Zach Galligan Interview Gremlins

Zach Galligan Interview: Gremlins

We interview Gremlins star Zach Galligan about returning as Billy for a Mountain Dew commercial, his ideas for a Gremlins 3, and much more.

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Mogwais are notoriously hard pets to take care of. They don’t like bright light, you can’t feed them after midnight, and you can’t get them wet. Some of them will do everything they can to make sure you break these rules. Others, like Gizmo (voiced by Howie Mandel), know that when things go wrong, they can REALLY go wrong and try to help you abide by the rules. It’s been over 30 years since the last major Gremlins incident, but now Mountain Dew may be at the root of another incident.

In a new spot for Mountain Dew Zero, Gizmo can’t resist the urge to try it and has a small accident. Billy Peltzer (Zach Galligan) was able to break away from tending to Gizmo and the new, new batch to chat with us about the new commercial featuring him and Howie Mendel reprising their roles, as well as rumors of a Gremlins 3 and the upcoming animated prequel, Gremlins: Secrets of the Mogwai.

I just watched this the Mountain Dew spot a little while ago, and the first thing I noticed was there are a ton of little Easter eggs placed around the scene that call back to the original Gremlins movie. Was there anything that particularly struck you?

Zach Galligan: Well, there were a couple. There’s still some easter eggs that people can’t quite see in the commercial themselves, and I’m thinking about putting them up on my Instagram.

The set decorators did an amazing job of [adding] framed pictures. You can’t see them, but they wanted to show the extent of Gizmo and my relationship through the years. There’s one picture of Gizmo and I both watching a 3D movie with 3D glasses, I’m eating popcorn, and he’s sitting next to me on the couch. There’s one hilarious picture of Gizmo and I, where we’re bowling together. I’m bowling, and Gizmo’s cheering me on by the gutter lane. There’s one where I have him near the sink, and I’m telling him to stay away from the faucet. It’s just cute, and you can’t see those at all.

But probably the most interesting thing that was cut was out of frame right next to the couch, on the left hand side. I don’t know why they didn’t really explore this, but I have a dog – Barney style dog, like I had in the original one. The dog is asleep in a little doggy bed, and when Gizmo spills it, the dog perks up his ears and gets kind of concerned. But I guess with a 30 second commercial – maybe if it was a 60 second commercial – you could show some of the details. But you’re trying to tell a quick, funny story as rapidly and as well and as visually capable as you possibly can. To do all that they managed to do in 30 seconds is pretty impressive. I guess they just felt like, “Listen, we love the dog. But there just isn’t enough narrative room in a 30 second spot to squeeze the dog in.”

How hard was it to convince you to come back for this? Were you jumping at the chance, or did they have to prod you a little bit?

Zach Galligan: Well, they didn’t have to prod me that much once they told me that Steven Spielberg and Amblin was getting involved with it too. Because once you know that production company’s getting involved, it just automatically tells you that the quality level is going to be high.

Spielberg and Amblin tend to have extremely high standards for literally every single thing that they do, so it’s almost like a quality control mechanism. You just know that it’s going to be good, and it’s going to be done well. I’m not going to be on some set somewhere where they have this cheap Gizmo attempting to match what geniuses like Rick Baker and Chris Walas managed to do 30 years ago.

Once they told me they were collaborating with Amblin, it kind of relaxed me and made me feel that I was doing a Gremlins commercial as opposed to a Critters commercial.

What determines where and when you can actually feed Mogwai? And what can they eat, because they’re so prone to getting wet?

Zach Galligan: Well, it is a very complicated and complex situation. Obviously, one that I’ve given a tremendous amount of thought to over the last few decades. Clearly, the thing that’s the most important is that the midnight time stamp signature has to be within the respective time zone that you’re in. You can’t feed them after midnight, so if you’re on the East Coast, you’re talking about the East Coast’s midnight – you’re not talking about California.

Now, people will say things like, “What if you put him in a plane and feed him at a certain time, and then you fly to LA?” First of all, you probably shouldn’t put Gizmo in a plane to begin with; that’s probably bad idea. He doesn’t really like flying; that’s something that he and Joe Dante have in common. They don’t really care for flying or traveling that much. So, you probably want to travel your Mogwai – it’s a little impossible – in the same time zone.

