Galumphing Back... is back.
For some wild and crazy reason, Tumblr removed our post from 9th May, 2008. Possibly because it was very long. Anyway, here it is again, handily - or awkwardly - divided into two posts; the main body of text, and the footnotes. Photos will be back soon. Oh, there they are, look.
The Gremlins are back! No, thankfully not in the dismal-sounding direct-to-DVD sequel Warner Home Video promised us over a year ago, fully computer-generated and with no Joe Dante involvement, but in a British television commercial for BT, following in the footsteps of that other latex Hollywood sell-out E.T. The advert is supposed to make the viewer aware of BT’s 24-hour helpline services but the only thing it successfully makes one aware of is just how difficult it is to bring popular characters back into the public eye without the end results being disastrous, and as such yet again makes evident just how exceptional Gremlins 2: The New Batch really is.
With this in mind we now reprint, neither updated nor corrected, an old article of mine comparing Gremlins 2: The New Batch to an entirely different sequel. This piece was original written for the November 2003 issue of God’s Rude Wireless, a pop cultural ‘zine almost exclusively distributed at The Fitzroy Tavern, London, on the first Thursday on every month between October 2003 and November 2004, conceived and edited by Simon Scott. It is with Simon’s kind permission we reproduce the article here, and inform you that he is also the mastermind behind Hamilton’s Brain and can be contacted through that site for those seeking back issues.
Galumphing Back
Gizmo Ca-Ca: The author meets one of the original Gizmo heads from Gremlins in Bob Burns’ basement.
Despite there being over a hundred years between them, there are a great many similarities between Through The Looking Glass, And What Alice Found There (1871) and Gremlins 2: The New Batch (1990). For a start, they are both sequels, and they both came out six years after their first instalment. Both are fantasies. Both contain elements of parody, and music. And both were created by men of passion: Lewis Carroll (1832 - 1898) and Joe Dante (1946 - present). And even though both book and movie incorporate in a mocking tone the interests of their creators, as well as parodying the conventions of them, the artistes are also able to treat their passions with a strong and genuine affection. Carroll would casually mock the futility of mathematics in the Alice books, yet still go on to write some of the most intelligent and original tomes on the subject of mathematic puzzles. Dante, meanwhile, was (and is) a great lover of old movies, and although he regularly sends them up mercilessly in projects such as Matinee (1993), Police Squad! (1982), Amazon Women On The Moon (1987), Eerie Indiana (1991 -92) [1], and of course Gremlins 2: The New Batch, at the end of the day all he is doing is following in the tradition of old Hollywood and making thoroughly entertaining pictures, the only way he knows how. He even pushed for Gremlins (1984) to open with the old Warner Brothers “shield” logo, such a fan was he of it, even though Warners had ditched the trademark several years previously. He and producer Mike Finnell were so knowledgeable about old Hollywood that actor Keye Luke gave them the nicknames of “Volume 1” and “Volume 2”. Dante loved the classic horror films so much that he went as far as naming his production company Renfield, after the Dwight Frye character from Universal’s Frankenstein (1931). He went even further back for Gremlins 2, taking cues from Chaplin, Keaton and Lloyd. As he said at the time about the mute Gremlins, “incorporating sight gags that don’t involve any dialogue is challenging. You need to go back to silent movies for an approximation of what we were after”. Like Carroll, he would frequently incorporate his love into his work.
But whereas watching a Gremlin who has had acid thrown in his face become out-of-focus as he creeps towards the camera in homage to Lon Chaney is rollicking good fun for children of all ages, trying to work out exactly what move on a chess board a row of asterisks symbolises is of no amusement whatsoever, which is a bit of a shame as Lewis Carroll bases his entire second Alice book around this rather weak conceit. Worse than that, the entire chess motif doesn’t work. Now, I know nothing about the game, but have been reliably informed that the whole concept fails in its execution. For a start, only selected character displacements represent a movement on the chess board. Carroll finished the book in twenty-one moves. A dedicated Caroll fan in the May 1910 issue of British Chess Magazine attributed a chess move to every character movement in the book. Entirely legally, he completed it in sixty-six moves, which is astonishing compared to Carroll’s lazy twenty-one. It is just a shame that Carroll was not alive to have this humiliation waved in his face. Our chessman’s achievement is even more stunning when it is realised that many characters in the novel, including Alice, travel from place to place often whilst have no impact on the surrounding chess game. Many characters in the book aren’t even ascribed chess pieces, despite there being plenty to spare. There are no bishops, for instance, because Carroll was afeared of upsetting the clergy [2]. In fact in a later edition of the book (printed 1886), Carroll had confused so many people with his book he had to include a new table detailing which character related to which chess piece. This only made matters worse: although some of the labels make sense (although being told which pieces the Red Queen and the White Knight represent seems a touch superfluous), others are arbitrarily given roles that they don’t encourage in the slightest. Minor characters such as Walrus, Aged Man, Crow and Sheep are all named as bishops, despite this being of no relevance to the story. The Walrus doesn’t even exist in the Looking Glass world, only being a bit-player in a song sung by Tweedledum and Tweedledee. The brothers Tweedle cause trouble themselves in the list. Marked as being two white rooks, then who (as inquired Dennis Crutch in a 1972 issue of Carroll fanzine Jabberwocky) is the rook featured prominently in Carroll’s own diagram in the front of the book? So confusing was this intro that it was ditched and replaced with an even newer preface for the next year’s edition. This all goes to show: Lewis Carroll was just making it all up as he went along, breaking rules when it suited him. No mathematical genius he. It’s the fact that the chess game doesn’t even pan out correctly that is a personal slap in the face to the readers. The move with which Alice’s adventures end is highly illegal. This, plus the lack of proper moves detailed above, makes the entire failed idea a huge waste of everybody’s effort. Not that I like chess or anything but, y’know, if he’s going to be boring he may as well do it properly. Alice sums it up neatly with her thoughts on the Jabberwocky poem: “It seems very pretty, but it’s rather hard to understand”.
