Firefox News was founded first and foremost as a fan site for, about and run by fans.  In fact, many of the staff originally met via a shared interest in the 1990's animated Gargoyles series.  As such, we were tremendously pleased to be able to chat with Greg Weisman, the man behind the clan, who created the show we knew and loved.  Greg is now the supervising producer for the upcoming Spider-Man animated series for Kids!WB  and Sony, and although he's got a full plate getting the show set up and running, he spent a little time telling us about that project and about the new Gargoyles comic book from Slave Labor Graphics.

 

FFN: Thank you so much for taking the time to talk with us today.

 

GW: I appreciate you taking the time to talk to me.

 

FFN: Then everyone's happy.  Hooray!  How are you this afternoon?

 

GW: Good.  I'm listening to over a thousand auditions for various parts for Spider-Man.

 

FFN: Is there anything you can tell us about where you're leaning in the casting?

 

GW: No, we're just getting all these auditions coming in, and it's a cattle call at  this stage.  We'll start narrowing it down soon.  I've probably listened to about five hundred or so, maybe six hundred left.  So it's a lot.  We'll narrow it down and start doing callbacks and stuff, but we're not even close.

 

FFN: I hear the Stargate folks are looking for work.

 

GW: *laughs*  We'll take 'em.  Of course, they're all in Canada.

 

FFN: Why don't you tell us a little about yourself?  Where are you from?

 

GW: I'm from Los Angeles.  I grew up here,  second generation, which is somewhat rare.  My kids are third generation, which is very rare.  I went to high school in LA.  I went to college up north at Stanford University for undergraduate, got my bachelor's there in English with a fiction writing emphasis.  While I was still in college, I went to work for DC Comics, freelance, and then eventually when I graduated, I took a staff job at DC in their editorial department, working my way up to Associate Editor.

 

FFN: Was that when you landed the CAPTAIN ATOM job?

 

GW: It was during that period, yeah.  I was working on a number of projects with Cary Bates, who was my writing partner at the time, and Cary got the CAPTAIN ATOM job, and he brought me onto that.  I wrote about fifty issues of CAPTAIN ATOM, the last chunk freelance again.  I applied to graduate school and got into USC's professional writing program, and moved back to LA.  I've more or less been here ever since.  When I graduated with my Masters in professional writing, with an emphasis in playwriting, I wound up taking a job at Walt Disney TV Animation as a development executive, and worked my way up there to Director of Series Development at WDTA.  I developed and worked on a number of shows, and with my team, we created a show called Gargoyles.

 

FFN: Which we've heard of once or twice.

 

GW: *laugh*  Passingly familiar with it, you are?

 

FFN: *laugh*  Passingly.

 

GW: So, Gargoyles was sort of my baby.  Well, not really "sort of" my baby.  Gargoyles was my baby.  Normally, as a development executive, I would develop a show and then, even if we developed it in-house, I'd find a producer and sort of pass it on and shove it out the door and sort of say "Good luck."  But I just fell in love with the whole concept and didn't want to let it go, so I wound up switching sides of the desk and becoming the producer, later the supervising producer of Gargoyles with Frank Paur.  We did two years of that, and they did the third year after I left.

 

FFN: We don't speak of the third year.

 

GW: Yeah.  Silent on that subject.  *laugh*  I went to Dreamworks for a few years, and then I went freelance.  I've been freelance ever since.  I've worked pretty exclusively in animation with a little work in comic books thrown in here and there, and various unsuccessful attempts to break into live-action and publishing, beyond comics.  I've produced a bunch of shows.  Last year, I finished producing a show called W.I.T.C.H. for Toon Disney, and now, I am currently the supervising producer of Spider-Man for Sony and Kids!WB and Marvel.

 

FFN: Are you technically freelancing for Spider-Man, or is that a permanent position?

 

GW: I have an office here at Sony.  In every way that matters, I'm on staff.  If you're asking technically, in theory I'm still freelancing.  It's a contractual distinction.  In a practical matter, I'm here day in and day out, at least until March, but we’re hoping that sooner than later, we'll get a pick-up for a second season of Spider-Man, and I'm hoping to spend a lot of time here.  I'd like to do a lot of years of Spider-Man.

 

FFN: I've heard that at least the first season of the show, and presumably the subsequent seasons, will be a kind of "Year One."

 

GW: Yeah.  We're not really calling it "Spider-Man: Year One," we're calling it "Spider-Man: Month Four."  The idea is that Peter's sixteen years old, he got bitten by the spider at the end of his sophomore year of high school, and Uncle Ben died.  That's a big wound to his psyche, and to his life, but that was four months ago so it's still very painful but it's not an open, bleeding wound anymore.  He's spent the summer fighting crime.  But I mean that like, stopping muggers.  There was one bank robbery he was very proud of foiling. There was the liquor store holdup, and that jewelry store, yeah, that was great.  Basically, nothing challenging, not to him.  He's just out of the league of most typical criminals, and he's thinking that's all there is.  He's been away from his school friends because they were all away for the summer, so he's been on his own for the entire summer vacation, having kind of a blast in a lot of ways being Spider-Man.  It's a huge release for him.

