Gift: Gizmo (1985) & Gremlins 2: The New Batch VHS (1990)

NOTE: I’m cheating a little with this post. Although the Christmas presents being discussed are a plastic Gizmo action figure and Gremlins 2 on VHS, it being Christmas I just can’t pass up the chance to talk about the original Gremlins film, which, sadly, I never received as a Christmas present.

In the weeks leading up to Christmas of 1990, I must have watched Gremlins 2 roughly 40 times. Not Gremlins, the movie that takes place at Christmas and has a lot to do with the holiday. No. Gremlins 2, a series of madcap oddities that has very little bearing on any real life holidays, or on real life in general. I’m not even sure how I watched it, since I didn’t actually OWN Gremlins 2 until my sister gave it to me for Christmas that year. My only guess is that I rented it, then cleverly used our VHS camcorder to record a copy onto a blank tape, thus driving the first nail into the coffin of the home movie rental industry (Sorry, Blockbuster. You were fun while you lasted).

Whatever caused this sudden fascination with Gremlins lore, the movie prompted me to go down to the basement to dig up a long forgotten Christmas present from 1985: A tiny plastic Gizmo action figure. Gizmo had been given to me as a present by one of our neighbors along with some puffy Gremlins stickers, though at the time I was much more interested in He-Man. By 1990 Gizmo was a little worse for wear—some of the paint had chipped away or faded, his distinctive brown and white fur was by then mostly white. Nevertheless, from that moment on, Gizmo and I became constant companions. When it came to light that my friend Jon also owned a similarly neglected 80s Gizmo (his was actually a stuffed animal!) the mogwai adventures began in earnest.
I’m not sure what it was about Gremlins 2 that appealed to me. It certainly doesn’t stand the test of time. Except maybe for that scene where Gizmo dances in the lab. And Christopher Lee is fun as the mad scientist. And the Spider Gremlin is crazy. Oh, and that Brain Gremlin—I still like listening to that guy. So fine, I can’t do it! I can’t sit here in my film school snobbery and pretend I don’t still think both Gremlins movies are absolutely awesome. They just are, okay?

My parents forbade me to see Gremlins until after Christmas that year, because it revealed (spoiler alert!) the fact that Santa Claus wasn’t real during Kate’s terrible story about her father dying on Christmas Eve. (Though since nowadays a kid can find out Santa is a myth simply by typing his name into Wikipedia, I wonder how long that particular tradition will last?) When I did finally see the original film, I loved it just as much as Gremlins 2.
And so the Gremlins movies became a somewhat warped part of my Christmas memories. I still think of the song "Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)" as “the Gremlins song” and get warm memories of making hot chocolate every time I see that Gremlin get burned alive in the microwave. Watching it again recently, I noticed just how much the production design nails the feeling of Christmas in the 80s. There’s the Christmas tree lot, the small town decorations, a Montgomery Ward department store (yes, there was once such a thing) all decked out for Christmas, the record player spinning Johnny Mathis’ “Do You Hear What I Hear?”, even a cardboard box in the corner of the Peltzer house filled with wrapping paper. A big part of the movie’s nostalgia appeal now is just how much it is a product of its time. (There’s even a part for Judge Reinhold.)

All nostalgia aside, a bunch of tiny creatures with an apparently inborn knowledge of pop culture creating mischief is just exactly the type of thing that appeals to a third grade boy. Gremlins is a dark, weird movie that would have a hard time getting made today. There’s an underlying pessimism that Hollywood doesn’t usually go for: Long sequences are devoted simply to the gremlins running amok and causing chaos. They even kill Santa Claus! Most movies would have the hero rescue the town from chaos with minimal loss of life—in Gremlins people are (presumably) killed left and right before the gremlins are finally stopped. It’s a movie that indulges in its malevolence without shame (though apparently the original concept was even darker and more violent) and that’s part of its charm. It’s a quintessential part, not just of my childhood, but of the childhoods of most of us who were kids in the 1980s.

Plastic Gizmo still lives on my nightstand at my parent’s house, serving as a silent reminder to my crazy Gremlins phase nineteen Christmases ago. During my first trip home from California for Christmas I happened to flip on Spike TV at 1am and found both Gremlins movies on in all their splendor. Back in the familiar cold weather of the east coast it was easy to sit in bed and enjoy the wonderful feeling of nostalgia and Christmas cheer that can only come with watching hordes of animatronic monsters torture and murder innocent people.