Gremlins: Everything You Didn't Know

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Too Much Information is a production of iHeartRadio.

Speaker 2 (00:09):
Hello everyone, and welcome to Too Much Information, the show
that brings you the secret histories and little known, fascinating
facts and figures behind your favorite movies, music, TV shows
and more. We are your two Maguis of Minutia. I'm
Alex Hagel, I'm Jordan run Talk, and I'm looking forward
to you explain to me what that means, well, Jordan.
Today we're talking about one of my favorite Christmas movies,

(00:30):
a delightfully nasty little creature feature that came out of
some of the greatest movie making minds of our time.
That's right, we're talking about nineteen eighty four's Gremlins. I
love both of these films. The first one is a tight,
pretty me little action adventure and the second one is
one of the best, like meta commentaries on Hollywood and
just a hilarious example of what I call later blank

(00:53):
check movie making. And they've got some of the best
weird little guys of all time, like You're not you
don't look at Gizmo and not fall in love with him,
and then the Gremlins are equally cool. I have one
sitting at my desk. I have the brain grind, and
not a full size one like a little six inch guy.
But yeah, I just the creature design is amazing. You
know how much I love movie magic. So we're gonna

(01:15):
talk a lot about Chris Waylis's work and Phoebe Kates. Dude,
this is true, perfect, perfect, Phoebe Kates delivering one of
the greatest monologues in movie history. I'm guessing this is
not on your radar.

Speaker 1 (01:29):
No, you know, I know next to nothing about this,
but every time it's come up over the course of
this series, I think when we talked about the movies
of Chris Columbus, The Goonies and Home Alone, you just
got so excited and it was so heartwarming to me
that I'm just so thrilled to dive into this. But
You're right, I'm not a creature's guy. I'm not really
a fantasy guy. Even stuff like et and Labyrinth kind

(01:52):
of push it for me. But I am just so
excited for you to do what you do best, which
is to teach me and by our dear listeners, all
about the making of this movie that he loves so well,
and tell me what it is about it that touches
you said deeply.

Speaker 2 (02:07):
I love Joe Dante. Like Tim Burton, he's one of
those guys that just has this like endless love for
a certain mid century era and esthetic, but his is
so much more goofy and widescreen. Like he's taken influence
from Looney Tunes all the way through to the William
Castle stuff in the fifties because he was a Roger
Corman guy, so he was really directly connected to that

(02:30):
entire era of filmmaking. But he also brings all this
other stuff into it, Like he loved comic books and
Looney tunes, what.

Speaker 1 (02:36):
Else did he do?

Speaker 2 (02:38):
The Howling is what got him this picture that was
part of the Great Werewolf trifecta of nineteen eighty four,
along with American Werewolf in London. And I think either
I forget if it's called wolfin or just Wolf, but
there's a third one that also came out in not
nineteen eighty four, I'm sorry, eighty two. I don't know.
There were three werewolf movies that came out in that year.

(02:58):
One was American Werewolf London, one was The Howling, and
then the third one which is either called Wolf or Wolfin'.
And yeah, uh, he also did a movie called Matinee,
which is like a little known John Goodman starring film
that is like Dante's tribute to like the William Castle,
like fifties gimmick stuff and a little bit of like
Roger Corman as well. And that movie someone mistakenly took

(03:23):
me and like like a lady friend when we were five,
to like go see this movie, and it terrified me.
Not the tongue in cheek satire parts, but it's based
off of a movie called mant which is about a
man aunt much like The Fly, but that's the movie.
It's like Mape, Yes, that is a movie within a movie,

(03:46):
so the whole thing is like this meta commentary, but
the actual ant man makeup and like footage of ants
that they put in this thing scared the shit out
of me, and for a long time I had blocked
it out of my memory. I didn't remember the title
of the film, so I was like googling, like fifties
giant ant man movie and like fifties ant movie, and
I eventually found out that it was this movie Mattine anyway,

(04:09):
that Gremlins and Gremlins too are just like I don't know, man,
I love Joe Dante. I love what he does with
his resources and money when he was afforded them before
Gremlins two put him in director jail. And you know,
in a way, this movie is basically us as a partnership.
Oh explain, well, it's a very sweet as we get
into it, Dante was took much from It's a Wonderful Life.

(04:32):
He's a big Frank capera fan. And so you you're
the like small town Christmasy sweetness at the heart of it.
And I'm the awful monster goblin that that mutates from
that and Rereek's havoc upon it.

Speaker 1 (04:45):
I just want to observe that that you were born
shortly after Halloween, and I was born shortly before Christmas.

Speaker 2 (04:50):
Yes, okay, I make you and and I mean to
you all the time like the Gremlins are to Gizmo.
So from the brand of beer the creatures may have
gotten their name from, to the beloved children's authors near
death experience that contributed to their legend, to the endless
trials of the film's SFX wizard, and the absolutely batched

(05:11):
blank Check sequel that came out sixty years after the fact.
Here's everything you didn't know about gremlin's let's start from
the top. Although there isn't one exact consensus, most folklorous
theorize that gremlin as a specific word came into popular

(05:32):
usage in the era between WWI and WWII The Big One.

Speaker 1 (05:38):
I just want to explicitly state, because we referenced this
gag many times over the last few episodes, this isn't
all the family reference, because Archie Bunker would always state
that he fought in say it with me now, WW
two The Big One, which I just always thought was
so funny because it inherently discounts all their vets of
all other wars, which I think is really fun and

(05:58):
very Archiepunker. I'm really glad by the way that you
put the section in here about the etymology of the
word gremlins.

Speaker 2 (06:04):
Thank you for that. Oh it's so fascinating. Yeah. So
the word itself is, and this is the stuff that
I'm triangulating from a few different online dictionaries and etymology sites.
Some people have tied it to an Old English word gremion,
which means to vex. There's an Irish Gaelic word which
I'm probably certainly pronouncing wrong, called graymin for bad tempered

(06:27):
little fellow, and then the a writer named Carol Rose
in a book called Spirits, Fairies, Leprechauns and Goblins and Encyclopedia,
she attributes the name to a portmanteau of Grimm's Fairy
Tales and Fremlin beer. Follow me here. Fremlin was the
most commonly available brand of beer in the British Royal
Air Force mess halls of India and the Middle East

(06:50):
in the nineteen twenties. We're gonna get into the Air
Force thing in a minute, but I don't agree with
the Grim's fairy tale part because it seems like an
easier portmanteau to imagine Goblin and Fremlin becoming Gremlin. But
you know, she wrote a book and I didn't. The

(07:10):
term actually didn't specifically even mean horrible little mischief monster
at first. From what I've been able to trace. It
was actually started as a semi pejorative term for younger,
more inexperienced technicians and Air Force men, like basically junior
Air Force employees. The oed Oxford English Dictionary puts the

(07:31):
first usage of the word recorded in nineteen twenty nine.
And You'll Love This in a poem published in the magazine.
Aeroplane that goes thusly, there is a class aboard, loathed
by all the high and mighty, slaves who work and
get but little little thanks for all their labor. Yet
they are both skilled and many, many men with many talents.

(07:53):
They are but a herd of gremlins. Gremlins who do
all the flying, Gremlins who do much instruction, shunned by
the wing commanders.

Speaker 1 (08:02):
Terrible poem doesn't even I'm gonna snap for I wish
I had bongos right now.

Speaker 2 (08:05):
They like you to energy crevs thin. It's it's like
the Yeah, it's like the the so I married an
ax Ax murderer. Woman? Whoa man?

Speaker 1 (08:17):
I mean, this is really interesting to me, and I
think you're gonna touch on this more later. But I
always associate the term gremlin one of two things, either
little monsters or a problem in aircraft, some kind of
technological thing, usually aircraft.

Speaker 2 (08:29):
Yeah, you're gonna read that in a few seconds. So
what I find most funny is that there's like proto
surfer and skateboarding slang that also records this. Gremlin or
gremy has been variously described as like surf culture slang
for either like under talented younger newbie surfers or unwelcome

(08:54):
beachgoers hangers on to the surfing community. And then Oed
has another reference to being used in skateboarding, which isn't
a surprise because skateboarding came from surfing culture. But like,
it's so bizarre to me to think that, like the
two roots of this word linguistically are from the Air
Force and maybe surfing. I'm sure they got it from
the Air Force. But anyway, Jordan tell us about the

(09:17):
the the Air forceical origins of the word, I'm.

Speaker 1 (09:20):
Still stuck on all the surf stuff because all my
beach boys knowledge, I've never really heard that word come up.

Speaker 2 (09:25):
Gremy, Yeah, neither had I. It just it just popped
up in like, well, the Oxford English Dictionary for starters.
So who am I to quibbled?

Speaker 1 (09:34):
Well, The term gremlins spread wider during WW two, the
Big One. In nineteen forty one, news Day mentioned them
gremlins as exasperating pixies, which just like a great Pixies
cover pan name. Yeah, and at least one person suggested
that the British tradition of blaming malfunctions on gremlins may
have helped the RIF get through the German offensive against Britain.

(09:58):
Author in historian Marlon Brest quoted as saying morale among
the RAF pilots would have suffered if they pointed the
finger of blame at each other. It was far better
to make the scapegoat a fantastic and comical creature than
another member of your own squadron.

Speaker 2 (10:12):
That's very British, right.

Speaker 1 (10:14):
There was even a series of posters urging common sense
caution for troops and RIF starring goblins.

Speaker 2 (10:19):
I want to google that. Oh, it's in the Wikipedia page.
They're amazing. They're like those beautiful, old illustrated like propaganda posters,
but it's all stuff for like remember to wipe up
your grease or the gremlins will come for you. Like
just like, well, do they have pictures of creatures? Yeah,
and they I'm picturing like the absent Fairy. Do they
look like gazoo basically? Yeah? If you if you look

(10:44):
up the h the actual disambiguation page on Wikipedia page, yeah,
they look like they're like sort of depicted as little
like clown men. But it's like gremlins think it's fun
to hurt you. Use k always back up our battle skies.
These like beautiful old four color poster illustrations. Oh my god,

(11:07):
you're right, yeah, Gremlins our floor greasers, watch your step.
Gremlins love to pitch things at your eyes were safety goggles.
Gremlins will push you around. Look where you're going.

Speaker 1 (11:19):
It looks like a not very like an overtly unintelligent
humpty dumpity On a zempic.

Speaker 2 (11:25):
There's also a really funny picture of a like a
bomber with the nose art of a gremlin, and he
looks just like the noid who ruins pizza famously. Oh
my god, he does, right, So yeah, I mean it's
amazing that in popular consciousness they've become these scaly, horrifying
little scamps that like when they were just pictured as

(11:47):
like sort of dumb, malicious elves.

Speaker 1 (11:51):
You're right, yeah, it looks like like somebody who got
fired from the Keebler factory.

Speaker 2 (11:55):
I should just keep reaching, man.

Speaker 1 (11:56):
This is a sequel Gremlins three. There are also folklorists
and historians who posit that the invention of gremlins was
a manifestation of anxiety around the new modern age of
warfare rapidly encroaching. So this was like a manifestation of
fear of the atomic bomb that's heavy.

Speaker 2 (12:16):
Or like the automization of war basically, which people really
talk about, Like, you know, World War One was like
I don't know, doing some rough math, like let's just
say a couple of decades after the Civil War, right,
Oh yeah, and so the Civil War like fifty Yeah,
this is when they were still lining up to take
pot shots at each other. So all the different stuff

(12:37):
coming out of World War One, like tanks, you know,
rapid fire, machine guns, mustard gas. This was all just
like like horrifying new death technology that people were just
like unequipped to even comprehend, much less forced to witness it.

Speaker 1 (12:52):
And I'm not even trying to be funny right now,
although this is I think this is literally an onion
ar dumb censury headline. It's like not very sportsmanlike. Yeah,
there were certain like codes of battle. I mean, as
you mentioned, it was hilarious how you would like the
two sides would line up like it was like a
red road, announce.

