The "Gravity Falls Main Title Theme," composed by Brad Breeck, is the opening theme song played over the title sequence to the Disney Channel animated TV show Gravity Falls. The official theme song is available on iTunes for $0.99, Spotify, etc.[1] Starting in "Northwest Mansion Mystery," a shortened version of the theme is used in episodes that are longer than actual episodes.[2] The Weirdmageddon episodes use a corrupted version of the song.
Sequences and versions[]
Title sequence[]
The sequence begins with a forest view and Paul Bunyan's statue alongside a water tower. Transition to the bus, the twins visit the Mystery Shack and meet their great-uncle while the Mystery Shack's logo is broken down with the letter "S" fallen off from the word "Shack". The twins step inside to see all the mysterious stuff and see two footprints alongside their great-uncle in a rainy day. Transition to a forest view, we see a vane with question mark, but the word "WHAT" is added. Dipper uses a candle to see the horned skeleton of and animal and Mabel hugs a pig, lights her colored sweater with her name on it. The great-uncle is rushing with a cash register at night and wearing an eye patch. The characters are in a campfire and being scared of a beast behind them. Wendy is in the gift shop of the shack and the eyeballs are in a jar. A character is pointing at a decoder. The twins are floating in a room, but similar to a space setting. A montage of photos are set down, and the show's logo appears, before glitching upside-down, and briefly showing an image with the Bill CipherZodiac before fading out.
Regular version[]
This is the regular main title used in every episode of season 1 and most episodes of season 2. It is 41 seconds long and plays right after the cold opening.
Shortened version[]
A shortened version of the main title —15 seconds long instead of the regular 41— is used in episodes that are longer than usual.[2] These are:
The Weirdmageddon story arc episodes use corrupted versions of the theme song, alongside apocalyptic opening sequences showing the destruction and weird changes Gravity Falls suffers during the event, like an up-going waterfall or Paul Bunyan's statue coming alive, and many Bill images and references.
"Weirdmageddon Part 1" uses an opening sequence replacing every single main character with Bill and his friends. In this apocalyptic version, Dipper is the only character normally in the opening screen that still appears: he's seen as a human skeleton wearing the blue and white pine hat that appears instead of the normal horned monster skeleton, even if only as a resemblance. Bill Cipher's page is seen with a hole where Bill's picture should be, nodding to the fact that he has finally entered Gravity Falls' world.
"Weirdmageddon Part 2" uses a shortened version of the corrupted theme song and opening sequence. This same version of the theme song is used in the split version of "Weirdmageddon Part 3" known as "Weirdmageddon 4: Somewhere in the Woods."
"Weirdmageddon Part 3" also uses the corrupted song and sequence, but it has the regular images for introducing Dipper, Mabel and Stan.
Rock version[]
In "Weirdmageddon Part 3," during the Shacktron's battle against Bill's Henchmaniacs, an extended rock version of the song featuring an electric guitar solo is used.[3]
Gravity Paws version[]
A Gravity Falls series finale commercial[4] with the Gravity Paws puppies recreating the series' opening aired during Animal Planet's Puppy Bowl XII.[5] The song features dog barks and howls.
Textless version used in some area[]
A version of the opening without most of the text was provided to Disney affiliates across the world to localize in their own languages. In some areas, the opening titles were changed with text missing. For example, in Germany (S1E1-S1E13) and Italy (S1E1-S2E9), the following were removed and kept blank:
"GAS" on the gas station sign
"GRAVITY FALLS" on the water tower
"SPEEDY BEAVER" on the bus
"BE AMAZED" and the whole "DANGER" sticker
"CASH" on Stan's cashier
"SALE" sticker on the eye-jar
"Boyz" on Mabel's magazine
In France, a textless version was used after adding the following:
"ESSENCE" on the gas station sign
"GRAVITY FALLS" on the water tower
"SOTEZ EMERVEILLES!" on the "BE AMAZED!" sign
The "DANGER" sticker
While in some areas such as Poland (S1E1-S1E13 in Disney Channel airing version, while in current Disney XD reruns, the localized intro is not used in all episodes), Israel (S1E1-S2E17), Taiwan & Hong Kong (S1), "MABEL" on Mabel's sweater was also removed and kept blank.
Kiff Parodies theme[]
For their April Fools prank video in 2024, Disney Channel did a special addition of their Theme Song Takeover series, in which the character of Kiff from the show of the same name, does brief lyrical parodies of theme songs for various cartoons on the network. One of them included Gravity Falls. In the brief scene, Kiff is dressed up like Dipper and takes his place in the opening, singing about the weirdness of the town while a confused Mabel looks on, wondering why her brother has been replaced by an orange squirrel.[6] The lyrics go,
WHAT ARE THE SECRETS OF GRAVITY FALLS?2 FOR 1 SALE ON EYEBALLS?!
