!!
Gah! To Netflix Insta Watch…except…it’s NOT AVAILABLE! Commence rocking back and forth in the fetal position!
Alcohol? Or maybe it’s only more or less pure water that has the effect; as pointed out by Freudian Slit food is full of water. So fruit juice or Pepsi is good, plain water bad.
Aw. Mogwai get to follow the exact opposite dieting advice as humans. Life IS more fun as a Mogwai, I knew it!
“What is that I see? Fresh water?!”
*
<slaps bottle out hand>*
“You’ll drink vodka and Pepsi and like it young man!”
Even in the original, the non-Gizmo Mogwai were a bunch of assholes. Bossing Gizmo around and I’m pretty sure pre-gremlinized Stripe tried to bite that one kid.
I wonder if it’s just that Gizmo was a unique case, and most Mogwai were savage little beasts.
Or, perhaps, Mogwai who are the result of normal reproduction are nice, and budded types are evil.
Or, perhaps, budded Mogwai are always of the opposite demeanour to the original they bud off of.
Maybe they just got unlucky with all of the Gizspawn…
According to the Wikipedia article on Mogwai, this is the case. I guess there’s been novelizations that added more details and Gizmo is an extreme rarity among Mogwai-kind.
Perhaps. There was a scene in the first movie where they were in a bar drinking beer. From a chemical standpoint beer is mostly H2O, but I’m guessing the alcohol negates any effects water would normally have on them.
They totally need to do Gremlins 3. IN it Gizmo the Mogwai would spawn smaller Mogwai which, along the lines those Chipmunks movies, could form a band playing postrock to twenty-something single men.
It’d be awesome. If they could Phoebe Cates involved, double Awesome. Jason Lee and you have Super Triple Awesome Alpha DX Turbo.
I always thought it would be neat to see what happened when you expose a mogwai to sunlight. The gremlins melt into green goo; what would happen to the furry ones?
Looks like you have a script based answer. I don’t have it handy, but I think there was also some kind of background information in the Gremlins novelization.
Edited to add: looks like the wiki page does have that info!
Zoological knowledge has undoubtedly improved, but last time I checked–sometime in the late 70s–you weren’t supposed to give koala bears water either, in the ill-advised event that you bought one as a pet. They got all the moisture they needed from eating eucalyptus leaves, and a dish of water could choke and drown them. Maybe this inspired the weird prohibition with mogwai.
If mogwai are from another planet, then “after midnight” makes even less sense.
I always thought the no food after midnight thing was deliberately silly, maybe a reference to a mummy’s curse or fairy godmother’s warning.
Well, I say always but actually when I was a kid I thought I was really clever for working out that “after midnight” makes no sense, until some adult pointed out what Gremlins was really doing.
Funny, I always thought they needed to be civilized, and with proper nuture would mature into nice mogwai. But since the kid didn’t know how to socialize the little bastards (or let them loose too young) all hell broke loose.
What was it doing?
I always assumed that “after midnight” meant the midway point between sundown and sunrise.
In the book, there was one more mogwai that popped out of Gizmo than in the movie. That one got caught in direct sunlight somehow (It’s been nearly thirty years since I read it.), and turned into a crispy critter. IIRC, only some scraps of fur were all that were left.
I remember that from the book as well. Gizmo wouldn’t tell the other Mogwai the rules, knowing that they’d, well, end up doing what they did. There was even a bit of dialogue between the Mogwai about it: as I recall, Stripe grinningly told Gizmo that “Clorr is dead,” pleased that he’d figured out that sunlight was deadly.
In the spirit of “How did the Alien grow so fast?”, where did the extra mass come from when Stripe jumped into the swimming pool at the YMCA and spawned a bajillion new gremlins? And what happens if you throw a mogwai into the Pacific?