When Gargoyles Met Darkwing: Disney’s Legends Unite

Today on Word Balloon, I’m talking with two legends of Disney TV animation—Greg Weisman, the creator of Gargoyles, and Tad Stones, the mind behind Darkwing Duck. They’re teaming up for the first time in decades for a brand-new crossover comic series — Gargoyles / Darkwing Duck, debuting this January from Dynamite Entertainment.

We’ll dig into how this unlikely mash-up came together, what it’s like blending the gothic mythos of Gargoyles with the high-energy satire of Darkwing Duck, and how the characters reflect two very different eras of Disney storytelling. Beyond the comic,

Greg and Tad share their memories from the golden age of Disney Afternoon syndication—what it was like building shows like DuckTales, Chip ‘n Dale Rescue Rangers, Aladdin: The Animated Series, and of course, Gargoyles—when animation was a daily fixture for millions of kids. And we’ll get real about today’s landscape—how streaming has upended the business model that supported those kinds of shows, what that means for creators, and whether there’s still room for original animated series to thrive outside of nostalgia. 

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hey, everybody, welcome back time for Word Balloon the Comic
book Conversation show John Santras here. Now this starts as
a comic book conversation because they've got Tad Stones, the
creator of Dark Duck, and Greg Weisman, the creative of Gargoyles,
and they have a new crossover comic book at Dynamite.

Speaker 2 (00:15):
Now.

Speaker 1 (00:15):
They both have been doing great stuff with their respective characters.
How the Gargoyles even had a crossover with Fantastic four
this year. But this is really great. They're crossing over
and they're old friends and they have a ton of
war stories about their days as part of the Disney
Adventure Hour, the Monday through Friday show that kids in

(00:36):
the nineties grew up with. That's where duck Tails came from,
Chippendale Rescue Rangers, all that stuff, and they just talk
about really how that was the heyday of animation in
the nineties. I didn't know Tad was the producer behind
the Return of Ja'far, the Aladdin sequel that was a
massive direct market, huge success as far as a VHS

(00:58):
direct to video proper, and it opened the floodgates for
as Greg points out, all these other shows to make
movies direct to video based on television shows and limited animation.
What an industry it's kind of gone, why, they explain
in this episode of Word Balloon. Word Balloon is brought

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Speaker 3 (02:25):
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Speaker 4 (02:49):
Yeah, all beautiful, all right, sure, maher's nice, all right,
And here we go, gentlemen, sack do that, all right?

Speaker 1 (03:00):
Here we go. Welcome back to word Balloon. Every mondy
happy to welcome too. Stalwarts of the animation business who
made afternoon animation really exciting in the nineties and beyond.
I'm so glad they're working together now, bringing their creations
together in a great dynamite crossover series. But happy to

(03:23):
welcome Greg Weisman back to word Balloon and Tad Stones. Gentlemen.
Good to see you both.

Speaker 2 (03:28):
You too, good seeing you, Jan.

Speaker 1 (03:31):
So the tone of Gargoyles and Dark Winged Duck are
certainly different. It's almost like, yeah, say it again, Greg,
what makes you say that?

Speaker 2 (03:41):
Yeah, it's right. I always say I heard people got
the shows mixed up. Sometimes they're so close.

Speaker 1 (03:47):
Kind of and you'll forgive the comparison. But it's almost
like a Howard the Duck Thor crossover, if I put
it in Marvel comic terms. But had you guys known
each other for a long time prior to this crossover?

Speaker 3 (04:01):
Oh yeah, Oh yeah. I helped Tad develop dark Wing
back in the day. That was one of my Tad
was something of a mentor to me. I don't know
if he wants me to say that any good stuff.

Speaker 2 (04:17):
Actually, how long were you How long were you at
the studio before you came on Darkwing?

Speaker 3 (04:23):
I mean I feel like it was almost immediately I
started in eighty nine, And when I started working with
you on Darkwing, it wasn't Dark Wing. It was Double
Owed Duck. Yeah, And I don't want to exaggerate my
role on it. But I was in the room. I

(04:45):
was like, you know, like the Hamilton song.

Speaker 2 (04:47):
I was.

Speaker 3 (04:49):
In the room and and tried to contribute at least
a little. I was a very, very junior executive in
those days.

Speaker 2 (04:59):
Yeah, the studio would basically always have an executive assigned
to a show. The idea was somebody who would know
the show. You know, they saw the development, they saw
what was promised in development in terms of, oh, it's
going to be this kind of show, and they're there
to say, hey, you guys are getting off track of
what you sold. But somebody who knew the show but

(05:23):
was far enough out of it that they could be
objective and give real constructive notes. The bonus for us
is that Greg had been an associate editor at DC Comics,
so he knew every comic reference trope we wanted to
play with silver age stuff, and that was just, you know,

(05:45):
fantastic as far as we were concerned.

Speaker 3 (05:47):
It helped that I was a big geek, is what
you're saying.

Speaker 2 (05:53):
Isn't that wrong with that? Man?

Speaker 1 (05:54):
You're in the right place. That's good.

Speaker 3 (05:55):
I know, I know my audience.

Speaker 1 (05:59):
Greg, I mean, yeah, continue please.

Speaker 3 (06:02):
When I started at Disney. The development department consisted of
my boss, my immediate boss, Bruce Cranston, myself, and Nancy
Battel was was a secretary that Bruce shared with George
Curtin was that is his name, George Kirk, who was

(06:25):
the publicity guy, right, and.

Speaker 2 (06:28):
He handed out with darkwing duck patches.

Speaker 3 (06:30):
Yeah. She worked half time for Bruce and halftime for George.
So the whole department was two and a half people
when I started. And then so I started on a Monday,
but I wasn't there. I was at Disney University for
a day, which is a fancy term for orientation, I guess.
And then I had been there four days when Bruce

(06:51):
left on what was supposed to be a two week
trip to go to England and France to set up
animation studios there, or not to set them up, but
to check on how the setup was going. And he
got over there with a finance guy named Brett Rodgers,
and they found that both studios were kind of disasters

(07:14):
in the making, and so what was supposed to be
a two week trip for him became a six month trip.
And Nancy came to me and said, I want to
make this very clear. I work for Bruce, I do
not work for you.

Speaker 5 (07:31):
And what that meant he went Bruce's house, picked up
his mail, sent him the bill his bills so that
he could pay them because he was had planned on
leaving for two weeks and was gone for six months.

Speaker 3 (07:46):
And then otherwise she just worked for George in publicity,
which meant that the entire development department was me and
I'd been there four days. But you know, so Bruce
and my boss Gary Kreisl said, well, just go follow tataract. Uh,
he's developing a show. You need to learn how to
develop shows. Go follow him around. So that's what I did,

(08:09):
and it was great, by the way, it was terrific.

Speaker 4 (08:12):
And a lot.

Speaker 3 (08:13):
I mean, I think we had a lot of fun.
Mike Piazza, who else was uh, who else worked on
developing that.

Speaker 2 (08:19):
Bob Klein, Bob Clin original pitch Cards, Yeah, yeah, and
Proza was jumping around. He had done a lot of
computer stuff for Tailspin. He did some He's posted stuff
online that's just gorgeous pastel stuff. I'm going I don't
remember those at the time, just remember Bob's things. I

(08:40):
have those in my office. If I hadn't you.

Speaker 3 (08:42):
Know, the show evolved from being a spy parody, which
is some of those elements of you know, in the
whole thrush and uh and everything, But it evolved from
being a spy parody with a duck in a tuxedo.

