Up until just a year ago, The Disney Afternoon (the Disney studio's syndicated afternoon cartoon line- up) was dominated by Gummi Bears and goofy kid stuff. Meanwhile, a stone's throw away from Disney's lot in Burbank, competing Warner Bros. was the television cartoon factory of choice making the headlines and the critics' lists with the dark, brooding stylishness and innovation of Batman: The Animated Series. Here was an afternoon show that appealed as much to adults as to their children.

But behind the scenes, Disney Television Animation's director of series development, Greg Weisman, was working on a show that would change all that.

Last fall Gargoyles was unveiled as a five-part miniseries that shook up Disney's TV animation department the way The Little Mermaid had revamped the feature division in 1989. Gargoyles' original 13 episodes ran each Friday, but this fall season Goliath and his clan took over four days of each week's DisneyAfternoon. Now it's Disney's show that has become TV animation's seemingly impregnable castle.

The story of a band of mythic warriors with wings who are transported from tenth century Scotland to modern-day Manhattan, Gargoyles centers on Goliath and his clan of gargoyles, who are the seemingly sole survivors of their species. Gargoyles sleep frozen in stone during the day, but by night Goliath's clan, 1,000 years out of their time, become the modern city's protectors. Drawing on some of the impressive talent on display in Batman: The Animated Series--including story editor Michael Reaves and producer Frank Paur---Disney's first dramatic animated series has received widespread acclaim. Unlike the television adventures of the caped crusader, which is a new take on an already established legend, Gargoyles cuts its story out of whole cloth and creates an impressively dense mythology that is attracting viewers of all ages.

"It really does play out of a lot of my own personal interests," says Greg Weisman. "When I was in high school I went on one of those student trips all over Europe, and I was just really enamored of the Gothic architecture, literally with the gargoyles. The whole notion that you take something scary and you put it on a building in an effort to scare away something that's worse was fascinating to me."Weisman studied English literature and creative writing at Stanford and Oxford, emphasizing playwriting, but departed to join DC Comics, where he worked extensively on theCaptain Atom series. He joined Disney in 1899, where he rose quickly to his current position in series development.

Weisman recalls that while brainstorming new ideas for shows, someone in his office mentioned the notion of gargoyles, and his brain snapped around it like a vise. "I really jumped on it," he recalls.

In keeping with Disney traditions at the time, "We developed it originally as a comedy. The backstory was basically the same, only not quite so tragic. We had parallel characters for almost everyone that's the show now, We failed to sell it with cute little gargoyles, " he "which, in retrospect, I'm glad about."

Eventually it was suggested that Weisman add a dynamic leader for the "cute little gargoyles" in the series, someone who could body many of the nobler concepts Weisman was trying to explore. "Out of that description came Goliath," says Weisman, and Goliath himself changed the whole tone of the series. "I'd say he developed himself. The backstory suddenly was being played up for all its tragic elements, because now we had a character strong enough that he could carry it, and make you believe it.

"We kept all the other characters from the comedy version, but they were altered as they reflected off Goliath's personality. Then it really became clear that this was not just another show I was developing, that it was something much more personal."

Weisman says he had toyed with doing a dramatic animated series at Disney for some time, but "We kept hedging our bets with it. We'd have something, but then we had to put something kooky in it because we were a little nervous. But with Gargoyles we hit on a concept that demanded a dramatic presentation."

"The only model that they had for it was Batman," says Michael Reaves, who was brought in to help develop the concepts Weisman was working on. "They had had a number of people trying to develop it, and I just went in there and said, 'It's got to be a dramatic show, it's got to be dark. Don't do it halfway, let's go for the gusto."'

'We pitched Gargoyles three times, " says Weisman. "The first time it was a comedy, the second time it was an action show. But the pitch was a little shotgun in method, not cohesive enough, and wewent back and looked at the focus of this thing, and it came down to Goliath and his relationships to Elisa, the clan and his new world. We focused on Xanatos and Demona as villains, and how they both acted as opposites to Goliath and had some of the same instincts that he had. Goliath represented this ancient, honorable past, and Xanatos represented this human, technological future, an amoral world that a lot of us find ourselves living in."

Goliath (voiced by Keith David, recently seen in The Puppet Masters) and the gargoyles are awakened in the modern world through the efforts of the ultrarich David Xanatos (Jonathan Frakes). Xanatos also presents Goliath with his long-lost love Demona (Marina Sirtis), who during the interceding 1,000 years has nursed a growing hatred for humanity. When Goliath teams with the New York City police detective Elisa Maza (Salk Richardson), Demona takes up arms against her former love.

