I vividly remember watching new episodes of “Phineas & Ferb” and “Futurama” when I was a kid. They were my favorite shows growing up, until they inevitably ended. I mourned as their finales aired, but I accepted it. Unless you’re “The Simpsons” with 36 seasons and counting, no show lasts forever… right?

But now, about a decade after my favorite shows ended, I’m watching new episodes.

Twelve years ago, “Gravity Falls” premiered on Disney Channel. Eight years ago, it aired the last of its brief-yet-acclaimed run of episodes, two seasons in the books. Following the time since it premiered, its tween protagonists Dipper and Mabel Pines would be nearing 25 years old. But in 2024, it came back.

This past July, the show’s creator Alex Hirsch released “The Book of Bill,” an in-universe tome from the perspective of the show’s infamous villain Bill Cipher. Hinted at by Hirsch’s fake Oregon Parks Department account (@OregonParksDept) on the social platform X, the book was unveiled in December 2023 and released this summer. For millions of fans worldwide (the show’s series finale reached a record-breaking 2.47 million viewers during its much-anticipated premiere), this was incredible news.

“It’s fun having something physical to decipher,” sophomore animation and visual effects major Samantha Hall said. “There’s so many secrets that I hadn’t picked up on. It’s awesome that there’s so much detail in the show and books.”

It’s that detail that intrigued so many fans as the show premiered and helped maintain its cultural significance. Throughout the two-season run of “Gravity Falls,” prolonged with delays and a scattered release schedule, fans would speculate online about hidden codes and easter eggs hidden in almost every episode. Ciphers were created and discovered to decode hidden letters and messages, revealing cryptic hints and pieces of foreshadowing months and years in advance of their narrative payoff. The show rewarded its fans and their devotion, and “The Book of Bill” continued this with new tidbits of information on characters and ambiguous fates after the finale had long-since aired. I don’t intend to spoil it for readers here, but those curious can find out what the book revealed about “Gravity Falls” here.

But “The Book of Bill” isn’t a substitute for another season of television that some fans have been clamoring for. Disney executives have been in talks with Hirsch, and fans have been told to “never say never” to a continuation. So, with rumblings following the book’s release, the question has arisen if it’s even worthwhile to return to “Gravity Falls” after so many years.

“This is certainly nothing new. Existing intellectual property (IP) is something Disney has done from day one, especially in television. There’s a lot of reasons why that works for them from a marketing standpoint,” Chapman Animation and Visual Effects lecturer James Schlenker told The Panther. “On a creative side it’s much more difficult to be doing sequels. Now not only do you have to carry the whole cast that you had that everyone knows and loves — and you have to do right by them — but you also have to modify it. You have to spin it to get it to be more than that.”

It’s a phenomenon akin to the legacy sequel (or legacyquel), but dealing with cartoons is a different beast. Cartoons don’t age like actors do, and as long as the voice actors sound the same, it’s completely possible to disregard gaps between installments. Between 1988’s “Beetlejuice” and this year’s “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice,” Winona Ryder’s Lydia Deetz ages from 16 to 52. “Gravity Falls” own Dipper Pines could be 12 years old for the rest of our lives.

And “Gravity Falls” is just one in a many shows in some stage of revival, confirmed or not. “Phineas & Ferb” is slated to return in 2025 and “X-Men ‘97” saw a spectacular return to form for Marvel Animation this past summer, not to mention the recent revivals of long-since ended cartoons like “Animaniacs,” “Clone High,” “DuckTales,” “Futurama” and more. More so than any other medium, it seems animation is the most easily primed for endless iterations and comebacks.

“I’m content with all the new content we have from the book, but there is that part of me that really hopes Dipper and Mabel will come back,” sophomore film and television major Jordan Held said. “Hirsch says in his bio (online) that he’s working on something new, so I’m gonna chug on that hopium. I think something will come back, even if it’s not Bill or anything. There’s a reason that they keep making new shows about Mickey Mouse, because Mickey Mouse and his friends are a good story. Why would you get rid of it? If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”

That said, crafting a follow-up would still be rife with challenges for creators.

“Oftentimes you think doing a sequel in one sense would be easier, because you do know the world and some of the rules and that’s true,” Schlenker said. “But the stories become more complex, and oftentimes the amount of characters and the new path they take makes it very difficult. So all these sequels, prequels, all these things — it plays both for and against you for audience expectations. You have to be additive, but you also can’t disappoint.”

He continued: “The tendency when the economy is not going well for motion pictures is to play it safe. So I think that’s definitely what we’re seeing right now in motion pictures (with sequels and franchises), and certainly in animation. There are really nice new projects being developed and in production, but the tendency is to go with some type of a sequel because it seems to be a safer bet. If it is or not, we’ll see.”

Whether or not we’ll ever see more “Gravity Falls” is up in the air. The show ended eight — almost nine — years ago, and audiences have grown up. “The Book of Bill” proved that there’s still an audience out there, eager for more. Long gone are the days of cartoons being for children, after all. The adult audience for animation has grown immensely in the past decades, evident with popular shows like “Arcane,” “Family Guy” or “BoJack Horseman” becoming cultural mainstays.

“I have such a sweet spot for animation, and I think that people should see it as another medium rather than a genre,” Held said. “There are some shows and some stories that you can only tell with animation, like it’s the perfect way to get it across and you can’t always do it with live action. I think that it shouldn’t be just for kids. If it serves the story better than doing it any other way, then why not?”

“The Book of Bill” isn’t for kids — or at least not the young kids that watched the show growing up, sporting a disclaimer on the front cover. “Travels to dimensions meant for older readers,” claims the book. Could that be reason enough to return to the world of “Gravity Falls” all these years later, exploring it with some added maturity? Hirsch was famously subject to heavy censorship from Disney as the show was in production, so revisiting it now could be a chance at bringing a new perspective to a beloved show.

Talking about “Gravity Falls” is always filled with uncertainty and speculation, given the cryptic and mysterious nature of the show. Who knows if “The Book of Bill” is the last we’ll see of this weird, wonderful program? Even in a world of endless revivals and reboots and postmortem continuations, it might just be at an end, with creators moving onto new prospects.

Whether or not we ever get any more, the impact is undeniable.

“I’ve been following (‘Gravity Falls’) since it first came out,” Hall told The Panther. “It was one of my favorite shows growing up and was honestly one of my main inspirations in becoming an animator and hopefully creating my own show one day.”

At the end of the day, “Gravity Falls” was a show that children watched and loved. If it returns, it could be a chance for a new generation to find themselves enthralled and inspired. But even if nothing comes of it, “The Book of Bill” serves as a nice reminder of that legacy.