Speaker 2 (09:00):
Ye that was I got to say. It came from
Jeffrey Katzenberg. Originally, Jeffrey and Michael Eisner both they loved
titles that, at least in their minds, were intriguing to
an audience. I mean, we were supposed to do great
shows that would keep an audience, and their feeling was,
but if you got an interesting title, that initial sampling

(09:22):
would be larger than it's up to you to keep them.
And the Ducktails had done an episode called double o
Duck featuring Launchpad mcquack, and Jeffrey loved the title and
he said that was you know. He told me to
develop it, and he said, the only rule is it
can't star Launchpad, who was the spy in the episode,

(09:44):
because the whole point was to create new characters. They
didn't want a literal spinoff of Ducktails. They wanted a new, complete,
new show that they could license separately and merchandise separately
and all that, and yeah, my first pitch was just
a parody and I was not excited about it, and

(10:06):
it turned out Jeffrey was not either, and luckily, and
it's only occurred to me recently, it's like, I gotta
luck was shining on me because normally when someone fails
like that and more modern times, they'd say, yeah, we'll
get somebody else on it. Dad's not getting it. Instead,
he just told me to do it over. And it

(10:26):
was the fact that we had this artwork of a
duck in a white tuck seal, a mask and a
hat and a cake that it was Duwayne Capeasi, story
editor of Men in Black and Jackie Chan all sorts
of things. Who was you know, at the studio at
the time. And he looked at it and said, you know,
that outfit reminds me more of the old pulp heroes

(10:49):
like the Shadow and Green Hornet. And that was the
light bulb that went off over my head. That was
a key moment where I said, yeah, because that got
me away from the you know, Double seven Q, you
know all those tropes. It's like, oh, no, Doc Savage
had you know, five guys who were all eccentric in

(11:11):
different ways, and some got along. One looked like an ape,
and the other guy was a pressy Englishman and this
guy was about communications. This guy was a chemical engineer
and all that. I said, oh, we could do that
way too many people to put into an episode, because
to service all those you'd never get to your story.
The story and Launchpad was still hanging around. He just

(11:34):
seemed like a good fit for whatever reason. In fact,
early development it was almost a thing where he thought
he should beat the buy. Anyway, we kept trimming it down.
The show really really didn't crack. So we added the
idea that what if he had a daughter, you know,

(11:54):
who refused to stay at home. Ultimately, after the show
was underway, we would just say, yeah, what if Batman
had little girl who refused to stay at home. That
was the premise and then it got okay. People, you know,
the executive like the show. We went out and sold
it and then Kebby Brockley and Company, who owned the
rights to double O seven, said, uh, double is not

(12:17):
a thing. It was invented by Ian Fleming. We own
it and you can't have it. And I think when
they saw the double page spread in the Hollywood Trades.
They were saying, look, we're still doing Bond, We're trying
to redevelop Bond. We can't have him made fun of.
And that was the best thing because that freed me.
We kept in my mind that spy background that we

(12:40):
had created is what funded his cool stuff. But that
just let me go crazy with you know, the comics
I grew up with could not think of a name
for him, and it was we had a contest. Now,
Gary Kreisel our boss, notoriously a cheap person, and he

(13:02):
came to company funds. I think the studio execs loved
him because he treated the money as if it was his,
not Disney's. Astoundingly, he said, let's do a contest. We'll
have a five hundred dollars prize, which in nineteen eighty nine,
nineteen ninety dollars whatever, that was pretty good. We got

(13:23):
this huge list of names, names and names, dead Eye Duck,
dead Shot Duck, a Ney d the Fabulous Duck, you know,
this weird stuff. And it was Alan Burnett who came
up with the idea of dark Wing. You know, night
Wing had never entered my brain. He did dark Wing,
and I said, that's perfect that's who he thinks he

(13:46):
is in his head. Let's add duck to it, because
that makes it goofyer. It's close to what he really is.
And of course Alan went. Alan won the money and
then left. He did a little show called Just a
Batman with Bruce Tim where he stayed until you retired.

(14:08):
So anyway, that freed me for all the silver age stuff,
and that's you know, that's when we really took off.

Speaker 1 (14:14):
That's excellent, man, all right.

Speaker 3 (14:17):
Flip of that, The flip side of what Tad was
saying is that a couple of years later, I was
pitching Gargoyles as a comedy adventure show, very much inspired
by Disney's Adventures of the Gummy Bears. So instead of
a bunch of cute little multi colored bears bouncing around,

(14:39):
I had a bunch of cute little multicolored gargoyles flying around.
And instead of because it was the nineties and so
everything had to be edgy, instead of setting it in
this sort of vague pastoral medieval time, we had this
rich medieval backstory, but we said it in modern day Manhattan.

(15:01):
But it was a comedy show, and I had pitched
that to Eisner and he had passed on it, but
Gary felt that there was something to it, and he
said keep working on it. And again in the in
those days, we were small enough company or division that
he didn't take it from me and give it to

(15:23):
someone else. He told me to keep going on it.
So I showed the pitch to a handful of people,
including Tad, and as I recall, Tad had just seemed
an early like an animatic of Ben and the Beast.

Speaker 2 (15:41):
Yeah, it was. It was a little bit of color,
as I recall, a lot of beautiful pencil tasks and
even you know, a story rail or what people now
referred to as an animatic. And I'd just come fresh
from one of those screenings, and.

Speaker 3 (15:55):
He said, instead of doing all these little cute gargoyles,
but if you did one big gargoyle, and because we
already had a human female who was sort of friend
to the gargoyles in the show, what if you did
a Beauty and the Beast thing with these two. And
you know, again, my background was comic books, and so
that clicked for me, and I worked with an artist

(16:17):
named Greg Guhler to design Goliath. There was no parallel
to Goliath in the original comedy development, and so that
little bit of inspiration from Tad led to the creation
of Goliath, and then we took the whole comedy show
and put it through the prism of Goliath and came
out the other end fundamentally with the show that you know,

(16:38):
the action drama that people are now familiar with. And
so I like to think that I was helpful on
Dark Wing, and I know that Tad was helpful on Gargoyles.
And so when Nate Cosby, our editor on this book
and my editor on all the Gargoyles titles, said hey,

(17:01):
you want to do a Gargoyles Dark Wing crossover, I
don't know who he asked first, but we both had
the same response. It's like, yeah, I'll do it if
Tadd will do it. And I think Tad you said
more or less the same thing.

Speaker 2 (17:13):
Yeah. Actually the person who came up with it is
Nick publisher of Donald Roucci or Roccie. He does a
weekly show, I Guess or something, or a show where
he's showing original art and I know where he's auctioning
it and a way to see what's coming up. And
I was stopped in as a guest and we just

(17:35):
chatted a little bit, and he's the one who just
said that he had both licenses. What do you think,
you know? Would you do a Darkwing Duck Gargoyle's crossover?
And I chucked him. I said, well, you can get
Disney to agree to it. I said, Greg knows dark Wing,
you know from the ground up. You know. I thought

(17:58):
that was the end of it. And then suddenly I
got the same called Greg Gott and they went for it.
So we get notes on the stupidest things, and yet
we're somebody combined Dark Wing, Duck and Gargoyle.

Speaker 1 (18:12):
He goes, yeah, whatever, that's so what kind of notes
do you get?

Speaker 2 (18:18):
I'll say this is on the dark Wing comic I
saw Disney doesn't Oh, we've got the stupid ones on
this one too. But on the dark Wing comic I
did a cover and Disney is really careful. They don't
want you know. And these kind of rules in my
outside of opinion now seem to change as middle managers change.

(18:42):
It's not there. They're not written down anywhere. It's like, oh,
my boss now is going to loosen up on this,
and he's you know, got to stick up his but
about this sort of thing. Anyway. They do not want
any like Easter eggs hidden around because they see it
as you're promoting another Disney product, and we don't want that.

(19:05):
I mean they I guess because they would look like
business people are something you know.

Speaker 3 (19:13):
That happened on our book. We uh yeah, there's a
There was a scene early on an issue one to
sort of establish dark Wing before the two franchises meet
up in Essence where I Tad and I plotted this together,
but I've been scripting it, and where dark Wing comes

(19:36):
up against the Beagle Boys who have come to Saint
Cannar and they're like, oh, no, you can't use the
Beagle Boys there from from Duct Tails And I'm like, well,
I know, but so launch Pad. It's all one universe, right,
and they're like, uh no, no, that will be seen
as us trying to promote Oh. My initial thing was

(19:59):
who why not? Who are you afraid of suing? You know,
I mean, we're in Disney's going to sue you over this?
I don't understand. And and Disney's response was, no, no,
it's not that. It's it's that we don't want to
look like we're promoting another title in uh in this book,

(20:19):
and I'm like, but we are, We're promoting dark Wing
and gargoy And they're like, yes, yes, but but this
isn't a dark Wing Gargoyles Ducktails crossover. And I'm like,
oh my god.

