The Staggering Genius of Mabel Pines: Five Reasons Why Gravity Falls is Amazing And Why It Will Be Sorely Missed

Yesterday, Alex Hirsch announced the conclusion of the Disney show Gravity Falls, to the astonishment of its strong fanbase.   The show has been a popular fixture on Disney’s XD channel for the past year and a half, and the program will conclude with its second season and the last two episodes that will tie up the Weirdmageddon cliffhanger.

Just what’s made Gravity Falls so popular?  There’s a handful of factors operating here, most of them gloriously unique – and they come together to make one heck of a show.

The Rainbow Disconnection: Why Are The Muppets Failing?

It started out in a bubble of goodwill as the most anticipated show of the fall, with a great preview package and gangbuster ratings.  But along the way it seemed to lose its buzz and its ratings, requiring a mid-run EP switch and garnering it bubble status six episodes into its run.  What happened?  How did the good times go so wrong?

The Ten Most Essential Rifftrax of All Time

Over five years ago, Rifftrax was established by Mike Nelson, offering audio commentaries to be played alongside big budget  mainstream motion pictures, In the way they never could due to budget constraints on MST3K.  He was eventually joined by Kevin Murphy and Bill Corbett, and the business eventually expanded to include downloads for full-length motion pictures and shorts as well as live events.

The series has an achingly funny back catalog and here, in my opinion, are the best of the best that they have to offer.

WARNING: The list under the cutline is very video-intensive!

Play MiSTing For me: the lost art of the MiST.

Marissa Flores Picard everybody

There was a time long ago – okay, maybe ten years or less – where MST3K fans gathered together and created a form of fanfiction that is not only entirely unique to the genre, but one that spread throughout various fandoms and gave birth to sporking culture.

Join Us, Won't You?: 10 Little Life Lessons I’ve Learned From MST3K

Some people get their life instructions from little books about chicken soup.  I get mine from watching Robots banter with movies on satellites.  But what have they taught me?  Read on to find out.

MST3K Half-Month: Of Satellites: How watching Robots make fun of Bad Movies Shaped My Sense of Humor

I still remember my first riff.  

I was about fifteen, my parents were out of town and I was on Easter break.  MST3K had just begun airing in syndication; I had been deprived of the show for years  because our cable company didn’t have Comedy Central (and it wouldn’t for another three years).   It was somewhere past midnight when I turned on what would one day be my local CW affiliate and heard it: “the hat from Breakfast at Tiffany's is coming in for a landing.”  I would later learn that that was Mary Jo Pehl’s first ever riff for the show, and when Pearl Forrester became my favorite character it felt like kismet.

Laverne & Squiggy & Chuck & Rhonda: The Bizarre Last Season of Laverne and Shirley

Here’s a little confession – I love Laverne and Shirley.  Yes, it’s goofy, broad and quite behind the times (avoid The Bully Show at all costs), but there’s something about watching two women struggle against the odds to figure out who they are and survive in an environment that is considerably hostile to them, two single women trying to date.  For all of the traditionalism that soaks into the narrative through the girls’ pursuit of guys and marriage, there are just as many episodes (“The Feminine Mistake” and “2001: A Sitcom Odyssey”) that served as a burgeoning support pillars for the nascent feminist movement that was just trying to grasp the concept that it was okay to want a fair wage, stay unmarried and be less than classically feminine.

The show suffered through some growing pains on its way to the eighth season.  Running out of fresh material, they chose to move the girls to Los Angeles, take them into the 60s and submerge them into the culture of the swinging, movie-mad era of the time.  The girls go from worshiping Fabian to lusting after the Beatles, but little else changes besides the size of their set and the introduction of a flighty-surfaced/iron cored blonde actress/dancer/model named Rhonda Lee

Then Cindy Williams became pregnant, and the show dealt with that fact very poorly.