i don’t know if you read a lot of historical fiction or not, but I doubt you’d find a single historical fiction novel written since 1900 that does not reference something that comes after the novel takes place.
In Dating Hamlet: Ophelia’s Story by Lisa Fielder, a story told from Ophelia’s perspective, Hamlet makes references to girls wearing pants in the future and also talks of people capturing lighting so that they could work at night, which was the original purpose of electricity. But of course, Hamlet is set in the ninth century A.D., a long time before Benjamin Franklin came along.
In Harvard Yard by William Martin, there is a woman in the 1850’s who has a copy of a lost Shakespeare play, and she hides it so that no one can find it until women are allowed to attend Harvard or 2030, whichever comes first. And while there were some women’s right’s movements going in the 1850’s, none of them were so radical as to want women attending Harvard so badly that they’d keep a serious piece of literature from the public eye. This was Martin’s own feelings about women’s right’s intervening. If Martin had been born fifty years before he was and had written that book, it would not have included that. At all.
There are countless examples, but the point is that it is difficult to separate the historical from the modern. Even if you say, “But they can look this stuff up in a book to see that it didn’t exist or couldn’t have been!”, you must see that it is not (most of the time), alips on the part of the author or moviemakers. It is because the audience of the work lives in the modern day. You do not live in fourteenth century France, and so you know about gambling and barbershops. And while the gargoyles shouldn’t–living in the time period they do–it is something that they would know about if time weren’t linear. In fact, it is almost impossible for anyone who has read The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, like myself, to think of time as linear. It isn’t. If it were, the very idea of the time machine would be inconceivable. H.G. Wells introduced us to it, though. And Douglas Adams combined it with space travel in such a way that makes it impossible for you to ever go back to thinking of time as linear.
Of course, Douglas Adams’ books are also full of crazy shenanigans, but the point is that audiences can relate to stuff from their own time in a way that a purely authentic historical book or movie can’t.
As for the gargoyles in pertanence to the book–they exist in the book, though it is not clear if the gargoyles talk back to Quasimodo or not. He couldn’t hear them if they did, since he is deaf. And actually, as Gothic as the idea of live gargoyles would be, they would have been cruel and menancing if they had actually been alive in Hugo’s novel. Not quirky and comic. However, the movie is adult enough as it is. This is like what I read in a book where there were reviews of many Disney movies…under Mulan it said that the movie would have been better without Mushu. If that movie had not had Mushu, it would not have appealed to kids at all. It would just be a depressing war movie. Oh, and a movie about “women should stay in the home, cook, clean, and take care of the children” and one women who fights against that principle, though not actively. In fact, Mulan does not see anything wrong with it. She thinks she’s the one who is wrong. Now see, that makes sense for her time period, but they broke the mold with the crossdressing…
Nah, I’m just messin’ with ya.