Speaker 2 (20:30):
But the cover that's out on the new Dark Wing,
or at least solicited right now, is talking about Darkwing,
you know, being a master of disguise. And and so
the cover I did is a diner full of different characters,
you know, a cop, a fireman. You know, it's that

(20:51):
they all have dark Wing space. You know. Well, next
to the fireman is a Dalmatian, but it's not an
actual dog. It's you know, a duck face with dark
ones you know face and basically what amounts to a
ones the Halloween costume, you know, with a hood and
ears like that. Disney gave a note because he had

(21:14):
a red collar on that I had to change the
color of the collar because that was the same color
as Pongo from one hundred one Dalmatians. It's like, what
but you know, thank god, easy change. You know, that's
what photoshop is for. Click you know, okay, green collar. Wow.
So you know those kind of notes are you know,

(21:40):
thank god that was an easy one, you know, like that,
and it's one of those things where the change of
the big old boys is like seeing the big big
old boys is kind of arguably a little plus rather
than a nondescript of thugs. Greg had to create new guys,
which are you know, fine by you know, it would

(22:01):
have been a little different twist.

Speaker 3 (22:03):
It's so more fun. It's more fun with the Beagle.

Speaker 1 (22:06):
Absolutely, and it's so weird because you know, you would think,
I'm always like stunned that what you guys are doing
with the Star Wars people are doing, what the Marvel
people are doing, you're all under the Disney umbrella. And
it's like with the Star Wars sequels that they really
didn't seem connected in ways that would make sense so

(22:27):
many the second and third movies, and it's like and
metaphorically right across the street, same company, Marvel is doing
this and having great success, joining all their their their
properties in the in this like series. Yeah, you would
think again, with what you guys are doing.

Speaker 3 (22:43):
They haven't featured Dark Wing in a Star Wars thing.

Speaker 2 (22:49):
The Planet of the Dutch. Maybe a Guardian of the
Galaxy would be well, yeah, exactly, Howard the Duck and yeah, yeah,
I mean, I guess back in the day, you know,
we had sansor practice at the networks. One of the
areas was you go early enough in kids TV and
the commercials are just you know, everywhere, and you had

(23:11):
the hosts talking about the commercials, and you know, they
clamped down on that. So I guess in some ways,
like I know, there was a Darkling Duck cover where
the guys had had a claw machine and in there
was a dark Wing Duck doll. Sure, and they said, no,

(23:31):
no change that. We don't we don't. We don't want
to use the comics to sell dark Wing merchandise, or
a lot, at least not too blatantly, I guess. So anyway,
And I mean I was told with covers not to
do because I had done comic commissions where you know,
you do a Vendors number four, the famous one of
Kirby's Captain America coming right at you. You know, I

(23:53):
had done those featuring the Justice Ducks, and they totally
know no parodies, thought okay, whatever, and they're Marvel did
a whole line of parodies, and in that case, I thought, oh, okay,
you didn't want any parodies because they're doing we're going
to be doing them or something like that. Just be

(24:13):
clear about that. But yeah, melding that, melding the two
universes was a lot of fun. I think Greg had
in some way that my point of view, Greg was
having more fun writing Dark Wing than he was his
own guys. It was like, stretch these muscles in a while.

Speaker 1 (24:31):
And how about the reverse stead writing Uh, did you
did you die?

Speaker 2 (24:35):
Greg? Greg was doing the heavy lifting. We was, you know,
we kind of I mean, we were on the same
page even before we started in that I felt the
impetus of the story would logically have to come from
the Gargoyle's world, so it's a serious threat, whatever that
threat would be. And Greg was already there and had

(24:56):
you know, his chief villainous be the the character who
starts things and comes into dark Wings world, because we
had a sorceress character that she could interact with and
in her point of view, tempt. So I mean, then
we went back and forth, and then I would give
notes to Greg even sometimes Actually my wife's always saying,

(25:21):
when are you going to clean up the desk? It's like, well,
you never know when I'm I mean, I'm would do
you know, drawings of gag ideas. You know, I don't
know if Nate's actually passing them on to Cerrol who's
you know, or Chiro who's doing the art, but it
sometimes it's like, okay, this is this is how I'm
seeing it, to just kind of push them roots of

(25:44):
the story.

Speaker 3 (25:45):
I'm describing tad sketches in the scripts as much of
detail as like, yeah, but but yeah, it's sort of
on Nate to pass the actual sketches over to Serol.
I don't know if he has, but I tried to
describe them the way Ted drums.

Speaker 1 (26:01):
Yeah, how do you say your artist's name?

Speaker 2 (26:06):
I think it's Chiro ken Gielosi. Okay, I'm going to say,
and that's probably the best way I've ever said it.
So I'm not a rippet.

Speaker 1 (26:14):
I know that a lot of European Disney artists are
fantastic in terms of the ability to stay on model
as far as you know, character design and stuff like that.
Do you know his background?

Speaker 2 (26:25):
Is he?

Speaker 1 (26:25):
Is he in a nation? Guy?

Speaker 2 (26:27):
Or the thing that they? I have no idea, and
actually they have their own models that they have the
neat they If you really know the stuff, you realize
that these guys have slightly different styles, but they have
such life to them. I did a convention in Belgium

(26:47):
years ago and I got to meet a bunch of
the guys and I have some like original art in
my house that they did of Dark Wing and Donald
you know, together, and I'm just in awe of their
ink line. How they do it, and what Chiro does
is a He does a great job of putting light
in the still image. Because again, even when I'm thinking

(27:10):
or even doing the little sketches, it's like, I know
how this would work in animation. But you know, a
comic is not a storyboard. It is here. You've got
a panel. The only one thing can happen in the panel,
but you can suggest what is happening or how fast
what you basically what you cut to in the next panel.

(27:31):
You you know, hopefully the reader filled in, you know,
the animation of a head swelling larger or whatever. But
his drawing has tons of lot. He's been doing covers
going back on He's done a lot of the variance
on the Dark Wing set, and I think he did
the artwork. I can be wrong about this. On the

(27:53):
Negaduct series that Jeff Parker did okay, okay, yeah, and Greg,
you have you worked with this guy before?

Speaker 3 (28:02):
No, this is the first time. But the stuff I'm
seeing looks fantastic, and I don't have any personal interaction
with him. It all goes through Nate. But but again,
I'm loving. I got no complaints, so let me put
it that way. It's all great.

Speaker 1 (28:20):
How did the glark Oyl series play internationally? I would
think amazingly so, given that that's really where all the
real guard growths.

Speaker 3 (28:26):
Are historically, it did really well internationally. I don't have
intel on you know, how the comics are doing internationally.
I know they're doing pretty well for Dynamite Gear domestically,
and I don't even know how Dynamite distributes stuff internationally. Frankly,

(28:48):
that's about my pay grade.

Speaker 1 (28:49):
I'm heavy.

Speaker 3 (28:52):
But I do know that I've been working with a
number of different international artists lately. On George Campadais did
a bunch of Gargoyles stuff for US, and I worked
with Enid Baalam on Fantastic for Gargoyles for Marvel, and

(29:16):
and Pascal on Gargoyle's Quest, and all of them sort
of expressed me like not to make me feel old.
I'm sure that's not the point, but to say I
love this as a kid. I love Gargoyles as a kid.
So they're all sort of fans. They're just so young.

(29:41):
But yeah, you know it must have done some good
business or at least got a little attention internationally, because
I've got all these artists who are doing covers or
doing issues and stuff, and they seem to be big
fans of the series. And that's, you know, tremendously gratifying
of course. Uh, and you know they're knocking out great stuff, right, Greg.

