17 Fun Facts About GREMLINS
Joe Dante’s Gremlins was my number one favorite Christmas set movie before Krampus came out. I still absolutely love Gremlins and will continue to watch it every year. After watching it last weekend with my family, I realized that I haven’t done a fun facts list for this movie so I decided to dive in and learn some things that I never knew about the movie before! So without further ado, here are 17 fun facts about this classic film.
The following info came from IMDb and I added some commentary and video to point out some of the things that are listed.
- In Cantonese Chinese, "mogwai" means devil, demon, or gremlin.
- The movie theater that blows up in the film was involved in a few other accidents in other films. Marty McFly drove the DeLorean into the entrance at the end of Back to the Future. The theater ended up burning down with the rest of the buildings in the fire that happened on the Universal lot right after the filming of Back to the Future Part II.
- The scene in the department store where the Gremlin Stripe attacks Billy with a chainsaw was not originally in the script. It was added by Joe Dante and Zach Galligan as an homage to The Texas Chain Saw Massacre.
- The movie helped influence the MPAA to create the PG-13 rating. Many felt the scenes of violence in both movies were too much for a PG rating, but not enough for an R rating — just like Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.
- The time machine prop from The Time Machine can be seen behind Rand Peltzer when he's on the phone with his wife while attending the convention. A moment later, the machine has disappeared to the astonishment of several onlookers. Steven Spielberg makes his cameo in this scene driving an electric wheelchair.
- Producer Steven Spielberg almost hired Tim Burton to direct the film after he watched some of his short films. He decided against it because Burton had never directed a feature-length film before. I actually would have loved to see how Burton would have handled the material.
- Both Judd Nelson and Emilio Estevez were considered for the role of Billy.
- Near the very beginning of the film, as Mr. Peltzer makes his way to the curio shop in Chinatown, there’s a wrecked car with the hood up and smoke coming out of it. That car is an AMC Gremlin. In real life, the AMC Gremlin logo (located on the gas cap) bears a resemblance to the Gremlins featured in the film.
- When Billy leads Pete up to his room to show him the mogwai, you can see a rolled up movie poster for Twilight Zone: The Movie. Dante directed one of the "episodes" for that film a year earlier. I had that same poster when I was a kid! I still might have it somewhere. I’ll have to look.
- “The official comic strip adaptation included scenes that were not in the movie, including Billy's mother asking if the mogwai was a rat followed by the mogwai using Rand's 'Bathroom Buddy,' thus earning the name 'Gizmo.' There was also more emphasis on a subplot of Mrs. Deagle trying to buy up everything in town, a scene of Billy finding that throwing juice on the mogwais has no effect on them, Mr. Hanson's students being more Billy's age, Gizmo and Kate trying to shut down the fountain and turn on the lights, and Billy smashing Stripe's skeleton with a baseball bat.”
- At the beginning of the of movie, the theater is showing a couple of movies called A Boy's Life and Watch The Skies. These were the working titles for Steven Spielberg's E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial and Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
- The Amblin Entertainment logo made its first on-screen appearance in the film.
- The original script contained a scene where the gremlins attacked a McDonald's, eating customers instead of burgers. It also had a scene in which the creatures killed a dog and cut off the mom's head and toss it down a set of stairs.
- “The Santa speech proved to be controversial, and studio executives insisted upon its removal, because they felt it was too ambiguous as to whether it was supposed to be funny or sad. Joe Dante stubbornly refused to take the scene out, saying it represented the film as a whole, which had a combination of horrific and comedic elements. Steven Spielberg did not like the scene but, despite his creative control, he viewed Gremlins as Dante's project and allowed him to leave it in.”
- They were going to try and have monkeys play the gremlins in the movie, but they scrapped the idea when the test monkey panicked when they put a gremlin head on it.
- “The Gizmo puppets were particularly frustrating because they were smaller and thus broke down more. Consequently, to satisfy the crew, a scene was included in which the gremlins hang Gizmo on a wall and throw darts at him. This was included on a list that the crew created known to them as the "Horrible Things to do to Gizmo" list.”
- The novelization explains that Mr. Wing's grandson was severely punished by his grandfather for the back alley sale of Gizmo.
Below you’ll find an original trailer for the film along with a 1983 behind-the-scenes featurette. I also included a collection of deleted scenes.