But for whatever reason, Gremlins 2 didn’t connect and I opted not to revisit the movie for many years after that. Oddly, I am and always have been a big fan of comedy, big, small or otherwise. Instead of the quirky townspeople who populated the original, Gremlins 2 featured cartoonish archetypes, parodying the more serious beats of Gremlins and, I felt, taking the heavy meta-movie-lampooning bar scene from the original and stretching it out to feature length. This was something different, a movie which took the general mold laid out by Gremlins and then warped it, exaggerating what was already exaggerated to begin with and bringing it more fully into the Looney Tunes territory its originator occasionally played at.Īdmittedly, my initial reaction was… disappointment. Gremlins (1984) had been silly at times, certainly, but, at its core, it felt like a horror film. ![]() Surely, the follow up would be a worthy successor and fall directly in line with what came before.įrom the moment Daffy Duck and Bugs Bunny began squabbling atop the Warner Brother’s logo heading into the movie, I knew something was different. As delighted as I was when I finally saw it, I was even more ecstatic to learn that the film’s sequel came again from director Joe Dante. My first exposure to Gremlins 2: The New Batch (1990) came in the wake of watching the first film after years of speculation and dread. After all, if the original is without its fans, why even bother with a second? That is to say, the sequel’s greatest enemy is expectation, more often than not brought on by the love and adoration which accompanies its predecessor. She appeared on patches, letterheads, matchbook covers, and decals.Sequels come with a certain degree of baggage. Walt assigned several artists to create these one-of-a-kind designs on a full-time basis.the Gremlins appear on at least thirty emblems designed for such far-flung divisions as the 17th Weather Squadron of San Francisco, the Royal Netherlands Military Flying School, and the Royal Canadian Air Force ‘Sky Sweepers.’ In 1943 Fifinella was adopted as the official mascot of the Women Airforce Service Pilots, or WASP. From the outset of World War II, the studio was besieged with requests for logos from all branches of the armed forces. In his introduction to the 2006 reprint of The Gremlins, film critic Leonard Maltin notes that “The Disney Gremlins did live on in the form of military insignias. (Several studios also were planning their own Gremlin cartoons.) But Sturrock notes that the “film project was gradually running out of steam.” The war would likely be over by the time the film was made, and the copyright problems were never solved. ‘They are “well known” by the entire RAF and as far as I can determine, no individual can claim credit.’ ” A book was published in early 1943, and Disney began merchandising some of the characters. ‘The gremlin characters are not creatures of his imagination,’ Feitel reported. A memo from Chester Feitel to Roy and Walt Disney after his first meeting with Roald confirmed that they were not original to Dahl. As Donald Sturrock writes in Storyteller: The Authorized Biography of Roald Dahl, Walt and his brother Roy were “concerned about the intellectual ownership of the, which their researches discovered dated back to the First World War. Wrote Dahl: “ ‘I’ve seen a fifinella!’ The pilots eyed her intently, from her small, elegant, curly horns down to her handsome white buckskin boots.”īut the project hit a snag. ![]() (Disney had had great success with its Academy Award winning animated short Der Fuehrer’s Face, which featured Donald Duck.)īy late 1943, the collaboration was mentioned by gossip columnist Hedda Hopper and reported widely. “Disney will use Lieutenant Dahl’s stories,” noted the New York Times, “which are to be published next month as a magazine article, for a feature-length cartoon, ‘The Gremlins.’ The author’s share of the film’s royalties will go to the R.A.F. Sidney Bernstein, of the British Information Services, forwarded the manuscript to Walt Disney, who was eager to make it into a movie. Dahl sent his manuscript to the Air Ministry for approval. To distract himself from the injuries he received in the crash, he began writing a short tale about gremlins, little people who sabotage RAF aircraft. Perhaps less well known is that Fifinella was taken from The Gremlins, Roald Dahl’s first children’s book.īy 1940, Dahl, a pilot in the RAF, had crashed his Gloster Gladiator in the Libyan Desert, and, no longer able to fly, had become a military attaché at the British Embassy in Washington, D.C. It’s well known that “Fifinella” was the official mascot of the Women Airforce Service Pilots (WASP), the all-female units that flew non-combat ferry flights during World War II.
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