Speaker 1 (30:09):
I got to ask because a couple of weeks ago
for Halloween. Every now and then we'll do movie reviews
on my show, and we do old movies that maybe
have slipped through the cracks over the back.

Speaker 3 (30:17):
And I swear to god, you're going to say to me,
so a couple of weeks ago for Halloween, I dressed
up as Demona and.

Speaker 2 (30:24):
That's that's between me and it got a real spit
take there because my brain went.

Speaker 1 (30:33):
But no, I was gonna ask. And I don't know
if you ever saw this, man, maybe Tad did too.
There's an old early seventies TV movie Gargoyles. Uh, yeah, okay,
was that was that at all in inspiration for.

Speaker 3 (30:45):
For We watched it. The crew watched it between season
one and season two. We didn't even know about it, okay,
so that we were way down the road. We watched
it between seasons with Bernie Casey is the lead bargoyl
and and and there was absolutely similarities and so you know,

(31:11):
we were having a good I mean watching over lunch,
a long lunch, uh before we started, uh it's research
pre production on season two, not really research, more like
this should be fun. And then and then you know,
there were some parallels, you know, even down to you know,

(31:33):
casting Bernie as the lead gargoyle and we had Keith
as the lead gargoyle and and there and the gargoyles
in that are the villains, but they're also fairly sympathetic villains,
certainly characters that Demona would could relate to, except that
they their plot was too unsophisticated for her. But uh, yeah,

(31:59):
so I am aware of it. I wasn't when we
created the show, but we we all watched it, a
whole group of the set down watch that's great.

Speaker 1 (32:08):
I'm not angling for a lawsuit or anything. I believe
believe I'm not.

Speaker 3 (32:13):
You know, we did get sued, not by really, we
got sued by h Gargoyles Sunglasses.

Speaker 1 (32:19):
No way, what the hell, just because of the name.

Speaker 3 (32:22):
Trademark, the name they and they saw an image of
the character of Brooklyn wearing sunglasses and they said, those
are our sunglasses. And We're like, no, we didn't know
you existed. Uh, and those are just fairly generic sunglasses
drawn by one of our artists who also didn't know

(32:44):
that Gargoyles sunglasses existed.

Speaker 2 (32:46):
So we got suits by the Disney one in court
by pointing out that our gargoyles do not exist in
the daylight. Yeah, therefore they cannot be wearing their sunglasses.
They only come out at.

Speaker 1 (32:58):
Night, was it? That's the Corey Hart defense. If you
know your eighties pop hits sunglasses at night. That was
a big songback then.

Speaker 2 (33:08):
Like the rest of the time in court was just
the judge asking Greg about you know, it never.

Speaker 3 (33:14):
Went to trial. I did get deposed. I was deposed.

Speaker 1 (33:17):
But would you say, sir, in your own words, the
similarities yet, the differences of the gargoss sunglasses and your animation?
Crazy crazy man, man?

Speaker 3 (33:31):
Wow, I mean that's the thing. Anyone can sue anyone.
That's why, you know, lawyers and companies like Disney are
so gun shy because it's not about whether or not
that they lose the case. It's about the money it costs,
the nuisance factor. If you present anything that puts them

(33:51):
at risk, they don't even they don't want to deal
with any of that. Sure, if it were just about
you can do it as long as you know you're
in the they don't care. They just don't want to
have to deal with. Yeah, the legal fees and all
that goes with because anyone can sue anyone over anything.

(34:14):
It doesn't matter whether it's legit or not. If it's
not legit, one hopes doesn't always happen, but one hopes
that down the road it'll get tossed or whatever.

Speaker 2 (34:24):
But you know, we used to have all the staff
writers and story editors, would you know, have these meetings
with somebody from Disney Legal, just to go through in detail,
this is what's allowed in parody, this is what satire
this is. You know, we go through that. We all

(34:44):
knew it in any of those cases, especially when I
was doing a Latin because Genie can go through you know,
many changes and transformations. Whenever we'd be very careful to
follow the letter of the law, and they would send
it to legal. Legal would say no, and it was
just we finally realized, Uh, the men's the mentality is

(35:08):
nobody gets in trouble for saying no. But if you
say yes and somebody brings a nuisance suit or whatever,
that's interesting. You're costing us money.

Speaker 3 (35:19):
Right, Who knew that's you know, that's so we've so
parody becomes almost impossible to do if the lawyers are
going to say no to everything. And we used to
have a phrase taught to me by Disney lawyer named
markin Chillian, a Latin legal term called deminimus, which is
if the reference is just small and quick for a

(35:42):
quick joke, that's fine. You're not going to get in
trouble for that. And so I've done a lot of
things that fell under the dominimous category, not just for Disney,
but at many companies that I've worked at over the years,
and they get called out and I'm like, and sometimes
this worked. I go, no, no, it's fine, it's deminimus.

(36:02):
And the lawyer that I'm talking to knowes, well, yeah,
like they know that legal term, so they're like, oh,
sometimes they'll go, oh, okay, yeah, it's de minimus. Yeah.
And the fact that I knew that one term, and
that's pretty much the only legal term I know.

Speaker 2 (36:17):
How could I How could you resist not creating a
gargoyle or a villain named yeah?

Speaker 1 (36:24):
Okay?

Speaker 3 (36:25):
Yeah, but uh but sometimes even that didn't work. You know,
they just be like, doesn't matter, we don't do that.
We're a big glass house. We don't want to throw
any stones, you know, And that becomes the attitude. This
has sort of devolved into a bitch session about uh, there.

Speaker 1 (36:44):
Is legal problems. Honestly, guys, it is it is behind
the scenes stuff that I really appreciate when it does
come up here on the podcast. So I'm I am
glad to hear about about that kind of stuff. And
Ted it inspires a question regarding Chip and Dale the
Lonely Island movie that they made with mulleni and and
Adam Sandberg and stuff, and You're like, were you were

(37:05):
you at all? Because wasn't there a lot of parody
in that?

Speaker 2 (37:08):
It was? Oh, it was all parody. It was all
it was basically the conceit was what of what we saw.
I mean it's like Roger Rabbit. Frankly, yes, it's like
what the movie. The cartoon show you saw was all
filmed with sets and actors, and the actors were these
animated characters and all that, and then they just had

(37:29):
fun from that premise backing up. But when the first
trailer went out, I thought it was hilarious. You know,
I got it. You know, we're you know, fans, or
at least some fans thought I'd be in rage. How
can they do this to you and your creations and
all that. The show is still there. This is something different,

(37:55):
and I guess the fact that I I was complimentary
to it and I said it looksious to me. I
can't wait. They got in touch with me and had
me play myself in the movie in that there's a
scene where a studio executive gives them a phone call

(38:15):
and offers Chippendale a show, and that's me on the
phone and myself and my partner Alan's aslov also have
our names very tiny on the back of a cargo
ship that's going across. So no, I really enjoyed it,
and you know, went to the Premierellywood Boulevard. It was great,

(38:35):
But your.

Speaker 3 (38:36):
Question, I think was about how did they get away
with all this parody? And the thing is that once
you raise the budget on thing, once it becomes in
essence an a list thing and not us doing cartoons
in the basement, so to speak, suddenly all those rules
that were such a big problem start to go away,

(38:58):
you know, and you know, and they're just allowed to
get away with things, which we should be also. I'm
not saying they shouldn't. I'm saying we should also be
allowed to get away with And it's like, oh, no,
you're not allowed to do that. You're just a conduct.

Speaker 2 (39:13):
No. Animators are famous for causing trouble for a company,
like Greg says, a big budget. It's like the lawyers, no,
they know what parody is allowed and all of that,
and it's and you know, we've gotten notes along those
lines that are ridiculous because it's like Mad Magazine wouldn't
exist if you couldn't do parody, you know, No, I

(39:35):
you know, there was.

