two get into a fight and in the fight, Stan gets burned on the shoulder. In a fit of rage, Stan throws Ford into the accidentally activated portal which he gets sucked into. The portal then runs out of fuel and deactivates. Stan tries to turn it back on but fails, as he needs the other two journals to activate the portal.

When he runs out of money, he heads into town to buy some essentials. He heads into the store Dusk 2 Dawn, where the locals mistaken him for the mysterious science guy who lived in the forest. They request for a tour of the shack that "he" lived in, offering money and at the thought of cash, Stan agrees, taking the name "Stanford", the name of his absent brother. He shows the locals around his shack and tries to impress them with some of his brother's gadgets but they are not impressed (Susan Wentworth gets one of her eyes shocked by an electric box, causing it to close permanently, earning her the nickname "Lazy Susan"). He comes up with some fake attractions and the locals find it amusing. So he converts the shack into a shack of fake attractions, dubbing it initially "the Murder Hut", but later renaming it "the Mystery Shack." He even fakes his own death in a car crash in another state to get the cops off his scent. After searching for another employee to run the Shack that would be loyal to him, he finally does so when he finds Jésus "Soos" Ramirez, who, at the time of his employment, was only 12 years old. Soos grows to like his job and regards Stan like a surrogate father, especially after he tried to get his birthday removed from the calendar (a day in which Soos always grieves about his father not being able to come to his birthday party), causing Stan to no longer be allowed at the airport. Meanwhile, Stan would go to the lab at night and try to get the machine back on to rescue his long lost brother, a goal he finally accomplishes in the episode Not What He Seems.

In the last few episodes, Weirdmageddon begins, Stanford is captured by Bill Cipher, the dream demon introduced in "Dreamscaperers," and Stanley takes refuge in the Shack, enchanted by Stanford's unicorn spell. Eventually, Fiddleford McGucket finds him and leads some magical forest creatures with him. These creatures include the gnomes, Larry King's disembodied head, the members of Sev'eral Timez, the Multi-Bear, and many more. This upsets Stan greatly, but he proclaims himself king and plans on eating canned meat and all the Gnomes until they run out. When Dipper, Mabel, Wendy and Soos return and the twins make plans to save Ford, Stan is jealous of their wanting to save him even though he started the apocalypse in the first place.

Later, the group finds the rest of the townsfolk in Bill Cipher's castle, and unfreezes them all. Ford remembers a way to finish Bill off. This was done by recreating an old prophecy on the floor with Robbie V's spray paint. Each symbol represented something related to Wendy, Dipper, Mabel, Soos, Fiddleford, Stanley, Stanford, Pacifica, Robbie, and Gideon. Each individual stands on their symbol except Stan, who refuses to further cooperate with the plan until Stanford says thank you. Ford gives him his request, but, after correcting his grammar one too many times, is punched to the ground by Stan. The two fight while Dipper and Mabel try to separate them, but too late. Bill finds them, locks Mabel and Dipper up, grabs the Stan twins, and turns the rest into flags. Dipper and Mabel distract Bill while Stan and Ford are locked in their own cell. Stanley and Stanford apologize to each other, and go over their options.

All that Bill wants is to get inside Stanford's mind for a simple equation needed to get through Gravity Fall's weirdness barrier and take over the world, but since Ford has a metal protector around his scull, Bill has to have Ford's permission to enter. The only way to defeat him now would to have Bill in his mind and erase it with Fiddleford's memory gun, but because of the metal protector, it would do nothing. Stan volunteers his mind to be erased ("Wasn't good for anything, anyway," he says) and the twins switch clothes. When Bill returns, he is about to kill Mabel right in front of them, but 'Ford,' Stanley in disguise, agrees to Bill's plan. The brothers fight for show, entertaining Bill. Finally, Bill and Stanley shake hands, with Bill going out of physical form and into the mindscape. Bill rejoices his win until he discovers that he's in the wrong mind. He calls off the deal, but there is no turning back, as the mind eraser has already been fired. As the mind burns, Stan's mind and Bill have a verbal war, until Bill weakens and declares one final spell before being punched by Stan and exploding into pixels. Stanley realizes that his purpose in life was to protect his family, and burns in silence.

Meanwhile, Weirdmageddon reverses itself, and the town returns to normal. His physical self has passed out. Dipper and Ford know that Stan will never recover, but Mabel believes he will somehow be okay. When he wakes up, he is clueless about himself and everything around him, and the kids take him back to the beaten-up shack. Mabel tries to revive his memories with her scrapbook, and his memories and characteristics come back quickly. On the last day of the summer, Stanley and Stanford make plans to sail around the world like they dreamed about when they were kids, but this time to find more anomalies. Stan hands the Shack over to Soos, whose lifelong dream has been to own it. Dipper and Mabel return to Piedmont. The family is finally safe and sound.

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.

Character and concept

Stan originally looked considerably different 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 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.