Full disclosure so you know whether or not my opinion matters to you: I enjoyed the original series, and I even liked the Saturday Morning Goliath Chronicles. The Marvel comics were too far away from the cartoon, the SLG comics are quite good but I turned away because Brooklyn’s quest for a mate was hitting too close to home, and it turned out that was resolved off-panel due to a trip to Avalon. The fact that he’s my favorite just made it harder. At least one of us found someone (though if I had to choose….). I kind of want to get the issues I missed out on. I have no interest in the current Dynamite series because they’ve already messed up too many of my childhood favorites, so I have no trust in them with something from my teen years. I would like to rewatch the series but it’s on Disney+ and thus not available to me.
I probably lost a log of the fanbase for not hating The Goliath Chronicles. For those of you who are left, thank you for giving me a chance. For the rest of you unfamiliar, Gargoyles was a 90s cartoon technically produced by Disney though clearly not their normal style. It was a Friday replacement for one segment of The Disney Afternoon until it became popular enough to get its own weekday slot and later moved to Saturday morning so Disney could boost their purchase of Capital Cities, ABC and ESPN’s parent company at the time, for their “One Saturday Morning” lineup. If you want to know the plot, watch the above intro. Keith David’s Goliath can explain it much better and cooler than I can.
Anyway, I’ve heard rumblings of a live-action reboot of the series, but word came this week that the project is done, and quite frankly that’s really good news. There are a bunch of reasons why, and I don’t know how excited the fanbase was for it, but they were wrong. This was always going to be a mistake. I’m not even convinced bringing it back in animation would work, but live-action? It’s easy to see how this wasn’t going to match up to the original, and two paragraphs from that article point to exactly why.
The proposed series would have centered on Goliath, described in an early logline as the last surviving member of a heroic race of gargoyle warriors. After awakening in modern-day New York City, he would have protected the city alongside a police detective.
The premise represented a significant departure from the original animated series, which followed an entire clan of gargoyles rather than Goliath alone. That approach could have reduced production costs, but it also risked alienating longtime fans who consider the Manhattan Clan essential to the franchise’s appeal.
We all love Goliath, but he and Elisa couldn’t care this show on their own.
Costumes wouldn’t have worked to pull off the look of the characters, especially some of the designs we see. Brooklyn has that long beak, Lexington had the spider-like features (that’s how I see those wings and arms anyway–you might have a better description), and Bronx is a gargoyle “dog”. CG would be the way to go, and maybe everyone but Bronx could use motion capture for the movement (unless you look at Barkley from the old days of Sesame Street and even that’s not quite going to work). It’s still going to be very expensive. Disney+ spends money like it’s going out of style for shows that were never in style for Star Wars and the MCU, so it wouldn’t be anything new. It just means they could only do one gargoyle. Admittedly Goliath is the best choice but it means a lot of us wouldn’t get our favorites.
The budget would also cost more than money. The Avalon story arc was one of the best stories in the series, as Goliath, Bronx, and Elisa Masa, most likely the detective from the pitch–by the way, nobody complains about the tough as nails Latina New York cop from the 1990s, where she was actually a character and not a representative stereotype–, end up traveling around the world from the Avalon from Shakespeare to meeting other gargoyle clans around the world. In the end they came home with Goliath and Demona’s daughter, adding another welcome member to the cast nobody complained about. There’s is no way they could have done that nearly as well with a streaming budget.
The show has a beautiful art style, and no live-action production could have replicated the gargoyles in flight the way the animation did. The type of stories that appeared in that show are unlikely to be made by modern writers who can’t seem to grasp the fantastic. Gargoyles borrowed their lore from A Midsummer Night’s Dream and MacBeth, spoke on general issues of the times without preaching to the audience, and had a larger cast to build relationships and character development. As the series went on, characters and elements came into being that a modern show would be too quick to get out there if they did it at all. Ignoring the source material except for the parts they like is common nowadays. Goliath and Elisa’s romance was something that developed naturally through the series, not because some fanshipper got into the writer’s room or the marketing office and demanded it.
