Me: First of all I would like to thank Greg for taking some time out of his busy schedule to do this interview with me. Greg, since everyone already knows your work very well, can you tell us a little bit about how you came up with the concept of Gargoyles?

Greg: Well, Disney had a show called the Gummi Bears, that we were all big fans of, every person on my team. In my opinion the show didn't get a lot of respect from people, not because it was named after candy, but because there was a lot of confusion in the marketplace between the Gummi Bears and the Care Bears. What I liked about the Gummi Bears was the medieval settings and the rich back story that came out of it, which was why would be people think of making rubbery bear candy, and that they actually came up with a reason for that. So me and my team set out to make a show just like Gummi Bears, but one that would garner more respect. So instead of cute little gummi bears, we created a show with cute little gargoyles. So we created the gargoyles, little guys mind you, but we thought the gargoyles had more edge. We kept the medieval settings, though we moved it to New York to give [the show] even more of an edge. We threw the story together, it was actually very close to what the show became, we called it "Gargoyles" and we pitched the idea to Michael Eisner, who was the CEO of the Walt Disney Company at the time. He decided to pass on the show.

But even though he passed on [Gargoyles] we still felt that we had something special on our hands. Now personally, I'd loved gargoyles for many, many, many years. I collected gargoyles postcards, and I just thought they were the coolest things when I was a kid. So when I thought of the idea [for Gargoyles], I decided to use the same premise as Gummi Bears, which was the question "why would people put these statues on their buildings to scare away evil spirits," and we went from there. But since our original pitch didn't [get picked up], we brought in Tad Stones, who was one of the creators of Darkwing Duck, and had him look at our pitch real and give us some suggestions. Now this was back in the day of Beauty & The Beast, so one of [Brett's] suggestions was to have one of the gargoyles fall in love with the female cop we had. It was a great idea, even though we never intended to play an angle like that. But it was better in the long run because all the Gargoyles characters had already been created at some point in time, but there Goliath wasn't one of them, so we created him specifically for this [storyline], and he became the central focus of the show afterwards.

Me: Was it very hard to sell a show like Gargoyles? Because obviously Gargoyles was a much darker show then most children's shows at the time, much less Disney shows.

Greg: It was hard, although I have to saw that I think the atmospher we were in back then made it possible, I think it would be nearly impossible to sell Gargoyles in today's market. It took us two years two years to sell [Gargoyles]. We pitched the show three times to Michael Eisner. The first time was as a comedy. He passed. The second time as a drama. He passed again. And then we made our final pitch, where we re-worked the show to what it is today, and finally he bought it. What we were trying to do at the time was diversify the Disney Afternoon lineup. All the shows on the [Disney Afternoon] were good, but they all tended to be about funny, furry animals, and we wanted to try different stuff. So Gargoyles was the answer to that problem. And I don't think that desire for diversity, that interest in taking risks, and that notion that you only have to convince one person [of a solid idea] really exists anymore. Now all the desisions have to be approved by a commitee, lots of people have to sign on, and it's a lot harder to sell a show now. That's not to say we had an easy time selling Gargoyles, because we didn't, but it would be much harder [to sell Gargoyles] now-a-days.

Me: What was it like working on the show itself?

Greg: *laughs* Well it was a lot of work. The first season was thirteen episodes, and we had a ten month [production] schedule, with which to finish them. So we were story boarding [the episodes], recording the voices, and getting back some gorgeous animation with a hectic schedule. It was very difficult. On top of which, I was working on a couple of other shows while I was working on "Gargoyles." Then in the second season, ["Gargoyles"] got a picked up for fifty-two episodes, in ten months. And that seemed pretty impossible, so I quit my other jobs to work on "Gargoyles" full time. We used to have one story editor, now we had four. The director of the first episode was brought back, and there was essentially a huge increase in staff for production of the [second season] in order to get the episodes finished in time. For season one we worked on two scripts a month, for the second season we were working on six [scripts] a month. So it was a LOT more work! But everyone working on the show were just trying to make the show as good as they could make it. It was never personal, even when there were arguments (and there were), it was always about making the best show possible. And in the end, I'm sure we all very, very proud of how it all turned out. I know I am.

Me: So ever since "Gargoyles" has been on the air the show as gathered a pretty big cult following. I mean, it has it's own convention right?