The Stupid and Lazy Reverend Charles Lutwidge Dodgson: Far too late to wave chess-based humiliation in his face.
Kudos to Carroll, though, for at least attempting to approach with a different angle the “Girl Falls Asleep; Girl Goes Off Into A Curious Fantasy World; Girl Wakes Up” story of the original, even if it is with the theme of a chess game rather than, say, something good. Not so Gremlins 2: The New Batch. Knowing he too had a similar problem with a must-be-followed-yet-fairly-uninspiring formula (“Don’t get them wet! Whoops, too late…”), Dante went off into a curious world of his own: the world of parody.
Gremlins 2: The New Batch [3] (tagline: “Here They Grow Again”) isn’t a sequel to Gremlins but a parody of it. Whereas Gremlins was a horror film with comedy elements, Gremlins 2 is a comedy film with some horror elements. Zach Galligan hit the nail on the head when he said at the time that Gremlins 2 “is much funnier and much less gruesome” that the first. Whole scenes and ideas are lifted from the first film,and then pointed at while the viewers (and film-makers) laugh at them for their ham-fisted clichés and lack of logic, such as in the scene were members of the cast get into an argument over the logistics of the Gremlins’ ‘rules’, pointing out their flaws. This is a good example of the film’s makers noticing the flaws in the first movie, and not giving a damn [4]. It’s often said that the movie-goer is more likely to complain about the implausible than the impossible. For example, people often complain that Christopher Reeve as the title role in Superman (1978) shows off his filings when he opens his mouth, saying that the Man Of Steel wouldn’t require any fillings, what with his superteeth and all. These same people don’t complain that the entire two hours is about an alien from an exploded planet who can use the sun’s rays to fly around the world and turn back time. That, it would seem, is totally logical, while the fact that nobody can recognise the man when he has his specs on is not. Gremlins 2 suffered a similar accusation: If bright lights can kill the creatures, then why do they have so much fun in a television studio? The Gremlins’ rules, I hate to tell you, are made up. It’s a film, of course they’re made up. Chris Columbus devised them after he had a dream in which mice were nibbling his fingers, and if Joe Dante wants to have a scene decrying their ludicrousness in the sequel, then he shall. These rules about feeding Mogwai after midnight are not nearly as strict and unchangeable as, say, the rules of a chess game. As screenwriter William Goldman once said of movie structure, “For any kind of world you set up, there are rules. The authors make the rules - and they break them at their peril”. Both Carroll and Dante made their rules and broke them, at their respective perils, in their sequels, yet only Dante’s paid off [5], with Carroll’s failed chess game insulting everybody. I would not mind so much if Carroll had been satirising the daft rules of chess. In fact it would have been a fun idea if he had, what with Alice moving whichever way she liked for the simple reason that she is not a chess piece but a girl. No, it is the fact that, after deciding for himself that he would stick very closely to the rules of the game, he goes and arses them up just to get an inconsequential end to the story that comes off as being so goshdarn lazy. The parodies in Gremlins 2, meanwhile, are anything but.
Most of the supposed ‘in-jokes’ in Gremlins 2: The New Batch are fairly obvious [6], even to the casual viewer: Phoebe Cates pastiches her ill-timed (yet finely acted) “Now I have another reason to hate Christmas” speech from Gremlins with a daft tale of someone flashing her on Lincoln’s birthday (“He looked just like Abe Lincoln. Except for the raincoat”) [7], and film critic Leonard Maltin appears for a cameo, giving the first film a bad review only to be eaten by the “ugly, slimy, mean-spirited little monsters” he’s just insulted: “I was just kidding, it’s a ten! It’s a ten!”. Many other jokes and references are more complex, and mainly designed so as to make Joe Dante giggle. Having Dr Catheter [8] walk in holding one of the pods from Invasion Of The Body Snatchers (1956), for instance, or marking a detached brain in a jar with the name “Donovan”. Or having a sign pointing out “Vectorscope Labs”, the name of the laboratory in Dante’s Innerspace (1987), or the casting of Paul Bartel, who had previously appeared in four films directed by Dante, in a brief role as a cinema manager to say to a complaining theatre-goer that they only show the films, they don’t make them. This is a direct reference to a 1968 film Bartel directed called The Secret Cinema, in which the theatre staff do make the films they show. Similarly, when Dante favourite Dick Miller turns a Gremlin into a gargoyle by drowning him in cement, this is another obtuse reference to a film called A Bucket Of Blood (1959) in which Miller makes statues of people using the same method. The church that the gargoyle ends up on is itself a movie-lover’s in-joke, being called the “Church of Saint Eva Marie” [9]. The thing about all these jokes is that even if you don’t get the reference (and few of the film’s young audience would) then you’d still be entertained by the sight of Dick Miller socking a flying Gremlin in the mouth. Not so with the in-jokes in Alice.