 

GW: We open our series literally the night before the first day of his junior year of high school, and get just a sense of what his summer's been like.  But then morning comes and school's in session in every possible way. I mean, a) he's back in school, back among his peers.  He's got a newfound confidence because he's Spider-Man, but none of them know that, so … *laugh*  From their point of view, he's still the same nerd he was four months ago, and that's an adjustment for him, because he's been thinking "My life is gonna change."  Life is going to change, but not everyone is going to recognize it.

 

GW: Meanwhile on the Spider-Man front, we introduce in the first episode his very first honest-to-Aunt-May supervillain, and he's going to be fighting supervillains for the first time, and they're going to be teaching him lessons too.  So, when I say "School's in session," I mean "School's in session," and that's really the theme for our series generally is the education of Peter Parker.  We've got a guy who is still unformed, in the rough.  Our plan is to put him through his paces.  We're skipping the first few months, because frankly to me, it's not as interesting.  I mean, we're all pretty familiar with his origin, and we will tell that story eventually, when we've earned it later in the season.

 

FFN: You've got a good track record with flashbacks.

 

GW: I think that for now, we don't need to see him firing the web for the first time, or swing for the first time.  Even our youngest audience has a passing familiarity with Spider-Man.  We want to see him really start to lean life lessons and learn what happens when Spider-Man's up against something tough, not up against a guy in a ski mask.

 

FFN: Speaking of the villains, are we going to be seeing his whole rogues gallery?  Are there any particular villains that are off-limits, or just that we're not going to see?

 

GW: We have a thirteen episode order, and we're going to be introducing a number of villains from his rogues gallery in season one, with clear plans, assuming there is a season two, introducing more members of his rogues gallery as we go forward.  There's only been one villain that's been declared off-limits to us for various contractual reasons.

  There's a clear legal reason why we can't use this one villain, but other than that we are free to use everyone from Spider-Man's rogues gallery.  We'll be introducing a good chunk of them in the first season, but obviously his rogues gallery is huge, so we're not going to introduce literally everyone in season one.  We have big plans for a lot of the most exciting Spider-Man villains.  We want season one to sell, so to speak, and with that in mind, we're not pulling our punches.  We've got big plans, and we're going to do some exciting stuff.

 

FFN: Do you think you'll be drawing, intentionally or not, on the villains we've been seeing in the movies, just because the audience might have more familiarity with those?

 

GW: I think the movies chose the villains they chose because they were, and are, and continue to be some of the best Spider-Man villains.  So if you're asking, are we using Green Goblin, are we using Doc Ock, are we using Sandman, the answer is yes to all three. I don't think that's too shocking a revelation.  *laugh*  I'm not going to go into any detail about it yet, it's way too early, but I don't think it's going to come as a surprise that I'm using three of the most important Spider-Man villains across our season.  Our feeling is that our bibles for the series so to speak are the original Lee/Ditko and Lee/Romita comics of the early to mid-sixties.  Now having said that, if there's a great idea in one of the movies, I'm not going to be shy about pick-pocketing.  *laugh*  If there's a great idea in ULTIMATE SPIDER-MAN, I'm not going to be shy about making use of whatever legit Spidey sources are out there.  But we are starting from scratch.  So it's 1962, sort of recast for the year 2008.  So everything's new, everything's fresh.  It's not a Marvel universe jam-packed with heroes and villains that you can't move five feet without tripping over some guy in a cape and tights.  This is all new.  So we're just going to have a great time with exploring these things for the very first time, and yeah, that means exploring all of the great Spider-Man cast.  The villains, of course, but also Spider-Man has one of the greatest supporting casts in comics, and we're having a great time exploring those characters as well.

 

FFN: I've heard that you're planning on condensing some of the storyline.  For example, Gwen Stacy was Peter's college girlfriend, but we'll probably be seeing her in high school.

 

GW: We are compressing a bit to get the cast into the early days, but I think we're doing it as much as possible to respect the characters and be true to them.  So you're right.  We're going to be seeing Gwen and Harry Osborne and Mary Jane Watson, all of whom Peter didn't meet until he was in college.  But you're also going to be seeing Liz Allen, Flash Thompson, and characters from high school days.  We're compressing, but we're also not in a hurry.  Our entire first season, thirteen episodes, takes place during the fall semester of his junior year.  Not religiously, but more or less across thirteen weeks, starting in September and ending in December.  So if we have a season two, we're thinking it's winter.  We're not going to race through this, we're not going to try to race to get him into college, race to make him an adult, but we want to explore this period of his life.  So while we are compressing his timeline a bit, in order to get some of his great cast in sooner than later, we're also not going to skip over things.

 

FFN: You've mentioned you've got an order for thirteen episodes.  Are you planning on making that one continuous story arc, or will you focus on standalone episodes?