Speaker 2 (13:12):
To each other that they were there, just like start shooting. Yeah,
so gremlins are possibly a psychic manifestation of that, you know, in.

Speaker 1 (13:20):
A way, aren't we all a psychic manifestation of anxiety,
the real psychic manifestation of anxiety with the friends we
met along the way. Emily Zarka, the host of Monstrom
on the PBS Stories Channel, told Atlas Obscura the first
military airplane was invented in nineteen oh nine, which was

(13:41):
like six years after the Wright brothers took flight. Wow,
we got on that quick, Oh, we sure did. We
can kill people with it. If we can find out
a way to kill people with some new technology, we
will find it.

Speaker 2 (13:52):
If we couldn't have sex with it, we'd make it
into a weapon of war.

Speaker 1 (13:55):
Human nature, flying is a really complex process, she continued,
let alone under the stress of war. I think that
in a lot of ways might have been easier, not
even just to explain away the mechanics, but to explain
away human error. Gremlins, it would be hard to take
responsibility for the death of another pilot in your group.

(14:16):
So Gremlin is the blank in the in the gun
of executioners.

Speaker 2 (14:22):
Yes, exactly. I mean, henceforth, I'm blaming everything that goes
wrong with this show on Gremlins.

Speaker 1 (14:27):
So I mean the British do exactly except Prince Andrew
I don't think gremlins did that.

Speaker 2 (14:32):
What if they hold up in court?

Speaker 1 (14:35):
Beloved Children's offor Raal Doll is credited with bringing gremlins
outside of the Royal Air Force.

Speaker 2 (14:41):
I didn't know this.

Speaker 1 (14:42):
He was a member of the eightieth Squadron of the
IRAF and in September of nineteen forty he was ordered
to fly his biplane in stages to the squadrons forward
airstrip south of MRSA Model in Egypt. I don't know
what half of those words mean byplane in stages. Oh wait,
like he had the fly piece of his plane like, no, no, no,

(15:02):
he had to fly in stage Okay. On the final
leg of this trip, Rawal Dahal couldn't find an air
strip and running low on fuel, he attempted a crash
landing in the desert, and the ensuing crash dull skull
was fractured, his nose smashed, and he was temporarily blinded.
He managed to get safely away from the wreckage, but
passed out. Although he was eventually rescued, he didn't recover

(15:24):
a site for another six weeks, and then, to add
insult to injury and RIF inquiry into the crash revealed
that the location he'd been sent to was completely incorrect,
and he actually crashed in a no man's land between
the Allied and Italian forces.

Speaker 2 (15:39):
So in a way, that could have got a lot worse,
I guess, I mean, yeah, it's just imagine that, like you,
I don't know what the timing of this was, but
imagine the accident that cost you your site for six
weeks and fractured your skull was like a complete cup
by someone of your commanding officers who were like, we
basically flew you into nowhere.

Speaker 1 (16:00):
Sorry, right, But also imagine being blind and crippled in
no man's lands, like the odds of wandering into the
opposing camp is. I also see this is the good gremlin,
bad gremlin.

Speaker 2 (16:16):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (16:17):
In January nineteen forty two, Dall was transferred to Washington,
d C as Assistant Air Attache at the British Embassy.

Speaker 2 (16:23):
I would assume a cush.

Speaker 1 (16:25):
Job to apologize for the screw up that nearly killed him.
And it was well in DC that he proceeded to
write his first children's novel, The Gremlins, which I'm not
familiar with, and I had no idea that he had
this bigger role in popularizing this term. He showed his
finish manuscript to Sidney Bernstein, head of the British Information Service,
who came up with the idea to send it to

(16:46):
Walt Disney, which they did in July nineteen forty two.
Disney eventually purchased the rights from Dahl for an animated feature,
and the story was published variously in Cosmopolitan in between
text tip was is guins.

Speaker 2 (17:01):
I don't think they were. They were more of a
lit mag at that point.

Speaker 1 (17:05):
And also as a picture book by Random House in
late nineteen forty two and early nineteen forty three. Eleanor
Roosevelt read The Gremlins were Grandkids, and the book sold
thirty thousand copies.

Speaker 2 (17:16):
Well, they printed like five thousand as an initial run,
and Dold like bought fifty copies for himself and passed
it out almost anywhere he could. But what an insane
twentieth century confluence of things, Disney, Eleanor Roosevelt, Gremlins, Willy Wonka,
and the Chaco Factory.

Speaker 1 (17:36):
By extension, Yeah yeah, the exis powers.

Speaker 2 (17:40):
Yeah, that is that is wild.

Speaker 1 (17:42):
Unfortunately, its reach was hindered by wartime paper shortages.

Speaker 2 (17:46):
But still roll Dahl.

Speaker 1 (17:47):
The book and the film project became known quantities in Hollywood,
even earning a mention in famed industry columnist had A
Hopper's work. My favorite thing about roll Doll was that
he wrote the script to my favorite James Bond movie.
He only lived twice, Sean Connery movie, which is funny
because then Ian Fleming, who wrote the James Bond novels,
wrote Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, which reads.

Speaker 2 (18:09):
Like a rolled all book. I always thought it was.
Is that weird? It's almost like they lost the bet
and we're like, all right, I'll try to write like
that's an amazing positive. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (18:19):
Sadly, the Gremlin film project was whittled down to an
animated short as opposed to a full feature, and then
canceled by Disney entirely in August nineteen forty three, when
copyright issues between the RIF and Disney proved insurmountable. I
would assume the RAF had copyrighted the figure for the
propaganda posters.

Speaker 2 (18:37):
No, I don't, actually you know this. One of the
sources that I read made reference to Statute twelve, and
I tried to look that up, and the closest I
can find is something having to do with the RAF
not holding pilots liable for damaged aircrafts. But I assume
it has to do with just details of the planes
and stuff that they were not able to square with,

(18:58):
you know, the British Armed Forces. What an unstoppable force,
immovable object situation, Walt Disney versus the R A F.
I mean, my money's on Disney. I mean no offense John, But.

Speaker 1 (19:10):
Yeah, But the Gremlins eventually moved to another medium, where
Walt Disney's Comics and Stories Outlet published the original story
and then another nine episode series starring its chief gremlin
Gus mm hmm, with the bulk of the latter drawn
by comics legend Walt Kelly is well.

Speaker 2 (19:29):
Kelly uh he was a was a Disney guy, and
then he left them and started this comic called Pogo,
which was like actually an enormously successful and influential comic
kind of like the era of like Fritz the Cat
and stuff, but Pogo it was wild for its sprawl,

(19:50):
like there would be all these themes of philosophy and
you know, social com political commentary and Alan Moore, you
know who wrote you know, Viva Vendetta and Watchman was
a huge, uge fan of Pogo. So if that gives
you any idea of the kind of guy who liked it,
imagine how bad it was at the time. It's fair.

Speaker 1 (20:08):
It looks like it's a cross between Calvin and Hobbs
and like R.

Speaker 2 (20:11):
Crumb, Yeah, it probably sums it up pretty well, But
Gremlin's proved durable for a while.

Speaker 1 (20:16):
In nineteen forty three, Bugs Bunny battled the Gremlin in
the Murray Melody's short Falling Hair, and again in nineteen
forty four is Russian Rhapsody, which this time depicted Russian
Kremlin's Sabotageian aircraft piloted by Adolph Hitler.

Speaker 2 (20:32):
Incredible.

Speaker 1 (20:33):
And then, of course there's the famous Twilight Zone episode
Night Near at twenty thousand Feet, which pitted a young
Bill Shatner against the Gremlin that only he can see.

Speaker 2 (20:42):
Have you ever seen that original one?

Speaker 1 (20:43):
You know what, I don't know if I've ever seen
it start to finish. I've seen the clip of him,
you know, yeah, looking out the window.

Speaker 2 (20:49):
But and then it was the Simpsons, I thought first
in the Simpsons Treehouse of Horror episode where they parody it,
but it's the design they went with It is bizarre.
It's like an ape like creature with like a sort
of pig dog face. It just looks weird.

Speaker 1 (21:06):
Yeah, I think I've only seen it like at an angle.
It's pretty creepy looking. Written by fame horror author Richard Matheson,
who also wrote I Am Legend. The episode was later
remade for the Twilight Zone movie with Shatner's part played
by John Lithgow, which came out just a year.

Speaker 2 (21:23):
Before the subject of this episode.

Speaker 1 (21:25):
Do we give our obligatory reference to the Twilight's On
movie tragedy?

Speaker 2 (21:28):
Yeah, the Twilight's On the movie pops up a lot
in this because Joe Dante worked on a segment of it.
You know. It was John Landis was involved and he
killed some kids, just like the way I off handedly
threw that off. No, it is. It is famous, even
though it was really a star studded production. It was
all of these like young, youngish Hollywood brats taking a

(21:48):
stab at the stuff that they were influenced by. But
it is most famous for John land the segment John
Landis was responsible for where yeah, two kids in a
stunt guy died in a helllicopter crash based on like
lax safety regulations or lax filmmaking that he was should

(22:09):
have been put in director jail for and was not.
And I think, like when pressed, was remarkably cavalier, bordering
on callous about the entire thing. But his kid sucks too,
So not really a surprise. Where did they film it?

Speaker 1 (22:21):
Like somewhere because it was it was like done location
and they like didn't they just get the kids by
like going out in the street and being like, hey,
what are you want a movie?

Speaker 2 (22:29):
Yeah?

Speaker 3 (22:30):
Me?

Speaker 2 (22:30):
It was bad. It was real bad. Oh. Yes, so
Vic Morrow, who was an Emmy winning actor was killed
in a helicopter crash with two illegally hired child actors.
That was it. Yeah, where did they film it? And
this led to a bunch of new safety procedures and
stuff implemented in the filmmaking industry. Basically, the guy was

(22:52):
shooting it was it was like a war sequence, and
the guy piloting the helicopter was like having troubled navig
the detonations that they were shooting into the air from
the ground by the pyrotechnic guy, and that caused this
helicopter crash. Damn he never oh, he was aquitted, but yeah.

(23:14):
Why do I think he was like sort of cavalier
about it? Anyway? I don't know. We talked about this enough,
it'll come back. Despite being a film that features one
of its main characters reciting the details of her father's
horrifying death and the murder of a senior citizen, Gremlins
has its origins with one of the most family friendly
writers of the past fifty years, Christopher Columbus. Columbus basically

(23:35):
wrote the original script for this as a writing exercise.
He never intended it for it to actually get made,
he told cut Print Film in twenty sixteen. I got
the idea from an apartment I used to live in
what sounded like a platoon of mice would come out,
and to hear them skittering around in the blackness was
really creepy. And his script was legendarily far darker than
the finished film. Gizmo actually transforms into the main Gremlin

(23:59):
stripe rather than birthing him. I hate using that verb.
And it also features a scene in which the character
Billy comes down the stairs and his mother's decapitated head
is bounced at him. Columbus had come to Stephen Spielberg's
eye with a short film that he made at NYU
called I Think I'm Gonna Like It here, And this
was like I think he was like twenty two or

(24:20):
twenty three, Like he just sent this script out via
his agent and it went out to like forty people,
and Spielberg grabbed it from like the submissions pile in
his office and liked it. He didn't like it enough
to direct it because he had just wrapped the puppet
heavy et and was now working on Indiana Jones and
The Temple of Doom, which featured a lot of heavy

(24:41):
special effects, but he offered Chris Columbus a chance to
come out to la and develop the script with him
at Ambulin. They toned it down and Spielberg actually came
up with the idea of making Gizmo a separate creature
from the Gremlins. He birthed them instead of becoming one
of them. Gotta stop saying that. And this was partially

(25:01):
done at the script stage, but also they like tweaked
a bunch of stuff right before production, both the design
of Gizmo and Spielberg was like, yeah, he should do
all the heroic stuff at the end, and they actually
took it away from Zach Gallaghan, who was like, I
got to be the hero in this, like my first,
my first film, and Spielberg gave it like I don't know,
weeks before they were supposed to start shooting and was like, uh,

