The Intergalactic Highway

I've recently gotten Gargoyles Season 2: Volume 1. I remember back in the day, it used to be my favorite cartoon. It was dark and mature but still had enough of that appeal for younger kids.

Now I watch it and realize how much of a mixed bag the show is.

Don't get me wrong, it's still a very good animated series that shows a certain depth and flair that many cartoons simply can't replicate but when I watch it from the perspective of someone who's tastes have changed over time, it's not everything that I used to think it was cracked up to be.

Season One of the show was spellbindingly brilliant. Season Two starts out really strong but eventually dips in quality towards the end of the discs. Some episodes in here are brilliant and just dripping with good, straightforward storytelling but others are so mind-numbingly banal, preachy, and pretentious that I wish Gargoyles was limited to the 13 episodes per season rule.

I'm going to be very straightforward here and say that Gargoyles is at its best when it concentrates on a small, tight-knit group of characters like Goliath and his Manhattan clan, along with a few human characters like Elisa Maza and Xanatos who actually contribute to the character development of the gargoyles. When the show tried to be epic and grand, it just fell apart and lost my interest. I tried my best to enjoy the non-gargoyle oriented episodes starring annoying second-raters like Matt Bluestone but I just couldn't. I tried to stay awake during the pretentious four-parter that focused almost exclusively on MacBeth's melodrama but I kept having this nagging feeling inside of me that MacBeth was a boring character whose angst was shoved down our throats and dragged on for way too long over the course or four freakin' episodes!

And oh boy, don't even get me started on the Mists of Avalon storyline that began over the last disc. It was something I enjoyed back when I was younger but looking at it now, I'm not impressed. The three parter could have just been trimmed down to one episode in all honesty. Too many lame, one-note characters like King Arthur were introduced and the main cast of characteres I had grown to love just felt more diminished and watered down as a result of the "expanding" of the Gargoyles universe. Seriously, this is the point in the show that it becomes less of Gargoyles and more of "Giant fantasy world which gargoyles just happen to live in."

I guess I can't completely blame Greg Weisman. When Disney called him up to do Season Two, they asked him to write for 54 episodes all in one season! That, right there, gave him a shock. I have a feeling that had the show been limited to 13 episodes per season, it would have been more restrained and not as overly pretentious. When you have a show with a small cast of memorable characters, you should concentrate on them and what you can do within the small glass box you're dealt with(kudos goes out to Bob Forward for this theory). Trying to add more characters into the mix and concentrating on them more will only diminish and upstage the core characters you've built up for so long. Seriously, look up any bad Mary Sue fanfic where Sue and her self-inserted friends take the established universe by storm and consume it with their collective egos. Gargoyles just isn't Batman: The Animated Series when it comes to psychodrama. It really does not have any interesting characters outside the main cast of heroes and villains that I really care or feel for(Other gargoyles across the world excluded).

My tastes really have changed over time. Sometimes, less is better.

I've also just finished watching Gargoyles again. My sister but the first season and the first part of the second season. Upon watching the first season I have to say that I loved it just as much, if not more, than back when I was a child. I even started loving characters that I used to hate, such as Xanatos, and Demona.

Upon watching the second season, there are still a good number of episodes I still really enjoyed watching. But I DO agree with you when it comes to the Avalon part of the series. It's long and makes me really miss the other characters back in Manhattan. A lot of episodes from that part just led to nowhere and really couldn't keep my interest. MacBeath was a character I used to love, but now that I watch it again I find him not nearly as interesting as some of the other character.

So yes, I agree with you. They should have kept the number of episodes between 13 and 20 since a lot of things could have been left out. And really the whole Avalon thing could have been a LOT shorter. I liked some of the episodes though, such as when they think they're back in Manhattan and everything's all messed up. They made Lexington a bad guy which I found to be brilliant because I never saw it coming. And it kind of makes you wonder if things may eventually turn out that way.