 

GW: Everything that we're doing has to work on three levels.  Or four, depending on how you look at it.  The show's airing on Kids!WB, and it has to be thirteen episodes that can each stand on their own two feet and tell a single great story. We're incredibly excited about each of those individual stories.  Having said that, these episodes will also be released as four DVDs of three or four episodes apiece, and we are making a conscious, intentional effort so that these three and four episode blocks work as a movie. Now, that's not the same as sitting down to write an eighty minute movie, but as much as possible, there's connective tissue between these episodes.  The show is episodic but it is absolutely sequential.  If a viewer is watching Kids!WB and they happen to tune in for the first time on episode six, they'll see a great story in six that they wouldn't have had to see one through five to see, but the hope is that they like six so much they want to go out and get one through five on DVD so that they can see how it plays out.  So there's a certain benefit to seeing them all and seeing them in order,.  The shows work both as individual episodes and the longer pieces, and then having said that, we have arcs that run through the entire thirteen episode season.  It's just the way my mind works.  Things that run from episode one though episode thirteen that we'll weave in and out.  Again, though we can't count on it in these very early stages, we're very hopeful that this lasts for many seasons, and I have long-term plans that go beyond this first season.  If they don't happen, I'll be a very sad boy, but if they do, we'll at least be ready for it and have plenty of opportunity to lay pipe, not just for the short term of this one season but for the long term as well.

 

FFN: Sounds fun!  So who is "we" on the team?  Who's in the writers' room with you?

 

GW: Well, it's very early days, but right now, the writing team has been assembled.  It's myself, and Kevin Hopps, Matt Wayne, Andrew Robinson, our writer's apprentice is Randy Jandt. We have Vic Cook as the supervising director and producer on the show, and he's been participating in those discussions as well.  We've got a bunch of very committed executives at three different companies in many different divisions very interested in what we're doing, participating and being helpful at Marvel and Kids!WB and at Sony.

 

FFN: So everyone's behind the project?

 

GW: Oh yeah.  Everyone really wants the show to succeed, and frankly, it can't not.  *laugh*  I mean, it's Spider-Man.  I'd almost intentionally have to try to sabotage it to make this show not succeed.  But, having said that, that's not satisfactory for us.  I think that, for us, our goal is either truly, truly arrogant or truly naïve, or probably both, and it is no less than our desire to make this the classic, definitive Spider-Man show of all time, the one that people look back on twenty years later and go, "Wow, that was a great Spider-Man show."  We're setting the goal that high, ridiculously high on purpose. I don't know whether we'll success, but we figure the only way, the only chance we have at succeeding is to go for it, to really set the bar for us that high and really try and make it that great.  And again, everyone involved in the process at three different companies is all on board with that idea.  They want to do something here that is both very contemporary and very iconic, and just winds up being a classic Spider-Man show.

 

FFN: It sounds like this generation's Batman: The Animated Series.

 

GW: Well, I won't deny we've had discussions about that.  Not that we're going to specifically emulate what Bruce Timm and Alan Burnett did on Batman, either stylistically or otherwise.  I mean, these are two very different characters.  But, that's how we all feel about Batman: The Animated Series, looking back on it ten years later.  It's still where the bar is set.  Our hope is that we can have that kind of success creatively on this show as well.

 

FFN: Have you had a chance to see the new movie yet?

 

GW: I haven't.

 

FFN: *laugh* How do you know what you might be accidentally copying?

 

GW: Well, we do have executives looking over our shoulders and all that.  I have to say, they've been terrific, and one of the things they've been terrific about is understanding that we are not in continuity with the movies.  The last show Sony did, the MTV Spider-Man show, was in continuity with the movies, and that I know because I worked on it briefly.  It was a very difficult situation, trying to second-guess what Features was going to do in the second movie, long before the second movie was out.  What Features gets now is that we're not in continuity with the movies, so what they're doing and what we're doing, again, I'm not saying there isn't overlap, because hey, it's still Spider-Man, of course there's overlap, but we're not in continuity with them, and so that's not a huge issue. 

 

FFN: One last question.  Are there any tidbits or in-jokes coming up in the series that you can share?  On the Atlantis series that sadly didn't get off the ground, you were going to have Demona show up in Paris.

 

GW: Well, that wasn't really an in-joke, that was a crossover.  We're just so not at that point yet.  And also, for me, even when I do write an in-joke, it tends to be more spur of the moment, more of a glancing blow, because frankly, you want stuff to work for the audience you're presenting it to.  If you can find a way to sort of slide in something for an audience that you've had in the past –  *ahem* Gargoyles – then, great. But you know …

 

FFN: It's not a high priority.

 

GW: It's definitely not a high priority.  Now, when we can, we might slip in here and there, but also, even if I had fifty in-jokes planned, which I guarantee you I do not, *laugh* I wouldn't tell you.  *laugh*  That would spoil the joke.

 
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