“It’s a ten! It’s a ten!”: The author, Leonard Maltin and a balloon Gremlin smile for the camera.
Through The Looking Glass is a veritable treasure-trove of oblique in-jokery. Indeed, the duo of novels are entirely based around a girl Carroll knew, Alice Pleasance Liddell, for whom the stories were originally and, pre-publication, exclusively written. The chess motif only appears because in the months preceding the book’s writing, Carroll was attempting to teach the Liddell girls the game of chess. Characters, too, are based on people specific to living the live of Lewis Carroll. There’s Alice, of course, plus the Rose and the Violet from chapter two, who are based on two of Alice’s real-life sisters, Rhoda and Violet. The Red Queen is based on the Liddell children’s governess Miss Prickett, while Carroll himself accompanies the body of one of the last characters Alice meets, but more on the symbolism of this later. Carroll also used similar comparisons between Wonderland inhabitants and real-life acquaintances in the first book, of course, most notably casting himself as the Dodo [10]. In fact the whole menagerie of the Caucus-Race are based on friend’s of the author: the Lory is one of Alice’s sisters, Lorina Liddell, the Eaglet another, Edith Liddell, and the Duck is based on Reverend Robinson Duckworth, a man often accompanied Carroll and the Liddell family on boating trips, one of which inspired the chapter’s incident where the creatures have to swim to safety. Many direct allusions to this anecdote in the story were removed when Carroll realised that the vast majority of readers wouldn’t enjoy the references. Good man. Would that he have hacked up “Looking Glass” in such a way. For you see, whereas Dante’s in-jokes are very accessible to the general audience (a character based on Donald Trump, for instance), Carroll’s are lost on everybody short of himself or anyone with the surname “Liddell”. Dante also knew how to edit well, as the deleted scenes reel on the recent Gremlins 2 DVD shows. A lengthy expositional scene involving Dr Catheter explaining what all the potions in his lab did was cut, despite some funny lines (Christopher Lee goes all vampiric at the mention of blood, and one scientist asks another if he’s “got any spare growth hormone, I’m a little short”), and quite rightly. This scene is long, slow, and adds nothing to the plot as all the potions that pay off later need no explanation. A Gremlin grows bat-wings not, as if the scene were included in the film, because of the Doctor’s earlier mentioned research on the movements of bats, but because the bottle has a large picture of a bat on it, and the film moves more smoothly and sillily because of it, coming in at a tight 107 minutes. Dante notes that, after early screenings of the film, at least half-an-hour was cut because executive producer Steven Spielberg complained that there were “too many Gremlins!”. The deleted scenes confirm this and, fun though they are independently, a two-hour New Batch would have died on its arse.
If the in-jokes in Through The Looking Glass fail then so do the parodies, because the items they pastiche are too far removed from the minds of today’s readership. The “Garden Of Live Flowers” chapter, for example, is a big old laugh at Alfred Lord Tennyson’s horrendously overlong poem Maud, now long-forgotten as the Alice books live on, and a man “dressed in white paper” is based on Benjamin Disraeli [11], a fact lost on most modern readers. Although these chapters may be amusing in themselves, the resulting irritation that mounts upon trying to work out what the heck to which Carroll is referring (especially in the repeated and varying use of a then popular advertising slogan, “A Thousand Pounds A Puff”) is not. Reading Alice is much like rewatching topical episodes of Spitting Image (1984 - 92) or Have I Got News For You (1990 - present [12]) in that respect. But not like Gremlins 2: The New Batch.
Of course, this lack of context doesn’t really matter in the first book, which is so plentiful of fun and enjoyment that if an unclear reference should rear its head (the Old Father William song, for instance), it doesn’t really matter as one is so swept along on the magical adventure Alice is having that one can ignore it and swiftly zoom off onto another amusing expedition a few pages later. Wonderland is such a joy to read that one can’t wait to leaf through another chapter, and is upset when the text finally comes to an end. Through The Looking Glass, however, is so incredibly dull in comparison [13], especially with its (ugh) chess motif recurring all the time, that the reader is given time to think about which jokes he or she is missing out on, which can only make one feel left out and even angry at the author for such an insult to the book-buyer, making one’s reading of the chapters quite painful and often put off as long as they can be. It would be as if the BBC started to only make programmes about what it’s like to work in a BBC office, and then increased the license fee to finance them. Lewis Carroll is calling us all pillocks from beyond the grave. Gremlins 2 wins again.
