IGN has officially been around for two and a half decades, and has borne witness to a lot of monumental shifts in video game and entertainment culture in that time. To celebrate our lengthy tenure on this earth, IGN’s 25th Anniversary Feature series will hone in on these shifts, and the movies, video games and TV shows that helped define them. First up today, we’re looking back at the beloved cartoon Gargoyles.
In the ’70s and ’80s, cartoon villains were mostly petty losers. Characters like Doctor Doom and Skeletor would be defeated by the end of the episode, only to shake their fist and grumble at their minions until their next episode rolled around… and things played out mostly the same all over again.
But Gargoyles co-creator, co-producer and writer Greg Weisman wanted to change that.
Gargoyles, which ran from 1994 to 1997, was a Disney show about ancient monsters that are — as the opening credits put it — “stone by day, warriors by night.” But it would become much more than that, gaining a cult following in the years since it first aired that has kept it near the top of the animation landscape from that time period. And much of that reputation is the result of how Gargoyles treated its villains… and how, in doing so, it helped to redefine cartoon villainy in the ’90s.
Bruce Wayne With a Twist
Weisman had worked with Cary Bates on the DC Comics series Captain Atom, where the series’ antagonist, General Wade Eiling, always had plots within plots. When Weisman and Bates teamed up to write for Gargoyles, they designed their primary villain by taking that quality but stripping away Eiling’s cruelty and intolerance, instead fusing him with another comic book character’s traits — those of Bruce Wayne!
“Bruce Wayne in the comics I read growing up was charming and a guy that you’d admire,” Weisman tells IGN. “What if you had a handsome villain who would say things like, ‘Revenge is a sucker’s game.’ He wasn’t into being a villain. He was into meeting his goals.”
The result was David Xanatos, a genius billionaire who remained a dangerous adversary throughout the show’s run because he always had so many redundant plans that he somehow emerged victorious even after seemingly being defeated by the heroes. His complex schemes became such a model for future villains that he’s even the namesake of a TV trope. The charm and humor that Weisman wanted for the character, who would always be the hero of his own story, was perfectly captured by Star Trek: The Next Generation’s Jonathan Frakes.
“I love playing a villain,” says Frakes. “Everybody does. It’s the best. It’s so much more fun than playing a good guy. There’s more colors. You can be somebody that you’re really not. It’s a delicious job.”
Frakes had auditioned for both Xanatos and the leader of the gargoyles, Goliath. He credits the strength of the character to the writers and voice director Jamie Thomason.
“Gargoyles was ahead of its time,” recalls Frakes. “Gargoyles was too smart for TV. They didn’t pander to a children’s audience. It was very deep. It had a lot of Shakespearean references. It examined the battle between good and evil in a very dense, interesting, psychological way. It had an incredible cast of actors. To Greg Weisman’s credit, the writing was very, very smart and funny at the same time.”
A Traitor, Tragedy and… Shakespeare!
Frakes joined the cast alongside his TNG co-star Marina Sirtis, who had originally auditioned to play the gargoyles’ human ally Elisa Maza but was asked instead to audition for the role of the series’ other primary villain — the traitorous gargoyle Demona. Frakes and Sirtis went from playing heroic Starfleet officers to recording Gargoyles where, unlike many animated shows, the voice actors all performed in the same room together. And the rapport the two actors already shared certainly helped with the development of their Gargoyles characters.
“Marina’s one of my dearest friends and one of my favorite actors,” says Frakes. “We have a great shorthand together.”
The Gargoyles writers kept Demona sympathetic by making her her own worst enemy. She was partially inspired by the X-Men character Magneto in her desire to protect gargoyles from the people who hate and fear them, even if it meant killing all humans — and the gargoyles that would try to stop her.
“I think we created two villains in Demona and Xanatos who were truly unique in cartoons of that day,” notes Weisman. “Demona’s a tragic character. It doesn’t justify her behavior, but there’s a tragedy behind that that’s real.”
When looking to bring tragedy to his characters, Weisman combined his passion for comic books with an unlikely inspiration for a kids cartoon — Shakespeare! The most obvious result was the character of Macbeth, an immortal version of the Scottish king with a touch of Batman to him, between his use of martial arts and tech gadgets. His long life came from a mystical connection with Demona that he sought to end, putting him in the unique position of being both an enemy to the heroic gargoyles and an occasional ally.
“We loved the irony that he’d confront Goliath and say, ‘I’m after your queen, Demona,’” chuckles Weisman. “And Goliath just laughs and says, ‘Demona tried to kill me last week. If you think kidnapping us is going to help you get Demona, you may have a problem.’”
The writers of Gargoyles largely avoided the common villain motivation of revenge. Even though Demona had betrayed Macbeth, he really wanted to kill her because he was suicidal.
“He’s lost everyone he ever cared about and he can’t die unless Demona dies,” explains Weisman. “Through the efforts of our heroes, he begins to learn there are still reasons for him to live and go on. We were a kids show in syndication so we never spoke to it objectively, but we hinted at it clearly.”
Demona’s a tragic character. It doesn’t justify her behavior, but there’s a tragedy behind that that’s real.