And then of course, after midnight, when is it safe again? And although it’s not explicitly stated, I think it’s kind of implicitly held that once the sun comes up. Whatever that time is, my guess is it’s probably safer to feed your Mogwai pretty much whatever you want once the dawn has broken right.

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I know that you’ve mentioned a few times that you have an idea for Gremlins 3.

Zach Galligan: Yes. I have many ideas for Gremlins 3. I’ve had three decades to think about it.

Zach Galligan Interview Gremlins

The first movie was more or less serious, even if it was a little campy. Then the second movie comes around, and it’s more of a meta commentary on the movie. Would you keep going in that fashion? I kind of liken it to the Evil Dead series. Would you go on a similar path to path, or would you like to see it return to a more serious, grounded tone?

Zach Galligan: The nice thing about it is, because the two movies are so different, you really can go a number of ways with it. I know that Chris Columbus has hinted that on the Gremlins 3 script that he’s written, he’s going to go darker and more of a Batman tone. It’s a lot darker and more adult and gloomier and scarier – just more menacing. Which is a good way to go, because we haven’t done one of those.

There’s been elements of that in the first one, like the kitchen scene with my mom, or them hatching up in the attic. Those are dark things. Killing my science teacher, ejecting Mrs. Deagle through the window – although a lot of people laugh at that, it’s actually pretty horrific.

What always got me was the Gremlin in the microwave.

Zach Galligan: Well, it’s a pretty violent thing to do to a creature. I remember seeing it at the premiere at the Chinese Theater, and the audience was going absolutely psychotic. You couldn’t hear any of the dialogue. There’s a joke, when you watch the movie, and there’s no crowd. If you’re just watching at home, the Gremlin blows up, and then the big joke is it cuts to Frances Lee McCain’s face. She’s watching and it goes, “Ding!” like it’s ready. People were screaming and laughing and shouting things at the screen so vociferously that you couldn’t hear it. You never heard the ding; just that whole sequence in the kitchen was riotous.

I can remember this like it happened 10 minutes ago. Phoebe was sitting a row ahead of me at the Chinese Theater and about two seats over to my right. If she looked over her left shoulder, she could look back and make eye contact with me. She sat down, and she was like, “Good luck, Zach!” We were in different rows with all of the cast and crew jammed into these two or three rows. And after the microwave scene, she turned around and looked over her shoulder, hunched over the chair, and she said something along the lines of, “If this isn’t a huge hit this summer, I’ll eat my hat.” …Something like, “If this isn’t a smash hit, I’ll be stunned.”

That was the moment where we kind of knew, based on just the absolute [chaos]. It was like what you imagine you hear when you hear about Stravinsky’s “Rites of Spring,” where there’s a riot after they do the concert. That’s what it felt like; it felt like the roof of the building was going to come off after that one. The movie really builds up beautifully, and then when they hatch and start unleashing the havoc, people are just not ready for it. They thought they were getting cute little cuddly Gizmo in it. In 10 minutes, the movie turns on a dime, and suddenly you have all this ultraviolence and people are losing their minds.

One of the big things that I miss is watching movies with a crowd, because the experience that you get with audience reactions is so different.

Zach Galligan: Yeah. And you would see that a lot in the trailers. The trailer would come on, and people would start screaming at it if they liked it. And if they didn’t like it, they would aggressively boo and shout stuff at it.

Moving into this potential third movie, we know how they turn out when they’re hit by water. Would the Gremlins that are created by being splashed with Mountain Dew be different, and would they have different inclinations for what they want to watch?

Zach Galligan: I think they would. I think they would be a little bit more energetic. Whenever I have Mountain Dew, I always get a bit of a rush. Although now, of course, with Mountain Dew zero sugar that might be lessened somewhat. But maybe not.

I think one of the interesting things is that people have been on the internet chattering, saying things like, “Why does he have a chemical reaction with Mountain Dew but not beer?” The Gremlins get splashed with beer in the bar scene, and the logical answer is that the alcohol acts as a you know as a non-catalyst agent for the chemical reaction. It basically stops the growth of the chemical reaction. Because alcohol is oftentimes an extremely damaging thing, as well. You see what it does to human body over time. So, it tends to inhibit growth as opposed to promote it, whereas Mountain Dew tends to promote the growth as opposed to inhibit it.