Via Mardot Version[]
As part of a promotional advert for The Book of Bill that was made by Ian Worrel and Joshua Ellingson (ellingson.tv), composer Via Mardot created a brand new version of the theme song. It uses instruments like a Theremin, baritone guitar, violin and more. She uploaded a video of her composing it to her Instagram the next day.[7]
Lofi Version[]
On July 26, 2024, Disney Music released a new album called "Lofi: Gravity Falls." Composed by Brad Breeck, it featured 12 songs from the Original Soundtrack of the show reimagined as lofi versions. One of these included the theme song, which was the lead song in the album.[8]
Unused and alternate theme songs[]
Dan Cantrell's Demo[]
A demo reel of music for the show was released in 2011 by Dan Cantrell,[9] with singers chanting the title of the show. The demo was 3 minutes and 44 seconds long. It can be assumed Dan was asked to create the demo as he had made music for Cartoon Network's The Marvelous Misadventures of Flapjack which Alex Hirsch worked on too and was therefore given the offer to. The demo was later disposed of in favor of Brad's work. At some point the demo was taken down from Dan's Vimeo page and was thought lost, until it was rediscovered on a foreign website and reuploaded.[10][11]A snippet of the demo was also uploaded in 2014 by the vocalist for the demo, Pilar Díaz. [12]An upload on of the demo was later found on Soundcloud and on YouTube from February 2012, making it one of the first Gravity Falls related videos ever posted online.[13][14]
Neil Cicierega also made two theme songs for the show. [15][16][17] One was an instrumental and the other lyrical.[18] These were not used in favor of Breeck's work.
Brad Breeck had also composed an alternate theme song which would eventually be used in the 2014 San Diego Comic Con trailer for the then-upcoming season. In the Gravity Falls box set released in 2018, Brad played a snippet of a never before heard alternate theme song which was never used. In 2020, he released a video about how he made the theme song and later uploaded to iTunes and Spotify with nine never before heard alternate theme songs which he had developed.[19][20] The songs released were:
In addition to these, a demo of the regular version of the song, which featured an alternated melody, was showcased in Brad's original video about how he made the theme. In 2020, the untitled version was found in the ProTools session of the theme song which Brad released. It was uploaded to YouTube that can be listened to it here.[21][22]
The main theme is often mistaken for the song "You Made Me Realize," due to its strong similarities to the real "You Made Me Realize" song Breeck wrote for MTV's Awkward. "Made Me Realize" is commonly mistaken for the extended version of the Gravity Falls theme song. It is also stated on Breeck's website that the two songs are indeed different, and not related to each other.
Gravity Falls Main Title Theme animatic and final comparison
Bigfoot in the Gravity Falls theme song.
Regular version[]
In the sped up shot of the trees, for one frame a large, hairy creature resembling the cryptid Bigfoot can be seen running by.
Towards the end of the song, a whisper plays and sounds like "I'm still here." But if it is played backwards, the whisper is revealed to be "Three letters back." This is how one solves the cryptograms at the end of each episode.
In "Double Dipper," a new message is whispered: "Switch A with Z." It is an statement to the "ATBASH" cipher.
Starting in "Bottomless Pit!," the whisper changes to "26 letters," a reference to the "A1Z26" style substitution cryptogram, which uses numbers to stand for letters of the alphabet.
In Season 2, starting with "Scary-oke," the whisper is now "Key Vigenère," referring to the fact that the cipher at the end is a Vigenère cipher that requires a keyword hidden in each episode.
In "Not What He Seems," the whisper is changed to "not what he seems."
It changes back to "Key Vigenère" the episode after that, "A Tale of Two Stans."
The whisper at the end isn't heard on some international airings of the show, on the SAP language section, and across most promotional trailers.
Towards the end of the theme song when the title shows up, a stamp can be seen near it. The number 618 can be seen on it, which is a reoccurring number in the show.
The face depicted on the stamp is that of the series' art director Ian Worrel.[23]
In the episode "Little Dipper," right before cutting to the theme song when the Pines are discussing what else to watch on television. Mabel states that 'the theme song is [her] favorite part'.
The cryptogram at the end of the song, encoded in the Caesar cipher shifted three letters back, is "Stan is not what he seems."
The television version of the song features the whisper and a flashing scene of a journal page of Journal 2 with Bill on it. But the animatic version without any whisper and instead of the journal page, a six-fingered hand with the number 3 and astrological symbols all over it appears.
Additional pictures portray mythical creatures from North American folklore, including the Fiji Mermaid, the jackalopes, and the Bat Boy.
