I'm still Alex Hirsch. I'm Jeff Rowe. I'm Shion Takeuchi. I'm newly Rob Ranzetti. And this is Weirdmageddon Part 2, Mabelland. We had to change the title at the last minute because... Spoiler. Yeah, we were really worried that the title would get out and people would know what was going to be in Mabel's bubble. And once they knew, they could kind of start to predict the episode. So we at the last second changed it to Escape from Reality or something like that. I still don't remember what our late title is. This is, I think, our first reveal of the Throne of Humans. Oh, yeah. Which was a nightmare for our artists to design. So, yeah. So, weird, too. Let's sort of talk a little bit about the broad concept. So, the idea was that Stan and Ford were these two siblings who were really close. And then life came between them, broke their relationship. And they spent these isolated lives growing further and further apart. and that Dipper and Mabel are these close friends who have been getting closer over the course of the summer but then a rift has come between them and sort of the job of Weirdmageddon, every weird thing in the show exists to do something to our characters. And for us, the job of Weirdmageddon is to have Dipper and Mabel get over their differences and that's the catalyst that causes Stan and Ford to get over their differences. So from a macro point of view, when we started planning this three-part conclusion to the series, we knew that that would be our sort of second act. and really kind of I sort of came to the writers and was just like alright I think we're going to do an episode takes place in Mabel's mind we had the idea of doing that in weird dreamscapers there was this idea of being in Mabel's dream and seeing her dream boys and it seemed like a really fun location so it was like Dipper and Mabel are going to get over their issues and they're going to go to Mabel's head and figure it out and Jeff can you sort of talk about sort of the brainstorming and the original concepts here I just I think I remember it was like you're living inside like a Lisa Frank thing. It's just like whatever the most Mabel stuff is that you can do, just go nuts on it. Well, she's accumulated so much. She's such like a creative character. She's accumulated so many sort of visual symbols for her own creativity over the course of the series. Mabel was always my favorite character to write for. And when we would like table read the scripts, I always like insisted on doing the Mabel voice. I'm like, I want to read Mabel. Rob always insisted on being Ford. or Stan. I was usually one of the brothers. Always did a great job too. So you were stoked to just get Mable-y. Yeah. And there was some actual emotional sauce there to dig into. Yeah, I don't know. Remind me if I'm remembering it correctly because it's sort of a blur. Everyone works on everything. But I remember sort of coming to the team with this broad idea of they're going to be in Mable's bubble and there's going to be some kind of arc that happens over the course of this episode. But the whole idea of the third act of the trial, did that come from Josh? Or was that you and Josh together? I think the trial was my idea. I apologize if I'm wrong, Josh. Because sometimes we try to come up with a third act set piece and it's like, well, it's a chase or a fight. So what's a different kind of thing you can do? Well, we've never done a courtroom drama. and there was something funny and appealing about the idea of putting reality on trial or making Dipper and Mabel duke it out in this specific way. In court. Well, something as serious as court in a place as silly as Mabel's brain. Yeah, it just kind of clicked in and made sense. I thought that was a cool idea. I had a really sort of different way I was imagining this episode before that idea. like I had there was a version of it that I had in my head that involved like act one took place in Mabel Land but basically the second two thirds of the episode took place inside a scrapbook do you remember that stuff oh I remember that there was this idea I had that like Mabel starts to really quickly figure out that this is all a lie and wants out and Bill can see that the plan is falling apart and he needs to get Dipper and Mabel to hate each other more so he sends Dipper and Mabel into a cursed scrapbook which has photos of their entire lives with the idea that they would relive every fight they had ever lived and that this would result in them hating each other. And there was a thought that maybe they'd team up with their younger selves. Hey, that sounds great. Let's go back and do that. Remember we had talked about that as a broad idea, but I think I remember coming to the writer's room and there was a group pitch, and so maybe that's why I was misattributing it to Josh. Remember there was a group pitch about the idea that we weren't making the most of the Mabelland location and that you could do this crazy courtroom scene and it would be really fun and really active. And the scrapbook ended up being a part of that scene. