Line #95 Headscratchers/Gremlins


1	* Given the massive potential for danger that a mogwai could spawn, and the knowledge of what they're capable of, why would any sane person even would allow a mogwai to live? If a gremlin outbreak has happened before, as is implied in the film, you think everyone would want to kill every last mogwai there is.
2	** Look at the end of the movie. Yes, killing Gizmo would be the logical thing to avoid more death and destruction since the potential threat is still there, but the Peltzers don't even think about it because he is just too damn cute (plus, the fact that it is not really the little dude's fault).
3	* If the rules are so important, then why not tell them of the consequences? The kid just said to not wet them or feed them after midnight, but never says WHAT happens if you do.
4	** And honestly if you found out that breaking said rules would lead to an apocalypse of homicidal monsters, would you even want to buy it as a pet? Or consider selling it? Or even doing anything aside from "kill the mogwai for the good of all humanity"?
5	*** Some people just want to watch the world burn.
6	** or the kid had no idea of the consequences of the rules, just that his Grandfather said them to him, but until the kid was to inherit the place he would not disclose the full ruleset just the basics, need-to-know style.
7	* Alright, here's a doozy for you. the rule that bothers me the most is the first one: Don't expose a mogwai or gremlin to bright light. Why is it that Stripe is killed by the sun, but not the lights in the Peltzer house, the lights at Dorry's Tavern, the lights at the movie theater, or the lights in the convenience store? Those lights are obviously bright enough to light up those buildings, so why aren't the gremlins killed by those lights?
8	** Because 1) artificial light is never shown as being able to kill Gremlins or Mogwai, it just hurts/scares them, most likely specifically because it makes them think of sunlight, or 2) all of the places you list had fairly dim lights, either by default or, in the case of the Peltzer house, because they'd deliberately lowered the lights in most of the rooms to make Gizmo comfortable or 3) it might be that there is something that is in sunlight that isn't an artificial light.
9	** Most artificial indoor lights aren't ''nearly'' as bright as full natural sunlight; it only seems similar to us, because our pupils dilate indoors to let in more of what's available. Unless we're talking about a 24-hour workplace where the management has shelled out extra for sunlight-caliber lighting, to keep their night-shift workforce fully "clock-shifted" and not groggy on the job, light bulbs ain't gonna cut it.
10	* Something always bugged me about this movie, and thus far any attempt by others to clear it up has failed. It's about the third rule. "Never feed him after midnight". But when, exactly, is "after midnight"? Every single day of the year is preceded by the midnight of the previous day, making ''every single time of the day'' "after midnight". So, when does a mogwai become feedable?
11	** Maybe it's the 12-6AM period.
12	** This bothered me too, I came up with two possible explanations. Either it's the "witching hour", midnight until one, once it becomes 1:00 AM you can feed it again. Or it could also mean just any of the predawn hours.
13	** And when is it midnight? the world is split into time zones so while its evening in America (or the East coast of) its gone midnight in Britain. Also what about summer and winter clock settings?
14	** Here's a thought: After midnight means "after midnight". You know, after twelve am? Seriously, when somebody tells you "We'll meet at five pm", do you fret about which time zone they're talking about? No, of course not, because it's obviously the one you're currently in! Why start wondering about that here? Unless the movie takes place right on the border between two time zones, there's not much to ask about. Of course, you have to wonder if this is adjusted to fit daylight savings whatsits, but apart from that it seems pretty clear.
15	*** I'd guess that it's anytime between when the moon is highest in the sky and dawn, so it'd still be midnight in whatever time zone the Mogwai happened to be in.
16	*** ...except that the only time the moon is directly overhead at midnight is when the moon is full. During other phases, it rises and sets at different times (the new moon is directly overhead at ''noon'')
17	*** [[http://www.oldeenglish.org/podcast/mogwai You're not the only person to be bothered by this one]]
18	*** Might I add that this whole discussion is hilariously lampshaded in the second film?
19	*** I don't care about the whole "midnight changes around the world" thing, I'm bothered by the fact that "after midnight" is too vague for me. That point is never addressed in the movies.
20	*** They are basically little magic creatures. Magic knows when midnight is. AWizardDidIt. (Or if you follow the novelization or whatever, aliens, but same difference in practice.)
21	** And that bugs me, a lot. Everyone is willing to discuss how international timezones affects mogwai, NOBODY is willing to define "after midnight" to me.
22	*** It means "after midnight".
