Self-Plug: Privilege Undermines Disney’s ‘Gargoyles’ Attempts to Explore Oppression

People who regularly read this blog, I have betrayed you. I have written about Gargoyles for a place that is not here.  Fortunately, thanks to the magic of the internet, you too can enjoy this fine post I have written on how privilege undermines Gargoyles‘ attempts to tell its story–a topic that should be familiar to my regular readers–over at the fine site Bitch Flicks. It goes something like this:

…Gargoyles is also a fantastic showcase of what can happen when creators possessing privilege write stories about the oppressed without their input. Weisman and his staff had good intentions, and yet that didn’t stop them from writing “Heritage,” a perennial contender for the award of Most Racist Story That Tried Not to Be Racist (Television). In the episode, Elisa essentially tells the chief of a failing First Nation village, whom she’s only just met, that he’s performing his identity wrong, and is proven correct by the narrative. While that episode is an outlier, it is not alone — despite the show’s attempts to be about oppression and about being the Other, it falls down in multiple and consistent ways featuring more than one episode where the message they wish to send is not the message they are actually sending.

Yay me! Once you’re done, there are also many other fine posts by awesome writers about various films and TV shows for you to read, so please give those a look. Thank you!

 

These Ten Episodes Will Tell You Everything You Need to Know About “Gargoyles”

So I was talking to Jed Blue in an attempt to convince him to work with me on little something-something for the blog, having to do with “Golem”. Whilst talking, he mentioned that he hadn’t had the opportunity to watch Gargoyles, and that he’d been thinking of asking me for a list of episodes to watch, so that he could have an idea of what the series was about and what it was trying to do, and work the series in as part of The Near- Apocalypse of ’09, his ongoing deconstruction of the DC Animated Universe (which y’all should seriously read, because it’s great).  Because he is cleverer than me, he immediately saw through my ploy of giving him a sixty-five episode list and told me that he’d prefer it if it were around ten episodes long.  Well, since I love a challenge, so I said “yes”, and after some thinking, here are the episodes, presented in airing order.  They’re not necessarily the best episodes, or the most significant, or even ones that necessarily make a whole lot of sense outside of their contexts as parts of a larger ongoing story, but together, they are enough to give the newcomer  comprehensive idea of what the series is about.

Shopping like it’s 1995

Things I got at the mall today:

• Person of Interest Season 3 (DVD)
• Frames for my two Babs Tarr prints, so I can finally hang them up after buying them back in May.
• The Trade Paperback for Magik: Storm & Illyana, rather fantastic X-Men mini-series.
• A Kenner Elisa Maza action figure.