Gravity Falls: Mystery Cart

Dipper and Mabel race to the sanctuary of the Mystery Shack in the re-purposed golf cart that is the Mystery Cart... probably being chased by an army of gnomes, a many-headed multi-bear or some other form of weirdness Gravity Falls has birthed!

A lot of people here probably grew up watching Alex Hirsch's 2012 cartoon Gravity Falls but it was a recent discovery for me. I'm way too old for it to have been a childhood staple personally (I grew up watching mostly Hanna-Barbera stuff in the 80s - Scooby Doo, The Flintstones, Wacky Races etc) but I'm sure I would've loved it as a kid. Even coming to it at this late stage, I really dug both seasons and even though it's aimed at younger viewers, like all good cartoons, there's plenty for adults to enjoy as well. Anything that references T.S. Eliot's The Wasteland and Jean-Paul Sartre knows its audience is likely to be quite varied!

I won't say any more about the show - if you're considering supporting this project, then it probably needs no introduction. I wanted to pay homage to it with my build, but also create something on a smaller scale, with less pieces, because I think there's an appetite for smaller, more affordable sets in the IDEAS line alongside the 2000+ piece behemoths! I'm also aware that there've been many Mystery Shack submissions and I doubt I could bring anything new (or better) to the table. Instead, I chose to try to do justice to a recurring prop that normally only pops up as a side-build or afterthought.

I see this project as being akin to something like the Scooby Doo Mystery Machine set (75902) LEGO put out a while back, where it's just a single vehicle with a small side-build - in this case the sign pointing the way (loosely!) to the Mystery Shack - and a couple of minifigures. You get twins Dipper and Mabel Pines - Dipper I've customized slightly as he had to have his trademark cap!

Being at minifigure scale (8 studs wide), I didn't give the vehicle functional steering, but the wheels are on axles and turn so the golf cart can move freely forwards and backwards. While it could happily sit on a shelf as a display piece, I would also envisage it being a play set and for that, it needs to be able to move!

So come on, if you're a fan of Gravity Falls and you like my idea, get on board the Mystery Cart! 😁