Gargoyles: The Disney Cartoon

As perhaps the most serious Disney cartoon(and considered their answer to Batman TAS), how does it rank? I've read in a few places of people considering it the only good disney cartoon(which I feel is inaccurate), but how does it rank among Disney fans, and fans in general?

I would say that Gargoyles ranks pretty high. It dared to be Darker and Edgier, and it had a number of three-dimensional characters on both the hero side and the villain side. They say The Villain Makes the Plot, and David Xanatos performed that trope beautifully!

I'd argue that Ducktales is better. Truth be told, I'm not a huge fan of Gargoyles and having recently watched the complete 1st season, I can't see what all the hype is about.

However, I would easily say Gargoyles is better than Disney's later cartoons like Kim Possible, 101 Dalmations (kinda... that cartoon had a stupid charm to it) and Recess.

Short answer: Yes.

Long answer: Hell yeah!

Gargoyles was rather unique, few Disney cartoons were of its genre (serious fantasy-adventure.) I'd say its one of the top three American cartoons EVER, along with Justice League and Avatar The Last Airbender. (Just the fact that everything -even seemingly casual details- ended up tying together in the end, and without looking forced, makes it awesome. Add great animation, voice acting, villains etc. and I was more than hooked.)

edited 21st Apr '12 9:45:59 AM by Sijo

@Moe Dantes

Only the first season? That's really only introduction, and how the gargoyles get used to their new home. The second season is where things start picking up, and the story threads connect

Gargoyles seemed like Disney's attempt to make an action series like Batman The Animated Series...... and they never produced one again until the bought MARVEL years later.

the person I was borrowing from didn't have Season 2 Part 1, and of course Disney never finished Season 2. I'm guessing I'm gonna have to resort to Perfectly Legal Means to see the rest of the series.

Although, I did catch one S2 episode ("Metamorphosis") on Disney XD... and I wasn't impressed. But maybe it was just a bad episode, so I'll wait until I see the whole thing.

You can find the crap out of it on You Tube, mind you.

If I have one complaint about it, it was that it was so obviously trying be Disney's answer to BTAS. (And cashing in on the ongoing Celtic craze at the same time.) It's a really good series, but I think it could have been even better and missed the mark in some way I can't quite put my finger on.

edited 22nd Apr '12 11:55:54 AM by Karalora

Really? It seemed to me more like Disney's answer to X-Men, what with the focus on "people fear us for not understanding us" thing. It also kind of had shades of Gummi Bears with the "creatures living secretly among humans and protecting them" angle.

If I had to say it missed the mark (again, judging just from season one), I'd say it tries to be serious but doesn't always stick with it. It starts with an awesome pilot movie and then gives us... television stars who become criminals because they're bored (and this is caused by Xanatos, somehow). It gives us a Shakespeare reference... and then explains the reference midway through the episode like they think we'd never get it on our own. Stuff like that.

But maybe season 2 gets better.

I'll admit I remember liking it as a kid, but it never grabbed me all that much. I also ended up developing a bit of Hype Backlash after being told by major fan on an anime board that it had some of the best fight choreography of any animated show ever. Imagine how that illusion was shattered upon actually watching a few episodes again and finding they all tend to follow the following pattern:

Character A rushes character B. Character B grabs character A by the neck, and throws them into a wall. Character A is knocked out on impact.

It didn't help matters that 90% of the reruns that came up seemed to be the Avalon arc, where they dumped the majority of the cast...

Gargoyles was and remains, one of my favorite cartoons and pretty much cemented my affection for Greg Weisman as a writer as well as improve my appreciation for Shakespeare when I rewatched it about a year ago.

Oddly, yes it was an action show but I never actually watched it for the action which was, admittedly, pretty weak in the fight scenes. I watched this show for the writing and the character interaction. This is really one of those shows you want to marathon as many episodes as you can in order at once.

I'd tend to agree with a lot of what has been said; the action scenes were, oddly enough, one of the weaker aspects of the series. Xanatos was a fun villain (and of course a trope namer, heh...), and the Gargoyles and their various allies and enemies were usually rather entertaining to watch (probably my least favourites were the... whatever they were called, the cat-bat genetically engineered people, but eh.), and the voice acting was a blast. For double fun, listen carefully on any episodes where Coldstone appears. Having Keith David and Michael Dorn trying to out-basso one another is hilarious.

