Gremlins: The Wild Batch is back on Max today with a new batch of episodes, after a far too long break. And in the second half of the season, the animated prequel series is taking the action from Shanghai and San Francisco, to the Old West… And not only that, actor John Glover provides a surprise voice turn as the distant ancestor of Daniel Clamp, the character he played in Gremlins 2.
“How do we tie this to the Gremlins mythology?” EP Tze Chun told Comic Book Club on breaking down the mid-season premiere episode. “So we started thinking about, well, where does Clamp’s money come from? All that stuff is built on generational wealth. And to us, it was just funny. If they had worked in electricity and they invented the electric chair. It’s that type of Gremlins-style, dark humor.”
In the episode, Gizmo and the gang get trapped, Scooby-Doo style, in a seemingly haunted house run by the Clamp-cestor and others. But that’s just the beginning of the journey that also includes somewhat villainous Gremlin Noggin (George Takei) on their tales, a ghost train, and many more wild swings.
But the biggest, most important question? How will an animated series on Max in 2025 deal with the fact that Daniel Clamp in 1990’s Gremlins 2 was based on a guy named Donald Trump (though Gremlins director EP clarified to us that he was based on both Trump and Ted Turner)? To find out more, we talked to Chun, as well as composer Sherri Chung while at WonderCon 2025.
Comic Book Club: We have a Clamp ancestor in the episode — a Clampcestor, if you will. The original character was based on Donald Trump, so how much did that play into or not into deciding to do this episode?
Tze Chun: You know, this episode was such a fun journey for us, because I think we always knew early on that we wanted to do a Winchester Mystery House type episode, but it wasn’t a little bit until, kind of deep into writing this episode that we were like, well, let’s not do just the Winchester Mystery House. How do we tie this to the Gremlins mythology? So we started thinking about, well, where does Clamp’s money come from? All that stuff is built on generational wealth. And to us, it was just funny. If they had worked in electricity and they invented the electric chair. It’s that type of Gremlins-style, dark humor.
So the answer is “not at all?”
Chun: Not really. I mean, I think we mainly just wanted to tell a fun story with the Clamp family. And if they want to do a Clamp spin-off, we’re here.
There you go. Gremlins Secrets of the Clamps. Sherri, you’ve obviously played off of the themes a lot in the show, but how much did you look at Gremlins 2 and the Clamp theme in particular?
Sherri Chung: I have to be honest, I didn’t look at all of the Clamp themes, because throughout the whole series, it’s been like, hey, this is our blah, blah, blah episode. This is our Scooby-Doo episode. I was like, oh, Scooby-Doo, I grew up with the show. I get it. So for me, it was much more about leaning into the ghost part of it, the haunting, but also the the solving a mystery type of thing, and leaning into the jump scares of it all. I mean, the show, the show has been so incredibly fun with all the different things, especially later into season two, all these themes are coming together. How do I keep track of all of them? It was just trying to make sure that I’ve got Chang’s and Gizmo’s and Bad Gizmo and Chang’s father, and then to have the Scooby-Doo on top of it, it’s a whole thing. So a lot of it was more influenced in trying to hang on for dear life.
You’re an old hand of this, in terms of mixing things that people have previously created into new work, through all the shows that you’ve done. But what is the right ratio of dropping in those things like the Gremlin’s theme, versus pulling back and creating your own original compositions?
Chung: Good question. It was pretty much the exact question I had for Tze and Brendan [Hay] when we started. How, first of all, for score, are we going more first film or the second film? Is it more any synth? Are we doing orchestral? And once I understood the stories, this is a more orchestral palette. Tze was really insistent upon the main title and end credits would be the “Gremlins Rag,” for sure… A lot of the directive was pay homage. [But] do they have those themes there when needed? Really we’re doing our own thing. Feel free to expand and develop. So it was a creative invitation to really explore.
You have two halves of the season: the first half was San Francisco, the second half you get into the Old West. Was that a behind-the-scenes directive in terms of splitting it up? Was that something you wanted to do?
Chun: Streaming has gotten pretty weird in terms of the releases. So we just felt that it was always supposed to be a mid-season finale in San Francisco that sends them out into the Old West, which is the second half of the season. And so it just felt like a natural break. From a storytelling perspective, both season one and season two, there are natural breaks in it, because we’re trying to tell a suite of episodes about this, suite of episodes about that. Honestly, once we started getting to the writing of it, there was too much fun to be had. The first episode takes place in Shanghai. Second is Alcatraz, and we have a number of episodes in San Francisco, and now these are really episodes of the week as we are exploring a different location in the Wild West, and really exploring that area.
Wide open spaces don’t seem like a particularly safe place for Mogwai… How did that play into the decision, or how did you work around it?
Chun: It is definitely a production challenge to have one character who cannot be exposed to light. Really, the saving grace was this box that they introduced in the original movies, and one of the earlier things we talked about was, okay, well, in a show that we want to be epic and have it be a giant adventure, how do we keep Gizmo safe from this stuff? So the box was the answer.
The Noggin and Gizmo relationship has been fascinating to watch. Where did that come from? And from the score perspective, what was it like developing Noggin?
Chung: With the score thing, it was really fun with Noggin, because he’s obviously a very elevated Gremlin. He’s very educated now. He can speak all the languages. He’s free from all the spells and stuff like that. And so I gave him more an overly complicated theme, because it just felt like it was very flowery and something you can’t even hum, something that would be very sort of stately and snobby. That was the musical fun that I had with Noggin, who’s an incredibly fun character.
Chun: Brainy Gremlin is Brendan, my Co-EPS, favorite character from the original Gremlins movies. So at every stage in season one, Brandon was just like, “What about Noggin?” So he just ends up in a lot of story. And once we cast George Takei, it’s like, if we have George Takei doing the voice, let’s put him in as many episodes as possible.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
Gremlins: The Wild Batch streams Thursdays on Max.
Comic Book Club Live Info:
Discover more from Comic Book Club
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.