(25:24):
Puppet's gonna do it instantly. Maguai means devil or demon
in Cantonese and Mandarin. It's pronounced mogui. I don't know
why I gave that a French accent. I'm not good
with languages. You cribn languages we're talking about, Joe Dante
told Empire in twenty twenty two. Originally, Gizmo was meant
to be in the movie for the first couple of

(25:44):
reels before turning into Stripe the Bad Gremlin, and about
six weeks away from the shoot, Steven Spielberg had this
brilliant idea, and it was a brilliant idea to make
him the sidekick. We built a giant Gizmo head and
got lots of close ups, and he became the de
facto star of the movie. We even reshot the ending,
much to Zach Gallaghan's chagrin. Dante had met Spielberg under

(26:05):
much less auspicious circumstances than NYU. It was when Universal
filed suit against Roger Corman, who, as I mentioned earlier,
Joe Dante came up under. This was over the Corman
produced Dante directed film Piranha. Universal sued him based on
its similarities to Jaws, but in an immense display of chillness,

(26:30):
Stephen Spielberg basically was like, you know what, We're gonna
get ripped off a lot, and this is the best
made ripoff I've seen. So he convinced Universal back down,
and he was impressed enough by Dante's direction on Piranha
that he gave him a slot in the Twilight Zone movie,
and based on the howling in the aforementioned Werewolf Year,
he offered Dante Gremlins. And the timing of this was

(26:52):
incredible because Dante supposedly was down to his last one
hundred dollars and like so depressed about his prospects in
Hollywood that when Spielberg's offer for it arrived in the mail,
he assumed it had been sent to the wrong address.
I'm funny this this is equally amazing and puts a
totally different film into an alternate timeline. Spielberg actually wanted

(27:13):
Tim Burton to direct this because Tim Burton had been
coming out of col Arts and like, had been actually
working for Disney, and he'd produced franken Weeny, which is
his like black and white thing about the kid who
Frankenstein's dog. But he just didn't think that Tim Burton
ultimately had enough experience to helm a feature film. And
then Tim Burton promptly proved him incorrect when Pee Wee's

(27:36):
Big Adventure came out not a long time later. But man,
imagine that Tim Burton directed Gremlins. Everyone just do that
Dutch angles German expressionism, a fucking Danny Elfman soundtrack. But
did Jerry Goldsmith's song was like, actually, yeah, that Jerry
Goldsmith theme from this movie, one of the two famous ones,

(27:57):
aside from Gizmo's Lullaby, sounds remarkably like some of Danny
Elfman's bullsh Maybe that was a dig.

Speaker 1 (28:04):
Maybe that was like when Tim Burton first started working
with Danny Elfman, it was like, all right, we gotta you.

Speaker 2 (28:10):
Want me to make the rest of my career sound
like the Kremlins theme the movie you took from me.

Speaker 1 (28:15):
I will say these two Spielberg stories with Dante and
Chris Columbus are very cool. Like he's showing that he's
cool in a way that I did not readily expect.

Speaker 2 (28:26):
Yeah, this gave me a whole new level of respect
for him, just the degree to which he was like
he like recognized a little bit of himself, like the
same kind of gee whiz nineteen forties and fifties. Yea,
loves movies, loved Paul culture stuff, and just like went
to bat with him throughout this entire shoot, which you
will now read.

Speaker 1 (28:43):
I'm sure I've told you this, but I had a
family member who semi casually knew Steven Spielberg and was
in his office a bunch on the Universal lot, and
apparently he had like a table with like all of
his special things on it and his awards, and he
would have his oscar next to like his like boy
Scott Pine with Derby trophy and stuff like that. Just
like it all was like equal in like these are

(29:04):
my special things.

Speaker 2 (29:05):
I know I can adorable. I really like that.

Speaker 1 (29:09):
Gremlins would be the first original picture from Spielberg's new
Ambulance Imprint, and Joe Dante told cut Print Film that
the studio was unconvinced that this was a great idea
for a movie. They did it to make Steven Spielberg
happy mainly, but the arrangement actually worked out fine. Since
Spielberg was busy shooting Indiana Jones at the Temple of Doom,
he wasn't available to be as hands on or as

(29:31):
you put in parentheses, interfering as he was with Toby
Hooper on the set of Poltergeist, which was a movie
that he basically shadow directed, ghost directed.

Speaker 2 (29:41):
Yeah, I mean this has been like an ongoing controversy
for decades. Mick Garris, who is like a horror guy
from the industry, he directed a film called Sleepwalkers, and
he's just been I think he has other stuff that
doesn't come to mind, but he has like a very
famous horror podcast that he runs, and he conclusively was

(30:02):
like Toby Hooper directed Poultergeist. But it was such a
controversy at the time where everyone was like accusing Spielberg
of basically leaning over Toby Hooper's shoulder the entire time
and telling him how to move the camera and telling
him how to do stuff that Spielberg was moved to
take like a full page ad out number of the
trades that was like Toby Hooper directed this movie, not me.

(30:24):
I am sorry, and then like, yeah, it was crazy.
You know, people had less to do back then.

Speaker 1 (30:30):
But because Spielberg was so hands off for Poultergeist, Dante
would basically use Steven Spielberg as a shield, asking him
to tell the studio to back off whenever they had
notes that he didn't agree with, which was nice. They
won't mess with you, and you won't mess with me.
This works out great.

Speaker 2 (30:45):
Yeah, yeah, I mean it was really an ideal suggest
Joe Dante's incredibly lucky director actually, given the success of this,
which could have been a huge disaster, and what he
got to do with Gremlins two, as we'll cover later.

Speaker 1 (30:56):
Yeah, you mentioned this earlier, the whole like nineteen forties
fifties gollage whiz Americana stuff. Jodah Day stuffed Gremlins with
nods to American pop culture. He studied Frank Capra and
Jimmy Stewart's iconic It's a Wonderful Life for the wintry
small town vibe of the film, and there's more than
one nod to him in this movie. The nineteen fifty
seven educational short shown in science class Hemo of The

(31:19):
Magnificent was written and directed by Capra.

Speaker 2 (31:22):
That's nuts. What an insane deep cut dude to find
a Capra directed educational short and sneak it into your
movie as a nod to him.

Speaker 1 (31:31):
That's pretty gone and it's a wonderful life. The movie
appears literally depicted on TV, as does Invasion of the
Body Snatchers. Plus Gremlins has packed with tributes to everything
from Flashdance to Looney Tunes and even Spielberg himself. The
titles on the movie theater Marquis are a Boy's Life
and Watch the Skies the respective shooting titles for ET

(31:54):
and Close Encounters of the Third Kind. And Spielberg also
had a tiny cameo in Gremlins.

Speaker 2 (31:58):
What was he? He's in a wheelchair when Billy's dad
calls him from the expo that he's presenting at.

Speaker 1 (32:07):
If we have more time, I would do a quick
sidebar on hitchcocky and directed cameos.

Speaker 2 (32:13):
Yeah, but we don't, we don't. Sorry.

Speaker 1 (32:17):
James Cameron is the third class paster boarding The Titanic
at the beginning of the movie.

Speaker 2 (32:20):
In Titanic there, sorry, I had to.

Speaker 1 (32:23):
It's like cartman. He can't start singing has to finish it.

Speaker 2 (32:26):
Yeah, damn it.

Speaker 1 (32:32):
The Gremlin jokes inserted in the movie Gremlin weren't even
limited to pop culture. They snuck an AMC Gremlin car
into the Chinatown scene, depicted with its hood up and
smoke pouring out of its engine because I think it
was kind of a piece of garbage if I re.

Speaker 2 (32:45):
Call yeah right, that was the bit about that car.
A bit.

Speaker 1 (32:49):
Funnily enough, one of the most repeated trivia bits about
Gremlins is that the set used for the film's Kingston Falls,
which is Universal's town Square set on Universal's backlot, was
reused just a year later for Back to the Future's
Mill Valley, a place that I used to wander around
quite a bit as a kid when I used to
roam the back lots as a little boy, and Back
to the Future was my favorite movie. So I used

(33:10):
to go to the clock Tower Square and it was
pretendo was Marty McFly was great. I also went to
the Bates Motel too, which is weird because you would
go inside and one of the rooms actually had a
shower with like dried fake blood in it, And I
don't know if I just kept it that way for
like people who would visit.

Speaker 2 (33:26):
But I didn't know that, and.

Speaker 1 (33:27):
I got really creeped out, really creepy.

Speaker 2 (33:30):
Yeah, I mean I think it was. Wasn't it Chocolate
syrup famously?

Speaker 1 (33:33):
Yeah, but you know, it was right after Gus Van
Sant did the Shop for Shot remake, which they also
shot on that so part of me was.

Speaker 2 (33:40):
Like, wait, is this from this?

Speaker 1 (33:42):
But I think it was just for people who were
visiting to to get a kick out of it. Anyway,
Gremlins had originally intended to film elsewhere to cut costs.
They wanted to use the so called Dukes of Hazzard
Street on the Warner Brothers lot, but scheduling delays forced
them to move to the more expensive Universal Towns where
these sequences of the film. But even shooting on a

(34:03):
back lot didn't guarantee peace of mind. About a week
before shooting started, another production company began setting up in
the area immediately behind the Universal town Square a lot.
Cinematographer John Horra told the American Society of Cinematographers magazine,
Suddenly they began erecting all these giant poles and tarps
and other paraphernalia right behind our buildings, and you pause it.

Speaker 2 (34:24):
This may have.

Speaker 1 (34:25):
Actually been the production of Back to the Future, because
the timeline works out release wise.

Speaker 2 (34:30):
I don't know the shooting schedule back to the Future.
I could have easily looked that up and I didn't. Yeh,
Nion regrets the area.

Speaker 1 (34:39):
You also pause it that if it wasn't Back to
the Future, it might have been Walter Hill's Streets of Fire.

Speaker 2 (34:44):
Which is in the Blu Ray commentary. They said that
was shooting at the same time. So those are the two.
Those are the two culprits that up the Gremlin shoot.

Speaker 1 (34:52):
We got to do Back to the Future one of
these days. Our buddies Jay and Alley really want us
to do that.

Speaker 2 (34:57):
I'll just let you do that as a broken monologue.
Oh come on, like the Iceman Cometh or something. We'll
like rent out a theater and you can just read
the entire forty five pages. I'm sure you'll write alone,
and I'll complaud you at the end like horse and
well as a citizen painning.

Speaker 1 (35:13):
I mean, I had seventy pages on Titanic, so I
think that uh.

Speaker 2 (35:16):
Yeah, Jesus fifty. Just pitch the fucking book, dude.

Speaker 1 (35:20):
Cinematographer John Horra said that these sets were so high
up that they couldn't shoot the tops of buildings for gremlins.
In one of the film's matte paintings, even had to
incorporate the other sets cables into the illustration. It was
a nightmare, he concluded. Not only did we have to
be careful where we shot, but while we were setting
up there was continuous construction, noise, pile drivers, hammers shouting.

(35:42):
The only quiet moments we had were when we were shooting.
The majority of interiris were shot on Warner Brothers sound
stages at the Burbank Studios. The non specific Chinatown where
refers to meet Gizmo, was shot on the Burbank Studios.
Tenement Street, which you pause, it is possibly racist. I'm
gonna say, yes.

Speaker 2 (36:01):
Against the Chinese or the Irish. You literally call something
Tenement Street like a shorthand reference to like the most
dehumanizing housing situation of all time.

Speaker 1 (36:11):
Or anti Semitic. I mean, it's anyone who's not or
anti Italian. There's really like lots of people.

Speaker 2 (36:16):
Make you pick those are just anti poor.

Speaker 1 (36:19):
Yeah, I was gonna say, yeah, it's more classes than racist.
I guess. Originally this was supposed to have taken place
in Hong Kong until someone points it out it might
be hard to get Gizmo through customs, and.