Speaker 3 (39:36):
An Animate episode that was a huge, just top to
bottom parody written by Kevin Hopps of Beauty and the Beast,
and and we're like they did that, why can't we
parody I mean in the original Gargoyles series there there
was a scene we had where Puck, the character Puck

(39:58):
who's magical, checks the time and he pulls out from
this tiny little pocket this giant uh watch uh time piece,
you know, And originally it was a Mickey Mouse watch,
a huge Mickey Mouse watch. And they're like, no, no, you
can't do that.

Speaker 2 (40:20):
Uh.

Speaker 3 (40:20):
And we're like, why not again, who's going to sue you?
You own Mickey Mouse And they were like, no, no,
you can't promote a Mickey Mouse product in in a
in a Gargoyles cartoon. I'm like, that's not what we're
doing here, and and they're like, no, you can't, you
can't do it. So, you know, he wound up still

(40:42):
pulling out the giant uh watch. But it was it
was just a generic watch as a and like, it's
that much less funny. Why are you doing this? And
and the answer is because we just we just don't
want to deal And honestly, that's the answer. We don't
want to deal with it. I don't want to get
a letter saying, uh, you know, we're in a defensible position,

(41:05):
that's not the point. I don't want to I don't
even want to see a letter from a parent saying
what are you doing promoting Mickey Mouse product on a
Gargoles televisionhow I'm like, no one is going to send
that letter. And they're like, you can't promise me that,
And I'm like, I can promise you that. I may
be wrong, but I can promise here.

Speaker 2 (41:26):
Sure, yeah, you know, and and back in the day,
it's not so much of a thing now because generally
google and send letters is an emails which have less
weight and no because literally if you took the time
to write something and put it physically in an envelope
and buy a stamp and put it on and go

(41:46):
to the mailbox and all that, it's like, oh, we
got to take that one seriously as opposed to me
and then push. You know, back when we were doing shows,
it was I know, Winnie the Pooh started by Carl

(42:07):
Gears went, you know, started on the Disney Channel at
the time, which was much smaller, and they they did
an episode where it talked about fears of there's things
under the bed. I think they were dust bunnies or
something like that, and you know, they got letters from
a mom saying, you know, I heard my child crying

(42:30):
and all that. I walked in and I was amazed
that it was Winnie the Pooh, and man, they took
that so seriously until the ratings came out, because when
the ratings Winnie the Pooh took there, they put it
on Sunday mornings. They want to say, like the lowest
rated time slot became their top rated time slot. Suddenly
all those letters just went away.

Speaker 3 (42:49):
You know, we got a letter on Ductails. There was
an episode with magic and the Spell and duct Tails.
We got a letter again, a physical letter, so does
carry more weight from a woman who is like, I
can't believe you're promoting Satanism. That is anything magic? Right?

(43:11):
That Satanism in a Disney cartoon, Anything magic that is Satanism?
Don't you know that? And my favorite part of the
letter was Walt Disney must be rolling in his grave.
And I felt like responding. I was tasked with responding
to this back when I was an executive. Have you

(43:33):
seen snow White? Like, let's not take that attitude, like
by the way to say that we had a.

Speaker 2 (43:43):
Whole episode of a darkwing duck hotspelled where Goslin is
tricked by the devil in disguise in designing a contract,
and I just took it as this is a literary
conceit where it's Devil and Daniel Webbs or whatever filest
you know, you do the story with the devil and

(44:04):
temptation and all that, and it got it was an
ABC show and it got just enough letters evidently from
the South that said basically, pree, Harry Potter, how can.

Speaker 1 (44:16):
You do this?

Speaker 2 (44:17):
And da da dad the same thing. They pulled it.
They never showed it again. Disney then pulled it out
of their syndication rotation, and from then I've had to
explain this to people as it goes to different you know,
media or ways of putting it out their distribution systems
like the Disney Plus or whatever. Nobody does due diligence.

(44:39):
Nobody goes in and makes a twenty twenty five decision
on is this acceptable or not. They just take what's
been done the package, and that's what goes on the air,
so that one's always been gone. The same thing. The
going back to the pilot of or what's called the
pilot of Darkling of which was a you know, multi

(45:03):
part because of the change. We would take episodes and
stack them vertically to show on Friday Night as a
movie to promote the show, and then they'd be divided
up into episodes. The time, the length of the what
was needed at night was a little longer than what

(45:23):
was needed when you divided it up, so I said, well,
this is great. We don't want to play the theme
song twice in a row. So the opening of the
Darkwing Duck part was set to the Dark Wing Duck
theme song. Some of the best animation we got from
all Australia studios, and once I got it back, I

(45:44):
should have shown it once a week to the step.
It really showed how this guy manages to defeat villains
and yet get clobbed in that acme anvil kind of way,
and yet turn it to his advantage. It was just brilliant.
From our storyboard guide to the execution in Australia, well

(46:06):
they I said, this is perfect a minute long. You
snip it out with the title sequences and that brings
us to time. When it went to DVD, nobody, especially
back in the day of DVD extras, nobody checked that
there was extra footage and so the only place that
beautiful piece of animation is you can find it on
YouTube sometimes and then gets taken down somebody else puts

(46:28):
it up. But you know that there is a kind
of machine element to producing of these shows. You get
back to the comic, there's you know, that is a
personal thing where we go back and forth and we're
making sketches. And to me, it was it was fun
having the Disney show that I most think of continuity

(46:51):
Gargoyle to the show that was you know, born in
the Silver Age where continuity didn't matter in a comic.
Trying to combine those two worlds, you know, and that
was it was fun.

Speaker 1 (47:04):
That's excellent. How many how many issues for this mini series?
Or for four issues? Okay, all right, that's that's cool,
and yeah it does it start this month? November January?
So wrong.

Speaker 2 (47:18):
I saw somewhere that was coming out a few weeks
and I said, oh, I should promote that, which is
the one thing to do. Although I said, no, check
with your comic store every week.

Speaker 1 (47:26):
And yeah, yeah, pre order you know, as we know,
pre order is the name of the game. As far
as hopefully begatting other you know, mini series cross so
I'm sure both of you would be open to more
crossovers with the two of you.

Speaker 2 (47:42):
Correct.

Speaker 1 (47:43):
Sure, yeah, boy, I figured it. I figured that's great.
I got to ask Greg, and I'm going to ask
about a couple other shows for both of you, and
and comics and stuff. First of all, what what what
comics did you work on as an associate editor at DC.

Speaker 3 (48:00):
I this is mid eighties. I worked on all of
Roy Thomas's books, so All Star, Squadron, Infinity, Yank Young,
All Stars, Power of Shazam, Secret Origins. I also worked
on Marv Wolfman's books at the time, so New Teen Titans,

(48:23):
Tales of the Teen Titans, Teen Titans, Spotlight. Sure, I'm
forgetting something. And then I was also freelancing on the side,
So Carrie Bates and I co wrote Captain Adam for
four years. I started doing that when I was at
d C, kept doing it while I was in graduate

(48:43):
school at USC, and then did it for a good
year while I was after I'd started at Disney. I
was still you know, I had to get special dispensation
from legal to continue to write a monthly comic. But
I was doing Captain Adam for at least a year.

Speaker 2 (49:02):
I think had you written any comics before working with
Kerry Bates?

Speaker 3 (49:08):
I'd written a lot and not and sold it. That is,
I got paid for it, and none of it got
published for all sorts of reasons. I Dick Giordano, who
was a mentor of mine at d C, had me
do I really loved Supergirl, so he had me doing

(49:28):
develop a new Supergirl series, and I wrote two or
three issues of that, and then they decided they were
going to kill Supergirl in Prices on Infinites, and then
I wrote Black Canary mini series, and then Mike Grell said,
after Frank Millard Batman Dark Knight returns, Mike Grell pitched

(49:55):
doing another Prestige series around Greenio called The Longbow on Earth,
and Dick said to Mike, that's great because we're doing
this Black Canary mini series. And at the end of
the mini series they get engaged, and Grell was like, no,
I don't want that, don't do that, which was, of course,
the drive of the whole four issues was to go
from them being having been a couple who had dated

(50:19):
for a decade at least by that time, not twenty years.
In Justice League, it was like, okay, they sort of
either this relationship is going somewhere, it's not. They break up,
they get back together, and they get engaged. And that
was something that the whole thing drove towards. So when
Grell said he didn't want that, it killed, you know,

(50:41):
and I get it. It's like Mike Grell versus Greg
Weisman and Mike Szakowski. It wasn't much of a contest,
you know, And so that got killed. So I kept
I was actually earning money, but it was tremendously frustrating
because I wasn't get anything published. And the first thing
that I actually got published was partnered with carry On

(51:03):
Captain Adam, and.