23	** Oddly enough, I have never been annoyed by this at all. I have always assumed it meant "don't feed him in ''the hours after midnight and before dawn'' ", according of course to the '''local''' hour and not to what time is it in another hemisphere or somewhere else (?). It was never literally explained, true, but considering the fact that the movie is basically a (dark) fairy tale, these weird and vague rules were kind of appropriate, I felt. I guess "Never feed him after midnight!" just sounded cooler than "No late night snacks after dinner and before breakfast!".
24	*** I would assume the rule refers to the astronomical midninght (halfway between sunset and sunrise), regardless of time zones and DST. This doesn't normally coincide with 24:00 on the clock ...
25	** I'd have no problem with it if it was magic, but all the novelizations mention that the mogwai were genetically engineered...
26	*** Which is why those novelizations have always been incredibly stupid to me. Everything makes so much more sense if the mogwai are magic; the rules punish you for being irresponsible with them. The sheer amount of convoluted logic you have to invoke to explain them by any means other than magic is just mind-boggling.
27	** This bothered me too until I realized that were someone to say this to us in real life instead of on a movie screen in a film we can gleefully ponder the (il?)logical intricacies of, we wouldn't be nearly so anal about the wording. Most people would immediately take it to mean, "Don't feed them at any time during the night after midnight," and time zones would be the last consideration on their minds because they would take it for granted that ''of course'' it refers to whatever time zone they're in. Still night hours? No daylight yet? Check. 12:00 A.M. has arrived (unless you have a really good clock always kept in sync by the U.S. naval observatory site, it's best to play it safe with the exact minute) in your own time zone? Check. Then don't feed them. Simple as that. Daylight savings time is an artificial convention recently imposed in the past couple of centuries, and nothing more than semantics, so it obviously wouldn't count any more than it would if everyone in the country universally started agreeing to call midnight twenty-nine-o'clock for no reason. It's still midnight. And unless you happen to be in one of those weird polar regions where it's always daylight, I don't see how any further conundrums should occur. And even if they did, they don't occur in the film. [[JustForFun/TVTropesWillRuinYourLife We really need to get a life.]]
28	*** Wait, you're saying a biological function can factor in ''time zone considerations''? I call foul.
29	*** Biological sensitivity to tidal forces. Don't ask why it's attuned to the solar tidal force instead of the stronger but less circadianly constant lunar tidal force.
30	*** I thought this as well: perhaps the mogwai metabolism can sense when the sun is exactly opposite to where the mogwai is standing at the moment and he cannot feed until the sun's radiation starts to hit directly upon the place where the mogwai is.
31	*** 12:00 AM? Fuhgeddaboudit! I'm not feeding them after 10:50 at night if I know the risk!
32	*** You're calling foul on biology not taking into effect time zone considerations in ''this'' movie? Seriously, [[ArbitrarySkepticism that's where you're drawing the line of ridiculousness]]?
33	** I too always figured that the time when you can't feed them starts at 12:00 AM, determined by whatever time zone you are in, and dawn, which will be specific to your particular area. After sunrise, you are free to feed them...until it's 12 AM again.
34
35	* Here's an interesting question: What would happen if you were to bring a mogwai beyond the polar circle?[[note]]On par with how do Muslims follow the Ramadan in the polar regions.[[/note]] On the second thought, just don't.
36	** Ooh, ''Gremlins VS Film/TheThing1982''! Someone make this happen!
37	* I think the law that bugs me the most is the rule of water. In other words, do not let them be touched by water. First of all, how much water will affect them? If it's any amount, that means the mogwai is going to be affected as soon as it's exposed to air (remember, there are water vapors in the air). Second, most of the food you eat needed water to be cooked, right? So why isn't that affecting the mogwai?
38	** This was actually addressed in the novels and comic books: it has to be clear, liquid water. Non-liquid water (such as steam or snow) or water mixed with something else (such as orange juice or vodka) won't work.
39	*** As all the drunk gremlins happily demonstrated.
40	*** Really? Well, then, why did they not include that rule? Sure, it has no place in the movie because it cannot be used dramatically. However, if they said this, it would have at least shut up the doubters like me.
41	*** Because people who write movies don't really consider shutting up doubters like you a priority.
42	*** And why did the chlorinated water in the pool work?
43	*** Probably because the water-chlorine ratio was so steep that the chlorine couldn't null the reaction. Every other averted instance has involved fairly small amounts of water mixed with other chemicals.
44	*** Completely pure water is never encountered in normal life, anyways, so there must be a limit when the concentration is so much the "water" is no longer considered water, but something else. One could probably make a nice science project out of this; dilute orange juice or something in ever increasing amounts of water until you can determine the maximum concentration that will cause reproduction, to three significant figures!