Greg: Yes, its called the "Gathering of The Gargoyles Convention." We go to a different city a year. In 1997 and 1998 we were in New York, in 1999 we were in Dallas, 2000 we were in Orlando Florida, 2001 it was Los Angeles, 2002 it was in Williamsburg Virginia, 2003 we were back in Manhattan, 2004 we were in Montreal, in 2005 we were in Phoenix, and in 2007 we're going to be in Tennessee. You can find out more about the convention at www.thegatheringofthegargoyles.com. It's a lot of fun. It's a small convention, but a lot of people show up every year, the fans have just been great to me and the people who worked on the show.

Me: If [Gargoyals] is a popular enough show to get it's own convention, then how popular was it when it was first airing? Because if I show is this popular, I'm kind of surprised it got cancelled in the first place.

Greg: Well, a lot of it goes back to economics, not popularity. The first season aired once a week on Friday's, and [the show] was a hit. I'm not saying it was a home run hit, but at the very least a double, maybe triple run hit. With the second season the show was on five days a week, but there were two difficulties we faced. The first was that the O.J. Simpson trial was going on around the same time the second season aired, so there were a lot of pre-empted shows, which made the show difficult to find. Sometimes it aired in morning, sometimes the late afternoon, and sometimes it wouldn't air at all. It was difficult for our audience to find. The second problem was that the show had to compete with "Power Rangers," which was a home run (though you could debate why). *laughs* But it was a fact that "Power Rangers" was a home run, and we lost to that show consistently to our main demographic, which was boys six to eleven. [Gargoyles] was still a hit with out main demographic though, and for a year the Gargoyles toys were the number one line of action figures with young boys, mainly because Power Ranger toys were slow to get to the market. Once Power Rangers toys hit the shelves though, we got our butts kicked.

Still, on television we were still a hit. We were only a single or a double, as Power Rangers was the home run. They were the giant players. And you've got to hand it to them for that. Again, I'm not a huge Power Rangers fan myself, but it doesn't change the fact that they mopped the floor with us. So by the end of the second season we had sixty-five episodes, and what you need to understand is that in those days is that [sixty-five episodes] was considered a legitimate syndication package for children's television. With sixty-five episode you can air the show five times a week, four times a year, and that's generally considered to be enough. If you don't get to sixty-five you're considered a failure, but once you reach sixty-five you're a success, and there needs to be other reasons to continue the show after that. Thankfully, we found that reason in ABC, which was launching a new children's block on Saturday mornings, and they were looking for an action show for boys to air, and they looked at Gargoyles. So ABC ordered an additional thirteen episodes for their upcoming Saturday morning block. So what happened there was that Disney ended up basically letting the entire staff go, not including the voice actors.

Me: Now you didn't have much to do with that season did you?

Greg: No, I wrote the first episode, but I didn't produce it, I didn't story edit it, and there were several changes being made without my input. [Disney] added narration because they were turning the show into the "Goliath Chronicles," so they re-cut my episode, they changed it a lot. It's still fundamentally the story I wrote, but it's not the exact way I would have shown it on TV. And it had absolutely nothing to do with the other twelve episodes of that season. The third season was done by a group of various different people, I have no criticisms of those people, they were under sever deadline pressure, more so then [my team] ever was. The resources at the time was to get used to the existing show. So what you see in the "Gargoyles: The Goliath Chronicles" is a show that is just...off. It's off. It's not on target with the show we made during the first two seasons, which makes the episodes in the third season not very good. I wouldn't call it a hit. I wouldn't even call it a single or a double, it was expired. And so now that there were sixty-five episodes of the original show, plus the thirteen that was made of season three, [Disney] canceled [Gargoyles]. And it's sad. It's understandable though.

And I wish I hadn't left after the second season, I wish had produced the third season, but at the time it seemed like it made sense to move on. And now I regret that decision, but that stuff does happen and I can't change it. The good thing is now we have a Gargoyles comic book, and we're picking up where the second season left off, starting off with the first episode of season three, which is the one episode I wrote, and we needed some intro point for fans of the show who haven't seen it in a long time. And starting with issue three we're leaving the "Goliath Chronicles" far behind, and featuring brand new stories, brand new characters, and the first real brand new Gargoyles material produced since the end of the show.

To Be Continued...

The above interview is © Kevin T. Rodriguez, and the interview cannot be reprinted in whole or in part without permission.
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