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. I remember trying to pull some of it back to some of that idea. Well, that was like a final hour, Alex Hirsch save. I think we're having a tough time with the exact resolution of this. And then Alex came in like a champion at the last minute and wrote all that really touching memories of them as children, the scrapbook stuff. Right. And it was just like some of the sweetest stuff on the show. I wanted to get a little bit of that scrapbook heat just because like there's this idea that one could selectively I feel like you could do this with your relationship with almost anybody is you could selectively Edit a bunch of memories together to make it seem like it was an awful time Yeah and then you could selectively edit a bunch of memories together to make it seem like it was an awful time And then you could selectively edit a bunch of memories together All the highlights I think everybody does that with their life They selectively remember what they want to remember or the bad things they want to remember or focus on the bad and forget the good. Right. And this episode is about Mabel being essentially in denial. Yeah. Yeah. Sorry, Mabel. Like, Mabel wants summer to last forever. She kind of lives in her own head. and Bill has basically given her what she asked for and kind of, like in my mind, and I think one thing that's sometimes misinterpreted about this episode is that, you know, oh, well, Mabel doesn't seem to understand the apocalypse and she's indifferent to it. And in my mind, Mabel has been a little, not fully hypnotized, but kind of tricked by this world. She's kind of in a dream, essentially. Yeah. Like the way the rules work in my mind is that, you know, Bill or Blendin basically, you know, said, you want more summer, right? Oh, I got to stop you right there. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Let's just talk about Dippy Fresh. Let's talk about Dippy Fresh. Wiggity, wiggity, what's up, dude bros? Yeah, maybe one of the finest moments. This really is kind of Jeff distilled onto screen. Yeah, yeah, yeah. What Jeff thinks of as the best parts of Jeff. Yeah, yeah. One of our nicknames for Jeff is Jeffy Fresh. Actually, is that for Jeffrey Thompson? No, no, I'm Jeffy Fresh. We have multiple Jeffs on the show. And that was the two Jeffs. No, yeah. What was the origin of Dippy Fresh? I think you said something, Alex, like, oh, and Mabel even has like a better brother, like a better version of Dipper. And then we just riffed on what that was. And it's like Burger King Kids Club. Kid Vid from Burger King Kids Club. Yeah, yeah. And just like, you know, his name is Dippy Fresh. And he talks like I do or something. He's aggressively supportive. Yeah. Nice. Actually, Mabel, I'm with Dipper on this. Gravity Falls is in trouble, and I really think... Wait! Guys? You're safe. We've got a monster truck full of fireworks, fake IDs, and pranking supplies. Want to drive this truck through the high school and glue this plunger to the principal's head? Well, I mean, again, the way we sort of pitched it was this is all kind of a dream. Like none of this is really real. Like the only thing that's real are these characters and like everything else is made out of just sort of imagination sauce. Right. So like to be fresh, you know, you can break his neck. You're not killing anyone real. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Just returns to the imagination dust from once he, from once he came. Wentz. Is that a word? Yeah. Wentz. Yeah. That's totally legit. Well done. Wentz is a real word. I'm trying to remember sort of other than that, like sort of there was that original mission. We want to see kind of the growth of we want to resolve Dipper and Mabel. We want to be inside Mabel's mind. And I think this was because this was an episode sort of about a denial. Right. Like every character is offered an easier out. Yep. Like Wendy is like offered like just like teen rebellion. Seuss is offered to sort of go into like this thing that he still secretly harbors. Like they're all kind of given something that they are starting to grow out of or on the precipice of leaving. and the sort of cynical hope being by Bill that they'll just slide back once tempted. Yep. And here's, well, we don't get to see what Dipper's supposed to be tempted by. Yep. Jeff, do you remember, I remember writing out a scene, but I'm not sure if I showed it to anybody, where I was trying to come up with an alt that involved a scene with Ford for Dipper's, what Dipper imagined. Oh, I don't know. Did I ever show that to the team? Maybe not. I never saw that. I think I wasn't able to crack it. I had this feeling with the Wendy stuff where I was like, we've gone to the Wendy well a lot. Is that a little bit too much Wendy? At this moment, maybe Dipper's greatest wish is his whole apprenticeship thing. And I tried to write out a scene where Dipper's like, okay, I need to figure out a way to get Mabel out of here. And then Ford just skyrockets in. And he's just like, Dipper, I've defeated Weirdmageddon. And Bill is dead. And we need to go and hunt mummies. Um, and Dipper's like, well, really? And then it's just like hard cuts to them. Like having finished hunting a bunch of mummies. Whoa, that was a long day of mummy hunting. And Dipper's like got a cool scar and like, it's like we're in another television show at this point. And Dipper's like kind of into like their next adventure. Like let's get our crossbows. Like there's a bunch of ghosts. And then like something happens where like they go by a school. It's like, we've jumped into the future and Mabel is now in high school or something. And Dipper's like watching her through the fence, having fun with friends. and he's like kind of covered in like mummy hunting crap. And like, everybody's like, oh, isn't that your brother, the creepy guy who just like hangs out with an old man and just like collects animal parts in like a basement. And Dipper has this like realization like, oh, maybe I don't want to do this apprenticeship. But like, I remember like I tried to write this out and it was one, way too long. Two, kind of crazy how much it broke the believability of the episode. And three, it also didn't make sense that Bill would allow a world to show the negative side of what Dipper wanted. That was the thing. I was like, Dipper has to see the negative side of this. Right. But like, like the imagine, Mabel Land would never let Dipper see the negative consequence. So like, that was such a mind screw that I couldn get it together Well I think this is more successful This is this shows that he has gotten past it because he basically just like hey you can be with the girl you want And he wise enough to pass it up I don't think I even showed anybody that scene because I tried it and it didn't work. You know what I mean? I remember this. Millipedes are just the creepiest thing in the world to me. So I was like, oh, how do you make it horrifying? Oh, she turns into millipedes. Just everything turns into millipedes. What is with those animals hanging from the tree? They're creepy. We tell the artists, make them terrifying. And they did. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Shion, do you have any memories of this episode of the creation? I have like vague flashes of like different versions where Wendy was like writing beat poetry or something. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. I remember that. Yeah, we were trying to come up with like different Wendy wants and then another classroom flashback for Dipper and Mabel and something something about being siblings and being in a classroom. I'm sorry I'm not illuminating any. No, that Wendy thing, I remember that. We spent some time trying to figure out something. We didn't want to be some guy. We'd done that. We explored that. What does Wendy want? Some cool guy. We felt reductive to her character. Yeah, just having a boyfriend. We did hope to find... That's not right for her. I mean, we did hope to... Wendy was always such a tough character because she's pretty self-actualized and she doesn't exhibit a lot of destructive character flaws that she really needs to get over. I think just having her friend group back, that was perfect for her. She just loves that aimless teen rebellion, man. It would be really hard for her if given the choice to turn down just a bunch of chaos. I didn't think the world's a neighbor land. And I remember I was super stoked when I saw all the stuff that you guys had written for this courtroom scene because it's just so funny and great. So here's Jon Stewart. What was that like, Alex? It was very surreal. So I was a huge fan of the classic daily show with Jon Stewart. When I was in CalArts, as soon as class was out, I would run as fast as I could to get to a television. I didn't miss a single episode. And Jon Stewart was always my dream guest. And we had gotten to the point where his kids loved Gravity Falls. Kristen Schaal was a correspondent on it and she got me on the show backstage to meet Jon Stewart and he was like yeah my kids love the show I do a grunkle voice around the house and I was like ah I need you to do an episode one day and I was always waiting for a chance that he would be available and we finally heard that he was um and so he seemed like he'd be perfect for judge kitty kitty meow meow face hyphen shortsteen it was really surreal bringing him on and a little terrifying because like he was in the middle of recording he was writing an episode with his writers and then he had to duck out of the writer's room into a little closet with a mic to record from new york to send us the thing to then go out to then do the show that night like it was we were just a tiny break in his day and i felt like i'm so unqualified to be telling him like yeah yeah but say no say me overruled it's not it's not me overruled it's me overruled can you give me another one i love the ripped off sleeve yeah yeah i love the idea that kras and zyler actually have legal knowledge like they're actually pretty good lawyers yeah that's hilarious Krasn and Zeiler as the lawyers is my favorite part of the scene Krasn and Zeiler was another one of those characters where it's just like it's a throwaway joke and then they became like so much bigger than we ever imagined they would be even though they only have a few appearances throughout the series they always make such a strong impression I think in like season 2 there was this like use every part of the buffalo we had enough breadth in the world that we could just draw on things and deepen it like just really give a lot of kind of things, characters and roles. This is literally my elementary school. Was it called Egbert? It was called Egbert W. Beach Elementary. Wow. And I just gave photos of this school to Ian, our art director, and I was like, just put Beach School in the show because at this point, if we're going to get a brief kind of taste of different Mabel's kids, I want it to be as close to my memories as possible. I love Mabel with the pigtails too. She's super cute. And we also never get to see seasons in this show. So often when we have a flashback, we'll try to take an opportunity. It doesn't make any logical sense they'd be doing school photos in the fall necessarily. But I was like, we're trapped in summer all the time. So let's get another taste of what these places look like. These outfits are kind of weird because they seem almost decade specific. That shirt actually looks older than a giant sweater for Mabel. It's very hard figuring out what do Young Dipper and Mabel look like. I like that slight fear shirt. Uh, yeah. I can't believe that kid's your brother. Hey, what's the point of all this? That was in the past! Is your life any better now, bro? Heartbreak, disaster, broken promises, that's reality for you. Out there, it's nothing but heartbreak. But in here, who wants pug sundaes? Hand me a microphone, Zyler. Yeah, this stuff is that sometimes when you sit down to write an episode, you've just got a couple comedic areas locked and loaded that you can sink your teeth into, and it's like those are the moments from which