Last fall, Nick Lutsko posted this amusing song wondering why there hasn't been a revival of Gremlins, the 1984 Joe Dante horror-comedy classic. Everything else from the era, from Ghostbusters to Battlestar Galactica, got the reboot treatment, after all!
♫ We could have had Gremlins 6 and Gremlins 7
Instead we got Covid and 9/11 ♫♫ So tell me where did Gremlins go?
It's been so long with nothing to show.♫
Great song. Watch Gremlins again! Not just a clip on YouTube. It'll be obvious why it got left in the 1980s. Just about everything in it can be read as a joke about racism. It's fair to credit it for lampooning white fear, white flight, racial demonization, the cosy bullshit of a too-white Christmas, etc. But it's still a solid hour of white folks screaming at blatant racial stereotypes, and even Hollywood can sense that this sort of thing is trouble now.
Lutsko's song knows the answer. To quote Matthew Goff: "This man just pitched a Gremlins 3 that deconstructs how liberal democracies are complicit in enabling and enacting fascist regimes."
As it happens, though, an animated Gremlins show is in production at HBO.
With that, it's over to Jordan Peele:
