Over thirty years ago, ego and the dollar ruled. It was a world with a changing television landscape. It was the golden age for animation! On one side you had the CEO of The Walt Disney Company Michael Eisner who entered the world of television animation with one goal in mind: to make the best animation television has ever seen (and to make a lot of money doing so). As a rival there was Stephen Spielberg. He too wanted to create animation for television that didn’t look like it was created for television. Neither man was so foolish as to suggest that their output would be as good as a feature film, but it was going to be miles ahead of what had come before it. By the late 90s though, all that was coming to an end. The television boom in animation was over as networks were finding it cheaper to import shows already created. Kids would watch whatever was put in front of them and ego gave way to fiscal responsibility. Such can be seen in the transition from Gargoyles to The Goliath Chronicles.
Yup, we’re finally doing it. After spending years avoiding the third season of the Disney Afternoon show Gargoyles I finally decided to take a look and see what all the fuss was about. If you’re new to Gargoyles, basically the show aired as part of the syndicated Disney Afternoon in the mid-90s. It was one of the later additions to the programming block which started winding down in the years that followed. With that, came the end of all of the shows that were part of it unless they could find a home elsewhere. Gargoyles was one such show and given a stay of execution as it would be moved to ABC’s One Saturday Morning as Disney recently acquired the network. Going from syndication to a network show is a big change behind the scenes as it introduces a whole new round of standards and practices, those things viewers and television producers tend to hate. For reasons not entirely clear to me, basically all of the creative staff on the show was replaced including showrunner Greg Weisman. Some may have left of their own accord as a the third season was a mere 13 episodes and in animation writers like to seek out full-series orders, whenever possible. Weisman did contribute to the third season’s first episode as a writer and was a consulting producer for the third season, but he’s indicated his only contributions were essentially negations.
Nevertheless, the show must go on and it’s not like a giant company like Disney would let anything stop them from doing something they wanted to do with a property they owned. The third season was given the subtitle The Goliath Chronicles and ran for 13 episodes. The voice cast returned and each episode was given an introductory monologue by Goliath (Keith David), a mostly pointless addition, but not one without merit since more Keith David is never a bad thing. Carl Johnson returned to handle the music, but beyond that almost everything was different. Eric Lewald (X-Men, Exo-Squad) was brought in as the new showrunner and joining him in the writer’s room were a lot of folks also associated with Fox’ X-Men. Both shows were still in production with X-Men also receiving its own surprise final season order and it’s possible the writers were spread thin. As an added challenge, the new writers were completely new to the show from what was reported. If any had watched Gargoyles previously I couldn’t find confirmation. Perhaps not surprisingly, the third season of Gargoyles shares a lot in common with X-Men as the main, over-arching, plot concerns a KKK-like group called The Quarrymen introduced in the first episode. Taking the gargoyles to a more grounded world where they have to confront human prejudice doesn’t sound like such a bad idea on the surface, but of course it’s the execution that matters most.
Perhaps the biggest change for an animation lover such as myself is on the production end. As covered in the opening paragraph, by 1996 there was little appetite at Disney to keep raising the bar for what was being shown on television when it came to animation. Gargoyles was taken from Walt Disney Animation of Japan and handed over to Nelvana which in turn outsourced a lot of the episodes to Akom and Hanho Heung-Up Company, neither of which carries the reputation of some of the studios that worked on the first two seasons. The final episode of the season was given to Walt Disney Animation of Japan and it’s a noticeable improvement, though perhaps still not on the level of prior seasons. The penultimate episode, “Seeing Isn’t Believing,” looks over-animated with a lot of exaggerated character movements like someone was trying really hard to impress. That was done by Walt Disney Animation Australia so perhaps it was like an audition of sorts. Most of the episodes use simpler lighting, flatter models, and less demanding staging. The addition of network censors means you’ll rarely see a character throw a punch and instead there’s lots of pouncing and the old animation standby move of a character on their back flipping an adversary off of them.
Censorship and lesser animation are but a disappointment, but not something that should necessarily doom an animated series. When people cite the third season of Gargoyles as being just plain bad, I have to believe it’s largely due to the approach being quite different. The first two seasons were, more or less, serialized. One plot beget another and during many chapters of the show one episode lead into another. Networks hate that sort of thing because one delayed episode can ruin everything. Many also believe it makes it hard for viewers to jump in and out of a series and if you’re alienating first-time viewers then you’re not growing your audience. Either there was a mandate to end that, or having a bunch of new writers necessitated lore taking a backseat to stand-alone episodes. And it’s not as if the show’s first 65 episodes were all bangers, it’s just that filler episodes tend to get lost easier when a show is airing on week days as opposed to week ends. Much of this third season feels like filler. Some of these episodes could perhaps slide into the first two seasons without much trouble, and some would still stick out as poor.