the rest of the episode is born. And I remember them as lawyers was a pretty early thing and it was like that easy and fun to write and then you got to fill out the other stuff to to get there yeah it seemed like everyone was having like a lot of fun with this story just because there's just so much ridiculousness and chaos in Mabel's mind and the art team did a great job of you know there's so many references there's shimmery twinkle heart we see um uh ducktective in there that waffle with the buff arms is from a drawing she did in headhunters, like many of these things. That horse with the little legs is a sticker from Mabel's Guide to Stickers. Oh, there's Sir Syrup in the background from Gobblewonker, and to the right of him was the basketball-playing dog from Irrational Treasure. A lot of this stuff is just from Mabel's brain. I mean, we had to populate this world, and we really just dug back into everything. Oh, and this is the only other episode other than the pilot where Mabel wears her classic pink with the shooting star. A sweater. Because we just thought, oh, this is the Mabel-iest episode. We need the Mabel-iest outfit. Mabel, I figured out a way to fix your photo. So this is definitely not based on anything real. There's no way I would have destroyed my own photo for Ariel. You are a much worse brother than Dipper is. Fact. But I could kind of buy that there was a time where Dipper wasn't as anxious. Right. When you're super young, sometimes it takes kids a minute to notice all the social pressure. Like, I think at this point, it's now starting to hit him. But, like, you know, maybe second or third grade, like, he was still kind of in that sweet childhood place. Yeah, and it was nice getting to reference, like, this fact that, like, they've had a lot of really great moments. And, like, they're a great team. And this plan that Dipper had of going off to be this apprentice, like, it sounds great on paper. But in reality, like, it would just be a lot of hanging out in a basement. Well, it's not time for that. It's time for him to be a kid. It's time for him to be a teenager. It's time for him to enjoy growing up, not be growing up yet. He'll get to all that. He'll get to better stuff than that. I also got to give a shout out to Matt Brawley, who is the director of this episode. So many of the visual flourishes, the ideas of what the settings would look like, how everything would fit together, and a lot of the gags and just the general spirit of this episode. I think Matt is a really, really sweet guy. and he I think can relate to a lot of Mabel and really put a lot of that in the episode. Matt and Alonzo were like these twin quasars of heart that just like always injected so much warmth and love into every board sequence that they did, the character designs. I remember during the season two brainstorm, Alonzo just boarded a bunch of ideas, just like random events. Yeah, so good. We ended up using a lot of that stuff. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Those guys are amazing. I got to give credit to Ali Dinesh, one of our artists. He did, I think, this design and a lot of other great designs in this episode. Oh, yeah, there's Aoshima. Yeah, I love that character. I think... Yeah, okay, and this whole section was storyboarded by Emmy, and she did an amazing job as well. It was nice seeing this happy world turn dark because it's grating to experience that much Mabel-ness for that long. Waddles seems to be this being that exists in whatever reality he wants to. Because here he is. This is actual Waddles somehow, giant. Uh-oh. Uh-oh. You got a good point there, Rob. Cancel the episode. Let's redo it. Uh-oh. No, I'm saying Waddles is the most powerful character in our canon. There was always... Alex, didn't you always want to have an episode where Waddles talked and had like Jon Hamm's voice and was just like a mature adult? Well, I mean, we had that, but in the Halloween episode. There was a concept for an episode in season one that Mabel would become protection crazy about. She's got a baby, Waddles, and now she wants to protect it. And she's constantly scared about it getting hurt. And she like covers Waddles in a ball of bubble tape and she's trying to keep him safe. Oh, that's right. And she ends up getting knocked out and has this fantasy sequence where Waddles speaks with Jon Hamm's voice. and it's like, if you love something, you have to let it live its own life or something like that. It ended up not becoming an episode, but we took that piece and we put it in a bacon in. Yeah, with Neil deGrasse Tyson. Oh, okay. I was thinking, was there some kind of thing with Waddles getting sick and Gideon being in prison? Do you guys remember that episode? Yeah, that was a Gideon episode. We never were able to fully crack it, but there was an idea that Waddles was sick and Mabel had to get an antidote and she had to go into prison and she had to infiltrate it to get Gideon's help. Yeah, I mean, for every episode you see, it's standing on the mountain of the corpses of a hundred other episodes that we wrote. And we started, we sort of played with ideas that we never quite resolved. I think you actually wrote this ending, Shion, because this was the beginning of the next episode that was yours. And it was just great to get all of these obscure characters back together in one place. Well, there they are. There they are. I wish we could have found a way for them to stay in our world at the end of Weird 3 but they had to go back oh yeah them questioning reality this was a very late addition I made to the animatic we were very tired guys and that's why you get gold like this you want to create your own weirdmageddon? stay up for days on end see what your brain makes