The bottom half of Alex Hirsch's face is seen in one of the many photos between the jackalopes and the Hand Witch's hand.[24]
Beginning with "A Tale of Two Stans," the full title sequence has the picture of a pterodactyl replaced with a picture of Ford Pines holding Journal #1.
Dipper's bag has a sticker that reads Piedmont on it, referencing the birth city of Alex Hirsch.
Dipper seems to be inspecting some runes or symbols before he is startled by the skeleton. The symbols look similar to the ones in the game "Mystery Shack Mystery."
The crew recreating the group photo from the theme song during Mystery Tour 2013.
In two alternated scenes, Dipper appears to have much thicker eyebrows.
At the end of the theme, Bill Cipher's entry page in Journal 2 flashes, even to the point that the lines of the character seem indented into the screen and fade from the outside in after the screen goes black.
There are some changes between the animatic and the official theme song:
In the animatic version, Mabel and Dipper arrive on a "Fast Dog" bus. It is changed to "Speedy Beaver" in the final-cut version.
One of the photos appears to be a robot, but was replaced with the Summerween Trickster.
The photo of the gnome has a bite out of it on the right side.
There is a picture of three spaceships and a monster, but they were replaced with the picture of the pterodactyl and a clawed hand. (The picture of three spaceships is flashed on Bill Cipher's body in 'Dreamscaperers'.)
The totem pole is on the left hand side of the Mystery Shack in the animatic version, while it is on the right hand side on the final-cut version.
The matrix in the Opening Ending Image[25] represents a scalar, rotation and translation matrix (also known as a transformation matrix), used to perform linear transformations.
A clip towards the end of the Gravity Falls theme song shows gravity rising and falling (hence "Gravity Falls") with Mabel lying on the ground and Dipper reading the journal. This is an allusion to episode 11 of Season 2 "Not What He Seems," and it even references the theme song directly with a rising black 8-ball in both clips, although the Twins are sleeping in the actual episode.
Much of the animation was done by James Baxter, best known for animating Ariel, Belle, Rafiki (The Lion King), and Quasimodo among other characters.
The Lumberjack seen in the opening bears a striking resemblance to the real-life Paul Bunyan statues located around the Pacific Northwest. Another one is seen in the episode "Roadside Attraction."
The Lumberjack also looks similar to a lumberjack character that appeared in a student film Alex Hirsch made in 2005 titled "On a Roll," but premiered seven years before the show's introduction.
Weirdmageddon versions[]
The title card flickers from "GRAVITY FALLS" to "JUDYLWB IDOOV," which, using the show's Caesar cipher, translates to "GRAVITY FALLS." Shortly after it appears, the water tower's inscription also changes to "JUDYLWB IDOOV."
Bill takes the place of Stan striking a pose in front of the Mystery Shack.
Bill also takes the places of various other characters in the intro.
Before the above scene, the lumberjack from before comes to life and proceeds to roam around town.
In the short version of the intro, it cuts right to the lumberjack coming to life right after the scenic view.
Instead of Bigfoot appearing for a frame, there is a walking pine tree. This may be due to the fact that the Pines are the ones hiding now, instead of the paranormal phenomena. It may also be just a switch of the places of Bigfoot and the pine trees in the usual version.
Where it would normally say "Created by Alex Hirsch," Bill is credited for creating the show instead.
When the first version is played backwards, Bill can be heard saying the words "I'm watching you, nerds!" The second one has him saying only "I'm watching you!" in a much angrier tone. The last one says "Goodbye Gravity Falls," since it's the last episode of the series.
The man at the stamp at the end is replaced with his skeleton.
The pictures are all replaced to have Bill on every one. He also does the same poses as the pictures. (Not counting one of them)
The weather vane with a question mark and four letters saying "what" is replaced with a picture of Bill's body and four letters now spelling his name. He can also be heard laughing in the background.
8 Ball, Teeth, Keyhole and Hectorgon all replace Dipper (Although his skeleton can be seen), Mabel (her light-up sweater is also absent) and Stan, in the intro. Keyhole running with a box full of keys and the keys falling out replaces Stan running with a cash register full of dollar bills, and Hectorgon tipping his hat over replaces Stan moving his eye patch to his left eye.
The page which previously held Bill inside is now ripped with the rip in the shape of Bill's body.
This is the first Disney show to use a darker version of the theme song. The second show is Big City Greens, which uses this type of song in the episode "Chipocalypse Now".
Cryptograms[]
During the theme song, there is a cryptogram that reads "VWDQ LV QRW ZKDW KH VHHPV." Once decoded it reads "STAN IS NOT WHAT HE SEEMS."
