TV Obsessive
Gargoyles
Nick: Over the weekend, I started watching the mid-90s cartoon Gargoyles on Disney+. My history with the show is pretty similar to Alex Boruff’s, who looked back on the show for its 25th anniversary last year. It’s a show that I’ve been meaning to watch for years—we didn’t have cable for most of my childhood, so I must have originally watched it during its run on ABC when I was no older than six years old. I hadn’t watched it since then.
I think I must have been very into it back then, even if only for a brief amount of time, because I always remembered it fondly—and why wouldn’t I, its main character is a giant, brooding, gargoyle superhero that would dwarf Arnold Schwarzenegger. While it never quite captured my imagination as much as the Batman or X-men cartoons, it’s one of the only shows from this point in my life I even remember that I watched. I know that the show developed a cult following, but as I revisit it now I’ve been left wondering why it hasn’t broken into the Millennial Nostalgia Zeitgeist in the same way as some of the other cartoons of the era because so far it’s great!
I suspect that part of it is because it’s somewhat derivative of the Batman (tone and animation) and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (a team of mutant outcasts) cartoons. Despite this, what I’ve seen of the show so far has been entertaining and memorable. The show’s first five episodes depict the gargoyles’ origin story in a feature-length arc. The eponymous gargoyles are batlike humanoids that turn to stone during the day and awake each night. The first two episodes take place in 10th-century Scotland, where they are teamed with the humans that inhabit their castle to fend off an invading army of Vikings.* They are betrayed and turned to stone for 1000 years, rising again in a modern New York City, where they have to adjust to a world they don’t know and whose humans are much more complicated than 10th-century Vikings.
The show is carried by the leader of the gargoyles, Goliath (the iconic giant, brooding, Schwarzenegger-esque leader of the group), brought to life by Keith David’s incredible baritone voice. While some of the twists are obvious (who would have guessed that not-Lex-Luthor was actually evil!), it’s interesting to watch the often naive gargoyles as they attempt to navigate the new, morally gray world. The action is solid for a ’90s cartoon (I kept thinking of Spider-man never actually throwing a punch, or Yu-gi-oh! cropping out guns a decade later, whenever I saw action that felt like it actually had stakes). It’s definitely worth checking out if you watched it when you were young, are a fan of Batman: The Animated Series (or any of the other cartoons I’ve mentioned), or just want to give something new a try.
*An aside: Hakon, the leader of the Vikings, is voiced by voice acting legend Clancy Brown (who in my opinion provides THE definitive Lex Luthor portrayal). Brown also voices Wolf, the leader of the villain group The Pack, in Episode 6, and the two characters vaguely resemble each other. I had hoped that this meant that the two characters were one and the same, but sadly I don’t think that’s where it’s going. I’m not so sure that the magus that froze them for a millennium isn’t the villain’s butler, though.
