The episode begins with Grunkle Stan driving the Mystery Cart with Dipper, Mabel, and Soos inside, to the bottomless pit to dispose of their unwanted items. While Soos fails to comprehend the pit's allegedly bottomless nature, Dipper doubts the existence of a bottomless pit. His skepticism, however, does not stop Stan from throwing down suggestions for improving the Mystery Shack, or Mabel from disposing of love letters from Gideon Gleeful and a box of "personal, mysterious secrets," (which is later found out to contain the Truth Telling Teeth) or Soos from throwing away his shoes and a barbecue. A wind storm suddenly rolls in, and Dipper instructs the others to go back inside, but Stan ignores him and continues to try to throw out the suggestion cards. Worried, the others hold onto him, but they end up falling down the pit along with him. Gompers then passes by before the theme song begins.
Dipper, Mabel, Stan and Soos are inside the pit.
In the pit, the group screams for a time, ending with Soos asking if anyone wants to scream some more. Dipper then asks where they are. Mabel lights up a green glow-stick to look around and replies that it looks like they are somewhere that looks like it's nowhere. Stan reasons that they will be stuck in the pit for some time and attempts a card trick to entertain the others and Mabel cheers even after he fails. Soos suggests that they tell stories to pass the time, and Dipper, angry with his uncle, opts to tell one about Stan getting them all thrown into the pit, but settles for a story called "Voice Over" when Mabel encourages him to do better.
Voice Over
Mabel, Soos and Wendy making fun of Dipper.
Mabel, Soos, and Wendy are playing a variant of spin the bottle called "spin the pig," in which they spin Waddles and whomever his face points at, he or she must kiss him. When the pig points to Stan, who is sitting on the porch nearby, Mabel asks him if he has ever kissed a pig, and Stan says he's not going to answer that. Dipper abruptly enters in a panic, believing that a snake bit him and that he must be taken to a hospital stat. Unfortunately, his voice cracks at the end of his exclamation, consequently not being taken seriously by Stan and the others, who explain that it is hard to focus on the seriousness of the situation with Dipper's voice frequently cracking. They then play a techno remix of Dipper's voice cracking, which irritates and embarrasses him into taking the tape and storming off.
Old Man McGucket showing Dipper his frightening voice.
As Dipper walks through town, he is met by Old Man McGucket, who says that he may be able to help Dipper and his problem. At the Gravity Falls Junkyard McGucket explains that he has been experimenting with a voice-altering formula, due to his frightening voice that he exhibits by scaring a young child, and gives Dipper a sample of the formula. Dipper drinks it and heads back to the Shack, McGucket saying that Dipper will sound like a new man if he survives as he does so. The next morning, Dipper awakes and discovers his new, deeper voice which he tries out and shows to Mabel. His sister does not react as he expected, however, and, thinking Dipper's body is being inhabited by a "body-switching warlock", hits her brother with a golf club. Dipper explains that he is indeed her brother, albeit with a different voice tone, and goes on to describe the potential benefits he sees, such as prank calls. However, his sister believes it to be a change for the worse, and Soos reacts in a manner similar to Mabel upon hearing Dipper's new tone, telling the tourists present in the gift shop to flee, and hitting Dipper on the head with a broom, yelling that Dipper must be killed with fire.
Stan, with his new voice, asking where his girdle is.
Upset by Mabel's and Soos' responses, Dipper sets out to find his uncle, whom he believes will appreciate his new voice and goes into town to find him. As he passes Skull Fracture, he is met by Tats, who recognizes Dipper as the perpetrator of the prank call he received from him and assembles a group of bikers to chase after him. Dipper ducks into the dump to scold Old Man McGucket about what a disaster his invention is and McGucket explains that Dipper sounds so odd because he gave Dipper the wrong formula (professional commercial voice over). McGucket goes on to say that Dipper would have reverted to his old voice come sundown, and Dipper, after listening to the appreciation his friends express for the uniqueness of his voice at the end of the remix, resolves that he likes his own voice, even if it is ridiculous. Back at the Shack, Dipper shows Mabel and Soos that he is back to normal, which relieves them, and he reveals that he dumped the alternative, permanent voice formula into his uncle's coffee. Grunkle Stan then walks in with an obnoxious, female voice and is laughed at by the others, which he cannot understand.
