The written word is all that stands between memory and oblivion. Without books as our anchors, we are cast adrift, neither teaching nor learning. They are windows on the past, mirrors on the present, and prisms reflected all possible futures. Books are lighthouses erected on the dark sea of time.
Of course, Bronx is also useful as a kind of living personality test. If Bronx likes you, it's a [darn] good sign.
First and foremost, that's what I am, I'm a writer. I can't draw worth a darn. I don't draw, I write.
Sometimes when you're in the midst of something you don't always appreciate it while you're doing it. Gargoyles was an exception to that. At the time, I knew we were doing something kind of special. Something that might not be repeatable. It turned out to be, professionally.
I've been fascinated with gargoyles since I was a kid. I took a high school trip to Europe, the 8 countries in 5 weeks kind of trip. Even then I collected postcards of gargoyles. Then I sort of forgot about it. You flash-forward a few years and I'm at Disney, we're looking for an idea to base a show on. I was running series development at the time at Disney TV Animation. And we came up with the Gargoyles comedy series. Which didn't sell!
Certainly if it's something you created, like Gargoyles was for me... on the one hand it becomes you and the other writers as well. It's not like it's a one man band by any means, but at the same time when something's really working, when you've got a group of characters that really are clicking and humming, they begin to tell you what happens next. It just all begins to feel right and that was true about Gargoyles. Not true about every show I ever worked on, but it was definitely true about Gargoyles.
We had 10 months, sliding schedule to do 52 episodes. After you get over the shock of the size of the number, the job became one of expansion.
What goes through one's head when Disney asked for 52 more shows? I remember seeing that in the supplemental features...When they first said "52" I literally laughed, I thought they were kidding. They said, "Well, how many do you think could do?" And I said, "Well, we've got 6 scripts in the works, so 6 obviously we could do. We did 13 last year, I think we could do 13 this year without a problem." I said, "If we really pushed it, I think we could do 18." And they said, "What about 52?" I started laughing but they were serious and eventually they did get the 52 episode order.
Gummi Bears was actually an adventure comedy. It was great fun, it had this terrific backstory, a show created by Jymn Magon. The candy was the inspiration for starting the show in the first place but the series that was created was really great. We felt that Gummi Bears never got the respect it deserved. I don't take any credit for Gummi Bears. Gummi Bears was up and running by the time I joined Disney. I thought it was a great show.
When I got out of college I worked for DC comics. I worked on staff there and I also freelanced for them for about a decade. I spent two years on staff as an editor right out of college. I'm from Los Angeles and I came back here after a couple of years in New York, to go to Graduate School at USC. I wasn't thinking specifically about animation although while I'd worked at DC.
I had co-written one episode of an animated show called Jem and the Holograms. Which at the time I didn't view as the start of a career, I viewed it as, "Hey, someone wants to pay me to write something, and I might get a TV credit, isn't that cool?" So I did it with my writing partner at the time, Cary Bates, and it was interesting but it didn't lead to anything and I didn't think too much about it.
I had studied William Shakespeare in Oxford, England and I had this sort of high faluttin' education but I had also worked in comic books. So, I wasn't too proud to work in something like cartoons.
Years passed and I hadn't really done much writing. Other than the fact that I'm constantly developing new shows, writing up proposals and stuff.
With Gargoyles, I didn't want to walk away. I liked the idea too much, I was too passionate about it and so I went to my bosses and said, "Guys, I want to produce this show." Their initial response, lets call it dubious, but they let me give it a shot and sort of the rest is history. I moved from one side of the desk to the other side of the desk, and became a full time writer which had always been the goal, but I came about getting the actual work in a sort of roundabout way.