And... yeah, Season 1 was good, but Season 2 was better. Although the Avalon arc really started to feel like it was dragging after a while >.<

Highly-Visible Ninja EDIT- oh, right... Moe Dantes, I'm pretty sure the Pack were criminals who became television stars and then went back to crime, not just TV stars who got bored- I'm almost positive that Dingo made some kind of offhand comment about going soft... relating to being a mercenary in the drug wars or some such. And that was before they stopped being TV stars.

edited 22nd Apr '12 3:36:21 PM by TeChameleon

I agree with the comments about the actions scenes, they really get predictable after awhile(glide around, glide around, tackle, throw). I think the real strength comes from the character interactions and the story arcs. Xanatos being behind many of the things in the series made a more close knit rogues gallery.

Also let's not forget that the show also had a major character (almost co-star, in fact) in Elisa Maza, a female police detective of ethnic nature (I thought she was Latino at first, but ended up being half-Black/half Native American, which is still awesome) with far more exposure than the similar Renee Montoya ever got on TV.

Although I like it a lot—enough to have a blog about it—I feel it's better than it had any right to be, and not as good as its most ardent supporters suggest. I also feel lot of its mystique lies in the absolutely gargantuan amount of Word of God it's accrued, and the stuff that we know we would have gotten, but never did.

I like how Greg Weisman is willing to expand on things in Gargoyles via Word of God. For instance, he says that Jackal is a sociopath and Hyena is a psychopath. Some people might ask, "What's the difference?" I would say that Jackal was made into a bad person, and Hyena was born as a bad person. Still, you get pretty much the same results, so that distinction probably doesn't matter much!

While I think Greg Weisman's protectiveness of the series is admirable(and it seems justified considering what I've heard of Goliath Chronicles), what exactly is his position on future interpretations of his work? Is he uneasy with fanfiction in general, or just badly handled/out of character ones?

I have read very little behind-the-scenes stuff on the series, so in my case Word of God doesn't hold much influence.

Oh, but I love behind-the-scenes stuff. I just can't get enough of it! It makes for nice juicy meat to be served up right here on this website. Not to mention finding out What Could Have Been and all sorts of fun trivia.

By the way, I thought Wolf was a total Jerkass who seriously needed to be put into his place. Finding out that he's descended from that Viking who wrecked several Gargoyles just proves that jerks come from jerks!

Oh, yeah, and that episode where the Pack Took a Level in Badass and captured several clan members was pretty entertaining. I just knew that Broadway was not going to be chosen as second-in-command the minute he impulsively ran up to his captured clan members asking if they were all right, only to get whacked by Coyote from the side. I mean, What An Idiot! A smarter move would have been to make sure the way was clear before trying to get to them. Oh, well, I guess we can't all be clear-headed!

I came across a piece of Fridge Brilliance someone else pointed out, and it goes like this:

• Why were gargoyles placed in cathedrals? To protect them from evil!

You can easily apply this to Gargoyles. It was their duty to protect that castle, and it makes the princess acting like such an Ungrateful Bitch become even more heinous. It makes Demona's Face–Heel Turn seem like something unnatural. It also helps to explain why they took a They Fight Crime! approach to life...because that's what they do!

Was I the only one who noticed the trope Not Even Bothering with the Accent being used in Gargoyles?

1. Jim Cummings, who voiced the Australian Dingo, didn't even try to sound Australian! That's interesting to me, because J.C. seems to be very good at his job. Then again, from what I've heard, Australian English sounds pretty bizarre and hard to understand to non-Australians, so maybe J.C. thought it would be more convenient for everyone if he didn't try it!
2. You have a Gargoyle clan hailing from Medieval Scotland, but none of them sound Scottish, except for Hudson, voiced by Ed Asner. Maybe the other voice actors thought that a Scottish accent was too hard to pull off!

I could swear that trope-or-other-thing was already listed on one of the pages.

Also, JC sounded like one of the few who was trying to do the accent (but sounded more "British"), unless I'm thinking of a different work of his (which I doubt).

... if you want to know why none of the Gargoyles' VAs tried for a Scottish accent... try reading an untranslated Canterbury Tales >.O By rights, they should have been functionally incomprehensible to modern-day humans. Heck, I'm not entirely sure they should have been speaking English of any form... Celtic, maybe..?

And I've gotta say, Dingo sounded as Australian as any non-Australian trying to sound Australian ever does, at least to me...

Oh... Tiggers? Goliath pretty much flat-out said that protection is what Gargoyles do- it's in their nature. And that that was, indeed, why they were doing the They Fight Crime! bit.