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Siren writes...
I was reading some of your answers and was reminded about how Broadway was originally female. I am an overweight female, and the thought that a overweight female gargoyle wouldn't have bothered me in particular. I think it is all in the way the character is. Broadway knows he is big, and his self esteem is pretty good, considering the jabs his rookery brothers make. He is smarter then he looks too. Naive, but so were the rest of the clan, it's a learning process. New time, new people, new culture, new ideas. I love Broadway, think he is a great character, but I hope one day they can come out with an overweight, young, smart female. Most overweight females are all the Miss Potts type. Mother hens, grandmothers, etc. I like the way Broadway is and acts, and I wouldn't want that to change, but I still want to see a similar female character one day, human, gargoyles, whatever. I know a some people blow things out of proportion when a female actress puts on a fat suit, like Courtney Cox in Friends. If your going to make the character humourous, it should be tasteful, not hurtful. Someone for people to look up to, not a joke, most characters should be. Look what they do to mentally retard people, Adam Sandler still does it, and it's still funny to a large amount of the public. (Not me.) Maybe it's just me about the whole thing, I am overweight, but I am secure in my look. I think the ones who bash the overweight characters are the people are unsecure with themselves. But there's my ramble. What do you think?
Greg responds...
I basically agree with everything you've written here. And, as I think I've admitted before, I'll blame our original decision (to change Coco into Broadway) on a combination of cowardice and commercial interests. We were doing a show that was designed to appeal to a wide audience on many levels. But fundamentally (i.e. economically), we still needed to hit our main target audience of Boys 6-11. We felt -- and I'm not defending our decision, just revealing it -- that that particular audience could enjoy and appreciate a tough male warrior garg that was (at least at the beginning) both overweight and fairly obsessed with food. We felt that the same character as a female would come across as (a) less interesting to that target audience and (b) likely to bring negative attention to the series.
The conventional wisdom, for example, at toy companies is that female action figures don't sell as well as male action figures. Kenner would not have been interested in Coco -- as they were not interested in Angela. But they were interested in Broadway.
Another conventional wisdom is that no good deed goes unpunished. We felt that if our one heroic female was overweight, we would not be praised for it, but attacked -- perhaps even called misogynistic, which I hope no one thinks our series is.
We justified all this creatively with the notion that the Gargs situation was more tragic when the only female left alive was the enemy Demona. But adding a female gargoyle to the cast was a huge priority for me for Season Two. Granted, Angela is quite svelte, but that made sense given who her biological parents were.
My hope, over time, was to introduce the audience to a whole bunch of individual gargoyles and gargoyle beasts -- in both genders and of all shapes and sizes.