A Gargoyles revival is currently being discussed. Here are the secrets behind the '90 TV series that fans still remember so fondly.
7. LEXINGTON SHOULD BE IN HIS BIRTHDAY SUIT
Lexington has the most unique design of the gargoyles. The rest of the clan have wings that act as appendages, but he’s webbed from his arms to his legs. It looks so cool, you don’t realize until later that it ought to be impossible for him to wear clothing. There’s no way for that belt to pass though Lex’s wings.
It may seem like a small blunder, but it left us scratching our heads.
Let's set aside how impractical loin clothes are for a flying creature. He shouldn’t even be capable of wearing pants without some serious discomfort. What possible explanation could there be? It turns out, his wings are pierced. Makes sense. Moving on.
6. DEMONA ALMOST CROSSED OVER WITH ATLANTIS: THE LOST EMPIRE
After Gargoyles wrapped production, Greg Weisman went on to develop a spin-off series of Disney’s 2001 movie Atlantis: The Lost Empire. Given that he had an immortal character in Demona, he planned to bring her onto the show for an episode called “The Last”. The series was canceled before it made it to air, but Weisman got much further with the crossover than you might expect.
Marina Sirtis even came in to record a vocal track.
The unfinished episode has held allure for fans over the year, and some have banded together to sync the audio track with the storyboards and even create new animation. The episode has screened at Gargoyles fan conventions.
5. BROOKLYN WAS SUPPOSED TO HAVE HIS OWN TIME TRAVEL SPIN-OFF
Brooklyn was a break-out character thanks to his Jeff Bennett’s reliably awesome voice and a cool design. He was also underutilized aside from a few episodes, but there were plans to change that. Brooklyn was to anchor a spin-off called Timedancers.
The series didn't come to fruition, but it would have been interesting to see.
He would have traveled to places old and new, encountering young versions of established characters and meeting entirely new people. He would have gone to 2198 and met a semi-reformed Demona, as well as find love with a gargoyle named Katana. In the end, Brooklyn would return to his own time not five minutes after initially disappearing.
4. THE GARGOYLES WERE SEPARATED FOR OVER ONE THIRD OF THE SHOW
Goliath and Elisa left Manhattan behind for a lengthy, magical world tour, and we barely saw the rest of our favorite gargoyles for twenty-four straight episodes. If you were watching at the time right now you’re thinking “Twenty-four? It felt much longer than that.”
To give the writers credit, it shakes up the status quo in a way that you rarely see on TV today, let alone in a '90s Disney show. The cast met larger-than-life characters all across the world and the goal was to build up the Gargoyles universe, but it feels suspiciously like twenty four backdoor pilots for spinoffs that never got made.
3. THE INSPIRATIONS FOR THE SERIES WERE INSANELY DIVERSE
Anyone who watched Inception knows that inspiration is hard to trace. That's not the case for Greg Weisman, who is easily able to list off everything that influenced Gargoyles. “Disney’s Gummi Bears. Hill Street Blues. The complete works of William Faulkner. The complete works of William Shakespeare. The Simpsons. Various comic book universes. The novels of Tony Hillerman.”
Even a children's cartoon an draw inspiration from adult content.
If a tornado swept through the library and pelted you with a bunch of old books and DVD cases, that assortment of titles couldn’t possibly be more random than Weisman's list. But if nothing else, it’s an excuse to revisit the series and figure out just how The Simpsons fits into all this.
2. THE ENTIRE FINAL SEASON HAS BEEN ERASED FROM CANON
After the initial series wrapped with the epic length "Hunter's Moon", Gargoyles continued under the new header The Goliath Chronicles. Only thing was, the original writing staff didn't return. The result was a season that felt like the precursor to the Dan Harmon-less gas leak season of Community, or the Jimmy Smits/Alan Alda dominated, Sorkin-less seasons of The West Wing. Same characters, same voices, same look. But somehow, off.
Weisman did write the first episode, but that was later repurposed for the first issue of the Gargoyles comics, the true continuation of the series. That means even if you manage to find the episodes, there's no real reason to watch them.
1. GOLIATH AND ELISA EVENTUALLY ADOPT A CHILD
It’s not often a cartoon can get you to accept and even root for an interspecies relationship, but Disney had that Beauty and the Beast cred. Goliath and Elisa were a little at odds in their first episode. By the end of "Hunter’s Moon", however, they’d acknowledged their feelings and even shared their first kiss.
We don’t know how far their relationship would have gone - though we expect there’s fan art. Even if they’re biologically incompatible, the plan was for them to adopt a kid - though not without “some tragedy” along the way.
Whatever that story entails, can you imagine Greg Weisman and Jordan Peele bringing it to the big screen?
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