Speaker 2 (51:05):
But that was still you were It's funny as you
as you brought these names. It's like the Gear Donald
and Roy Thomas and all that. It's like, you know,
I think there's a good chunk of word balloon listeners
who would know those names. You know, you were edited
by these guys, so you had to be picking up
stuff about comics and.

Speaker 3 (51:27):
Oh, I mean I've read comics for years and years,
and I wasn't edited by Royan and Marv. I was
there assistant editor or associate editor.

Speaker 2 (51:39):
I mean of the of the scripts that you wrote, of.

Speaker 3 (51:41):
The ones I wrote, Yeah, Dick was editing amazing because
and he would have eventually passed them off to an editor,
but they again, they never got far enough to publication
to do that. And I worked with Salom and Dola

(52:06):
on well with Karen Berger on New Talent Showcase and
then Salom and Dola on Talent Showcase, and I've got
some of the start on my wall right now. But
like Dick Airs and I did a Western because I
did a supero thing for New Talent Showcase and then
Salth took over the book from Karen and they retitled

(52:28):
The Talent Showcase. And because it was going to team
new talent like me quote unquote in theory with older
talent like Dick Airs, so he team me up with
Dick Airs to do a Western. And because he didn't
want superhero stuff, so my superhero series was just shelved.
I'd gotten paid for it. It was shell And then

(52:51):
I did this western with Dick and the western was
about a sort of young teenage farm hand put in
the position of having to deal with these outlaws, and
he was the idea was he was tall and skinny,
but not you know, he didn't carry a gun. He

(53:12):
you know, he was a farm hand he wasn't like
even a cowboy. He was just a farm hand and
and and the first few pages are great, but Dick
chose He told me this later. He's like, when he
gave him a hat, he used the hat that he

(53:32):
had used on ah, some classic cowboy like.

Speaker 2 (53:42):
Or two Gun Kids.

Speaker 3 (53:44):
He was like wild Bill Hillcock or something like, not
like a fictional cowboy, but some series he had done. Ah,
he just liked that hat. And I said, the hat's fine.
Here's the problem. Even within the first story then there
was it was a five part thing, serialized ten page segments.

(54:06):
But even within the first story, by the end of
the story, this sixteen year old kid becomes a thirty
five year old man with a chiseled jaw and uh
and you know, muscles and all this stuff. And I
point this out to Dick and he was sweet about it.
He was very embarrassed. He's like, oh my god, it's

(54:26):
become It wasn't wild Bill Hillcock.

Speaker 2 (54:30):
It was.

Speaker 3 (54:32):
Who's the guy from ok Corral? My brain just white Earth. Uh.
It just became wider by the end of the issue,
and by the end of the story, and in the
second segment it was Wieter from beginning to end it
was this older and so I'm like, this doesn't work
anymore because the whole point is that this kid is

(54:53):
this huge underdog. This guy looks like he could take
out these bad guys three seconds, you know. And also
he's aged twenty years over ten pages, you know. And
so Dick's like, it's this is on me. I'll redraw
it all. I'll redraw it all. But by the time
he redrew it, Town Showcase was canceled. So again I

(55:17):
got paid for it all, but I still hadn't gotten published.

Speaker 1 (55:21):
You got yeah later.

Speaker 3 (55:24):
I uh, I actually went to Paul Levinson and bought
back those two ideas. Oh wow, So everything I got
paid for this series called Red, White, and Blue, which
I had done for New Talent Showcase, and for Outlaw,
which I did for Talent Showcase. Well, that money I paid,

(55:46):
I paid back so I could get the rights to
it back.

Speaker 1 (55:49):
God it please put it out? Is that great?

Speaker 2 (55:52):
Put it out?

Speaker 1 (55:52):
Man?

Speaker 2 (55:53):
Is that? All I've got is literally.

Speaker 3 (55:55):
Got one page. I don't have the art. Oh black
and like xerox is a pencils, you know, And.

Speaker 1 (56:02):
Yeah I had. I had the pleasure of meeting him
years ago at a convention I had him due and
if I had known, I would have done asked him
for one of the Marvel Cowboys or Sergeant Fury. But
I asked him to do Iron Man with that fantastic
face plate that had the points at the top that
very briefly in the mid sixties. Yes, exactly there you go,

(56:23):
ted out a boy. But Greg, I got to ask
him bout working with Carry Bates. He's literally my favorite
Bronze age writer and I've tried desperately to get him. Well,
I shouldn't say desperately. I asked Elliott Magan to put
in a word for me to maybe get Carrie. Thank god,
Mark Miller.

Speaker 3 (56:40):
Got h you just send me an email and hermind.

Speaker 1 (56:43):
Me will oh god, please, I would. I would love
that because yeah, you know, Mark Miller had a wonderful
interview with him, and I am I'm such a fan.
It was so great and I don't know if you
guys read it, but in the twenty tens he wrote
in else Worlds of what If all of jor El,
Laura and and Kalo all, Oh my god, it is

(57:04):
a great and it's just like, oh, he still has it.
He's still a great writer.

Speaker 3 (57:08):
He's terrific. Yeah, I mean he did a lot of
Gargoyles episodes. He did a bunch of Wow on a
bunch of my shows. Wow. We're not writing partners anymore,
but we still like working together. We did the Fall
and Rise of Captain Adam. I mean he wrote it, Yes,
I co plotted it with him, just I don't know,

(57:29):
five years ago, six years lost atensive time because of
the pandemic.

Speaker 1 (57:33):
But yeah, yeah, yeah, I didn't realize that I missed
that one. Holy cow, that's great to hear, truly, you know.

Speaker 3 (57:39):
I just talked to him. Uh just had a birthday
a couple of weeks ago.

Speaker 1 (57:46):
Oh, man, guys. As as the animation of vets and
certainly the environment has changed, can you tell me what
the challenges are? And you know, have you have you
tried to pitch new things? So Ted, Ted, I know
you're you're kind of kicking back a little bit after
Bob's Burger's, But I don't know if you're still pitching
or not.

Speaker 2 (58:06):
No, I'm not. And in fact, I've been doing more
art than writing, which isn't necessarily my strong point. I've
been it's been fun doing these covers and all that,
but the animation industry right now, they aren't making the
shows or very I mean Greg can tell you more
than me of ever since you know the streaming experiment

(58:32):
where everybody, you know, Netflix, Flix funded some fantastic shows.

Speaker 3 (58:37):
Yes, and Netflix built an entire studio yeah, which they
then dismantled.

Speaker 1 (58:45):
Wow.

Speaker 2 (58:46):
Yeah, I mean Netflix were just you know, we would
say how did you get this much money to this show?
And it was like they looked at what I had
done on this theatrical film I did, and they looked
at this subject matter, they put it through their algorithm
and they said, Okay, that's worth this much money and
spend it however you want. You know, it was that

(59:07):
Glory Days and Disney was doing all sorts of stuff,
and then it was like, are we making money doing this?
And nobody had a good answers.

