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The good news: GRAVITY FALLS TOYS!

The bad news: ...Jazwares.

The good news: They look better than Jazwares' Adventure Time and Regular Show stuff. And there's plushies, which Jazwares always does well. I need Waddles!

More good news: The sculpts capture the cartoon's style well, and the face sculpts are full of personality.

Thoughts?

Heck yes!!! And these actually look pretty decent for Jazwares, man. If you didn't say it was Jazwares, I probably would not even have guessed. I love Gravity Falls. Probably one of the best animated shows I have seen this past 5 years. I enjoy it on the same level I enjoy Regular Show. It has hip retro synth beats, wacky stories with hilarious references and kooky characters. Both shows also feature the lovely Linda Cardellini. What more could I asked for?

They do! It looks like Jazwares made the decision to cut down on the articulation and bulk up the extremities from their usual style for cartoon figures - I know a lot of that has been them trying to match the style of various shows, but some of these figures have just been ridiculously flimsy. These look much sturdier than their usual, and I'm hoping they use a decent grade of plastic on these.

The state of TV cartoons right now is just insane. Gravity Falls, Steven Universe, Adventure Time, Regular Show...Man, these shows are hilarious, absurd, reckless, surprisingly heartfelt, and full of awesome characters. Every time I hear someone my age saying, "We had it so much better in the 90s," I have to ask if they've even seen these shows. To me, kids' TV cartoons have been good SINCE the 90s, and that's partly because they migrated from major broadcast networks on Saturday morning to cable at all hours, where there seems to be more freedom. And that's not even counting the more adult oriented stuff.

Totally. Another thing is that Kristen Schaal makes Mabel awesome. She is a total star on this show and Bob's Burger, too. I think BB is pretty underrated in general. I hear you on the shows, too. The complexity of shows really started to expand with the writing quality. Even some of the old favorites with fairly good natured hammy writing like He-man and Transformers began to amp it up with Princess of Power and the final seasons of G1. They became darker but not for the sake of it. It's just the writing got a little more serious in tone and the themes were more interesting. I don't think the world was ready for that yet since those shows never seemed to garner the popularity of their predecessors but dare I say it helped usher in a braver experimental writing workforce for future animations along with other writers who kind of dared to experiment or go off the beaten path.

This is definitely one of my favorite cartoons right now. Jazwares did a fine job capturing their looks!

Avalon wrote:Totally. Another thing is that Kristen Schaal makes Mabel awesome. She is a total star on this show and Bob's Burger, too. I think BB is pretty underrated in general. I hear you on the shows, too. The complexity of shows really started to expand with the writing quality. Even some of the old favorites with fairly good natured hammy writing like He-man and Transformers began to amp it up with Princess of Power and the final seasons of G1. They became darker but not for the sake of it. It's just the writing got a little more serious in tone and the themes were more interesting. I don't think the world was ready for that yet since those shows never seemed to garner the popularity of their predecessors but dare I say it helped usher in a braver experimental writing workforce for future animations along with other writers who kind of dared to experiment or go off the beaten path.

Kristen is just killing it in everything these days. And GF has tons of great voice acting, but hers might be the best. I'm always impressed by Alex Hirsch's range of voices, too.

And that's a great analysis - I was watching some She-Ra not long ago, and you're totally right. PoP is a huge step forward from He-Man. Then once you get to the 90s, Nickelodeon and the Timmverse stuff just warp cartoon writing ahead to a standard that's not far beneath what animated films were doing during that era (and the appearance of adult-oriented cartoons probably raised the standard, too). It's pretty amazing to look at how far televised kids' cartoons have come.