There’s also this new cartoon that’s coming out soon for HBO Max, Gremlins: Secrets of the Mogwai. Have you seen anything from this yet? Is there anything that you can share about it, like your first thoughts?

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Zach Galligan: I can’t really, because I’ve only seen the same stuff that’s been released publicly that you’ve seen if you’ve researched it.

The only thing that I could add is that Joe Dante is a creative consultant on it, and not only is he a creative consultant on it, he is arguably one of the world’s great cartoon aficionados. He’s obsessed with cartoons; most people argue that his movies are extremely cartoonish. He even decided to go all the way with Looney Tunes Back in Action in 2003, I think it was. He owns an enormous library of actual 35 millimeter – you’d have to ask him what the millimeter is – original Bugs Bunny and Looney Tunes cartoons. I know, because I’ve been to his house and he screened some for me. He has a massive library of at least a few hundred actual original cartoons that they would show at the drive-in or in the theater, on a reel-to-reel projector.

He has seen a bunch of stuff. I said, “Between you and me, is it any good?” And he goes, “It’s very good.” He’s very happy about it, and he thinks that everybody associated with the project is exceedingly smart. Apparently it works on two levels, the same way that Bugs Bunny and Bullwinkle cartoons worked. You can watch it as a kid, and it’s fun and slapsticky, and it’s amusing. It’s got obvious cute jokes that a seven and eight year old can laugh at, but it also has some amusing social commentary that a 40 and 50 year old can laugh at as well. Jokes that go over kids’ heads, but that adults sit there and smile and nod their head grinning at. That’s my favorite type of animated show or cartoon, when it works on two levels.

I just wanted to ask you one last question about Gremlins 3 and the rumors of it happening sometime soon. Are you able to speak about what the potential for this actually happening is.

Zach Galligan: It just seems to me, like with a lot of these franchises, what happens is a lot of it just depends on momentum. A project like Gremlins 3 starts to take on a momentum of its own. Things like the Mountain Dew commercial kick start it; you can see that when the Mountain Dew commercial came out, it kind of took people by surprise. And then within two days, maybe it was a coincidence and maybe it wasn’t Secrets of the Mogwai started announcing voice actors. And then the next day they announced it had been picked up for a second season.

In the last week, there has been an enormous surge in interest in the franchise. If you compare it to two or three or four years ago, when there was absolutely nothing, it’s night and day. The momentum starts with the Mountain Dew commercial, or arguably with the announcement last July that Secrets of the Mogwai was happening. And now there’s going to be not one but two seasons of it; it’s going to start in November or December.

My guess is that, and it’s not really rocket science, if the animated series does well and starts garnering a lot of attention – particularly if it does well around the world, in all sorts of other markets, including China, which it seems to be somewhat aimed towards because it has largely Chinese-American cast and takes place in Shanghai in the 1920s. If it starts to really get a popular foothold in the public imagination, then you basically have to think that a Gremlins 3 becomes eventually in inevitability. Because it’ll be like a boulder rolling down the hill, and it’ll just be too much pent-up demand and desire, and it will just be financially practical and sensible for Warner Brothers to do it and pull the trigger.

I can tell you right now, I don’t have any inside information, and I don’t know of any start date for Gremlins 3. It just seems like something that’s going to happen, given the Ghostbusters remakes and Cobra Kai and everything old is new again, as Cole Porter said. It just seems like it’s got to happen at some point.

Would you prefer to see it as an official Gremlins 3 movie, or in the spirit of something like Cobra Kai, would you be down to see it in an HBO Max series?

Zach Galligan: I don’t really care how they do it or which format, as long as the execution is really well done. Any time you want this franchise or property to be recreated, as it was in the Mountain Dew Zero Sugar commercial or in this upcoming animated series, you just want to keep the quality level high. You don’t want it to sink below a level, because then it becomes cheapened and ruins the brand.

I think everybody at Warner Brothers, who are way smarter than I am, are keenly aware of that. That’s why you haven’t seen Gremlins 3 straight-to-video or DVD knockoffs and things like that. They know they have valuable property, and they know that it has the ability to be resuscitated, and now they know that the only way to do it is with a lot of thought, a lot of time, a lot of effort, and a lot of money so that it’s a really A-list quality product.

Link Source : https://screenrant.com/gremlins-mountain-dew-commercial-zach-galligan-interview/

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