Gremlins 2 always wins, whatever the round [14]. Even in its execution of fantasy. For both stories are set in a fantasy world, be it through a looking glass or in a New York skyscraper infested with anthropomorphic demons. However, both have, and must have, a healthy dosage of reality instilled in them also. Remember what I was saying about the audience’s suspension of disbelief, the impossible and the implausible? Applies here it does in large, although luckily both stories’ formats have a looseness about them which allows the creators to deviate from the usual. When Kenny Everett would broadcast a cock-upped sketch instead of a proper take nobody cared because, hey, he’s Kenny Everett. The wacky video idiot [15] can do what he likes and, because of the non-linear feel to his shows the audience would be amused greatly, barely giving the radical breech in convention a second thought. Ditto Gremlins 2: The New Batch. Due to the parodic, Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker [16] style of production, director Dante can go off on a wild flight of fancy if the mood suits him, or if the action in the picture starts to sag. And when it does, Dante literally breaks the film. Only it’s not him doing it, it’s the Gremlins, and they’re making surprisingly elaborate animal shadows with their hands in the projector’s beam (including an excellent Abe Lincoln: “Faw scaw an sebenyewago…”) before playing a nudie movie to the stunned theatre patrons. A woman goes and complains to the manager whereapon he walks down the auditorium and gets the real Hulk Hogan [17], the only man alive tough enough to scare Gremlins into submission, to terrify the creatures into restoring the film. It works, presumably because he ripped his shirt off, and the movie resumes [18]. This sketch, a direct tribute to the scary auditorium gimmicks of William Castle, is perfectly exectuted, appearing pretty much in the centre of the film, amusing the viewers briefly (yet brilliantly) before returning the film to normal, and nobody watching minds, surfing back excitedly into the film’s story with no effort at all. What, then, is Through The Looking Glass’s equivalent of Joe Dante’s cinematic flight of fancy?
Jabberwocky.
Don’t get me wrong, Jabberwocky is perfection in poetry. Making fictional words slide off the tongue as if they were words of everyday speech is a truly great skill, one only mastered by Lewis Carroll, Spike Milligan, and Beck [20]. This poem is unquestionably one of the finest in the world, and the clear highlight of the book. So where does Carroll place it? In the tangibly stupid place of the end of the first chapter. Um, Mr Carroll, mightn’t the middle of the book be a better place for it, structurally? Here it makes for a ridiculously good opening followed by eleven full chapters of anti-climax. The ideal place for this magnificent piece of fiction would be, as Joe Dante no doubt knows, towards the end of chapter six, slapbang in the book’s centre. In this place, preposterously, is an explanation of what this made up tale actually means. Am I the only one to find this completely insane? The world’s greatest nonsense poem, being the world’s greatest nonsense poem, does not need a commentary! Possibly in the Martin Gardner annotations produced sixty years after Carroll’s death, yes, but not in the text itself. At this point in the novel Humpty Dumpty, who is explaining the piece to young Alice, would be better simply to recite Jabberwocky rather than dissect and analyse it. He does, in fact, recite a poem here, and by golly, if it isn’t the worst poem in the world. As I say, some editing here could have helped the book’s overall structure insurmountably. Point goes to Joe Dante, if only for not standing in front of the film, pointing at it and shouting “You see?! I’m being abstract!!”.
The story in Looking Glass is so predictable [21] anyway, it is unlikely the movement of the frumious Bandersnatch would’ve considerably helped. This second book follows the pattern of the first to the letter, down to who she meets and when. Even the number of chapters are identical, there being twelve in each book. And the ending in the novels is the same, both being that (gasp!) it was all a dream. Although this dumb dumb superdumb conclusion is seen as cliché in today’s post-Wizard Of Oz (1939) universe [22], it was probably seen as very inventive when Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland was first published in 1885. But even the youngest of Victorian readers couldn’t fail to feel disillusioned by the reimergence of this ending, especially when done in such an uninspired way. The final sentence of the book implores us to guess whether we think the story was a dream of Alice’s or a dream of the equally sleeping Red King’s. Upon reading this, every reader shouts in unison “WHY, IT’S ALICE’S, YOU STUPID, STUPID MAN, AS SHE IS THE ONE WITH WHOM THE NARRATIVE STAYS, AND BESIDES WHICH THE RED KING IS, IN THE REAL WORLD, A SMALL CHESS PIECE WITH NO SENSE OF CONSCIOUSNESS AND AS SUCH CANNOT DREAM. SO I SAY IT TO YOU AGAIN; YOU STUPID, STUPID MAN. JOE DANTE DOESN’T PATRONISE US THIS WAY. HE ENDED GREMLINS 2: THE NEW BATCH BY HAVING DANTE REGULAR ROBERT PICARDO MARRYING A SEXY FEMALE GREMLIN IN A HEAD-TURNING PARODY OF THE ENTIRE RIDICULOUS SERIES. IF YOU HAD DONE THIS AND MADE THE STORY AND ALL ITS CONTENTS, INCLUDING ALICE, FIGMENTS OF THE DREAMS OF A CHESS PIECE, THEREBY PROVING A REAL MIND-FORNICATOR TO THE DEDICATED READERSHIP, THEN WE WOULD HAVE BEEN IMPRESSED. BUT NO, DULL YOU WERE AND DULL ETERNAL YOU SHALL REMAIN, YOU STUPID, STUPID, STUPID MAN”. Well, it’s what I shouted after I’d read it anyway.
