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Taming a Mogwai is hopeless. Mastering a Mogwai puppet is near impossible.

The Gremlins franchise would never have worked if Gizmo and his Mogwai buddies weren’t convincing. However, making those tiny creatures come to life on screen was one headache after another. Each animatronic required constant wiring, which couldn’t be visible on film. In addition, the filmmakers kept changing their minds about what the Mogwai should do on screen, forcing the puppeteers to start from square one.

During a Gremlins spotlight panel at GalaxyCon Columbus 2024, Billy Peltzer actor Zach Galligan opened up about the difficulty the puppeteers had working with Gizmo and the Mogwai. “In Gremlins 1, because they had never done a lot of this animatronic stuff, they really blundered in the writing of the script.”

It’s one thing to write about Gizmo being carried, but filming it isn’t as easy.

“Not that Chris Columbus blundered, but he would say things like, ‘Billy picks up Gizmo and takes him into the bathroom to bandage his ear.’ In order for me to have Gizmo talking into my hands, I would have to pull my shirt sleeves down and then you had about 14 or 15 cables that came out of Gizmo’s butt, they would taped to my arm, go down through my body, all down through my legs, and they cut a whole in my socks, and the cables would go across the room. Each cable to a different joystick manned by a different crew member,” Galligan continues.

“They would all be watching the same monitor and they practiced for months to synchronize all 14 cables so they would move in unison and look like an actual expression. They practiced it for several months. And Chris Walas, who by the way, also had a nervous breakdown on Gremlins 1, and refused to do Gremlins 2, which is why Rick Baker did it, because it was just two years in hell – they kept changing what they wanted from him.”

According to Galligan, the studio was impressed with the animatronics, but that led to some increasingly unreasonable demands.  

“It would be like, 'Well it doesn’t have to walk. Now it has to walk.' 'Can you make it skateboard?' 'Oh my god, we love looking at it, can you make it breakdance?' They kept asking for higher highs. It’s kind of like saying, ‘Hey can you climb K2? Then can you climb Everest? We’re building something on top of Everest, can you climb that? Can you build a thing built on top of the thing that you put on top of Everest to climb that?’”

“By the end of it you’re ready to freaking kill the person who keeps asking you to do more. Your desk was just empty, and they come over with a giant pile of books and put it on your desk just as you finish doing it. They made lots of elementary mistakes and they made things very complicated. And then Rick came along and looked up at the script, and sat down with [Gremlins 2 writer] Charlie Hass and said, ‘Let’s see if you can put him in something so Billy doesn’t always have to carry him in his hands.’ That’s where you have the toolbox.”

The next time you watch Gremlins 2: The New Batch, pay attention to how many times the Gremlins are in a box or on a table. That was done so Rick Baker wouldn’t have a nervous breakdown. It turns out the Gremlin animatronics caused just as much stress as their fictional counterparts.

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