Breaking Into Grunkle Stan’s Contraband
Alex Hirsch is a man-child after my own heart. One of the biggest draws of Gravity Falls for me was how many phenomenal allusions to pop culture from my past Hirsch cleverly snuck into his show, allowing for me to pause each and every episode to ask myself things like, “Wait, was that a Polaroid of The Weekly News’s Bat Boy I just saw?!”
Episodes like “Fight Fighters”, “Soos and the Real Girl”, and “Little Gift Shop of Horrors” seem to have been written almost entirely around clever homages to toys, video games, and movies from that most bizarre of decades past (as Dipper wisely observed in the episode “Dungeons, Dungeons, and More Dungeons”: “Must’ve been dark times, those Nineties…”), but today I’m going to be picking apart a literal treasure chest of nostalgic nuggets from the oft-overlooked season 2 premiere episode: Grunkle Stan’s box of contraband from “Scary-oke”.
Man, this one singular shot is just incredible! Alex Hirsch is a whole five years older than me, but we must’ve enjoyed the exact same things growing up; I had cardboard boxes filled with stuff just like this as a kid, and I just had to snag a screenshot and dissect every little knick-knack within. Upon looking around my own personal junk drawers, however, I decided to take it one step further and actually recreate the damn thing!
What a glorious project this was. Alex Hirsch, whatever you create in the future, please fill it with opportunities for me to make retro-tastic crafts like this. Now let’s dig in!
1. Street Sharks Action Figure
This is actually the one homage that made me want to recreate this entire box. For those of you youngins who were introduced to the ridiculously-popular Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles in the new millennium, most of you probably have no clue how enormous of a phenomenon it was in the late-80s and early-90s. And like every phenomenon, it was lovingly imitated shamelessly ripped off by every animation house under the sun. While the creators of the TMNT were rightfully annoyed, these copycats were straight-up blessings to kids.
I didn’t watch the cartoons upon which they were based growing up, but the action figure line for Street Sharks (four radical teens are mutated into anthropomorphic crime-fighting animals, who patrol an enormous, unsuspecting city from their secret underground lair) was too impossibly awesome for me to pass up. Real life sharks scare the ever-loving piss out of me, but sharks that wear ripped jeans and spiked bracelets are A-okay in my book.
The particular figure Grunkle Stan confiscated looked to be based on Ripster, the unofficial leader (or Leonardo) of the Street Sharks. I can only imagine the reason why Stan would hide away such an action figure would be out of genuine fear that such a creature could exist in Gravity Falls, and that would terrify me, as well. Demons, ghosts, killer gnomes…I could tolerate them. But giant killer rows of teeth that can walk around on land? I would probably just fall to the ground and cry.
These particular bouncy balls seem like the insignificant, almost dusty prizes we would all have but never actually play with. We probably got them from a 25 cent vending machine, or maybe as a party favor from a particularly lame birthday party. Either way, they would always end up at the bottom of a junk drawer, and no matter how many you throw away, you always end up finding just an armada of more throughout the house.
Maybe that’s why Stan hid them away? Maybe, in the backwoods of Gravity Falls, these sort of bouncy balls really do multiply, and no matter how often you try to rid yourself of them, they just keep coming back with a vengeance?
Or maybe Mabel kept bouncing them around the Shack. Either way, they would’ve been annoying.
Oh snap, what if the dusty, multiplying bouncy balls and the slingshot go hand-in-hand? Maybe the balls are the ammunition? Maybe Grunkle Stan had no problem with these two items on their own, but together he knew that they had to be stopped?
Then again, he let Mabel keep and play with a military-grade grappling hook, so who knows?
The only slingshot I have is hand-carved to look like a pirate captain. I don’t know if this makes it lame or impossibly cool.
Grunkle Stan was, is, and probably always will be a gambling man. He’s also a notorious cheater; if he’s playing any sort of card game, he’s playing by his own devious secret rules. Dipper and Mabel probably brought these playing cards with them to the Shack, and Stan probably confiscated them immediately. He couldn’t have his self-made cheater’s deck and their ordinary, “impossible to know the outcome” deck mixed up, after all.
Probably made of metal, but also the absolute cheapest metal available. Maybe two or three bucks at your local Walgreens, right? Comes with a set of keys that you’d only need if you had the strength of an origami swan; otherwise, all you’d need to do is pull your wrists apart with an ounce of strength to break these things forever.
Grunkle Stan, however, has had enough experience with handcuffs to know that any pair is a bad pair. Toy or not, these had to be removed from his sight ASAP.
I know exactly which knife this is. I’ve had so many of them, and they’re at every single costume shop from September to November 1st. Usually, you can get one packaged with any Ghost Face costume, and yet I tore my house apart and couldn’t find any of the dozens that I had as a little Halloween-loving tot. Going around to various different stores in the month of January was also fruitless. Who’da thunk that finding a simple children’s toy based on an ultra-violent gutting weapon would be so difficult to find?
7. Glow-in-the-Dark Vampire Teeth
That light-green color specifically makes these fake vampire teeth of the glow-in-the-dark variety, which is such a good touch on the animator’s part. Why they would be considered contraband is beyond me, though. Grunkle Stan is a huge HalloweenSummerween kinda fella, and I’m 99.7% positive that he even wore a pair in that episode. Maybe they just reminded him of the fact that he hasn’t been able to visit the dentist since he took up his brother’s identity?
Or maybe he’s met vampires with legitimate glowing fangs, and he just finds them pretentious?
Ahhh, glorious little Tamagotchi. I knew you so well.
Tamagotchi’s were little “digital pets” that would demand your attention every minute of every day or it would die a horrible, 8-bit death. This was a bit of a bummer, since every school in the civilized world banned these little pocket monsters from being brought into classrooms. Every one in my family had one (well, I had a Giga Pet, which seems lame until you remember that Giga Pets had a Jurassic Park-themed Baby T-Rex version, which was infinitely cooler if you managed to smuggle them onto the playground and show your dinosaur-loving friends). Nowadays, our digital pets are long gone/dead, but I still have a few Tamagotchi Happy Meal toys from McDonald’s circa 1997! Which totally counts, right?
Grunkle Stan probably had no qualms with either of the twins having a Tamagotchi, until he kept being woken up by its constant beeping cries in the middle of the night. He didn’t have time to worry about a bleeping purple keychain.
So there we go! All of the little Easter Eggs hidden in Stan’s Contraband Box! Next up, I’d love to dissect and review all of the glorious treasures hidden in Soo’s room…I mean, he’s got a Stretch Armstrong, guys!
The finale begins in just a few short minutes. I’ll be doing a full review of the entire show in the next few days, but in the meantime, I’d like to thank Alex Hirsch for creating a show that made me, and millions of other twenty-somethings around the world, feel like a stupid little kid again.
