The gargoyles came first, the stories came second. I've been fascinated with gargoyles since I was a kid. I took a high school trip to Europe, the 8 countries in 5 weeks kind of trip. Even then I collected postcards of gargoyles. Then I sort of forgot about it. You flashforward a few years and I'm at Disney, we're looking for an idea to base a show on. I was running series development at the time at Disney TV Animation. We were looking to develop a show that had a lot of the elements that Gummi Bears series had.
There was Care Bears and there was Gummi Bears, and Care Bears was very, sort of
saccharin... kind of TV show. Where everyone was kind of giving hugs and that kind of thing. Gummi Bears
was actually an adventure comedy. It was great fun, it had this terrific backstory, a show created by
Jymn Magon. The candy was the inspiration for starting the show in the first place but the series that was
created was really great. We felt that Gummi Bears never got the respect it deserved. I don't take any
credit for Gummi Bears. Gummi Bears was up and running by the time I joined Disney. I thought
it was a great show.
We felt it didn't get respect for two reasons. One was, it's about little cuddly bears. Two was, it had this
sort of medieval setting to it. So we set out to create a show that would have a little more edge to it, so
the first thing we did is we took these medieval characters and brought them into the present. The second
thing we did was instead of making them about little cuddly bears, we made it about little gargoyles.
Certainly an influence from the movie Gremlins was in our mind a bit. I just thought gargoyles was the
perfect thing. I always had been interested in them and the legend of gargoyles, that sort of predates
our series is, you put these scary creatures on your building to scare away evil spirits. And that was
actually what had always fascinated me, this notion that you put something ugly up to scare away something
even uglier.
So we decided to sort of extrapolate backwards. Why would human beings create these stone statues? What might
have inspired that notion? So we came up with this idea of this race of creatures who were good, who protected
church stone during the day but came alive during the night. And we came up with the Gargoyles comedy series.
Which didn't sell!
When that didn't sell we went back to the drawing board a couple of times. We redeveloped it as a drama series
and that did sell and there you have it.
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