{"id":13987,"date":"2025-02-01T18:50:51","date_gmt":"2025-02-01T18:50:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/topat10.com\/?p=13987"},"modified":"2025-02-01T18:50:51","modified_gmt":"2025-02-01T18:50:51","slug":"gargoyles-the-movie-the-heroes-awaken-promoted-a-new-age-30-years-ago","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/topat10.com\/?p=13987","title":{"rendered":"Gargoyles the Movie: The Heroes Awaken Promoted a New Age 30 Years Ago"},"content":{"rendered":"


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At a time when the Disney Afternoon was stacked with a strong lineup of colorful and cuddly animal-based characters, An idea was conceived to bring in something similar but different, with a more muted palette, sharper tone, and an interwoven story structure. These were the defenders of the night, ancient creatures awoken again in modern-day Manhattan, stone warriors known as Gargoyles, which received a movie adaptation you might not know about called Gargoyles the Movie: The Heroes Awaken.<\/p>\n

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\u00a0\u201cOne thousand years ago, superstition and the sword ruled.<\/em> It was a time of darkness. It was a world of fear<\/em>. It was the age of Gargoyles.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

The Gargoyles cartoon originally debuted on television in October of 1994 with an impressive five-part story arc known as \u201cAwakening,\u201d it received a lot of praise. These episodes are an origin story for Goliath (Keith David) and his clan of gargoyles. Their story begins in Scotland, 994 A.D., where they protect castle Wyvern, their home, but the humans who live there don\u2019t appreciate what the creatures do, and our heroes are soon betrayed, but like many parts of this show, there is more to the story, and it won\u2019t come to light until later. These events lead to them being cursed, turned to stone even at night, and it is a spell that cannot be broken until the castle rises above the clouds, which, thankfully, a man named David Xanatos (Jonathan Frakes) has the money and power to accomplish. With their home moved to Manhattan, now sitting atop a skyscraper, they will become the protectors of New York, even if humans still fear them.<\/p>\n

Part of the promotion for the show would be a World Premiere screening of these episodes to take place at Walt Disney World\u2019s Pleasure Island multiplex in Orlando. Since they wanted this to feel more like a big epic showing, and it would be mostly for members of the press and school kids who had been bussed in for the event, the five episodes needed to be cut down into something closer to a movie. Producer Greg Weisman<\/a> and a separate team worked on this project while Frank Paur pushed on with the original crew to make sure the episodes were ready. They knew that what they had was strong for television, but the energy and pacing would need to be different for a feature presentation, chiseling it down to around 82 minutes and focusing on scenes that feature the two main characters.<\/p>\n

The movie Weisman and the others created premiered in September of \u201994 and might have been the last fans would have heard of that version until Buena Vista Home Video made a deal to release \u201cAwakening\u201d on home video. Finding out there was already a shorter, edited-down cut without the intros, credits, and commercial breaks made that the version they asked for to save time and money on their end. Weisman wasn\u2019t thrilled with the idea of selling an adaptation that had less overall material, but the company said they would be adding value in other ways. So, though it was never intended to be shown again or made available to the public, Gargoyles the Movie: The Heroes Awaken was released on VHS and LaserDisc in early 1995.<\/p>\n

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