Speaker 2 (36:31):
That's the one thing they decided to make realistic about it.

Speaker 1 (36:33):
It's gonna say, I love the logic rears its head
very selectively in these things.

Speaker 4 (36:40):
As you meditate on that, we'll be right back with
more too much information after these messages. Woo, and now
we were onto the true stars of this movie, and

(37:03):
it's MVP, the puppets and the man who made them possible.
SFX legend Chris Wayless. I believe it is pronounced he
would go on to win an Oscar for still some
of the most horrific imager I've ever seen in my life.
The Jeff Goldbloom falls apart or turns into a fly
cancer monster in David Cronenberg's The Fly Wayless. You might remember,

(37:30):
for those of you with an encyclopedic memory and a
love of this show. He previously appeared in TMI when
we did Raid the Lost Arc because he was the
guy who designed the melting Nazis at the end.

Speaker 2 (37:42):
Oh yeah, and he initially came on to Gremlins because
he'd been working with Joe Dante and Dante's producer Michael Finnel,
who is also a Roger Corman alum on I think
a three D version of Creature from the Black Lagoon,
and this is hilarious. That project was shelved in favor
of John three D, one of the most famous cinematic

(38:03):
nightmares of all time. But you know, Wayless still wanted
to hang around with Finela and Dante narrator voice, and
he would regret that choice. He told an Empire. I
pulled the first draft of the Gremlin script the other
day and read it, and I have no idea how
I could be so stupid as to commit to that project.
I'd written one word on the front cover.

Speaker 3 (38:24):
Ha.

Speaker 2 (38:25):
I didn't think it could be done. The technology didn't exist.
I didn't have a shop or crew, but I was
desperate for money. Columbus's script had included initial descriptions of
both the Magua and the Gremlins. Wayliss recalled them as
like armored things with big, white, spiked horns, but he
wanted them to have a specific esthetic callback to the Magua.
He wanted them to be on a continuum of quote

(38:47):
unquote evolution, so he gave them their you know, the
big bat Ears, just a great weird little guy design
really all up there in the pantheon. Well we'll get
to that, but I mean the Gremlins as well, because
Spielberg endlessly meddled with the design of the Magua. As
we'll book talk. Wales told Cutprint Films that his initial

(39:08):
inspiration for Gizmo was more simion shall we say apes
after ape like after reading the script, my first idea
was to take the tarsier a little primate and give
it to cartoony proportions. I wanted the big eyes to
make it cute. I showed it to Mike Finel and
Joe Dante and they asked for some tweaks, So I
made the next one. This was more like a puppy.

(39:29):
Fortunately they didn't go with it. Those are the only
two magua I sculpted before the final one. And I
mentioned that Stephen would just like randomly call in from
wherever he was shooting Temple of Doom and be like, uh,
make it have translucent like bat ears or like fox ears.
And then later he was like in the grand tradition
of George Lucas, basing Chewbacca on his own dog Spielberg

(39:50):
would call and say, yeah, can you make gizmo match
the color of my dog Chauncey, which I believe it
is a beach Chauncey. And then once they had the designs,
then they had to figure out how to animate these
little bastards, Wales told Fangoria. Initially, Joe Dante wanted the
magwa to look very real. At one point we even

(40:12):
brought in a monkey to see if we might be
able to put a monkey in a suit. Then we
thought of getting little squirrels or some kind of rodent
from some remote part of the world that wouldn't be
immediately identifiable, and do a little coloring on them.

Speaker 1 (40:23):
Front of the pod monkeys in suits.

Speaker 2 (40:26):
But the dog in the film was I think enough
working with animals for Joe and anyway, we decided to
go with a full effects creature, Dante told Cutprint Films.
We actually did get a monkey and put a head
on him and watched him koreene around the editing room,
pooping on everything in tear. We decided it really wasn't
going to work out. There were so many hilarious images

(40:46):
of when people try to make animals as like a
cost cutting measure. There's one from Alien three where the
alien hatches out of a dog. So they were going
to try and make a whippet with like an exoskeleton
and props around it, and they are like set photos
of this thing, and it is first of all, so
cute with his little like aliens like armor and tail,

(41:08):
and second of all is just like, why, why, guys,
why are you making me do this? Anyway, Whales has
said that Gremlins is his favorite thing that he's worked
on repeatedly, but he has also steal said it was
an enormous pain in the ass that nearly killed him,
and most of that was Gizmo, he told star wars
dot Com. The small size of the Magua made it
difficult to come up with mechanical puppets that would have

(41:30):
enough features to keep the puppet alive on film. We
just couldn't get away with the most standard puppet techniques
at that small size, so most of the Magua were
largely animatronic, as opposed to the Gremlins. The Gremlins were
specifically designed to be hand puppets, and the majority of
them were relatively simple puppets that were enjoyable to operate.
There were lots of specialized puppets that only did one thing. Crawl, skateboard,

(41:52):
hang from lights, etc. We made a lot of puppets
on that film, so many that an accurate guess at
a number is not really feasible, especially since we canized
a lot of them to create new ones along the way.
They made around twenty different gizmos for the film. Sometimes
several were used in the same shot. This is insane
to me. So he would he would be he was
carried by Billy, and that would be I think they said,

(42:14):
an RC controlled like a radio frequency controlled puppet, and
then Billy would set hit the character would set him down,
and in the intervening time, when the camera was panning
downwards Wayless would have to yank the other one, the
one he was holding out of frame. In the intervening
time before the camera reached the floor, where a different

(42:35):
model piloted a different way, had already been placed in
the shot. Zach Allagan, who plays Billy, told Empire, if
you look at the film, the camera almost never pans
below my waist. That's because there were twelve people down there,
duck walking around with joysticks while cables ran up my
body I'd have to be smiling and having a fabulous
time with this little furry thing while this contraption pinched

(42:56):
my flesh. That's my favorite Zappa album. Contraption pinched my flesh.
Deep cut reference there not even one of the most
popular Zappa albums. Weasels ripped my flash. It is oh okay,
I stand corrected, not a deep cut. By the time
gizmo started moving, it was incredible. He'd be so cute,

(43:17):
I'd get the inclination to touch him, and the puppeteers
were so good that he'd instantly react. That must have
been a little insane making imagine showing up to work
like a little altered and like you're like.

Speaker 1 (43:29):
The puppet is real.

Speaker 2 (43:31):
It's reacting to me. This is nuts to me. Like
they designed because they couldn't fit all the mechanisms in
a smaller sized puppet. They designed just what they called superfaces,
which were like foot wide three feet with the ears
oh intensely packed and intricately designed gizmo heads that had

(43:55):
all of the motors and hydraulics necessary that you see
in the intense close ups. That's how they got his
like you know, his eyebrows and cheek and all of
his lips and the eartips to move. Is that that's
a much larger puppet than the actual things were, just
an extreme close up way. Let's told Death by Films.
We used all sorts of methids to operate the Magua
and Gremlins, radio signals, rods, handwork, marionetting cables, and what

(44:21):
I call throw them across the room puppetry, which could
probably be best seen in the tavern scene where they are
literally just rubber puppets being cast across the room. Speedwork's
relatively last minute decision to make Gizmo more heroic and
central to the film's action necessitated his place in Billy's
backpack for most of the second half of the film

(44:42):
because all the junk that they had to animate him
with could be more easily hidden. And the crew hated
Gizmo so much that they assembled a list titled Horrible
Things to Do to Gizmo, and the shot of him
being strung up on a dartboard by the graund Lands
was pulled from that list. Dante did tell Empire though

(45:04):
the dog in the movie Mushroom thought Gizmo was real.
We got reactions out of him that were just incredible.
They actually started calling him like the cutaway dog, because
whenever they were stuck for like a reaction shot, they
were like Mushroom would always have the most incredible face reactions.
They would just fill frames by cutting away to the dog.
Cigar chopping executive, Shoot the dog, more dog in the picture.

Speaker 1 (45:28):
That's not what I mean, is okay?

Speaker 2 (45:32):
Gizmo cast quite a long shadow. Joe Dante recalled an
ama on Reddit that when Ferbie Fever was sweeping the
nation in nineteen ninety eight, producer Mike Fanell and I
noticed a certain similarity between Ferbie and the Magua and
pointed it out to Warner Brothers. Soon there was a
gizmo Ferby for sale, and no doubt some settlement money

(45:52):
changed hands. He has also recently charged Disney with wholesale
ripping off the gizmo for the baby Yo.

Speaker 1 (46:01):
Oh wow, oh my god. Yeah, oh, I didn't even
think about that. Despite the fact that there were a
ton of gremlins and some were literally just built to be,
as you said, thrown across a room. Billy actor Zach
Gallaghan recalled that security was extra tight around these puppets
because they were such a substantial part of the budget.

(46:22):
This look gonna sell these puppets on the black market.

Speaker 2 (46:24):
I don't know.

Speaker 1 (46:24):
Maybe they maybe they would sell them to Disney, who knows.

Speaker 2 (46:27):
Supposedly these things were in the neighborhood of like thirty
thousand dollars, would go up to costing like thirty thousand
dollars each between man hours and parts and everything. But
who would you sell them to?

Speaker 1 (46:37):
And it's not like whoever you sold them to, who
could use them because they'd be so identifiable in the
movie as like, oh that's the thing I built like.

Speaker 2 (46:44):
A thriving a thriving La skid Row marketplace, black market,
place of screen used gremlins. Hey, may I want to
buy a puppet? Opens a strench code? Actually those things
are all over the community online. There's because they made
so many, they're still being sold.

Speaker 1 (47:04):
Cast and crew were asked by security to pop their
trunks to make sure no puppets were being smuggled out.
That's one of my favorite factoids we've ever read.

Speaker 2 (47:13):
On this show. Wow, is that a maguaie in your pants?
Or you just happy to see me? Better?

Speaker 1 (47:19):
Said in the scar chomping executive voice. Creepier but much
more effective. Compounding any scene with a puppet was the
fact that production didn't have the budget to build raised
sets like they did for Muppets films.

Speaker 2 (47:32):
Or who framed Roger Rabbit.

Speaker 1 (47:34):
In other words, you could have the puppeteers beneath the
floor where the human actors were to kind of, you know,
do the puppeteering. You know how puppets were and if
you don't pause this show right now and google it,
Jim Spencer, the production designer, came up with the affordable
answer Waylis told Dailydaed dot com. He chose one of
the Warner Brothers stages that had a pool in it

(47:55):
and built the sets over the existing flooring there.

Speaker 2 (47:57):
I'm smart.

Speaker 1 (47:58):
So the puppeteers had to go down into the cement
flooring of the pool and work their way through the
maze of floor supports. It wasn't the ideal situation, but
it worked. Cement Pond.

Speaker 2 (48:09):
She's Hillbillies too, Yeah, right.

Speaker 1 (48:12):
The most complicated scenes in the film were the scene
in which Phoebe Kate's character is being menaced, as you say,
by gremlins in Dori's tavern, along with the scene where
the gremlins are in the theater watching Snow White, which,
as you mentioned and I can only imagine, necessitated some
intense negotiation with Disney. Maybe that was why they felt

(48:32):
entitled to snatch it for Baby Yoda.

Speaker 2 (48:34):
Oh yeah, sure, we earn this.

Speaker 1 (48:37):
Waloes explained to Daily Dead that the bar scene was
made even more complicated by the fact that director Joe
Dante encouraged the crew to help brainstorm the action by
way of a blank list he posted on set. There
are big on lists on the set. We had to
build a law of special rigs, and there was even
a rig built for three gremlins dancing against the wall

(48:57):
that ended up not being used like full Monty style.
There are all kinds of gags we did in the
bar that were cut from the film. I think the
original bar scene ran twenty minutes long and Joe cut
it down to ten, so there's a lot of missing
gremlins in there. I don't remember many specifics, as I
was burt to a cinder by that time in the production,
but it was a week in the bar just shooting

(49:18):
gremlin gags over and over again. In the bar scene,
the lighted cores sign on the wall was apparently a
huge headache for camera and lighting crew, presumably because they
didn't want to have free advertising in there, so.

