2019 Geek-A-Long: Gargoyles

This week the Geek-A-Long honors Gargoyles, and I’ve been looking forward to this one all year! I was obsessed with the show when I was in Middle School. Also, I had a major crush on Goliath, but my tween feelings for a talking statue are a bit much to unpack here. The show is one of those things that if you were the right age when it was on, and into after school cartoons, chances are you loved it. On the other hand, if you weren’t in that sweet spot, you have probably never heard of it. It doesn’t get much air time in syndication, and was a super dark and complicated show, considering it was in the after-school line up.

The plot centers around 6 gargoyles. If you’re about to say to me “well actually, they aren’t gargoyles unless they have functioning waterspouts” you can just save it. I had that fight with a kid named Nate in middle school. I sincerely doubt Nate is reading my knitting blog, but if you are out there dude, I am still willing to fight you over this.

Ahem.

Anyhow, they are the protectors of a castle which gets cursed. Curses have a strange logic to them, and one of the “curse rules” is that there is always an out. An intrepid evil sorcerer acknowledges this, and creates and out that can’t come to pass. In this case, the Gargoyles were put into a magical sleep until the “castle rises above the clouds”. You can probably see where this is going. Fast forward 5 or 6 hundred years and now it’s the 1990s. The greatest decade. An eccentric millionaire in Manhattan purchases the castle and has it airlifted to NYC, like you do. The flight soars above the clouds and the curse is broken. Suddenly, 6 Medieval warriors have to adjust to life in modern day New York, and because what else can they do for work with centuries of gap on their resumes, swear to protect New York.

The plot arc is too complicated to really get into here, but the show addressed some serious shit. They fought gun violence before it was cool, and got an episode banned from the hallowed halls of Toon Disney over it (that ban was lifted in 2002, presumably as a graduation gift to me).

I get riled up just thinking about Gargoyles. It had a major impact on me. This was in a time before On Demand and DVR, and really even DVDs. So to watch it meant seeing it live or renting tapes from Blockbuster. My dad would let us pick a movie from the kiddie section at Blockbuster most Fridays, but we had to agree on one. And for a solid 2 years, the only one I wanted was the Gargoyles VHS. I was not usually able to get a consensus on that. But our Blockbuster had Gargoyles the Movie: The Heroes Awaken (which is actually just the first several episodes edited into a movie) and I watched the hell out of it, whenever I could get my dad to rent it for me. The Gargoyles don’t have names, and the bad-ass lady cop that finds and befriends them when they wake up in New York names them all after NYC locations. In the movie, she’s aghast that most of them don’t have names and asks the obvious question “What do you call each other?” and Goliath, the leader and who I assumed was destined to be my future husband, tells her

“I call him, friend.”

Hormonal teeny-bopper me cried every single time I watched him deliver that line. It got to the point that my affection for the show was a running joke in our family. My dad still pokes fun at me over how much I loved it, and I’m not sorry, it was an amazing show. As I’m typing this I realize I don’t have the DVDs and that’s a tragedy. I’ll leave you with one last thought before I go off to hunt Amazon for them: If you weren’t already sold on the show, you may be interested to know that the principal voice cast cast was made up almost entirely with cast members from Star Trek The Next Generation.

Whether you’re knitting, crocheting, or cross stitching this square, you can download the Gargoyles pattern here. Instructions and charts for both knit and crochet are listed in the pattern. When you’re finished making it, don’t forget to Instagram your squares at us @lattesandllamasyarn with the hashtag #geekalong! Want to hang out with other people making the blanket? You can find moral support in the Geek-A-Long group on Ravelry here.

~Megan-Anne

“One thousand years ago, superstition and the sword ruled. It was a time of darkness. It was a world of fear. It was the age of gargoyles. Stone by day, warriors by night, we were betrayed by the humans we had sworn to protect, frozen in stone by a magic spell for a thousand years. Now, here in Manhattan, the spell is broken, and we live again! We are defenders of the night. We are Gargoyles!”

If you enjoyed this post, please consider making a donation to Child’s Play Charity. Here is a direct link to our official donation page benefiting the charity. Please help us raise $1,000 this year. No contribution is too small! Wanna make your donation go even further? Lattes & Llamas will donate $1 for every skein of Geek-A-Long Yarn purchased.