Sure, the book has a great many good moments. Jabberwocky, of course, and the fun “Tweedledum and Tweedledee” chapter, which includes the smashing morality tale The Walrus And The Carpenter. But that’s all they are; just moments. It is the poorly-balanced structure and overall uninvolving narrative that destroys any good ideas contained within the text. The first book doesn’t suffer this (and nor does Gremlins 2: The New Batch), and therefore you would suspect that elements such as the Tweedle twins or the Garden Of Live Flowers would work much better if they were inserted into the superior story of Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland. And you’d be right. Check out Disney’s under-appreciated feature Alice In Wonderland (1951) which does exactly this and is a fine seventy-five minutes of fantastical entertainment. And such are the similarities, not intentional at Carroll’s end it would seem, between Wonderland’s Queen Of Hearts and Looking Glass’s Red Queen that the Queen Of Hearts in the Disney film adopts dialogue from the queens in both novels (“Your way? All ways are my ways!”) and creates a much stronger character as a result.
Not just the Red Queen, but all the characters in Through The Looking Glass are utterly rubbish, and not even worthy of a more decent and well-worded send-off than that. For instance, there is no reason for the new characters, such as the Tweedles or the man dressed in white paper, to be there in Alice’s dream. In the first book the majority of characters she meets were animals, and you get the impression that Alice, half-asleep and dreaming in a field, had partially been aware of the existence of these creatures around her and had incorporated them, subconsciously and anthropomorphically, into her dream. This theory is played out by the fact that all the beasts she meets are ones that could conceivably be found in the British countryside: the Dormouse, the March Hare, the Caterpillar, the lizard (“There goes Bill”), the huge puppy [23], the baby pig, and, most obviously of all, the White Rabbit, whom Alice spots just as she is drifting off. Even the deck of cards may have been something bought along by either Alice or her sister to the riverbank where they rest. Other, more fictional, animals may have been mixed up in Alice’s mind from Alice’s consciousness sensing other animals around her. Is it really so impossible that the half-asleep hearing of the cooing of a bird, the cawing of a crow, and the purring of Dinah, Alice’s cat, may account for the (non-)existence in the story of a Dodo, a Gryphon and another sort of Cat, a Cheshire one to be precise. It all makes (non)sense if the reader adopts the right dreamy approach. Not so for Looking Glass, however, where the characters couldn’t exist in such a way, mainly being taken from fairy stories or other verse (Humpty Dumpy, the Lion and the Unicorn). Indeed, our dozing heroine can’t even make a sheep exist as she falls asleep indoors this time round. Even a chess set seems an unlikely playing field of the subconscious in this situation and besides, what do all these people have to do with a looking glass world anyway? Nothing, that’s what. The whole looking glass conceit appears to be hastily and poorly tacked on the front of the novel, just there as a convenient way for the girl to get from cat-playing reality to chess dream. Through The Looking Glass may have many layers but all of them are bad. Meanwhile, Gremlins 2: The New Batch, although superficially shallow, actually contains so much more.
Being a scary creature feature is just one movie, inside it is another; a well-timed anti-greed movie, made just as the species of power-mad Yuppies were dying out. John Glover [24] plays a Donald Trump/Ted Turner hybrid [25], creating monstrosities of mechanical technology for the betterment of industry (how far removed from the quaintliness of Hoyt Axton’s small-town inventions in the first film). Towards the end of the movie the mass-destruction of his office skyscraper by the now-eradicated Gremlins makes him realise the value of traditionalism: “[This building] wasn’t a place for people anyway,” he intones, deeply, “It was a place for things. You make a place for things… ‘Things’ come”. The film is also a hark-back to the way movies used to be, the way Joe Dante used to enjoy them when he was young. And so, Gremlins 2 starts with a cartoon, ends with a Busby Berkeley musical number, features the audience-involving scare-tricks of William Castle mixed in with the devil-may-care zanity of Hellzapoppin’ (1941) or Frank Tashlin cartoons, and is strongly opposed to the recent Hollywood trend of “colorization”, showing It’s A Wonderful Life (1946) to prove it’s badness (and to carry on his use of the film from Gremlins) and finally ending with the Ted Turner-a-like realising his error in redoing Casablanca (1942) “in full colour, with a happier ending”. And of course Dante also adds to the proceedings great old character actors like John Astin and Henry Gibson. And Christopher Lee! And Bugs Bunny!! No wonder Dante calls it “one of the most unconventional studio pictures ever”; he has succeeded in bringing modern-day America back to a more innocent time, fifty years previously, when films were fun. Dante has made the world’s only fifty million dollar Marx Brothers movie, which must truly be the single most anarchic act in Hollywood history. Is Through The Looking Glass the most anarchic book in publishing history, let’s ask. And let’s answer: No!! I doubt it was even the most anarchic book of 1871 when, I suspect, it wouldn’t have caused even the slightest ripple of commotion in the publishing world. Not least due to the boring, boring logicless new characters.