Speaker 2 (49:31):
They playing it threw off the the way they were
lighting the shut. Yeah, in that in that ASC magazine article,
what's his name? Horace? John Horace? Uh, would I think
work on Gremlins two again, he talks about how they
wanted the lighting for this to look like old EC
comics splash pages. So like that scene in the pool

(49:52):
where it's like lit from below by green but also
like four different weird other light sources from the from
the windows and all this stuff in the bar. They
were trying to make it look like a comic and
a cartoon, and this course sign was just throwing off
all the lighting and always dead center in the shot.

Speaker 1 (50:09):
They got around this by asking the guy supervising the
shot when the gremlin flies off a ceiling fan if
he could aim the prop at the light and he
successfully destroyed it in one shot. What a good problem
solving in this?

Speaker 2 (50:21):
Yeah? It just whales will I mean, yeah, we're going
to talk about the personal hell that this was for
Chris Whalis, But like, doesn't sound fun to whip a
puppet off a ceiling fan and smash a bar.

Speaker 1 (50:35):
Sign like, come on, that was the problem to solve
that day.

Speaker 2 (50:39):
He was seriously put through the ringer though by this,
because after principal photography wrapped, there were another three months
of puppet filming for shots that didn't require any humans
to be in the frame. I'd barely survived the main production,
he told Empire, And this was literally just one puppet
shot after another. At best, I averaged three hours of
sleep per night. I mean, it's just a very very hectic,

(51:00):
panicked endurance test. He got a kidney stone and literally
fell off a truck at one point during this marathon,
injuring his ankle and forcing him onto crutches. The voices
of Gizmo and the Gremlins were made of a fairly
talented cast of dudes. Howie Mandel gets a lot of
credit for the voice of Gizmo, but he's annoying and
his Gizmo voice is essentially just the one he used

(51:22):
for Bobby's World, so for him. Most of the film
was actually shot with the Gremlins and Gizmo silent. Waless's
crew would make little noises and voices when they were
working with the puppets, so they actually got to record
a guide track. They brought all the crew into the
studio and had them record like a guide track for
the actual voice actors, and then Waless was really hurt

(51:42):
when he went to see the movie and discovered that
all of those noises had been replaced with animal sounds.
So they went back and did it again. Other voice
actors included Michael Winslow, forever known as the Police Academy
funny Mouth Sounds guy, and friend of the pod legendary
voiceover artist Frank Welker. Welker actually got Mandel the job,

(52:04):
the suckier of the two men, revealed. Frank set up
this interview for me, and I went in. Mandel, who
sucks told cut print film. It was a building that
also housed a gynecologist's office, So when I approached that
sign and heard noises coming out, I thought, oh my god,
I have no idea what procedure this doctor could possibly
be doing. It turned out it was just the auditions
for the Gremlins voices. This may be Mandel telling a

(52:28):
flop sweaty joke because Film School Rejects does this great
feature called commentary commentary where they just like transcribe the
best of audio commentaries for different movies, and for the
Gremlins one they talk about Howie Mandel like does the
Gizmo voice of course, and spends like half of they say,
he spends half of it cracking jokes about half of
which land. Oh Howie Mandel, who is a piece of

(52:51):
losersh doesn't sing Gizmo's iconic song that was a thirteen
year old from Jerry Goldsmith's synagogue. Why old do you
hate Yai Mendel? He sucks? Oh, just okay. He's one
of those like old comics who's like, you can't make
these my stuff today because the PC and these America's

(53:13):
got talent. So like, fuck him, what do you mean?
Why do I hate Howie Mandel? His face, his meen.

Speaker 1 (53:21):
I knew it was his co creator and co writer
on Bobby's World. He has a show too, oh how
A Mandol No, no, no, this other guy. Oh he
has a show with Jason Alexander called Really No really.

Speaker 2 (53:35):
Oh yeah, yeah yeah. All the voice actors had to
redub their lines for the foreign releases of the film
with local phrases and slang because they just really like
made up the different sounds for them as they went.
They were like when the when the the Gremlin goes
like Gizmo coca, that was just like something that they
just ran with. But then they had to redub it

(53:57):
in other languages, despite the fact they weren't speak English
in the first place. This was a little bit of
canny marketing on the part of Spielberg and Joe Dante,
because they when they were re recording it, they threw
in all kinds of little local nods to each locale
that the film would be marketed in, and different pieces
of slang in that language to make it land. For example,

(54:20):
in Dori's tavern, they've replaced all of the music and
what the Gremlins are singing with German drinking songs. I
like that. Yeah, it's great, good marketing, guys. Less interestingly,
we can talk about the cast of Gremlins. I actually
really like Zach Alligan. He plays Billy Peltzer. He's a
sort of adorable every kid quality to him that's more

(54:40):
endearing than your average Spielbergian child lead, most of whom
I hate. And he would reprise the role in Gremlins too.
He was a child, he was nineteen years old when
he was cast, but he was originally meant to be thirteen,
which is why his best friend in the film is
a pre pubescent Corey Feldman. He didn't. He kept acting,

(55:02):
but like has not done much other than the Gremlins films.
Gallagan was actually also almost beat out for the role
by Emilio Estevez and Judd Nelson, who hilariously in the
Blu Ray commentary they say displayed a bit too much
anger in his audition. Judd Nelson too angry for Gremlins.
There were other Judd hersh however. Yeah, the other casting

(55:28):
calls for this read like the who's who of eighties
male leads. Kevin Bacon, Rob Lowe just too handsome and
also busy raping people at the time, right, I didn't
know that. Google's Francically Yeah, nineteen eighty eight, his sex
tape was with a twenty two year old woman and
a sixteen year old.

Speaker 1 (55:47):
Oh, I knew there was a sex tape. I didn't
know the sixteen year old part, So my mistake.

Speaker 2 (55:53):
He was not having sex with an underage woman when
he was auditioning for Gremlins. TMI regrets the air.

Speaker 1 (55:58):
The age of Cassette and Georgia that time. I was fourteen, so.

Speaker 2 (56:02):
There so oh my god, the South.

Speaker 1 (56:10):
At the time that he was in Atlanta, Georgia for
the Democratic National Convention where he was campaigning for Mike Ducaucus.

Speaker 2 (56:16):
Ralph Macchio also was like castor list, we should see that. Yeah,
he's he's great. He's a little too like maybe I
just because I only think of him as the karate kid,
but he's like I can't really imagine him as like
Jersey guy. You know, he just is forever in my head,
like biking around to banana rama and has like a
doofy Jersey accent. I don't think I could buy him

(56:38):
in like a wintry upstate setting. Gallaghan auditioned for Gremlins
without really seeing the script or knowing that Spueberg was
involved at all, but he got the part in two meetings.
Our initial reaction was he's another pretty boy, producer Michael
Fanelt told The Washington Post. But when he read it
was very touching. He had exactly the sort of ingenuousness
we were looking for on Gallagh. And second day he

(57:01):
did a screen test with Phoebe Kates and the next
day both of them were offered the part. Supposedly, when
Spielberg saw this test footage, he said, Oh my god,
look at that. He's in love with her already. I
don't need to see anything else. And to add the
final insult to injury. Phoebe Kates does not remember testing
with Galian Oh ease of auditioning, aside, being a nineteen

(57:23):
year old in his first starring role meant Gallaghan was
a little inexperienced. In the Blu Ray commentary, Dante recalled
having to repeatedly tell him to shut his mouth when
he wasn't speaking. The editor used to come up to
me and say, can't you get him to keep his
mouth closed? He's always got his mouth open, and I
got to cut around it. Gallagan blames this on a
book about Montgomery Clift.

Speaker 5 (57:43):
That he read.

Speaker 1 (57:44):
Ah, I'm not.

Speaker 2 (57:45):
Familiar enough with Montgomery Cliff other than he got his
face smashed to know that he was gate mouthed in scenes.

Speaker 1 (57:51):
Well, Elizabeth Taylor had to like pull his teeth out
of his throat when I do remember that, So maybe
that was I don't know, maybe that was teeth mouth.

Speaker 2 (58:00):
Yeah, face smash, no, no brace story. There's a clash
song about him, the right profile really, so yeah, I
think it's on. I think it's on London calling him.
Gallagan also recalls being blown away hold for applause by
his first run in with big screen pyrotechnics.

Speaker 1 (58:18):
Like the theater, hold for applause after because nobody knows
what Nobody knows the joke until you have the blow
the pyrotechnics.

Speaker 2 (58:25):
Don't tell me how to do this. Don't ever do that.
I'm not in front of the guests. Jordan may ask
you in the kitchen any help with the potatoes?

Speaker 1 (58:37):
Now?

Speaker 2 (58:40):
Uh? For this theater explosion. He has one of the
crew how big the explosion would be, and the guy
cryptically responded, well, we've packed it pretty good. It was deafening,
Gallagan told the Garden just the ultimate like grizzled teamster responds,
just like, pretty well packed packed it real good. Gallagan's like,
what is that mean? It was deafening, he told the Guardian.

(59:04):
And the heat was so intense I thought it had
singed my eyebrows. It blew the doors off the theater,
as you can see in the film, and it shattered
windows on a building at Universal a mile away. Insert
Michael Kaine. It was only supposed to blow the bloody
doors off. That was terrible. That's good insert the actual clip. Okay,
you're only supposed to blow the bloody doors off. I

(59:26):
have a hard time with Michael Kaine. I can do
the like Master Bruce, you could do the broken the
broken vines. It becomes very and as he's gotten older
cigars and pulled his voice lower. Gallaghan also shares the
screen very briefly with the legend of animation that Joe

(59:47):
Dante snuck in as a tribute Chuck Jones. Oh, we're
going to the bar. Who's seen teaching Billy how to draw?
That's the guy who created Marvin the Martian, pepy La
Pew and Wiley E. Coyote and the road Runner. That's nuts.

Speaker 1 (01:00:01):
Considering how wildly wholesome Phoebe Kds comes off in the film,
it's weird to think that the studio initially balked at
her casting because she was considered risque. After doing her
iconic pool exit in Fast Times at Ridgemont High, she.

Speaker 2 (01:00:15):
Had another film where she was like way too young
to be nude? Right? Or was this after Ridgemont High?

Speaker 1 (01:00:21):
There was something on because we talked about went on
with her. I feel like it was like something like
her dad signed her up for or something. Then she
had some kind of like bohemian family that put her
in like weird situations. I should probably stop before I
get into a lawsuit.

Speaker 4 (01:00:35):
Oh no.

Speaker 2 (01:00:36):
It was her first film, the movie Paradise, in which
she was seventeen, and she performed several full frontal and
rear frontal keeping that in scenes as a minor, and
she later regretted it and then went and did Fast Times,
which Rolling Stone has described as featuring the most memorable

(01:00:58):
bikini drop in cinema history.

Speaker 1 (01:01:00):
But she wound up with Kevin Klein, so a happy
ending for Phoebe ks. We love Kevin Kline, don't we?

Speaker 2 (01:01:06):
We do? We do?

Speaker 1 (01:01:06):
Yeah, we surely do another Fast Times at Ridgemond High.
Alum Judge Reinhold originally had a much larger role in
Gremlins as Billie's nemesis, but his part was significantly cut
down and many of his lines were given the Phoebe Kates,
which I am fine with because I hate Jed drihnd Hold.

Speaker 2 (01:01:22):
Like Cowie Mandel. Okay, we each get one. We each
got one. That's my want, Buddy, I don't have just one.

Speaker 1 (01:01:31):
Phoebe Kate's reveals in the Blue Bay in the Blu
Ray said the Blue Man commentary. Yes, Kate's reveals in
the Blu Ray Commentary that her parents bought her a
scooter to get around the Universal lot, but she crashed
it too many times and they took it back from her.
Was she that young that her parents could buy her
a gift and then take it from her?