Speaker 3 (59:19):
Not profitable, Yeah, I mean it is for Netflix, although
even at Netflix it's not as profitable as we all
assumed it was. And what it has successfully done streaming
is cannibalize every profit making business that the studios have
ye DVDs, home entertainment. By the way, the whole thing
that Tad created with the Aladdin sequel. By the way,

(59:44):
this whole market of of animated movies done at a
television budget or or anything DVDs now, you know, or
Blu rays or whatever, that's gone. It's just gone. And
that was a huge, massive source of pure profit for

(01:00:06):
the studios, completely gone crazy. And you know, broadcast television
dying slowly, cable television dying quickly, ironically, you know, movie
theaters in trouble. It's because of streaming and everyone consumers

(01:00:29):
and I get it, I'm a consumer too, but everyone
just thinks everything's available. Why do I need to have
a DVD player? Why do I need a blue ray player?
I can get whatever I want to watch whenever I
want to watch it. That's not true, but they think
it's true and it's just easy. So it's like, okay,

(01:00:51):
why get why go to the movie theater? Why you
do this? Why do that? I can watch whatever I
want whenever I want to watch it. And so the studios,
the traditional studios have not cracked the code as to
how to make money with uh streaming when all the

(01:01:13):
other anciliary businesses are dead or do.

Speaker 1 (01:01:19):
Isn't that crazy?

Speaker 2 (01:01:20):
Yeah, it used to be that toys would practically when
you go back to the days of g I. Joe
and Transformers and even Gobots and that's stuff and Thunder
the Barbarian or No he Man is huge one. Yeah,

(01:01:40):
it was like and and Turtles. Obviously, it's like, we'll
keep pumping out shows as long as they're different enough
that we get a new line of toys out of it.
And that was the you know, the shows had smaller budgets,
but that was the reason. But now you have to
convince somebody put those shows on your channel. There is
no syndication market, that's right. You know, the Disney Afternoon

(01:02:03):
hit at the height of that market, and people say, gee,
why was you know? I was so mad when Darkwing
Duck was canceled and I thought it was never canceled.
It was just the plan was to do sixty five
episode that was the business model. The idea was, that's
the minimum amount of shows that you could do, thirteen
weeks of you know, Monday through Fridays, and that's all. Now,

(01:02:26):
because ABC was interested in the show too, we ended
up doing ninety one episodes. So it was actually not
only was it not canceled, it actually got another couple
of seasons out of it. Sure, but it was a
whole different, you know, business thing, and it was the
amazing thing about the Disney Afternoon. This is true for
certainly for my shows early on and Gregg's is once

(01:02:50):
we sold the show internally because it was just Buyna
Vista was distributing it. We got no quote network notes
because it was an in house Disney company. After you know,
the Boss would look for like really intense on development
and the first three issues, and then you know, we
had a business to run. We were kind of left

(01:03:12):
on our own to come up with stories and having
developing all that. Again, every show would have an executive
to you know, watch over things or to give their
own kind of notes, but we had a tremendous amount
of freedom and that totally went away, you know crazy.

Speaker 3 (01:03:29):
There's a great moment in Gargoyles where Gary Kreisel, our boss,
took Frank Parr and I, who we were the coach
show runner at Gargoyles to lunch and he was actually
kind of apologetic. He's sort of like, hey, things have
been crazy and we had problems on Bonkers, and I

(01:03:51):
just I haven't really I apologize, I haven't really been
paying attention. How's it going on Gargoles. We're like, it's
going great, and it's like, well, what are you doing
on the show. So we told him a bit of storyline,
including Owen Xantos, Mary's Fox, and then they have a
baby and he's like, oh, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. I
wouldn't do that. Don't do that. Those are your villains.

(01:04:15):
You can't let the villains have a kid, because what
are you going to do. You can't let the kid
be raised by villains. But we can't be showing the
heroes taking a child away from its parents. It's a
catch twenty two. You can't do that. Don't do that.
And there's this long pauses. Frank and I sort of
look at each other and I turned to Gary and
I go, we already did it. And then there's another

(01:04:41):
long pause. And I know what's going through Gary's head
because I worked with Gary long enough to know. And
he's sitting there thinking, Okay, I could blow this show up,
pull these episodes out of animation, and put another one
of our series in crisis, and you know, blow out

(01:05:02):
our budget, blow out our schedule, all this stuff. And
I could just see a wave of exhaustion roll over it,
and so instead he just sort of heaved this tremendous
sigh and said, Okay, just don't dwell on it. I

(01:05:24):
didn't know what that meant to this context, but both
Frank and I are like, oh no, we won't dwell
on it.

Speaker 2 (01:05:30):
You know.

Speaker 3 (01:05:30):
We went ahead and did whatever we were planning to do.
It was a note with no effect whatsoever. And Gary
and I still talk periodically. I'd say we have lunch
once a year or so. But that was one of
the great moments where there's this There was I mean,
it seemed like forever. His pause seemed like forever. I'm
sure it was like maybe five seconds or something like

(01:05:52):
that tops, but for a second where I thought, oh
my god, my whole show is about to get torn
apart and go down ands. But instead he was just
like Doug Dwell whoa, and we moved on.

Speaker 2 (01:06:10):
But you're still paying for lunch, right.

Speaker 1 (01:06:17):
I'm sorry, Greg. I gotta ask about Young Justice because
that was in such a weird time where you had
DC doing the new DC and we had all these
new character designs, and as a fan and everybody listening
audio wise, this is John saying this. I wanted to
get Gregan in any sort of trouble. I was thrilled
that you kept the classic designs of the heroes and

(01:06:40):
the Young Justice characters as well. But was there any
sort of pushback within either the animation side or the
comics side while you guys were making Young Justice with
those designs.

Speaker 3 (01:06:55):
I mean, you know, we launched just before that, and
I think there was an awareness that, you know, there
was only so much that could be changed. There were
certain things we did update between seasons. We always had
a time jump between seasons and if it seemed to
make sense to us myself, Brandon Vietti my partner, and

(01:07:18):
first three seasons, Phil Barrosso was our literally Emmy Award
winning character designer for the series. You know, we made
some changes here and there. I think we we updated
Wonder Woman's design and and I like it better. We
updated Batman's design, and I didn't like it better. And

(01:07:39):
so for season four we kind of shifted part way back.
And uh so, but that wasn't really being driven from
the comic book people. I mean, we we would get
notes from DC, but uh, you know, uh.

Speaker 2 (01:08:05):
When you got notes from when you got notes from them,
were they from creators or was it basically the same
way we would get notes.

Speaker 3 (01:08:13):
We'd get There was a guy who I go way
back with named Mike Carlin was sort of the okay,
the our liaison with d C. I'm not sure that's
quite I don't know if that was his title, but
in essence that was his job's.

Speaker 1 (01:08:32):
Coming from the comics. Yeah, I know, I know he
finished up.

Speaker 3 (01:08:36):
We'd get notes from him, and some of them we
discussed and we'd explain what we were planning and he'd
be like, oh, Okay, I got it, I see where
you're going. That's fine. Other times, you know, it sort
of came down to, know, this is company policy, you
can't do that. One big thing that had to get changed,
I guess because it was at least in part of

(01:08:57):
legal thing, is that, you know, our first two seasons
we have Captain Marvel in the show, and by the
time we got to season three, five years later, you know,
the company had dropped the Captain Marvel name, had sort
of ceded that to Marvel for their Captain Marvel character,
and they had renamed the character Shazam. And I'm like,

(01:09:18):
can I just do an episode that transitions the name,
like use it Captain Marvel one last time to make
the switch, and they said, no, you can't say the
word Marvel at all. And we didn't know what to
do with that. So literally, in season three we never

(01:09:39):
named that he's in there. I mean, he's not a lead,
so it wasn't a huge problem, but you know, he
was an occasional guest star, and we had an episode
that he's in and we literally never named I mean,
his name is never spoken out loud because we couldn't
figure out in the short time. You know, you're facing
deadlines right all the time, and in the short time

(01:10:04):
we had, we couldn't figure out how to transition it
without referencing what he used to be. By season four,
we figured it out and so we did it. He's like,
he starts to say his name was Captain Marble, but
he gets interrupted and then and then it's like, well,

(01:10:24):
what do you call now? Well, I this was actually
Mary Marvel saying this, but I can't say it out loud,
and then someone else whispers shazamn, you know, but she
can't say it because then she'd transformed.