The talking cowboy skull in the pinball machine.
Soos' Really Great Pinball Story (Is That A Good Title? Do They Have To Be Puns Or Whatever?)
Soos is excited that he may get the high score after four years of trying while playing a creepy old game of pinball with the twins cheering him on. After some consideration and annoyance, Soos takes up Dipper's suggestion to turn tilt the game, which results in Soos achieving his goal. The pinball machine, however, recognizes that he cheated and zaps Soos and the twins into the game in a flash of green lightning. After they play around in the machine for a while, the three are confronted by the talking cowboy skull in the machine, who attempts to punish them for breaking the rules by killing them.
They plan to escape by manually turning off the game from inside, with Mabel and Dipper distracting the cowboy skull by jumping up and down and making annoying noises, but are hindered as Soos is distracted by a picture of a wench he finds attractive. Dipper reminds Soos to focus, and the twins carry out their role in the plan while Soos rides a mine cart into and through the inner mechanisms of the machine. When the twins check on Soos, they find that he is reluctant to turn off the game, as it will permanently erase all data, including his high score, which he views as his greatest accomplishment.
Free at last.
The twins try to reason with Soos and are interrupted when the cowboy skull discovers their whereabouts and attempts to finish them off. However, Soos has a change of heart and shuts off the game before he can do so. Soos, Dipper, and Mabel wake up outside of the machine where Dipper feels sorry for Soos having to lose his high score. Soos then tells him it's okay because he now has a new life accomplishment: saving the twins' lives. He then asks if they think that the pinball wench will call him.
Back in the pit, Stan decides to tell a story of his own, one that he thinks is much better than what he's heard so far.
Grunkle Stan Wins the Football Bowl
Stan celebrating his victory.
Stan heads to the end of a football field and scores the winning touchdown. He is thanked by the players for teaching them that old people are incredibly useful. Stan then receives a trophy from a woman he finds to be beautiful, and says that he could not have done it with his robotic sidekick and own invention, Footbot. Everyone cheers for Stan as the story ends.
Soos, Dipper and Mabel disapprove of his story, but Stan believes it was good. Mabel claims she will tell a better story, which is called "Trooth Ache."
Trooth Ache
Stan lying about the bear.
The Pines are hanging around the Stanmobile as they oversee Manly Dan unload a bear, which Stan plans to teach to drive, for an attraction at the Mystery Shack. On the road, the bear drives very poorly as Stan coaches it with false driving tips, and the police pull them over. When Sheriff Blubs demands an explanation as to why a bear is driving Stan's car, he dishonestly replies that his physician, "Doctor Medicine," assigned him a seeing-eye bear to drive him to the hospital in case of an emergency, and the Sheriff pardons him. Stan then tells the bear "To the hospital, Honeypants!" and the bear drives them away. Later at the Shack, Stan is spray-painting rocks gold to sell to unsuspecting customers as authentic gold nuggets when Mabel calls him out for lying to the policemen. Stan makes the excuse that by his age, one learns to "bend the truth a bit for the greater good," which he shows by lying to Dipper about Soos possibly knowing where Dipper's plate of spaghetti (which Stan was eating) is, much to Mabel's disgust.
Up in the attic, Mabel talks to Waddles about Stan's lying problem and decides to consult Journal 3 about a possible solution for her uncle's dishonesty. She comes across information about a set of truth-telling teeth that render it impossible for the wearer to lie and sets out to find them. In the middle of the night, she creeps into Grunkle Stan's bedroom and implants the truth teeth, which shine golden in Stan's mouth as she then wakes him up to test them out. To her satisfaction, the teeth work and Stan, not totally getting that something is wrong, goes back to sleep. Mabel tells Dipper what she did at the breakfast table the next morning and, though he initially thinks it to be a horrible idea, experiments to see if Stan will tell the truth and both twins are disturbed with a set of truths their uncle reveals, such as the fact that he does not wash his hands after using the bathroom.
Now under the teeth's influence, Stan cannot help but be brutally honest.
