The show had much the same set-up: tenth century gargoyles put to sleep for a thousand years by a magic spell. Their castle was moved to the tallest skyscraper in Manhattan and they woke up and tried to adjust to 20th century life. The gargoyles were all diminutive, kinda like Gummi Bears with a modern edge. The whole development went through a number of changes over time, and I won't attempt to list every permutation but here's the basics on the characters. The name that heads each paragraph is the name the character ended up with in the show that you guys ultimately saw on television.
Demona - Dakota was the leader of the gargoyles, and she was, in a word, boring. Too straight to be the leader of a comedy ensemble. So we changed her name to Demona and turned her into a traitor working with the enemy....
Xanatos - Xavier was a human descendent of the wizard who had cursed the gargoyles a millenium ago. He was rich, powerful and petulant. Very Captain Hook.
Owen Burnett - Mr. Owen was Xavier's assistant. In the first episode, he got hit by a magic spell that permanently tranformed him into an anthropomorphic aardvark.
Brooklyn - Amp became the leader after we changed Dakota into Demona. He was a little guy who looked more like Lexington than Brooklyn, but he had Brooklyn's out-there adventurous personality.
Broadway - Cocoa was a heavy-set female gargoyle with artistic pretensions and a great love of food. This always made us uncomfortable, which is why she eventually became a he.
Lexington - Lassie looked a little more like Brooklyn than Lex, but he was the closest thing we had to Lex. He was an idiot savant, fascinated with technology. He could spend hours working on a computer. He could also spend hours watching a traffic light change colors.
Hudson - Ralph was the couch potato gargoyle. A bit older than the others. Content to stay at home and watch tv.
Elisa - Morgan Reed was a human school teacher who befriended the gargoyles. She was also a firefighter for awhile. And a museum curator. And an archeologist. And Xavier's former partner. She had a daughter for awhile too. For awhile we played it like she was Princess Katharine's descendent. We had the Gargoyles move onto the roof of the apartment building where she lived and cause a lot of trouble for her.
There was no parallel character to Goliath. After the comedy development was rejected, Tad Stones (Producer of Darkwing Duck and Aladdin: the Animated Series, among others) suggested adding a dramatic male lead. We came up with Goliath and put the whole show through the prism of who Goliath was. That was the turning point, obviously.
I still maintain that the original comedy development would have made a great comedy-adventure series. Something to be proud of. That's not to say that I don't greatly prefer how things turned out, but it's apples and oranges.
