Jon22: The Website of Jonathan Dobres

I was going to write about this yesterday, but shame prevented me from doing so. Shame over being a childish dork. Given the amount of time that I have spent over the past three days revisiting this particular childish dorkery, I now believe that it is in my best interest to just write and move on.

Gargoyles. Not the statues, but the TV show. As in the Disney cartoon series. Gargoyles has always been one of my favorite cartoons. You’d think a show about a clan of Scottish gargoyles who are reawakened in modern Manhattan after a 1000 year sleep would have a pretty limited appeal, but no. This show is brilliant. To satiate my nostalgia, as well as to ensure that I wasn’t remembering the show as better than it really was, I downloaded and watched the whole thing over the summer. I can honestly say that yes, it is that good. Almost every episode in the thirteen that comprise the first season is a winner, from the almost cinematic beauty of the five-part premiere to the shocking (and somewhat controversial) “Deadly Force”.

The second season has a few bad apples, but that’s to be expected when suddenly you’re asked to churn out a whopping 52 episodes for a single year. Season two still features stellar work like “Ill Met By Moonlight,” “Future Tense,” and “Avalon.” The series is notable for its unusually adult feeling, a heavy emphasis on continuity and character development, and some incredible voice acting. I always hated Marina Sirtis’s goody-two-shoes Diana Troy character on Star Trek, but from her unbelievable work voicing Gargoyles’s Demona, she’s clearly meant to work in villiany. I really do wonder what the show would have been like given an hour for story instead of 22 minutes, as well as less pressure to keep it “kid friendly.”

Still, I remain puzzled as to why my nostalgaic interset in the series reached a spike over the summer that continues even now. Could it be because the show premiered almost exactly ten years ago, on October 24, 1994? Could it be that Gargoyles maintains a strong and active cult following to this day? Could it be that Greg Weisman, creator and producer of the show, continues to update Ask Greg, thus feeding peoples’ interest in the mythology of the series? (That’s where I’ve been wasting hours of my time, by the way.) Could it be that the Season One DVDs recently got a release date? Could all these events stem from the collective unconscious? Probably not.

End of dorkery.