Speaker 2 (01:01:53):
How old? I mean, yeah, she was. If she was
seventeen when she did the Gross film, she was like twenty. No,
she was born in nineteen sixty three. Yeah, I guess
he was shooting in eighty two eighty three. That's weird.
I mean maybe they were like, you know, this is
the money, Phoebe gesturing to face, don't up the money.

(01:02:13):
I was rewatching. O. J.

Speaker 1 (01:02:14):
Simpson made in the America the thirty for thirty documentary,
and one of his friends was talking about how like
they would go to places and he'd be like, Ohjay,
you don't have a ticket, and he'd be like, this
is my ticket, and he was gestured to.

Speaker 2 (01:02:25):
His face, Jesus, it's just just watching that this afternoon.

Speaker 1 (01:02:30):
Uh, classic murderer. Great, you know he went in the
Coles funeral. It's not wild fucking balls on him. Yeah,
Phoebe Kate's and Zach Gallaghan got to be good friends,
which I'm sure devastated Gallaghan to the point where she
said kissing him felt like kissing her brother.

Speaker 2 (01:02:46):
Oh god, poor gosh, she just keeps murdering a Yeah,
interview after interview terrible.

Speaker 1 (01:02:53):
And this was complicated further by Spielberg's assistance that Gizmo
be included in the kissing shots.

Speaker 2 (01:02:59):
I love that so much. Spielberg shows up for like
one of his two days on.

Speaker 3 (01:03:02):
Set when it's like cap that has the name of
the film on it, Yes, classic Spielberg, and it's like,
you know, poor Zach Gallaghan is having his like first
on screen kiss with like the impossibly beautiful Phoebe kids,
and Steven Spielberg is.

Speaker 2 (01:03:16):
Just like off camera slowly shoving a Gizmo puppet between them.

Speaker 1 (01:03:24):
The Spielberg also like one of the scenes that he
supposedly ghost directed in Goonies was Sean Aston characters Mikey's
kiss with Andy like the cheerleader girl or something, and
it was all in like in silhouette, and it was
very cartoonish, like it looked like a Disney thing about
the wishing well.

Speaker 2 (01:03:44):
Yeah, having a quasi fixation on like teenage first kiss
moments is probably very Spielberg.

Speaker 3 (01:03:50):
Hmm.

Speaker 1 (01:03:51):
You know, I describing that, I thought it was wholesome,
and then hearing you describe it like that really took
something from me.

Speaker 2 (01:03:56):
Oh, you're welcome, he hates.

Speaker 1 (01:04:00):
His famous monologue about her father's death sounds like an
urban legend, but the legend itself may have been based
on a famous Playboy cartoon, which is screen out at
Chris Columbus's inspiration when he was writing about this.

Speaker 2 (01:04:12):
No, I've no idea what you're talking about. I knew
this urban legend that ostensibly takes place, but I had
no idea about the origins of it. Well, here you
take this. I don't know this at all. Yeah. So
this was a nineteen sixty four cartoon by.

Speaker 1 (01:04:26):
Well, remind me what her monologue is.

Speaker 2 (01:04:28):
She talks about finding her dad dead dressed as Santa
in the chimney Ga Gahan Williams. I don't know how
to pronounce his name. Uh. So this was a cartoon
in Playboy, as I mentioned, and it depicts a chimney
worker telling a couple, well, we found out what's been
clogging your chimney since last December, and includes an illustration

(01:04:50):
of Santa as a skeleton a red suit. Wilson told
The Washington Post he received more angry mail over that
than anything I ever did. You can mess around with religion,
but when you kill off Santa cl there's an uproar.

Speaker 1 (01:05:01):
Kates meanwhile, took the speech very seriously despite its kind
of ridiculous origin. Zach Gallaghan told Yahoo News she would
rehearse it every day. She'd say, what about this way?
What about that way? We probably rehearsed it one hundred,
one hundred and fifty times, so by the time we
got there, she absolutely nailed it and did.

Speaker 2 (01:05:18):
A phenomenal job. He still sounds down bad, Yeah, wouldn't
you be?

Speaker 1 (01:05:24):
Well?

Speaker 2 (01:05:25):
Sure, come on, dude joke.

Speaker 1 (01:05:26):
Dante was also quick to praise Phoebe in the Blu
Ray commentary, He said, we worked so hard on this
scene and tried to make it just the right touch
of pathos and goofiness, and I was really happy with
it and thought, this really encapsulates the tone of this
movie for me. On the way back to the editing room,
the editor turned to me and said, this will never
be in the picture, and it became my quest to

(01:05:47):
make sure it stayed in the picture, but both Spielberg
and the studio bulked at it. Galagan continued, The studio
was like, what is this? Some people were like, is
this real?

Speaker 2 (01:05:58):
Is this a joke?

Speaker 1 (01:05:59):
Is this supposed to be funny? So we had to
go and tell Phoebe that they were going to cut
the scene. She was not happy about that, and Joe
was not happy about that. And basically we had final cut,
and when it came time to leave in or take
it out, we just decided, you know what, I'm making
an executive decision and leaving it in. Spielberg, perhaps still
feeling stung by the ghost directing controversy around Poltergeist Bun,

(01:06:22):
ultimately back Joe Dante with the studio against his own desires,
and the rest is history, And the scene stayed in
the picture. In the scene stayed in the picture. There
you go, yeah, yeh. In Roger Ebert's review of the
scene Sorry. In Roger Ebert's review of the film, he

(01:06:43):
praised the scene being in the tradition of sick nineteen
fifties jokes.

Speaker 2 (01:06:48):
That's a very.

Speaker 1 (01:06:49):
Interesting, very specific phenomenon iveren that I never really thought
of as a trope, but I guess it kind of
is Ebert barely missed. You can take a quick break,
but we'll be right back with more too much information
in just a moment.

Speaker 2 (01:07:15):
The rest of the cast of Gremlins is filled out,
aside from a pre fame Corey Feldman, who had yet
to stir in the Friday, the thirteenth film that semi
launched him by veteran character actors. Edward Andrews plays the
senior bank nemesis of Billy's. This was actually his last role,
but he managed to launch another iconic eighty film into
his CV. He played Molly Ringwald's dad in sixteen Candles,

(01:07:37):
which came out the same year as Gremlin's. Imagine yeah,
those two films being your last two of the most
iconic films in the eighties. Eventual Emmy winner Glenn Turman
plays the ill fated science teacher, initially studying the Malguai
and he was famous for his role in the original
Broadway production of A Raisin in the Sun. As a
child actor, he was on the COSMIESH spin off A

(01:08:00):
Different World and I Know in Best as the Mayor
in the Wire. He A Luke who played the Magua's
original owner apparently had such good skin at the age
of eighty that they had to age him up to
play his character. Gallaghan recalled he asked him. He was like, man,
what is it? And the guy was like, no, fried foods,
So we'll tip for you there. But Luke had an

(01:08:23):
incredibly long history in Hollywood. He was known for playing
Lee Chan, the number one son in the outrageously racist
Charlie Chan films. He was the original Cato in nineteen
thirty nine to nineteen forty one Green Hornet Cereals. He
played Master Poe in Kung Fu, and most incredibly, he

(01:08:43):
played Friggin' Brack in the original Space Ghost cartoons. No
Way Ugh Polly Dean Holliday played the Venomous Missus Degle.
The venomous Missus.

Speaker 1 (01:08:55):
Degle, that's a great collection of word. It's like the
fantastic Missus Masel.

Speaker 2 (01:09:00):
But she's more likely remembered as Flow from the nineteen
seventies sitcoms Alice and her own sitcom Flow. She was
the kiss my Grits lady. Oh yeah, And it is
a clever bit of screenwriting that her cats in the film,
and she's the Missus Diego is the richest woman in film.
All her cats are named after different kinds of currency Kopeck, rubele, Peso, Drachma,

(01:09:23):
and dollar bill. That's a good bit. I like that
a lot. That's good, dude, when you like actually, when
seeing all the details from this film stacked up against
each other, it is honestly insane.

Speaker 1 (01:09:34):
And Chris Columbus's first script or well, okay first.

Speaker 2 (01:09:38):
Like between him, Spielberg and Joe Dante, just like this
thing is like a walking encyclopedia of like mid century
American fiction. Dick Miller plays mister Futterman, the grizzled everyman
vet who relays the aviation origin of the Gremlins. Dick
Miller is one of those guys who you will absolutely
look at and go that guy. Yes, he was one

(01:09:59):
of Roger Corman's stock players and later Dante's. He is
known for playing grizzled every man and this is most funny.
As a sort of industry in joke, he was frequently
cast as Walter Paisley. Now this was a reference to
his starring role in Roger Corman's early cult flick A
Bucket of Blood. But bafflingly, he would continue to be
cast as Walter Paisley even though he wasn't playing that character.

(01:10:23):
This includes the Twilight Zone movie and the eighties Killer
Robot Jim Chopping mall, that's great.

Speaker 1 (01:10:28):
He was also in My beloved Explorers, that movie with
a young Ethan Hawke, young River Phoenix. I forget there
was somebody else in it. To the movie where they
turn a tilted world into a spacecraft.

Speaker 2 (01:10:40):
It's a good movie.

Speaker 1 (01:10:42):
That's in eighty six. It's an awesome movie.

Speaker 2 (01:10:44):
And lastly, Hoyt Axton, who plays Billy's failure of an
inventor Dad, was far more known as a musician. He
also apparently ad libbed like ninety percent of this film.
His mom co wrote heartbreak Hotel, Yeah, wait, wait accent.
Wasn't he a songwriter too?

Speaker 1 (01:10:59):
He wrote like he was joy to the world.

Speaker 2 (01:11:01):
He wrote, oh my god, Yeah, she wrote joy to
the World, popularized by Three Dog Night and The Pusher
recorded by Steppenwolf for the Easy Riders soundtrack. And he
was Dante's first choice for this role after seeing him
in The Black Stallion with sound design notably by Alan Splett.
I guess Joe Dante took one of the inventions, the

(01:11:21):
Peltzer Peeler Juicer, and it is still for sale online,
but it is like so filled with NFT jargon that
I think it may actually be a parody. Like you
can google Joe Dante Peltzer Peeler Juicer and it'll take
you to an ostensible sale page. But it is so
like jammed with cryptocurrency and NFT that I almost it

(01:11:45):
has to be like a bit. I don't know where
else to put this, but our man Jerry Goldsmith turned
in the score for Gremlins.

Speaker 1 (01:11:51):
Well City Do, Air Force, One Little City Do?

Speaker 2 (01:11:53):
Didn't you just do Planet of the epide Ago?

Speaker 1 (01:11:56):
And he did at first one in like like six
days or something crazy star Trek.

Speaker 2 (01:12:00):
Yeah, he's a true and sneakily avant garde too, Like
I remember when we talked about Planet of the Apes.
You know, he was doing all these weird ethnic percussion
things treated with a bunch of echo. And first of
all he turns in two bangers. There's the Gremlin rag,
which I think you should pump in here, and then

(01:12:39):
there's Gizmo's La La By which is great, just super cute,
and the one that was sung by a kid from
his Synagogue. I couldn't find much about this screed Goldsmith's
own words, but I did find a UK sheet music
publisher that had this to say about the film. Incorporating
a total of eight synthesizers, a drum machine, and a
digital polyphonics sequencer, the Gremlin score reads like a who's

(01:13:02):
who of classic eighties synths, Roland's Jupiter six, notably providing
the cat's meow sound heard prominently when the Gremlins term evil.
Sequential circuits, Prophet T eight, Rhodes Chroma, Yamaha's GS one,
Mogue's Memory Mogue, a pair of Yamaha's ubiquitous d X seven's,
and an Oberheim trio, the ob eight synth, DSX sequencer

(01:13:26):
and DMX drum machines. Is that was what Kate Bush
used to record Hounds of Love on? Yeah, The Oberheim
is one of it's probably the second most famous eighties
drum machine from the after the Lynn drum. And this
is where DMX got his name. I didn't know that. Yeah,
A lot of his early beats were done in a
with an Oberheim, and he took DMX from it and

(01:13:49):
I think later reverse engineered it into dark Man X
God love DMX anyway, rather than being prerecorded or fed
directly into the mixing desk. This I claims that these
synths were amplified and played live with the eighty piece
orchestra that Goldsmith was conducting. That's cool, and this was

(01:14:10):
his second reteam with Spielberg and Dante. He did the
score to both Poultrygeist and the Twilight Zone movie. Poltergeist
also has an iconic creepy children's theme sung by a
child as well. If memory serves, Poultrycase must have terrified
you the first time you saw it. Have you even
seen it? Oh? Yeah, okay a long time ago. I
figured you may have for Spielberg, but is not an

(01:14:32):
appropriate film for children, as we'll cover. Yeah, that's what
this was it Goldsmith and creepy kids. Well, and I
think I watched it.