But the new batch in Gremlins 2 don’t suffer the lack of logic the way those in Looking Glass do. Their reasoning for being alive is simple; they are test-tube Gremlins. The Vegetable Gremlin exists because he drank from a test-tube with a picture of a tomato on the side. The Electricity Gremlins cos the test-tube he drank from had picture of a lightning bolt. The Bat Gremlin… well, we’ve already discussed the Bat Gremlin. These being’s evolutions may be corny in the world of science-fiction but, due to the parodic intention surrounding the film, nobody cares. In Dante’s world of the impossible, there is no implausible. Even the minor Mogwai players are, rather than given the “Get Wet; Eat Late; Kill” one-dimensions of the previous story, are fleshed out with full and daft characters in the shape of Daffy, Lenny and George, created purely as mad Dante-style references to Daffy Duck, John Steinbeck’s Of Mice And Men (1937), and Edward G. Robinson respectively. Why? Why not. With this sense of disorder rife throughout, who needs the fixed unbreakable rules of disciple, or indeed of a game of chess? It may not be very civilised but, to quote the Brain Gremlin, (exquisitely voiced by Tony Randall), “Was that civilised? No, clearly not. Fun but in no way civilised”.
Few recurring characters appear in either Through The Looking Glass or Gremlins 2: The New Batch, yet in neither are they especially deep or detailed. Ignoring Mogwai and Gremlins, Looking Glass and New Batch have four recurring characters apiece: Alice, Dinah, Hatter and Hare in Looking Glass and, in New Batch, Billy Peltzer (Zach Galligan), Kate Beringer (Phoebe Cates) and the Futtermans (Dick Miller and Jackie Joseph [26]). Character development in both is all but nil. Hatter and Hare, for some inexplicable stupid reason, are now not nutty tea-party guests but Anglo-Saxon messengers called “Hatta” and “Haigha”. Stupid! No connection is made between them and their counterparts in the first book, and Alice doesn’t recognise them in the slightest. Stupid! I suspect much could be written about the change in personas and functions between these two mad people and the effect that they must have on Alice’s subconscious to appear uniquely in two dreams six months apart, but whatever is written will conclude in the same way: with the exclaimation “Stupid!”. Quite why Carroll chose to do this is anyone’s guess, and anyway, whatever happened to the Dormouse?
The people in Gremlins 2 are even less realistic. But does it matter? After all, who is it the paying public have come to see? Not Zach Galligan, that’s for sure. As special effects maestro Rick Baker said to Christopher Lee when he wondered why the film’s SFX men wer receiving the majority of attention, “The movie is called Gremlins, not Actors!”. In the original both Billy and Kate weren’t so much characters as catalysts, designed to start scenes of Gremlin activity by creating them and screaming at them respectively. Murray Futterman has a bit more of a purpose; being a movie Old Man he fought in the war (doesn’t matter which one, they’re all more or less the same) and has encountered “Gremlins” of a sort before, those being the fictional elves created by Roald Dahl and blamed for engineering faults during wartime. It is he who gives both the creatures and the franchise their name. He also dies. In the book, at least [27]. In the film he is last seen under a snowplough driven by one of the beasts (in fact his last act is to christen the new breed), and neither he nor his wife are ever referred to again. They survive though, it seems, as both he and his lovely wife turn up in The New Batch. Not even the Grim Reaper can defeat the power of Hollywood money. Just ask Jack Palance about City Slickers 2: The Legend Of Curly’s Gold (1994) or, more unpleasantly, Blake Edwards about the two Pink Panther pictures he made after Peter Sellers’ death using out-takes of the actor from previous films [28]. The Futtermans, we are told, were just, quote, “kinda rattled” by their experience rather than completely flattened by it, and are due to visit Billy and Kate in their new New York home as if nothing untoward had happened. The only change in the life of the Futtermans is that his wife’s name is now “Sheila” not “June”, and they are now the comic relief. That said, Murray does have one good reason to be in this second film: to kick some Gremlin ass! Which he then does. Splendidly.
Les Gremlins de Hollywood: The author visits the Warner studios.
A lot (be fair, all) of the character development, such as it is, in Gremlins 2: The New Batch is delivered in throwaway lines in the style of the “kinda rattled” one above. The scene in which this is said, the first in which we see Billy and Kate, ends with this conversation between them:
“We’ve been living here all this time, I’m still in the same job.””It takes time, Billy.”
”If we’d stayed in Kingston Falls I probably would’ve been promoted twice at the bank by now.”
”Yeah, and you’d hate it!”
