At times, Gravity Falls tends to have its funny moments. As time moves on, certain parts of the show become funnier in retrospect.
- Mabel's goal of restoring the wax sculpture with her "arts and crafts skills" feels reminiscent of the story of the Botched Spanish Fresco, when the episode would have been written long before that story broke.
- "Soos and the Real Girl" features animatronics at a pizza place coming to life and attacking people. Sound familiar? Alex Hirsch actually had to make a statement confirming that it was a complete coincidence, thanks to Production Lead Time. The same episode also has an anime girl from a dating sim who became self-aware at some point in the past, falls in love with the player (not the player character, the player) and tries to win him by affecting how the game works and by "erasing" her competition. That exact concept is the infamous plot twist to Doki Doki Literature Club!, which came out exactly three years after the episode aired (on the same day). So yes, this show essentially predicted two popular indie horror games... with one episode.
- An all-seeing wish-granting demon possesses a youth, using his new body to further his own nefarious purposes and keep others from stopping his goal.
- The game .GIFfany hails from is called Romance Academy 7.
- From Northwest Mansion Mystery: When the ghostly antagonist starts rampaging on the wealthy party-goers, they all turn into warped tree versions of themselves. Bonus points for the entirety of the mansion temporarily becoming a forest. Not to mention the sheltered girl kept in line by a certain sound: "The ringing of the bell commands you!"
- In "Legend of the Gobblewonker" Mabel makes up a rap of all the words that rhyme with her name, and Soos remarks they should write it down. Fast-forward to "Society of the Blind Eye"; Soos reveals that for half the summer he thought Mabel's name was "Maple, like the syrup"! They SHOULD have written it down so he could remember.
- Also from "Gobblewonker," we have terrible jokes delivered by a pelican.
Three years later, we get Joke Yoda, who appears to be voiced by that same pelican.note
- Also from "Gobblewonker," we have terrible jokes delivered by a pelican.
- Around late 2012, a fanfiction was made titled "Pacifica's Revenge" that featured Pacifica making Dipper her butler as revenge for telling her that her grandfather never actually discovered Gravity Falls. Parts of the story involved Dipper being forced to wear a butler outfit and eventually becoming Pacifica's boyfriend. Northwest Mansion Mystery also featured Dipper in a butler outfit (though under the request of Pacifica's father instead of Pacifica herself) as well as signs of possible romance between the two characters.
- The revelation that Grunkle Stan stole his brother's identity and has been living under his name for thirty years made for some of the most serious scenes in the series so far, but it's made extremely giggle-worthy when you realize that his brother, the Author of the Journals, is now technically legally married to Old Goldie the mechanical gold panner.
- More proof of why Alex Hirsch is a Trolling Creator: for about half of season two Dipper, Soos, Wendy and Mabel assume that the laptop in the bunker belonged to the Author. When we get to "A Tale of Two Stans", the Author shows his contempt at the thought of personal computers becoming successful.
- Bob Odenkirk was asked to do the voice of Stan. He's known for playing Amoral Attorney Saul Goodman, who became the main character of a spin off called Better Call Saul. Said spin-off goes into detail about Saul's past as a con-man, his arrest records, and even having a falling out with his more responsible brother. Made funnier by the fact that Stan's father is voiced by Jonathan Banks, who starred on both shows with Odenkirk.
- Back in season one, Quentin Trembley was heard on a recorded message saying: "The only thing we have to fear is gigantic, man-eating spiders!" Guess what we meet later on in season two? Perhaps he knew about them?
- Gravity Falls is infamous for its schedule slip and constant hiatuses. Shortly after Dipper and Mabel vs. The Future aired, it turns out that Gravity Falls is still airing new episodes to at least November 23rd, while nearly every other animated series it shares fans with (i.e. Rick and Morty, Steven Universe, Star vs. The Forces of Evil, etc.) is currently on hiatus until at least 2016.
- At the end of "Boyz Crazy", upon witnessing Several Timez being freed, Candy believed that they wouldn't last a week out in the wild. They show up alive in the Weirdmageddon and help out the other survivors to fight Bill and survived in the end.
- 5 months before the finale landed, famed fanartist MoringMark drew a scene depicting Bill Cipher making a deal with Stan, only to have been conned by Gravity Falls' greatest conman. During the climax this is part of how Bill is actually defeated. Doubles as Awesome and Harsher in Hindsight considering that it also marks Stanley's Heroic Sacrifice.
- While the show was on its way out, JK Simmons played the villain of Kung Fu Panda 3, who turns kung fu masters into jade zombies, keeping them as ornaments on his belt when they're not being used. It's not quite making a throne of human agony, but the same ballpark.
- There's at least one fanfiction with a Rule 63rd Mabel named Mason. As it turns out, according to the Defictionalization of Journal #3, Mason is Dipper's first name.
- This wouldn't be the last Disney-owned series to feature a character named Mabel.
- In "The Love God", Mabel is revealed to have had a crush on the "guy from the ten-dollar bill". A few months after that episode aired, Lin-Manuel Miranda's Hamilton came out, and soon thousands of other people were falling in love with Alexander Hamilton.