Speaker 1 (01:14:45):
After I heard that there was like a Poultrgeist curse
with the little girl died and yeah, Dominique Dunn was
she and that?

Speaker 2 (01:14:54):
Yep? Yeah, yeah she.

Speaker 1 (01:14:55):
Died too, Dominic Dunn's daughter who was strangled by her
ex boyfriend or maybe current boyfriend.

Speaker 2 (01:15:00):
I don't know who's to say. Dominic Tongue.

Speaker 1 (01:15:05):
Man his like compendium of reporting for different high profile trying.

Speaker 2 (01:15:10):
I know you're obsessed with him for his like both
his writing and his pay.

Speaker 1 (01:15:14):
Oh. Yeah, he had some contractory we get like one
hundred fifty grand for Vanity Fair to write like three
two thousand word articles a year.

Speaker 2 (01:15:20):
And then like an outrageous bonus per word if he
went over.

Speaker 1 (01:15:24):
Yeah, meanwhile, I've written I've written that in the past
five days.

Speaker 2 (01:15:29):
Yeah. He used to write two thousand words a day
at page six.

Speaker 1 (01:15:32):
Sometimes I turned in a four thousand word article in
the Beatles today that I wrote this morning.

Speaker 2 (01:15:39):
What have we done to this world? Remember when art man,
Remember when artists were like considered artists and not just
like annoying roadblocks in the path to content. I mean
I don't remember it firsthand, sadly, No, just all the
reading about it when we were kids. Yeah, reading about
it and being told school one day I could possibly
inhabit that world. Yeah, Alry, go ahead. Spiraling.

Speaker 1 (01:16:03):
Though Grandma's was initially scheduled for a Christmas release, it
came out on July sixth, nineteen eighty four because America.
Oh that was the same date as Ghostbusters was dropped. Damn.
It was rushed out because Warner Brothers apparently found out
that they had nothing going against Indiana Jones and the
Temple of Doom or Colombia's Ghostbusters.

Speaker 2 (01:16:22):
It is amazing that Spielberg was quite literally pitting two
of the Big five Big four how many biggest movie
studies against each other.

Speaker 1 (01:16:31):
I'm surprised they wanted to compete.

Speaker 2 (01:16:34):
Why wouldn't you just let the other studios have that?
And then, okay, because they're really mean spirited about it,
the IDs to not let anyone have an exclusive hold
on a particular date. Okay, fair.

Speaker 1 (01:16:45):
Unfortunately, this was a bad choice for Universal everywhere except
New York City.

Speaker 2 (01:16:50):
Who I guess.

Speaker 1 (01:16:51):
Denizens of New York are used to seeing little creatures
scurring around everywhere when they're out and about, so maybe
that's why Nope, just read the next sent okay, Joe
Dante Old Empire Magazine. Ghostbusters routinely beat us in terms
of money everywhere in New York City because while shooting there,
they pissed off so many New Yorkers that they decided
not to see it. And for some reason, Gremlins was

(01:17:13):
huge there.

Speaker 2 (01:17:15):
Grady City and Deward Baby Let's go, Men's being bong I.

Speaker 1 (01:17:18):
Remember my first semester, my freshman year at n YU,
they were filming that Will Smith movie I Am Legend
on in Washington Square, which was like the park that
we had to walk through to get get to class
every day, and every day people will be late to
class because it was like, sorry, they just blew up
a car in the middle of the park and I
saw like sorry, sorry everybody. So yeah, by the time

(01:17:39):
it was released in theaters too, we all could kind
of a grudge against I Am Legend too, so I kind.

Speaker 2 (01:17:44):
Of get it. Yes, yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:17:48):
Coincidentally, Steven Spielberg sent Joe Dante, producer Mike Finnell, and
Chris Columbus, and the film's editor to Hawaii as a present,
presumably after the movie was done, and when they checked
into their hotel, they bumped to Evan Reitman and the
Ghostbusters guys who were on their own celebratory vacation.

Speaker 2 (01:18:05):
That is so f funny to me, Like, imagine being
the other sci fi fantasy crew and you're just pummeled
by Ghostbusters and you show up on your Spielberg sponsored
vacation and they're at the same hotel as you. Forgetting
Sarah Marshall like come on.

Speaker 1 (01:18:22):
Well, and also, I mean another Chris Columbus movie, The
Goonies director Richard Donner finally gets away from these little
bastard kids.

Speaker 2 (01:18:32):
Spielberg also shipped them to Hawaii to vex him further. Well,
Spielberg loves sending people to Hawaii. I guess man, he's
the best.

Speaker 5 (01:18:42):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:18:42):
I didn't think I'd come away from this liking Spielberg
as much as I do right now. Unfortunately, the studio
battle director Joe Dante and Spielberg all the way up
to the release. One of their notes was that there
were too many Gramblins in it, to which Spielberg supposedly equipped,
shall we cut them out and call it people instead?

Speaker 2 (01:19:00):
One of the all time studio comebacks. I just love
the fact he had such big dick energy. He was
just rolling around telling different studios again two of the
biggest to just themselves like I'm Stephen Spielberg, how dare
you speak to me like that? And he was righting
to do it.

Speaker 1 (01:19:18):
Yeah. Hence, the expectations around Gremlins were not high, which
made it all the more incredible when it became a
runaway hit, eventually grossing over one hundred and forty eight
million dollars during its initial run worldwide on a budget
of eleven million. I had no idea it was that
big of a hit. Oh yeah, this is such a
blind spot for me.

Speaker 2 (01:19:37):
Like I really don't know and really like now that
I'm telling you to watch like four hours of gremlin stuff,
but you should really watch both of them. No, I mean,
I've done worse to you. I mean, they're just so fascinating,
this one because it's so mean and so like really
wildly out of pocket for what would be a children's film,
and then the second one for how bat shit it is,

(01:19:58):
which I would joyfully talk about later. Okay.

Speaker 1 (01:20:00):
Gremlin's also wound up the fourth highest grossing film of
nineteen eighty four, behind Beverly Hills Cop, Ghostbusters and Indiana
Jones and the Temple of Doom. That's posting some serious numbers. Wow, Yeah, dude.
Gremlins has also lodged in film history for being directly responsible,
along with the Temple of Doom and Jaws for the
PG thirteen rating, which you write, is kind of funny

(01:20:23):
that Spielberg has this reputation as a sentimental family filmmaker. Well,
he made three films way too violent for kids, for
if you count Poltergeist, which incredibly also came out with
a PG rating. Poltergeist was three D.

Speaker 2 (01:20:37):
Is this scene where man peels his own face off?
Oh the look on your face right now? You forgot
about that, bro? I remember it.

Speaker 1 (01:20:44):
I just can't believe it was PG.

Speaker 2 (01:20:45):
Oh yeah, And it's so funny that you like it
was just Steven Spielberg. I mean, surely other films, but
like these are the ones that I always here mentioned Jaws,
Temple of Doom, Gremlins and Poltergeist.

Speaker 1 (01:20:58):
I like almost don't belie leave you like I. Director
Joe Donzelater told The Guardian at the premiere after the
scene where one gremlin explodes in a microwave, a mother
watching with her kid came storming up and shouted at
me that it was totally unsuitable for children. Spielberg had
in fact argue the NPAA down from an R to

(01:21:20):
a PG, but the combined reactions to Gremlins and the
Temple of Doom building on Paltrygeist forced them into a
conflict with the MPAA Motion Picture Association of America.

Speaker 2 (01:21:30):
Yes, yeah, now just shortened to MPa, and famously they're
rating they're they're you know, I think we've covered this before,
but their ratings process is one opaque and largely dictated
by the personal grievances of whoever's running the organization at
any given moment. There's all kinds of talks about different
people going back for like edits from like literally cutting

(01:21:51):
out like a frame or a second or too many
like thrusts during a sex scene. And there's one that
I think, like, I forget which film is, but they
like literally lied to the npa A and we're like, yeah,
we cut it again and it was accepted with but
they hadn't made any cuts. So it's a stupid system
an organization. And for a while, it was really that

(01:22:12):
they could make or break a film, like if something
came out with an R or god forbid an X,
when that was still kind of a thing, like you
were basically.

Speaker 1 (01:22:21):
Yeah, I know some people who work at standards and
practices and it's pretty arbitrary.

Speaker 2 (01:22:24):
Wasn't there.

Speaker 1 (01:22:25):
I forget if it was an MPa a thing or
just like a network TV thing where people would intentionally
write things into scripts knowing that they were going to
be oh.

Speaker 2 (01:22:34):
To see if they were reading well see if they
were reading. But also, oh yeah, it was good will
hunting as like.

Speaker 1 (01:22:42):
A sacrificial like okay, we'll cut this.

Speaker 2 (01:22:44):
Yeah you like smoke, like like a false flag.

Speaker 1 (01:22:47):
Yes, yes, like okay, we'll lose this, but you have
to let us keep this. And yeah yeah, oh yeah,
that was good will hunting where they wrote in a
sex scene between Will and the Robin Williams character, just
to see if any of theseecutives were paying attention. And
that was why they went with Einstein because he always
paid attention to the sex scenes.

Speaker 2 (01:23:05):
Hey.

Speaker 1 (01:23:07):
Spielberg later spoke of his conflict with the MPAA to
Vanity Fair. He said, I had come under criticism, personal
criticism for both Temple of Doom and Gremlins.

Speaker 2 (01:23:15):
That same year.

Speaker 1 (01:23:16):
I remember calling Jack Flenti, who was then the president
of the Motion Picture Association, and suggesting to him that
we need a rating between R and PG because so
many films were falling into another world, you know, of unfairness.

Speaker 2 (01:23:30):
I love that Vanity Fair refused to do the pretty
standard practice of removing like, you know, another verbal tics.

Speaker 1 (01:23:36):
Unfair that certain kids were exposed to Jaws, but also
unfair that certain films were restricted that kids who are thirteen, fourteen,
fifteen should be allowed to see. I suggested, let's call
it PG thirteen or PG fourteen, depending on how you
want to design the slide rule. And Jack Flenty, the
aforementioned president of the MPAA, came back to me and said,
we've determined that PG thirteen would be the right age

(01:23:58):
for that temperature of movie. The first film that came
out designated as such would be Read Dawn. I'm not
sure if I'm fair.

Speaker 2 (01:24:05):
That's the movie where the kids form an anti communist
militia in their hometown Wolverines.

Speaker 1 (01:24:11):
Oh, with Swayze's and Swayze in that.

Speaker 2 (01:24:14):
Yeah, it's like another brat pack movie. What's really funny
about Gremlin specifically is that even after they instituted this rating,
Prince continued to go out rated PG. Like. Even after
they created a new interim rating retroactively deciding that this
movie was not appropriate for children, it continued to be
distributed with the PG rating.

Speaker 1 (01:24:32):
Hollywood We Read Down also has c Thomas Howell, who
why do I know him?

Speaker 2 (01:24:39):
He's the blackfaced guy Soulman.