”I dunno. At least we could afford to get a decent place to live, get married…”
Wow. How’s about that? In one five line exchange we learn that the pair left their home town a while back for New York, have started new jobs with low pay, and are living together in a small apartment yet are not married due to a lack in monetary funds. I hate exposition normally but even I have to take my hat off to Charlie Hass for his sheer chutzpah in hitting the audience over the head with every fact in the film as they’ve barely even chewed their first mouthful of popcorn. And furthermore, they got away with it! How? Because the audience cares for the characters in Gremlins and Gremlins 2: The New Batch. They may be flat and stereotypical but the action in the two films is so rapid that one can’t help but feel for their plight, be it personal or Gremlin-related. And it is down to Joe Dante’s excellent direction [29] that we cry when Kate Beringer tells us of her father’s demise, and why we laugh when she parodies it with a speech about a flasher dressed in a stovepipe hat. Nobody emotes such to Alice [30]. Or indeed to Alice, so unpleasant a charcter is she. Maybe not quite so objectionable in the first book but certainly in Looking Glass. She thinks badly of everyone in the looking glass world, and treats them accordingly. From Queen to Dumpty, from Lion to Unicorn, all and sundry receive the young girl’s distain. Which is understandable considering they all treat her with similar contempt (there is one character through the looking glass who is nice to Alice and to whom Alice in nice back, and his name and purpose shall be revealed later).
“Hatta and Haiagh? Fuck off, Charles”: Dodgson/Carroll’s final portrait of Alice Liddell (1870).
The change in Alice’s character may be on account of the change in Alice’s role, which has differed considerably since the first book. There she was written as the Innocent, around whom all manner of mad and loopy characters play out their party tricks. Her equivalent in the Gremlins films, Gizmo, had a similar function: to essentially stand around while the Gremlins do their nasty thing. Gizmo is also an Innocent; it is the other Mogwai/Gremlins who are evil. In the novelisation of the film, Gizmo is a true Innocent. He was, like the entire Mogwai genus, created by an alien race as an intergalactic ambassador, designed to travel from planet to planet, bringing peace to its people and really spoiling them with plates of Ferrero Rocher. Needless to say there were a few flaws in the design (the eating-after-midnight thing being the biggest) so the idea was cancelled, although a few perfect messiahesque Mogwai were created and sent out, one of whom, of course, was the Earth-bound Gizmo. He, like the pre-pubescent Alice, is truly innocent, and as such must be the hero of the film [32].
Interesting that in cinema of the forties and fifties, the hero had to be innocent and the villain (or villains) always had to fail. The Lavender Hill Mob (1951) couldn’t get away with their otherwise perfect bank robbery as the script wanted, and the death of Rebecca (1940) was no longer murder, as per the novel, but an “accident”. Had it been murder, then the murderer would’ve got away with, well, with murder, and the censors wouldn’t have allowed that. The most notorious case was To Catch A Thief (1955) which had a tacked on ending revealing that, hooray, cuddly old Cary Grant wasn’t a murderer and could go and live happily ever after with Grace Kelly on the French Riviera. Grant, Kelly and Hitchcock all hated this scene, yet were forced to go through with shooting it by the studio, terrified of being attacked by the censors, with their independent ideas about what’s right and wrong. But the thought of having to be an Innocent to end your story with some success is an interesting one, existing as far back as books like Frankenstein (1818), where the otherwise charming Dr Henry F. has to die in a big firey windmill because he was playing God [33], and, despite changes in censorship, this idea still exists today in rubbish like Freddy Vs. Jason (2003) where the slutty naked teens die and the clothed virgin wearing white is redeemed by surviving the bloodbath and getting the guy of her dreams, even if she does cut Freddy’s head off in the process, proving once and for all that in Hollywood that carnage is more worthy of reward than the carnal. In this tradition where being an Innocent equals success, Alice and Gizmo are both guaranteed redemption at some point in their adventures. Even their names imply it, the first syllable of each of their five-lettered uninames starts off harshly - “Al” and “Giz” - yet smooths itself off in a calm, almost heavenly fashion - “ice” (pronounced “iss”) and “mo“[34]. This provides an interesting subtext for both Looking Glass and New Batch as it is the opposite to this which happens in the sequels. It is not until the Innocents become moderately evil, rather than good, that they are redeemed by their creators. In both the firsts of their epics there is a slight character change which affects the story so that it regresses back to the way it started: Alice shouts at the playing cards and wakes up, and Gizmo, inspired by the sight of Clark Gable racing in To Please A Lady (1950), drives a toy car around the dramatic final battle with the final Gremlin. Yet while these actions are both fairly heroic, in the sequels both Alice and Gizmo cultivate throughout the story unpleasant characteristics which eventually save their days, the characteristics being those of the Red Queen and Rambo, respectively.
In homage to Gizmo’s earlier homage to Gable’s able racing, Gizmo learns through television that, in the immortal (and very likely immoral) words of John Rambo that reverberate around Gizmo’s tiny little mind after a particularly violent torture session, “to survive a war, you gotta become war”. Gizmo, thus, becomes war for, as Charlie Hass puts it, “he is forced to become the warrior. They push him too far”. Indeed they do and by the end of the film the once calm and meditated Mogwai has fashioned a crude bow and arrow and, whilst wearing the obligatory tough guy red headband, shoots a lit match into the heart of the Spider Gremlin (which was once Mohawk), causing it to go up in Joe Dante’s inferno. The self-satisfied leer that appears on Gizmo’s face when all the Gremlins are ethnically cleansed toward the film’s finale implies that Gizmo is no longer an innocent; he’s found violence, and he likes it that way. It is only then that Gizmo achieves redemption in the ultimate Hollywood accolade: a rich man wishes to turn him into an action figure, the nearest thing in movieland to ascension.