We would have lost Brooklyn’s character growth from young hot head to second in command of the gargoyles, Lexington’s love of gadgets, Broadway learning there’s more to life than food through his relationship with Angela, plus that great story where he gained a love of reading (preach it, stone brother!) or the time he accidentally shot Elisa. Hudson’s combination of wisdom and love of television and his friendship with a blind man would also disappear, and even if Demona was in there somehow, I don’t see her being treated the same way. Today’s writers are afraid to make a woman look like a bad guy or an extremist even when the story unwittingly depicts her as such. (The “don’t call them terrorists” from Falcon & The Winter Soldier or more recently John Stewart’s mother in Greenless Lanterns comes to mind.) That completely misses her point in the story. It was her hatred of humans that led to much of their clan being wiped out and what made her a good antagonist throughout the series.
I don’t know if it’s intentional, but I just got that joke right now.
We’d also lose those amazing vocal performances. Nobody is going to do for Goliath what Keith David did, or Ed Asner as Hudson. Not that Hudson or any of the other gargoyles would be in there, but the cast for this series had some of the biggest names in voice acting, and a few more known for on camera work. Four different Star Trek: The Next Generation actors played major roles, and while Jonathan Frakes could in theory be a great David Xanatos in live-action, he’s kind of older than the character now so it would look as bad as the Rock reprising his Moana role for the live-action demake. Brent Spiner as Puck would be fun to see at least. Marina Sirtis, who I actually got to ask about her character vs Deana Troi at a press junket many years ago, could voice Demona and she might do it. Salli Richardson IS Elisa Masa as much as Keith David is Goliath and my ears will not accept any substitues.
There’s one problem that would affect any continuation, including the current comics and any attempt at bringing the show back: the creators aren’t going to be the same as they were in the 1990s. I don’t just mean that some of them are gone or retired so you’d have to hire brand new people. I mean the way Greg Weisman tells stories isn’t going to be the same as it was back then. He’s evolved–for better or worse is up to you–and has different world perspectives that would blend differently into the work even as a continuation. We see that in even the good years of Doctor Who or the recent attempt to continue the Fox Kids X-Men series. It’s not an insult to say Weisman is different now. It’s a fact of life for hopefully all of us. Could he recapture the magic or is it just fans happy to see more of a show they love and thus willing to overlook the flaws. Russel T. Davies first run of Doctor Who already had flaws I didn’t like as a fan, and looked at what happened when he came back. Look at how George Lucas approached Star Wars between trilogies, right down to the Special Editions, then see what Disney did with it. The show was magical for its time, but even if the magic isn’t gone, it’s most definitely going to be a whole new spell.
Also, they’d totally change the target audience and ruin that as well. The original was an all-ages show, not talking down to the younger audience while giving older fans teen and adult some great characters. You know the new show would target nostalgic adults…and then tell they to stand aside for the new generation and cater the show to the usual warped viewpoint of the modern audience and totally miss everything that made the show great. Today’s Hollywood seems to hate kids as much as they do cartoons, and that would alter the tone and lore, making the show unrecognizable. Again, that’s how Dynamite lost me in their “adaptations” of shows I grew up with, from Voltron previously to the ThunderCats, Silverhawks, and Thundarr The Barbarian they’ve recently put out. It’s also why I’m not one of Skybound’s fans when it comes to their “Energon Universe”. It just wouldn’t be the same show I remember in the areas that I really liked about the original.
I say just go back and watch the original series…those of you who can, which sadly isn’t me. It’s about as perfect as it can get whatever you think of the SatAM period. The SLG comics were good. I just don’t see anything attempting to redo the original series working regardless of how many gargoyles you have on it. Gargoyles was a special show at a special time, and we’ve seen too many franchises ruined by attempts at being modern, where the fantastic has lost the fantasy. Don’t ruin what’s already great…again. Let the show stand on its own, get past Hollywood’s animation hate, and enjoy the beauty we already have.
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