Speaker 1 (01:24:41):
Yes, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you.

Speaker 2 (01:24:43):
Okay, for which Lou Reed did a cover of Soulman.
If memory serves, Gremlins was basically a license to print
money with creatures both cute and gruesome to adapt into toys.
Jo Dante told Empire, I remember the day we watched
dailies of Gizmo coming out of his box for the
first time. These hardened Warners executives started going ooh. In

(01:25:05):
the back of my head, I could hear cash register noises.
They instantly put their merchandising staff into high gear board
games and color forms and clothing and bedsheets. And it's
easy to forget now, but merch ti ins with movies
weren't as much of a thing until Spielberg with Jaws
and George Lucas with Star Wars. This trend peaked with
et and had actually dipped for a little while until

(01:25:26):
Gremlin's and naturally, Gizmo was the star, various stuffed versions
of him, becoming one of the defining toys in the
nineteen eighties. But everything from trading cards to video games
were lent the Gremlins name, and not even the food
stuffs were safe. The film had a tie in with
Hardy's where in the fast food chain released five story
books and record sets that told the story of the film,

(01:25:48):
manufactured and distributed by Disney. There was also Gremlins Cereal
as well, although they really whiffed it by not calling
it Gizmo's Hold for a Place Us manufactured by Ralston
the Geniuses who also brought us Nintendo Serial System and
Bill and Ted's excellent Cereal. I am not making that up.

(01:26:10):
Dante and Gilligan both panned the serial in their Empire review,
with the director describing it as just awful, like Peanut
Butter gone wrong. Unsurprisingly, Warner Brothers wanted a sequel to
Gremlin's immediately, and I do mean immediately, Joe Dante says.
They asked him the weekend after the film opened to

(01:26:31):
get started on a sequel. What unds about right, but
he felt he needed a rest and also, unsurprisingly, Warners
immediately began cycling through other writers and directors for pitches
that Dante would recall included Gremlin's Go to Las Vegas
and Gremlins Go to Mars.

Speaker 1 (01:26:47):
Wait did the studio pitch him on those or did he.

Speaker 2 (01:26:50):
Know they were just bringing in anyone who had an
idea for grounds And this went in two went on
for two or three years. And then they eventually went
hat in hand to both Dante and his producer Mike
Fanell and just said, will you come back? Sorry, I'm
getting ahead of myself. Joe Dante ran into Terry Simmel
on the Warner Brothers lot, who was then head of

(01:27:12):
the studio. Mike Ferrell told Consequence of Sound for their
amazing Gremlins two oral history, and Terry said, look, we
need this is the cigar jumping executive part.

Speaker 5 (01:27:21):
Look we need Gremlins two. We have to have Gremlins two.
You can do anything you want. I don't care about
the script. I don't care about the story. It just
has to be called Gremlins two and have Gremlins in it.
Anything else is your call.

Speaker 2 (01:27:35):
That is the quote I put it in a different voice.
The film started shooting in nineteen eighty nine. Because of
this protracted process, five years after the first one. That
is insane to me, man like they should have just
canned it. I'm sorry, but then we wouldn't have had
Gremlins two, the new batch, which is, as I mentioned
up top, possibly the defining blank check you film. Again,

(01:28:00):
Dante agreed to do this because he had complete creative control.
That's what they promised him, and with his enhanced budget,
he went a. Gilligan and Kates both returned, but Chris
Whyalas understandably declined and they brought in probably the only
person better than him became Rick Baker of the thing

(01:28:21):
and that was that was Rob Boteen. Rick Baker, Sorry,
well we just said him on something. Well, he apprenticed
on Star Wars. Oh, Planet of the Apes, he did,
he did the two thousand and one. Yeah, and they
went with the only person probably more suited by a
hair than Chris Waalas, which would be Rick Baker, who

(01:28:41):
won the Academy Award for Best Makeup seven times from
eleven nominations. He's famous for assisting veteran Dick Smith on
The Exorcist. He won for American Worlf in London. He
turned Michael Jackson into a wearcat for a thriller. Yeah,
Men in Black, Men in Black. And so with this

(01:29:04):
expanded budget, and once again I have to stress no
creative oversight, the two of them just turned in this
incredible Again, dude, you just have to see it for
how insane it is. I'll describe it to you and
that will not get close the film is set in
a thinly veiled Trump Tower, Billy and Kate having moved
to New York City to make it, with character actor

(01:29:26):
John Glover playing the namesake blustery tycoon who's a thinly
veiled analog for Trump, and that is it as far
as plot goes. There's a Gremlin's outbreak and then it
is just an escalating series of site gags and crazier
and crazier Gremlins stuff. I think Baker and Dante knew
that they would never have this opportunity again, and they

(01:29:46):
went balls to the wall. Baker didn't want to redo
Chris Waylas's work from the original film, so they came
up with the idea of having a genetics testing lab
as part of this tower, and it is run by
Christopher Lee in an amazing cameo. There's a great part
where the secretary like coughs into a tissue in front
of him, and he removes the tissue from her hand

(01:30:08):
and puts it in a bag and take back to
the lab. And this conceit of having this concept of
having this genetics lab came up with the opportunity for
them to just say, anybody have an idea for a gremlin.
We're gonna do it. This includes a batgremlin, which at
one point escapes and leaves a hole in the wall
the exact shape of the Batman symbol, and then is

(01:30:30):
covered in cement and freezes into a gargoyle on I
think Saint Patrick's cathedral. There's also a lady, a sexy
lady gremlin, a brain gremlin voiced by Tony Randall, a
spider gremlin, a salad gremlin, and an electric gremlin that
is trapped in the phone system. And I might even
be forgetting some A salad gremlin. Yeah, he pops out

(01:30:52):
of a salad bar and he's like all made of
like like radishes and carrots and stuff. This is all
parodied in an amazing Key and Peel Scale where they
have this like completely like fake movie consultant come into
a like a board meeting and get everyone to like
pitch their dumb ideas for Gremlins, and then it ends
with another exec coming in and saying, you guys, none

(01:31:14):
of this will be in the movie, and then smash
cuts to like a card saying all of this is
in Gremlins too, which you should also look up as
it's Jordan Peel's hilariou, isn't it the brain Goblin again
voiced by Tony Randall? Is it's in? This is the
movie is in that beautiful period where the technology for
practicals was as good as it would ever get and

(01:31:35):
before it was starting to be replaced by CGI. They
recorded Randall's dialogue far in advance, and because this was
because they had to feed it into a computer which
was plugged into this device called a Gilder Fluke, which
is just the name of the company. But what this
thing did was map the animatronics movement to the dialogue

(01:31:59):
via computer, so they didn't have to control it by hand.
And that was how they get this thing to match
Tony Randall's incredible dialogue. And this is all even aside
the litany of insane cameos and references that are in
this film, because the other thing is they weren't just
content to make like an SFX showcase. They were also like,
we have to make something that just puts its thumb
in the eye of Hollywood as an idea and also

(01:32:21):
like corporate greed. So the whole thing opens with a
Chuck Jones Looney Tunes animated segment just apropos of nothing.
They have a guy playing essentially Al Lewis as Grandpa Munster.
Leonard Malton plays himself and is mauled by some gremlins.
Hulk Hogan makes a cameo, Gizmo cosplays as Rambo, and

(01:32:42):
Sylvester Sloane actually gave him their blessing for this. Julius
Sweeney plays a receptionist, and the film also takes time
to riff on the absurdity of the Maguai rules. There's
a whole scene where people are like, well, what happens
if he's on a plane. It crosses time zones and
it's after midnight that way, it's always midnight somewhere, right,
That is just a They just take a minute to

(01:33:03):
have a bunch of guys sitting the round and like
riff on how dumb the rules are. And the film
whole thing concludes with a musical number where the Tony
Randall gremlin sings New York, New York. There's also a
fourth I forgot to mention the fourth wall break. There's
an extended fourth wall break where the Gremlins sabotage the
projection reel and they and they like tear apart the

(01:33:27):
reel and there's like all these blots and burns, and
then they cut a separate version of this. This is
the dout of detail. This is so insane. Because the
projection gag wouldn't work on home video, they cut a
separate scene where it looked like your VHS and VCR
were glitching out, with a separate John Wayne bit, which

(01:33:48):
they had to reach out to Wayne's estate to approve. Also,
the musical number of the New York New York is
a reference to a Buzzby Berkeley number in Dames, a
Warner Brothers musical from the nineteenthties. Again deep cut, and Dante,
in his infinite genius, wanted to ship little cardboard gremlin

(01:34:08):
cutouts to movie theaters so that when this fourth wall
break happens and it looks like the projection is breaking down,
audiences would turn around and look at the booth and
see these little cardboard cutouts cavorting around in silhouette. This
was like his idea. Yeah, he was trying to do
a William Castle and they were wisely like no, dude, like,

(01:34:28):
are you kidding insane film?

Speaker 1 (01:34:33):
I'm just on Joe Dante's Wikipedia page and his list
of unrealized projects is pretty.

Speaker 2 (01:34:39):
Insane because of this. You know, this film ultimately came
out in nineteen ninety, and it had the multiple catastrophes
of Warner Brothers shuffling around its release date. They were
originally going to put it out Memorial Day and then
they moved it to compete with Warren Batties Dick Tracy
remake from Disney. And also it was released six years

(01:35:02):
after the first one, which maybe past the statute of
limitations for a sequel. The film was a flop, perhaps
needless to say, but it has become an enormous cult hit,
which I urge everyone to seek out. I think it's
been a talk of a Gremlins three since like forever,
but the closest we've actually come is a recent HBO
animated series called Gremlins Secrets of the Magua, which came

(01:35:24):
out last year.

Speaker 1 (01:35:25):
What was the budget for Gremlins two to thirty and
fifty million?

Speaker 2 (01:35:31):
That only made a forty one point five Yeah, so
roughly three to five times the budget of the original
and made a third ough Man, What a perfect movie.
It's so good. I love how much you love this

(01:35:52):
you have? I would actually tell you I would I
watch two first. I don't know, man, Yeah you could
if you only have time for one. Two is not
as good of a movie, but it is a more
entertaining movie because it's so much goofier and cartoony, Like
the first one is kind of scary and mean in parts,

(01:36:14):
and the second one is just like, we're gonna do
Looney Tunes with our weird little guys from six years earlier.
Just incredible stuff. I'm still thinking about it. I'm always
thinking about it, to be honest. Who all right, folks,
if I can get serious for a moment. Writing in

(01:36:34):
Vulture in twenty thirteen, Anthony Scabelli hosited Gremlin's moral, spelled
out by kay Luke's wisened old man, is that Billy
and perhaps American culture as a whole, cannot take something
sweet and pure like a Magua without transforming it, even
if just inadvertently, into a Gremlin. When he's given it's

(01:36:54):
a wonderful life, Dante must transform it into Invasion of
the Body Snatchers quote, joyfully anarchic, but somehow still lovable.
The Magua and the Gremlins represent the best and worst
in not just America, but everyone. We're all just a
few errant drops of water away from reverting to our
bassist selves, and the wonderful tension of life rides on

(01:37:15):
the razor's edge between those two halves. Folks, thank you
for listening. This has been too much information. I'm Alex
Heigel and I'm Jordan run Talk. We'll catch you next time.

Speaker 1 (01:37:30):
Too Much Information was a production of iHeart Radio.

Speaker 2 (01:37:32):
The show's executive producers are Noel Brown and Jordan Runtog.

Speaker 1 (01:37:36):
The show's supervising producer is Michael Alder June.

Speaker 2 (01:37:39):
The show was researched, written and hosted by Jordan Runtalk
and Alex Heigel.

Speaker 1 (01:37:43):
With original music by Seth Applebaum and the Ghost Funk Orchestra.

Speaker 2 (01:37:47):
If you like what you heard, please subscribe and leave
us a review.

Speaker 1 (01:37:49):
For more podcasts on iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
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