When it comes to the poor outings, most of them come back to scope. Take “And Justice for All” where Goliath actually gets captured and arrested and put on trial. The recent run of from Dynamite Comics undertook such a plot and it needed the better part of 9 issues to resolve it. The Goliath Chronicles tries to do it in one episode, and while I wouldn’t expect the show to get all of the legal system accurately conveyed in a children’s show, this one still turns out like a mockery of the whole thing. I have my issues with the plot in the comics as well, so in this case neither medium hit it out of the ballpark, but one is clearly inferior and it’s among the least enjoyable episodes of the season. Another episode I strongly disliked was “To Serve Mankind” where Goliath is brainwashed into attempting to murder a peace activist on an international visit to New York. He gets as far as yanking the man from his limo which leads to a rooftop showdown with the non-brainwashed members of the clan and the police. It’s all resolved in the end, but with absolutely no repercussions for the gargoyles and nothing carries over.
There are other episodes that are fine. Lexington (Thom Adcox-Hernandez) taking an interest in the son of Xanatos (Jonathan Frakes), Alexander, leads to a somewhat cute story in the season’s second episode, “Ransom.” We also get to see Hudson (Ed Asner) deal with his own diminishing eye sight by seeking the help of his friend, Jeffrey (Paul Winfield), who also happens to be blind. He’s a returning character and there are other episodes dealing with members of The Pack, the clones, and Demona. Nothing is overly consequential though giving their appearances more of a “Villain of the Week” vibe as opposed to furthering character growth. There seems to be a deemphasis on the magical component of the show in favor of something more grounded. Again, I don’t necessarily find fault with exploring how the gargoyles relate to the humans and their chosen city, but perhaps this was too drastic a change for most.
We also need to talk about Xanatos. The chief rival and villain of the series was basically turned into an ally at the end of the second season. The new writers can hardly be blamed for that turn, but it feels abnormal to see how much of an ally is he is to the gargoyles in this third season. He is often relied upon to save the day and there are moments where I expected a return to the Xanatos of old, but it never comes. He is, as far as I can tell, completely earnest with his reform and consumed with being a father to Alexander and a husband to Fox (Laura San Giacomo), who too is completely reformed. I don’t know that I really wanted to see Xanatos pull another 180 and go full villain once again, but some nuance would have been nice. There’s really no conflict to speak of between he and the clan, though some distrust is still felt. There is a moment where conflict could arise in “Ransom,” but Xanatos squashes it immediately. I don’t love what the later stages of the show’s second season did with Xanatos, but this third season did nothing to rectify that either and instead represents a doubling-down.
There’s a lot that doesn’t work with The Goliath Chronicles, but I suppose there is some time to say what does. I liked the approach of introducing a racist group of gargoyle haters and making that a season-long conflict. I wish there was something done to differentiate The Quarrymen more from the very similar Friends of Humanity as well as real world inspirations. It’s not as if X-Men is the only show that can utilize KKK-adjacent hate groups, but it does feel like there was some obligation on this show to find another way. I did enjoy the episode “The Dying of the Light” and it’s one I felt could have been transported to the second season with relative ease. “Ransom” was enjoyable, though perhaps misplaced as the second episode of the season, and I did like catching up with the clones in a meaningful way in “Genesis Undone.” The season finale does a good job of wrapping-up the season. It even uses a runaway train in much the same manner as the movie Spider-Man 2. Perhaps it was an inspiration? If it was, it’s probably the most meaningful contribution the show made to pop culture.
What drove me to finally watch The Goliath Chronicles after all these years was essentially the fact that there are only so many episodes of this show, of this cast, that it felt silly to dismiss some out of hand. Is the third season bad? In a vacuum, no. It’s a perfectly cromulent season of children’s television. Is it up to the standards of the first two seasons? No. I do think over the years the first two seasons have become deified to a degree because the high points are so high and the show is limited to 65 episodes. I’m not even sure if the show’s worst episode exists in Season 3, but I honestly haven’t given that particular subject much thought. Talented writers worked on this season and, in general, they delivered C-average work. It’s certainly not spectacular, but it’s hardly a trainwreck.
Does all this mean that I’m actually giving The Goliath Chronicles a recommend? Well, not exactly. It’s disposable television and there’s an abundance of that out there to the point where it feels like one doesn’t have the time to waste on anything that isn’t wonderful. I do think if you’re a Gargoyles fan who has never watched it and dismisses it as trash then you do owe it to the show to actually watch it and see for yourself. It’s probably hard at this point to not go into it with an objective mind, but for those that do I think most would come away with a half-hearted “It’s all right.” If you just want to know the main story of Gargoyles and are only interested in the aspects of the story considered canon, then you don’t need to watch this. Even if this season were considered canon, really nothing happens that would have made it difficult to jump into a hypothetical fourth season. It’s all pretty disposable. You can safely stick to the first two seasons, the SLG comics, and the current Dynamite run for the core story. If you just want some new adventures with a familiar cast then at least The Goliath Chronicles might have something new to offer if you’ve been ignoring it for almost 30 years.
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