The origin story "Awakening" was initially written by Eric Luke, but eventually Reaves rewrote it from scratch. "They had a script done that they weren't satisfied with, and I was technically just supposed to be story editor, but I basically wound up rewriting the whole script based on a story that Greg and I came up with," says Reaves. "if the concept is there, then i think the world will evolve. It's a good. strong central concept. "

Once the parameters of the Gargoyles mythology were constructed, Weisman discovered that the writers had -- only inadvertently-- not contradicted any of the tenth-century Scottish history. "I took that as an opportunity and decided to try to fit it into the historical accounts of the period," he says. "We made our Princess Katherine the niece of King Kenneth, who was the historic king at the time. We had Vikings attack, and sure enough Vikings were attacking Scotland throughout that period. We then discovered that the historical Macbeth was king just shortly after 994, and we became interested in the notion of another immortal as an antagonist and someone who came from the same kind of background. I have a near-obsession with Shakespeare, and that just seemed perfect, so we did a lot of research into the historical Macbeth as opposed to Shakespeare's character "

While Weisman and Reaves were establishing the storyline's scope, another team was busy developing the animation. One of the most important elements of Gargayles' success is--like Batman---its unique design style and the quality of its animation. Key to this is producer Frank Paur, who served this same function on Batman.

"Greg is pretty much in charge of the writing of the series. and he presides over that. I'm in charge of the design, the storyboards, the execution of the script, the overseas production, overseeing the animation. All the post production. I'll be doing retakes and the editing," says Paur.

"They had already had about two years of development on the Gargoyles series when I came here," he adds. "They already had an idea of what the main characters would look like, but it was more in the comic book vein. When I came in back in December of '931 looked all the materials over, and then. I went through and stylized all the characters in much more traditional animation lines. I took my cue from Disney-style animation and streamlined the characters' look. I took out a lot of the details. the big-muscled, heavy veins on the muscles and the lines, and just broke it down to the basic elements.

"Inevitably there is the comparison to Batman, but I actually took our cue from the Disney features, which is simplicity. Batman was designed with animation in mind. They're much more graphic than Disney. I think our characters come across more three-dimensional than in Batman. Our characters are a bit more complicated, in that they are more real-looking and not as cartoonish But originally the designs were much more in the range of comic book-oriented art."

Regarding the backgrounds for the series, Paur say; that the distinction from Batman's look became more difficult to achieve. "We didn't want to do Batman," says Paur. "The problem that we had is that the show takes place at night. Batman takes place at night. so we're all very conscious of the Batman connection. We wanted to be different but still evoke the same kind of mood and spirit that a show like Gargoyles requires.

"We weren't doing Gotham, which is a fictional city, we were doing Manhattan, and everybody knows what the real New York City looks like So we settled on a much more painterly feel to it since it takes place at night. The gargoyles inhabit the top of the buildings, and there it has a much cooler look, in the blue and grey range, until you get down to the street, and there we started using other colors to bring out the life and vitality that's there."

Batman had boasted an enormous number of voice over actors drawn from television and film, and Gargoyles can make a similar claim, right down to its regulars, which also include Edward Asner (Lou Grant), Jeff Bennett, Bill Fagerbakke (Coach) and Frank Welker (who recently provided some of the jungle sounds in Congo).

Says Jonathan Frakes, who essays the role of Xanatos, "I think this has great style, and I think Jamie [Thomason, the voice director] and his cohorts at Disney have cast some of the most interesting actors I've worked with. People from stage, film, TV. It's great to be part of it. becuase the voice-over work is a different style than other kinds of per forming. It's totally freeing."

In addition to utilizing the acting abilities of ST:TNG's Frakes and Sirtis, Gargoyles has regularly raided the 24th century for vocal talent. Nichelle Nichols and Michael Dorn appeared in the first season, and Kate Mulgrew will do a recurring role in the second. Clancy Brown Matt Frewer, Richard Grieco, John Rhys-Davies and David Warner have also done parts.

Says Keith David in his distinctive basso-butter voice, "This is probably the most fun I've had in life. It's just been an exceptional cast. I think Goliath is a wonderful, wonderful character and I love playing him I wish I was more like him. He's a great spirit. He knows how to lead. He knows how to discipline. He has a great relationship with moderation, so when he disciplines he does it with a gentle, kind hand that doesn't leave scars. I wish I had more of that. It's no wonder that adults are attracted to it," David says of the series, "but also the values on the show are values that you want your children to have." David has an 18- month-old son, arid the youngster's reaction to Gargoyles is one of the show's chief delights for him. "He watches and he always sits up and responds to my voice."