Speaker 2 (01:10:39):
And there was a scene on the cutting room floor
where he just walked in and said, oh, yeah, I
go buy shazamn now, and the other character said, well,
that's marvelous, easy way.

Speaker 3 (01:10:51):
I mean, so there were there were things here and there,
but for the most part we got a lot of
you know, it was a pretty he's a relationship, and
there was some give and take. I mean, we were
working on for season two an alien invasion story amage time.
In the very early days, we knew we were doing that,

(01:11:12):
and Mike sort of suggested bringing in the new blue
beetle and the reach and that kind of thing, and
that wound up being a huge thing for us. That
came out of one of Mike's suggestions. So, you know
it it was a pretty i'd say, like nine times
out of ten, a pretty easy thing. And then every

(01:11:33):
once in a while we get hit with something like
that Captain Marvel thing, and you know, there was no
recourse in that because it was that was company policy.
Can't use Marvel, and so we just had to make
do for a bit. And there were probably two or
three other things like that.

Speaker 1 (01:11:50):
Interesting.

Speaker 3 (01:11:50):
Otherwise, it was pretty easy.

Speaker 1 (01:11:52):
That's cool, No, that's great. And then honestly, much much
as Tad was saying about, you know, dark Wing getting
extended and stuff, you guys went beyond three seasons and everything,
which is you know, you guys in Justice League and
very you know, and I guess the Batman animated series.
But I do know that kind of rule where or
at least accepted practice of two or three seasons. That's enough.

(01:12:15):
We're going for the Y seven audience. Now, the new
Y seven audience can enjoy the reruns and everything. Back
when there were working.

Speaker 3 (01:12:22):
We had this sort of Harry Potter idea that our
audience will get older with us. So, you know, Harry
Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone has written it for a
younger age group. By the time you get to Deathly Hollows.
I mean, that's not a book I would have read
to my kids when I read them. But by the

(01:12:44):
time we got to Deathly Hollows, they were old enough
to be able to handle that sure, And so our
idea on Young Justice was similar. One of the things
that we could do on the show that very difficult
for opposing company to do is we could age our characters.
And so, you know, Dick Grayson starts as a thirteen
year old and by season fortis twenty four years old.

(01:13:08):
And so we had a you know, we ended up
doing one hundred episodes total across four seasons, with a
five year gap between season two and season three, and

(01:13:29):
that was great. I'd love to do more. There doesn't
seem to be any appetite for that over it HBO Max,
And I think the attitude is, if someone wants to
watch Out Justice, there are one hundred episodes on HBO
Max that they can watch. Why don't we spend money

(01:13:50):
on something new. But I think the main thing right
now is that between all the mergers and all this
company buying that company, and all the sort of blowback
from the streaming wars of four or five years ago.
You know, I do still pitch things, but I go

(01:14:11):
to meetings at places, and universally, what I hear back is, well,
the dust is still settling here. In fact, they all
say that, and they all say it so much that
the last meeting I had, the person said well and
then paused, and I nearly said the dust is still settling.

(01:14:31):
And then I stopped myself because two seconds later he
said the dust is still settling here, and I realized
that would not have gone over well in a pitch.
But that's how they all feel, you know, that there's
so many layoffs, including among executives, and so much churn
and transition of who's in charge and what the game

(01:14:52):
plan is. And that kind of thing is that it's
a tough time in the animation industry right now, really tough,
with a tremendous amount of unemployment.

Speaker 2 (01:15:04):
You got to realize how many, you know, as when
Disney suddenly turned out films like Little Mermaid, which began
it and while in Roger Rabbit that stud made millions
and millions and millions more than the animation had ever
done before that suddenly they built up animation as a whole,

(01:15:27):
became something real and important, and colleges around the world
started saying, we can offer an animation course. And then
there were like colleges who had really reputable departments, you know,
teaching people this. And that continued on and people came out.
You know, I used to walk through you know, conventions.

(01:15:47):
There's seeing It, No, what is the CTN. No, No,
there's an animation done by Tina Prize and anime convention
once ar in Burbank and it's all animation professionals and
animation students basically, and you know, and then other people

(01:16:09):
come to it too, but I would walk up and
down those tables where students had their you know, little
things they were selling, but really it was a way
to show their portfolio and stuff like that. I just
looked there and I said, I would never have made
it into this industry if this was the competition at
the time. So all those kids were trained, many got

(01:16:29):
into the industry doing fantastic work, and now it has shrunk.
And you know, I follow them all on social media
and they're just you know, always looking for other work,
any work, you know, and it's not necessarily an animation.
So it's it's uh, you know, it's it's it's worse

(01:16:50):
than when kids were being trained into the animation. By
the time they got it, they graduated, everybody had gone
to CG and now somebody's just going to you know,
speak the correct pump into their AI machine. And I've
seen incredible stuff. I've seen live action versions of gargoyles

(01:17:11):
online which are really creepy.

Speaker 1 (01:17:13):
Oh that's crazy, my guy. Have you seen that story?

Speaker 3 (01:17:16):
Yeah, I've seen little things, but I actually try to
avoid it.

Speaker 1 (01:17:20):
I respect huh, all right, you know guys, seriously, it
is this kind of information that I know, my show
and my viewers and listeners really do appreciate it because again,
as just consumers, you can understand that. I want to understand,
we got decades of this stuff and now all of
a sudden it is so rare. And you hear that
Warner Brothers might be thinking about ditching their animation thing

(01:17:42):
and selling it off or whatever, or licensing it to
another company, as they've done with that, well at least
from a distribution standpoint, that Porky Pig Defy Duck movie
that just came out this year, and whatever is going
to happen with the John Cena Acme movie that is
you know, out or at least made and you know,
waiting for a platform unless I missed it coming out,

(01:18:03):
but yeah, you know so so no, it is. It
is interesting. I would imagine then that obviously it must
be a comfort to just, you know, talk to Dynamite
and crank out a four issue comic and make it easier.

Speaker 2 (01:18:13):
Yeah, well it's nice. You don't know, You don't need
to know anything about the shows to appreciate the comic.
You can just pick up the comic, both on the
dark wing side and the Gargoyle side. If you had
heard nothing of it, you would get, oh, well, this
is an evil character, and oh, I get everything's contained

(01:18:36):
as far as the relationships and all of that, and
you know, so.

Speaker 3 (01:18:42):
That's that's not a little more out of it if
you're familiar with one or both properties. But we tried
to do the thing so that if this was your
first if this was your first exposure to Gargoyles or
your first exposed are a dark Wing or both, you

(01:19:02):
can still just enjoy it as a fun, somewhat goofy story.

Speaker 1 (01:19:08):
That's excellent, guys, excellent, and truly, thank you so much.
We can wrap now, and I appreciate your time and
again all the background and stuff. Please come back. You know,
Tad Tad, Tad knows, Uh, he's been he's been here.
We're balloon enough. But yeah, Greg, I honestly and thank
you so much, rig for really the time and the
and the detail of beyond this great crossover that starts

(01:19:29):
in January and the great Gargoles stuff you've been doing.
Fantastic four wonderful crossover as well from Marvel and Dynamite,
so I'll continued success and really, uh you're talking.

Speaker 2 (01:19:41):
Dark Wing Deck comic coming out right now by.

Speaker 1 (01:19:44):
Talk to me, what's what's that?

Speaker 2 (01:19:46):
I mean, it's Dynamite's been putting it out there, you go.
Smith is writing it and it's looking great, beautiful.

Speaker 3 (01:19:53):
Beautiful Gargos Demona by me and Frank Parr. Frank was
my partner on the show originally, and the issue four
came out out today and Wish You five comes out
next month.

Speaker 1 (01:20:05):
Excellent, right from the horse's mouths, hum in the animated
horses mouths and then comic book mouths to tell you
that there's great dark wing and gargoyle product from Dynamite,
and Dynamite facilitated this conversation. So boys, I really appreciate it,
and like I said, continued success and we'll talk soon.

Speaker 2 (01:20:21):
Thank you, thank you, thank you.

Speaker 3 (01:20:23):
Joan