Being a children’s cartoon created more conflicts than just a need to be coy about dark character motivations. It also meant hard restraints on how the writers could depict violence and death. Weisman’s team hated the Disney villain death, a common trope where the antagonist is killed offscreen, typically through their own actions, and they sought to subvert it every chance they could. For example, in one story the megalomaniacal Archmage seemingly fell to his death, but was actually rescued by a time traveling version of himself. Meanwhile, Macbeth’s scheming rival for the throne, Duncan, fell off a cliff — but only after he was shown burning to death because of a magical artifact.
Studio Notes in the City of Stone
The show was also able to show a surprising amount of onscreen carnage by having characters who had been turned to stone bloodlessly smashed to pieces. That liberty was most noticeable in the arc “City of Stone,” where Demona uses a spell to transform all the humans in Manhattan into stone from sunset to sunrise.
“Sometimes the decisions that came down seemed a little ironic to us,” says Weisman. “We were told you can show Demona smashing a handful of characters, but you don’t want it to feel gratuitous. We wanted her to blow up someone as she exited the scene and they said it’s too much. Someone said, ‘Well, what if she just fires and blows off a woman’s arm but otherwise she’s fine?’ And the answer was, ‘O.K., you can do that.’ I thought, ‘That is dark and they don’t even realize it.’ Everyone else is shattered into a million pieces and dead. This woman’s going to turn back to flesh at sunrise and half her arm is going to be gone and she’s going to bleed out. It’s just horrible.”
Conflicts with Disney executives weren’t always as predictable. During a check-in with Gary Krisel, then the head of Walt Disney Television Animation, Weisman and writer Gary Sperling described an upcoming plot where Xanatos married his mercenary leader ally Fox and the two had a child. While the episode hadn’t yet aired, it had already been written and animated.
“[Krisel] says, ‘You can’t do that,’” recalls Weisman. “‘They’re the villains. You can’t have the villains have a kid. What are you going to do? You can’t take their kid away from them, but you can’t let the villains raise a kid. What are you doing to that poor kid?’ There’s silence at the table and I said to Gary, ‘We already did it.’”
Rather than scrap the work, Disney allowed the plot to move forward and it helped grow those characters and even provided a chance for the villains to team up with the heroes to protect their son.
Serendipitous Recording Sessions
But while many aspects of the serialized story were planned long in advance as the Gargoyles team sought to build a complex universe, they were also open to changing course. Fox was originally just intended to be a loyal minion who deeply admired Xanatos. But then Weisman heard actor Laura San Giacomo read the line, “He’s the most brilliant man on the planet.”
“I thought, ‘Holy shit. Fox is in love with Xanatos. That’s really interesting. Let’s run with that,’” says Weisman. “We began to conceive of this idea of them getting married. We thought Xanatos wouldn’t marry a minion. He has to respect her. We began to develop her as a more fully realized character and develop their relationship.”
I thought, ‘Holy shit. Fox is in love with Xanatos. That’s really interesting. Let’s run with that.’
Episodes showed the two were equally matched in chess and explained Fox’s complex backstory as the daughter of a wealthy businessman and the faerie queen Titania. While Xantos originally explained their relationship as a matter of genetic compatibility and similar goals, it grew to be real love and helped make Xanatos an even more complex character.
Another case of villainous serendipity came when Weisman was listening to the sound mix of the video release of the first five episodes of the show and kept hearing Elisa actor Salli Richardson say Thailog, which is Keith David’s character Goliath’s name backwards.
“I thought, ‘We’ve got one of the greatest actors of all time playing Goliath and he’s marvelous in this character,’” remembers Weisman. “‘But there are whole aspects of his talent that we just can’t use for Goliath because it would be totally out of character for Goliath. What if Goliath were the bad guy? What if you took Xanatos’ mindset and put it on Goliath? Let’s have Xanatos clone Goliath, educate him the way Xanatos thinks he should be educated. What comes out the other end is Goliath’s opposite. The origin of that was me hearing this word backwards over and over again. We just tried to stay open to that kind of stuff.”
Not every villain plot Weisman wanted to do was accepted. A two-parter where the powerful witches responsible for the link between Demona and Macbeth, the Weird Sisters, trapped the heroes in a production of Shakespeare’s play was deemed… well, too weird to risk two episodes on. Weisman scrapped the idea because he didn’t think he could cram even the most condensed version of the tragedy plus a framing device into just 22 minutes.
“I wanted to use the Shakespearean dialogue and I thought the kids would get it,” says Weisman. “It would be elevated but understandable. I thought I could do this, but they were way less convinced.”
But that was the thing about this show. Weisman and his fellow writers were always pushing the envelope in terms of what a quote/unquote kids show could do, and that influence continues to be felt in the world of television animation today.
Weisman considered Gargoyles to be a superhero show without capes or tights. After the third season ended in 1997, he would continue his work crafting complex villains for comic book adaptations like The Spectacular Spider-Man and Young Justice. Yet there are still many fans who would like to see Xanatos, Demona, Macbeth, and the rest of the Gargoyles characters get another chance to shine.
“This was a good gig,” says Frakes. “We’re still talking about this 1994 show. I’ve done a lot of stuff nobody is talking about anymore, but Gargoyles still has a heartbeat based on Weisman’s work and the fans’ loyalty.”
Who is your favorite Gargoyles villain? Let us know in the comments!