Stan's truth telling soon grows out of hand and without a filter, going to the extent of insulting a customer's appearance, writing that he commits tax fraud on a tax form, scaring the twins with a talk about death and so forth. Stan's boundless honesty quickly grows to annoy the twins and nearly gets him arrested as he admits to several crimes when Sheriff Blubs and Deputy Durland arrive to interrogate him about his seeing-eye bear and the nonexistence of Doctor Medicine. Mabel reluctantly lies to cover for her uncle, saying that he is secretly a crime fiction author and was telling them about a character in his upcoming book, and sends the officers away. Mabel is shocked at herself for lying, but Dipper says it was for the greater good, and Stan, still under the teeth's influence, calls the police station to admit to tax fraud before the twins tackle him to stop him. Mabel then removes the teeth from Stan's mouth and disposes of them, along with a box full of other magical items, into the pit, saying she never saw the box again, but then spots it in the pit. Additionally, Soos finds the shoes he got rid of earlier in the episode.
Back to Reality
Dipper, Mabel, Stan and Soos approach the end of the pit.
Dipper then tells Mabel that they already know that story, as it just happened to them and they are currently living through it, which causes Soos to ask how the story ends. Dipper then spots a bright light at the end of the tunnel, and he and the others get closer and closer while screaming. They eventually reach the end of the tunnel, but the group comes out at the top of the pit, right where they had initially fallen in. Dipper checks his watch and, upon checking his watch and noticing that hardly any time has passed, deduces that they must have traveled through kind of wormhole. When Grunkle Stan points out the unlikelihood of anybody actually believing them about something like a wormhole, Mabel points out to him, Dipper and Soos that this is probably better off keeping to themselves (which the guys end up agreeing with). Stan accidentally falls back into the hole after leaning against a sign and breaking it and while Mabel and the others do seem worried for him, they quickly realize that he will ultimately be fine.
In the credits, a bored and grumpy-looking Stan is seen inside the pit, falling in silence for a while before ultimately proclaiming "This is stupid!".
Viewership: This episode was watched by 3.095 million viewers on its premiere night.[2]
Promotional artwork for Gravity Falls' pilot showed Dipper, Mabel and Stan falling into a bottomless pit similar to the one in this episode.
Old fez design (left) vs new fez design (right).
As of this episode, the design of Stan's fez has been retconned. The new design has a dot put in the "fish's" mouth and the "fish" body changed from an arc to a circle missing a wedge (similar to Pac-Man). The opening sequence has also been changed to include this new design, and flashbacks to previous episodes in episodes after this one use the new design.
This episode is the first of two anthology episodes, which are episodes that feature multiple separate storylines that don't connect together. However, there are connected wraparounds between the segments.
The story titles are as follows: "Voice Over," "Soos' Really Great Pinball Story (Is That a Good Title? Do They Have To Be Puns Or Whatever?)," "Grunkle Stan Wins The Football Bowl," and "Trooth Ache."
It is revealed that Gideon Gleeful has been sending Mabel love letters. To read some of Gideon's disturbing letters, click here.
During Mabel's story, the Pines family watch a caricature of Alex Hirsch riding a unicycle and juggling while surrounded by alligators on television.
Stan is revealed to having committed tax fraud, smuggling endangered animals over borders, and faking doctor's notes.
In Mabel's story, "Trooth Ache," she mentions Dipper's journal, which Stan isn't supposed to know about. It is revealed in "Gideon Rises" that he is aware of the journal's existence.
In Mabel's story, Stan reads an issue of the Gravity Falls Gossiper, with headline "UFO Was A Sham!". The article reveals that Durland threw his hat, took a picture of it and submitted it as a picture of a UFO, only to come clean later.
Mabel's story is the only one that actually happened. Therefore Dipper, Soos and Stan's stories are not considered canonical.
Grunkle Stan’s football story became a meme in 2024 when a user on the internet edited him to say “Grunkle Stunkle wins the Funkle Bunkle”, and altered the fantasy scene with sudden edits visually and audibly. Alex Hirsch caught on to the meme after seeing the clip from a Twitter user dedicated to posting the altered clip daily on their page.
Cryptogram
End credits.
The cryptogram in the end credits reads "14-5-24-20 21-16 14-5-24-20 21-16: "6-15-15-20-2-15-20 6-15-15-20-2-15-20 20-23-15: 7-18-21-14-11-12-5'19 7-18-5-22-5-14-7-5."" Once decoded it reads: "NEXT UP: "FOOTBOT TWO: GRUNKLE'S GREVENGE.""