- "The Stanchurian Candidate" has Stan's mayoral campaign becoming unpopular with the public due to his controversial opinions and outrageous ideas for solving problems, basically saying whatever crazy rhetoric pops into his head. Sound familiar? There's even a bird ("mayor pickin' eagle") that picks the mayor & Stan gets attacked by a few eagles at one point, eerily prescient of the "Birdie Sanders" meme and the video of Donald Trump provoking a bald eagle.
- Nearly a year before the finale, Markmak posted a fan-comic origin of Bill Cipher, in which he was banished from his home dimension but vowed to return for revenge. Come the finale, Bill reveals that he was once a citizen of the Second Dimension, and it's hinted that he destroyed it.
- The series has a show called Ducktective, which is about a duck that solves mysteries. Around the time Gravity Falls ended, it was announced that Sean Jimenez (the art director) and both Dana Terrace and John Aoishima (two of the directors for the series) were lending their talents to DuckTales (2017).
- Made even funnier now that it has launched, with Dewey Duck trying to crack the mystery of his missing mother. So he is in fact a Ducktective. The other similarities (a missing twin, a greedy great uncle, a rift between guardian figures, etc) aren't hurting either.
- After all of Dipper's embarrassment at Mabel's antics, Jason Ritter's next show Kevin (Probably) Saves the World has a premise that could have popped right out of her head: a guy who has to save the world by giving people hugs.
- In one Dipper's Guide to the Unexplained, there is a character named Lefty that turns out to be a robot controlled by little aliens. So in other words, something controlling something else that seems to operate on its own. Come 2017, and another character named Lefty has a similar concept.
- Bill playing "We'll Meet Again" on the piano during Weirdmaggedon Part 3 becomes this during the end of Season 3, Episode 4 of Stranger Things when the original version by Vera Lynn plays as similar supernatural entity the Mind-Flayer looks over the army of People Puppets provided to it by Billy and Heather.
- In "Land Before Swine", Stan says that dinosaurs are "just big lizards". According to Journal 3, right after the episode the twins found that Stan stole a dinosaur egg that hatches into a Compsognathus, a tiny dinosaur similar to a bird.
- In "Boyz Crazy", Mabel and her friends discover that their favorite boy band are actually mass produced clones. In No Straight Roads, the band 1010 has almost the exact same concept, with the only real difference being that 1010 are robots instead of clones.
- When it came to Sheriff Blubs and Deputy Durland, Alex Hirsch wanted the both of them to be fully confirmed in the show proper to be LGBT, but Disney wouldn't allow him. Cut to 2020, Hirsch is voice acting in a Disney show where the main protagonist and a major side character are confirmed bisexual and lesbian respectively. If only Gravity Falls was made a couple years later!
- Like Gravity Falls, the podcast The Magnus Archives would also feature a final story arc where a supernatural, powerful entity with prominent eye imagery reshapes reality, forcing the heroes to undo it. A YouTuber even made a special mashup intro similar to the Special Edition Title of the Weirdmageddon episodes referencing events of the Magnus Archives Season Four finale and first act of Season Five.
- In "Dreamscaperers", Dipper, looking at Stan, wonders, "What is going on in that guy's head?" A year and a half after the episode aired, the official trailer for Inside Out would ponder the exact same question.
- In "Weirdmageddon Part 1", Gideon and his hench angels arrive with an aesthetic reminiscent of Mad Max. Due to Production Lead Time, this was likely meant as a nostalgic Shout-Out to an 80s film series Hirsch and the crew may have remembered from their childhood, but became newly relevant when Mad Max: Fury Road released six months prior to this episode.
- The episode "The Golf War" features a race of small golf ball people who operate the insides of the machines of a mini golf course. A few years after the episode’s airing, there would be a different Disney show that would star people that look just like the mini golf people portrayed in the episode.
- When fighting Bill In "Dreamscaperers", Dipper says that a portal out of Stan's mind would be Bill's worst nightmare. Ironically, in the finale, a portal out of Stan's mind would’ve been the exact opposite of Bill’s worst nightmare, since it would've been the one thing that could've saved his life.
- Mabel's desire to meet a vampire (something she may have done offscreen, based on a line of dialogue from "The Deep End") is particularly funny since her actress, Kristen Schaal, would go on to play a vampire in What We Do in the Shadows (2019).
- Celebrating Halloween twice a year was considered a strange tradition unique to Gravity Falls in 2012 (in order to have a Halloween Episode set during the summer). But in more recent years, some companies, including Disney, now celebrate Halfway to Halloween around April or May.
- Alex Hirsch deliberately gave Mabel an Outdated Name that would sound archaic, old-fashioned, and uncool to viewers in 2012, which Pacifica Northwest lampshades when she calls it "a fat old lady's name." Not only would Mabel see a revival in popularity as a girl's name in the 2010s, but much of that revival was due to the show itself and parents naming their daughters after the character Mabel.