Alice’s ‘redemption’ is slightly more self-serving. All she wants is to cross the board and become a queen, with no regard for the lives of any other being in the looking glass universe. But by the final chapter in that very world something interesting happens; she becomes nice. Lewis Carroll realises, rightly, that to become the highest of the high, to change from humble pawn to majestic queen, Alice must start doing good things for the glass’ inhabitants. Starting by helping an aged White Knight with his suit of armour and generally tolerating his rotten poetry, she goes on to read a Wasp (in a wig, no less) his newspaper, despite the Wasp being very rude towards Alice, notably about her eyes being too close together. These two pieces of narrative are Alice’s last selfless acts of charity before ascension to the throne. Except they’re not. The White Knight she meets in the book, yes, but the latter incectival incident was cut from the piece because, it is claimed, Tenniel said he couldn’t draw a wasp [35]. And so cut it was although, despite being overly sentimental and comparatively poorly-written, it is vitally important to the narrative of the book. Without it, the character arc of Alice, which should go “Arrogant - Arrogant - Arrogant - Redemption Through Kindness - Becomes Queen - Wakes Up Beatified”, simply goes “Arrogant - Arrogant - Arrogant - A Bit Nice - Becomes Queen All Of A Sudden - Wakes Up Arrogant Again”, which is of no inspirational use at all to any reader whatsoever.
So what is left in then? Just who is this White Knight anyway? The only character in either of the Alice books who is kind, courteous, warm, and actually listens to what Alice has to say, and is genuinely sad to have the girl depart from his presence. Isn’t it obvious? The White Knight written about by Carroll is meant to represent Carroll himself. The exchange between the Knight and Alice is a metaphor for the real real Alice’s transcension from schoolgirl to adult, shown by having her gain an automatic degree of responsibility and maturity by becoming crowned Red Queen of the looking glass world. When the White Knight tells Alice how to be a good queen while asking her to wave him a cheery goodbye, Lewis Carroll is making tangible his aim to make the real-life Alice, nineteen at the time of the book’s first printing, into a conscientious adult, and his fear that when she does she will no longer require the company of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, her teacher, her mentor, her story-teller, her friend. A deeply personal resolution which, in the context of a fantasy novel set in a chess-based dream, makes very little sense at all. This, plus the eventual and poorly-realised waking up finale, add up to create a deeply aggravating book, one which, unlike the first which plants such high expectations in the mind for the second, completely fails to engross or embrace its readers, leaving them with very little impact of having even read the book, with nothing remaining within the mind but bad memories of wasted pages. A heart-breaking flaw.
So if Carroll based the White Knight on himself in Through The Looking Glass, then who does Joe Dante base on himself in Gremlins 2: The New Batch? No question about it: Dante is Gizmo. A tiny, insecure ball of fur and fun, trying to be peaceful in a world of horrible little emotionless reptilian creatures (or movie executives as they call themselves), battling against the odds to bring laughter to the public rather than to horrify. The sharp claws and teeth of the Gremlins representing the ever-continuing recuts of the film by powerful yet inwardly terrified Warners bosses, perhaps. Was Dante using Gizmo’s final redemption, of using a film to beat the bad guys, as an metaphor for his struggle, using traditional movie-making techniques of the forties to destroy the norm of the nineties and thus create the most anarchic nine-thousand, six-hundred and thirty feet of celluloid in the history of Hollywood, and eventually becoming marketable property to be cherished by the bosses instead of an awkward outcast, with the red headband that Donald Clamp wishes to remove from Gizmo at the end of the movie a symbol of the rebellion that the studio often wished to take from Dante which he stubbornly and forcefully retained throughout his long career?
No. No, of course not. Nothing of the sort ever entered his dumpy little trivia-filled head. Joe Dante made the film just to have a bit of an old laugh at some rubber puppets from a picture he made six years previously. If only Lewis Carroll had taken this facetious approach and not taken his sequel quite so seriously then maybe he could have again created something which is magical, something which transports us from our everyday lives and briefly places us somewhere fantastical. Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland does. Gremlins does. Gremlins 2 does also. But Through The Looking Glass does not, and that the problem; for all the book’s perfect moments, overall it simply doesn’t effect, doesn’t evoke, doesn’t involve and, above all, doesn’t entertain. And that, ultimately, is why Through The Looking Glass And What Alice Found There is a far far far inferior sequel to Gremlins 2: The New Batch. That, or it doesn’t have Hulk Hogan in it. Which did you think it was? Fade out…
Author meets auteur: Jonathan Sloman and Joe Dante, The Egyptian Theater, Los Angeles, September 2006.
