During this WuFlu lockdown my kids got a chance to watch a nineties favorite of mine. Gargoyles on Disney Plus (again, I’m not paying for it, so why not?).
I suspect Gargoyles was something of a reply to Paul Dini’s truly excellent Batman animated series. Disney was trying to prove that it could play in that sandbox too. IF it felt like it. Since Gargoyles was a one-off, they apparently didn’t.
It was a kinda-sorta, Disneyfied grim-dark. It worked well enough.
The reason it worked was not the gargoyles themselves. It was their antagonist. David Xanatos was the most interesting animated villain of the Nineties and I am including Mark Hamil’s Joker in that assessment.
Nothing ever got the guy down. You had to love that in villain.
Anyway on to the horror.
It’s just a rumor at the moment but the source is usually reliable. And there are an awful lot of articles about Gargoyles all of a sudden.
I suspect it had an unexpectedly high view count on Disney Plus. There was a genuine pent-up demand for it, as it hadn’t been available in any form for a while and Disney lawyers were very good about copyright striking attempts to put whole episodes on YouTube.
The rumor is that there is going to be “a bold reimagining” of Gargoyles.” Lots more diversity and environmental awareness. Xanatos’ real crimes are that he will be racist, sexist, and homophobic.
These days the announcement or even the rumor of a reboot of any property makes me shudder.
Yeah, it’s gonna suck
The Dark Herald 
Ah, Gargoyles: my first great fictional love. Less so nowadays, since 1)the writing doesn’t look as brilliant once you’re almost 27 instead of about 7, and 2)I can now recognize that it contained a lot of lefty bulls**t.
You’re right about this being an answer to Batman TAS, Greg Weisman – the creator – has confirmed it; he has also said that in his mind Lexington – the short yellow guy – was supposed to be gay*, so look forward to that in the potential reboot.
On that note, I think we can expect more female gargoyles (and less male ones), perhaps a change in backstory – in the show the main gargoyles are scottish, they could have them come from Africa** or something – but not racist Xanatos: he’ll be an uber-intellingent black guy who is immensely rich but still feels sad sometimes because black-in-America; the main racist baddies will be the Hunters.
*Which, now that I think about it, is a pretty obvious Rowling Retcon: there was no hint of it in the entire show, heck, there was even an episode towards the end where Lex and his two best friends all try to woo a female gargoyle; Weisman justified that with “Oh, he was just following the herd, but he wasn’t REALLY attracted to her. Also, Darth Vader was totally always meant to be Luke’s father.”
** “Where from?”
“Africa.”
“Sure, but where specifically?”
“Africa is not a single place?”
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Wasn’t season 3 of Gargoyles a Bold Reimagining….. and I remember it sucking pretty hard.
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Season 3 of Gargoyles was an abomination. It had potential but It was the first time I can recall that a property was killed because it went woke. Nothing in it worked.
For that reason, I can see a reboot of Gargoyles being a real tempting project to work on. However, it is doomed to failure because Disney does not cater to boys at all. I dare you to name one property from Disney, not Pixar, but Disney that is targeted at Boys. I can think of none. Even their boy properties has been feminized. Ducktales being a good modern example of going woke and female and not really having an engaging masculine adventure series.
I know people would say Star Wars but, with the exception of Solo, every movie has been female driven. They completely ignore what interests boys and shoehorn every franchise as needing to be a girl driven.
I think any boy property that was originally meant for boys is only reimagined for girls and they are never reimagined and modernized for boys.
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Gravity Falls is definitely for boys. But that’s the only one that comes to mind.
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I may have to give that a a second look, but I don’t have high confidence it will be for boys.
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No, Jew613 is right. It is for boys.
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It used to be all genre/adventure series were aimed at boys and girls watched them because the sight of men doing manly things makes those men attractive.Then, the girls would write romantic fanfiction starring the male characters and a female self-insert. Then things went woke and the fanfic writers were handed the reins to the franchises. They quickly began writing fanfiction with their own self-inserts written as the female main characters. Being self-inserts, they were powerful Mary Sues with the heroic boy characters now taking a back seat and/or commenting how wonderful and powerful the female self-insert main character(s) is(are). of course, no one (apart from other deranged fanfic writers) wants to see any of this crap, but since fanfic writers are the most vocal part of the internet, the company that makes the adventure/genre series thinks it was all a big success. (None of the toys sold, but the series had to be a success because people on Twitter can’t stop talking about it.)
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Gravity Falls is like Phinneas and Ferb. It’s for kids. Boys and girls. That is so rare that it seems to be for boys.
But if you read old books like Captains Courageous or Treasure Island, you know what “for boys” is really like. And unless it’s indie like Castalia’s Rod Hunter, it doesn’t get published. The only modern stories for boys in video are things like Haikyuu!
Also, Mr. Sergius, how do you get Disney whatsit for free?
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All Verizon customers get a year of Disney+ free.
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They missed telling me. Must be a regional thing. Thanks.
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