We all get together once a week for recording sessions," says Frakes. "Only sometimes do we try to stockpile and do two episodes in a day, but the show's been picked up for 52 episodes, and now we're all feverishly trying to turn them out."

The pace of completing the second season's order of new episodes may be tough for the actors, but it's even more so for Frank Paur and his artists, who must work more than six months in advance due to the turnaround time for the animation which is done mostly in Japan and Korea.

It's just layer upon layer of mechanics," Paur says. "There are so many episodes going on at the same time that if it weren't for my associate producers, I'd forget they were in production."

Paur details the typical production process: "We'll get a script, we'll start working on designs of the characters, we'll get the recording back, the recording is then given to the storyboard people, they'll do their thing. I'll make notes and go over all this stuff. It then goes to the animation director, the slugger, and I'll go over all the breakdowns and all the backgrounds and character designs, and it gets to be a big mess. It's extremely, extremely complex work."

Paur keeps in tough with the oversees animation studios through a lot of telephoning, a lot of faxes and twice-a-week conference calls. Trying to communicate the show's needs to a team working a continent away is frustrating, but only twice has it resultes in major problems for Paur and the producers. "In 'Enter Macbeth,' out of 400 or so scenes we has well over 350 that had to be redone. Even then it still wasn't what we had envisioned," he says. "We had characters looking like they were coming out of Aladdin or Animaniacs. They were extremely cartoony. Goliath looked like the big blue genie in Aladdin."

Paur also describes problems on "Long Way to Morning," done by a Korean studio. " They were used to doing cartoon shows, not a seriously type of drama. It was a communication problem. I just didn't communicate clearly enough what we needed, and they eventually did a fairly decent job on it. They're doing more for us. It was a learning lesson." "

Commination is the key to Gargoyles' success, not only between produce and animator, but also between artist and writer. Michael Reaves and his wife, story editor Brynne Chandler-Reaves, are often surprised by the inclusion they receive as writers in the overall production process.

Says Chandler-Reaves, "At one place I got yelled at nine or ten times for going down and even talking to the artists. But on Gargoyles we're even invited to the recording sessions. "I got a call from one of the artists at my home, " she recalls "He was in a panic becuase one of the scripts: called for one of the characters to pick some Scottish heather, and the artist didn't know what it looked like I said, 'Just draw a flower.' And he said, 'No, the script says Scottish heather, it has to be Scottish heather.' I had to get a picture of Scottish heather and fax it to him. It's very heady to have your words taken that seriously."

Writing a dramatic series for animation (ostensibly a kids' medium), Chandler-Reaves has often had her go-rounds with Standards and Practices, "But on Gargoyles our Standards and Practices person is not afraid of difficult emotion in a script. She told me once that when she looks at taking something out of a script, she looks at what the impact is going to be for the whole script. If this is the linchpin scene we need to find a way to address her concerns, but she won't say 'Yank the whole thing' the way some Standards and Practices people have done. She doesn't have the same attitude that kids need to see only a candy-coated world."

Candy-coated or not, the details of the Gargoyles world are becoming more rich, as Greg Weisman approved more and more scripts for the 52-episode second season. "The good news is that every story that we write suggests three or four more," he says. "There's just a richness to what the team has put together that allows us to have fun with it and really expand on it. I only have three slots left on the [script planning] board for the second year. That's amazing."

Weisman's desk is decorated with all manner of gargoyles, including some new Goliath action figures being manufactured for his show. As the clan of ancient warriors becomes more and more popular and the word francise gets bandied about in the hallways at Disney, is there a concern that the "personal" show Weisman oringinally developed will become too big for its producers to handle?

"Greg Weisman is nothing if not in control of this whole thing. He's tireless," says Chandler-Reaves.

Notes Weisman, "Yes there is the big merchandising machine, but this building drives that machine. No one's coming to us and driving the show in a direction. I'm gratified that the merchandising seems to take off. I think I have some of the same concerns, but if this thing becomes something that goes beyond my involvement in this project, that would make me really happy. Am I concerned that in the year 2025 they're making plush toys of Goliath? No. But if the people are making new stories about him long after I'm dead, then good."