45	*** Sure, find me a Gremlin and I'll get right on it!
46	*** I smell a ''Gremlins 3'' movie ...
47	*** Maybe as a precaution we should use sports drinks for all our water, like in Film/{{Idiocracy}}.
48	*** Does sea water make the grade?
49	** Maybe it has to do with the temperature of the water as well.
50	** Let's discard the whole "engineered by aliens" thing from the novel for a moment and assume that Mogwai and Gremlins are some manner of magical creature like a faerie or oni or whatever. If the rule about feeding is governed by our perception of midnight (meaning that what we consider midnight counts as midnight for the purposes of feeding them, whether it's strict astrological midnight or not), then the rule about getting them wet is probably governed by our perception of water. Do we consider snow to be water? "Frozen water!" But do we consider it to be water? No, we consider it to be snow. Alcohol is mostly water, but do we think of it ''as'' water because of this? No. But we ''do'' consider the water in a pool to be water, no matter how much chlorine you add.
51	** It seems to be that it has to be is liquid water, it also seems to have to touch their backs to start producing, you might argue that in 2 gizmo got some on his head, but he didn't fully react for a few seconds,until the water ran down his back, thats just my theory,also it seems the amount of water and not the length of time determines how many are produced, in 1 a Mogwai got a droplet of water from a dropper and only produced one other, otherwise he would have produced more from simply having the water on him.
52
53	* If Gizmo ate after midnight and morphed into a gremlin, would he become evil? His "children" were mean from the very birth but what about him? Frankly, it'd be pretty cool to have a "nice" gremlin fighting the others.
54	** I always got the impression that Gizmo is the only good Mogwai; and that's the reason the other guys hate him; he's a goodie two shoes among a crew of psychopaths. I've always inferred from the fact that he enjoys music, and watching TV and likes to sing for Mr Wing; he's visible bothered by getting wet, shows genuine sorrow and concern when he notices the other mogwais eating past midnight and he resolves to fight Stripe to the end.
55	** This is discussed in the WMG section: the popular theory is that if a mogwai is exposed to water against its will, their offspring will be AlwaysChaoticEvil. If the mogwai wilfully exposes itself to water, it can choose the CharacterAlignment of it's offspring. What a good mogwai morphs into if it eats after midnight is beyond me...
56	** I always saw the reproduced Mogwai as just bad seeds but not nearly as bad as the Gremlins, and that being transformed into a Gremlin brings out the bad side. Gizmo would turn evil if fed after midnight, but he might be less evil than the others.
57	*** Supported by the novelization: Less than 1% of Mogwai are good-natured. "Bad" mogwai are mischievous, and even potentially harmful, but still less dangerous than gremlins (in the novel, mogwai are genetically hardwired to be incapable of even ''contemplating'' harming another of their own species). And Gizmo tells Stripe that he'd be as violent and short-lived as the others if he exploited "the third secret".
58	** If Gizmo would turn evil when turned into a gremlin, why wouldn't the gremlins just forcibly turn him into one of them?
59	*** Probably because they hate/despise their father enough that they don't think he's deserving of becoming one of them. They would see their evil nature as a great gift.
60	*** Perhaps they are not ''that'' clever.
61	** Remember, when Gizmo's offered food after midnight, he turns it down. He either found it unappetizing, wasn't hungry, or he may have some sense that it's after midnight and he shouldn't, but wasn't able to properly convey this to Billy. Or he simply thought "It's late, I'd better not take any chances despite what the clock says", he's a fairly smart little guy. Anyway, simple answer: Gizmo wouldn't turn evil by transforming simply because he'd do everything in his power to avoid transforming in the first place.
62	** Even if becoming a gremlin won't turn Gizmo evil, there is another good reason for him to refuse to eat after midnight considering what gremlins are capable of. If Gizmo becomes a gremlin and then gets exposed to water, he'll produce more gremlins who likely won't be as nice as him. And it is shown that when gremlins get wet, they spawn ''gremlins'' rather than ''mogwai''. Plus remember that in both films, multiple mogwai were produced because Gizmo got wet by accident. Gizmo knows it could likely happen again in the future and so would want to keep the risk of producing more gremlins as low as possible, which would mean remaining a mogwai. It's better to regenerate as a mogwai than as a gremlin, as gremlins are much more dangerous and as long as mogwai are kept from eating after midnight, they will never become gremlins.
63
64	* Another issue on the Water Rule. How is Gizmo supposed to stay hydrated?
65	** By drinking orange juice, Coke and Pepsi. As I said before, the comic books and novel explicitly demonstrated that only clear, pure, liquid water works on mogwais.
66	*** Aren't carbonated drinks dehydrant?
67	*** That's a myth propagated by the same people that think you need to drink seven glasses of water a day.
68	*** ''Caffeine'' is diuretic, hence somewhat dehydrating. Carbonation doesn't add to or reduce a drink's hydration effect.
69	** Also, the rule is "don't get them wet." A simple drink of water may not do it.
70	** Who said they even need water?
71	*** Exactly. They're like kangaroo rats.
72
73	* Does the rule literally require them to be FED after midnight, or simply to EAT after midnight? And if so, what are the requirements of being "fed" (apparently snatching a sandwich off a counter is acceptable). I ask this because it seems like it would make it unbelievably easy for a mogwai who wanted to transform to do so. All he has to do is palm a tiny amount of food (assuming there isn't a minimum amount), and eat it after midnight, which makes the clock trick seem rather pointless.
74	** Yes, it would be very easy for an ill-tempered Mogwai to transform. That's part of the point, you have to be very responsible to be trusted with one.
75	** If you think about it, when he unwittingly feeds the other mogwai, Billy offers Gizmo a piece of chicken, but Gizmo declines, so the rule ought to be no-eating, however if you don't feed them their chances of eating drop dramatically, so the no feeding rule makes sense as a safety measure. Yet it could also be possible that the mogwai may not really know what happens if they eat after midnight and all of them were just eating out of hunger.
76	* This one falls under the MST3KMantra, obviously, but it confuses me as to why Mogwai/Gremlins seem in pain when water is splashed on them. Biologically, conception should be ''pleasant'', to encourage organisms to do it as much as possible. Yet Gizmo is clearly in pain when he gets water on himself.
77	** It's not conception, it's giving birth, which is generally regarded as feeling ''un''pleasant.
78	** Also, most creatures don't necessarily receive any pleasure from sex as breeding tends to be a fairly clockwork thing. It's pleasurable for humans precisely because it's so damn painful for us and we don't have a particularly strong clock about it.
79	** If the mogwai were indeed engineered, making their procreation painful would actually be a smart (if callous) measure to prevent them from breeding uncontrollably.
80
81	* Chinese civilization is essentially 5,000 years of recorded history and artwork concerning nature. And yet somehow, there seem to be no Chinese pieces of art or writings which warn about the Gremlins whatsoever.
82	** They do, to some extent, but only in that universe
83	** Chinese emperors were known to deliberately burn and destroy any records from before their reigns. This even carried to Mao Zedong.
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85	* What ''is'' Gizmo's real name? In the context of the movie, is the name "Mogwai" referring to the species and/or Gizmo? When Mr. Wing, at the end of the first movie, tells Billy that "Mogwai will be waiting", is he referring to Gizmo by name, or his species?
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87	* Why haven't these creatures taken over the world á la [[Franchise/StarTrek tribbles]]? Surely some time in the past some wild mogwais would have got caught in the rain...
88	** If Futterman is to be believed, it happened before.
89	*** There are no "wild" Mogwai. The old Chinese shopkeeper was lying about Mogwai being one of "nature's gifts". [[AdaptationExpansion In the novel]], we find out that Gizmo fell from space many years ago, and in the game, we find out the whole Mogwai species were created in genetic experiments by aliens to be the perfect pets. The experiments were considered a failure, obviously.
90	*** Nope. The novel is non-canon, and the writer didn't even see the movie (at least not at the time the movie was being made).
91
92	* How can the Gremlins drink beer and dig through snow and not multiply?
93	** Not pure water.
94	** The Gremlins read-along books (merchandising tie-in with Hardees, if memory serves) has a bit where Mr. Hanson explains that water has to be "above freezing" for them to multiply. One presumes water past the boiling point (and thus turned to steam/water vapor) would also not work.
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96	* How did Mr. Wong acquire the Mogwai to begin with? Surely no one told him the rules; he'd have had to figure them out the hard way. So was there a Mogwai outbreak in China in the mid- to late-twentieth century that news of which was kept strictly hush-hush by the Chi-Com government?
97	** ''WesternAnimation/GremlinsSecretsOfTheMogwai'' explains the backstory.
98
99	* Seriously confused how is it that Gizmo gets exposed to water and spawns the 5 five new ones, but Stripe jumps into the pool and spawns an entire army.

Context Headscratchers / Gremlins