Gremlins
The first gremlins can be traced to the early 1940s and the airfields of the British Royal Air Force, where they were blamed for inexplicable mechanical mishaps early pilots endured during WWII. A gremlin might run out of the clouds to stand on the wrong wingtip and throw off the pilot’s controls. In the days of prop planes, they might run down the nose of a taxiing aircraft and tip it forward. By all accounts: mischievous, omnipotent, and something every pilot needed to take into account.
This is exactly what mythology does. Aviation in WWII was intensely complex and frequently deadly in ways that resisted explanation. Gremlins gave the inexplicable a name and a personality, and crucially, something to blame that wasn’t pilot error.
1943: Year of the Gremlin
One of those RAF pilots was Roald Dahl. At some point in his early piloting days, his path crossed with Walt Disney, who pushed him to write a children’s story. That story was “The Gremlins” (5,000 copies published in 1943). Disney illustrator Bill Justice researched what they wore: mittens and Viking hats. It gets cold up there.
In Dahl’s telling, the gremlins’ forest home gets destroyed when The Man moves in to build a plane factory. That’s why they hate airplanes. But before they can seek revenge and destroy the RAF, the British win them over with postage stamps and everybody lives happily ever after. The story has a notable environmental tilt — these gremlins sit somewhere closer to a Rogue Forest Gnome than a mechanical pest.
When it came time to turn the book into a film, there were too many issues with who “owned” the rights to the idea of a gremlin. The RAF wanted final say. Dahl wanted payment. Disney couldn’t resolve it. The movie was never finished. Dark Horse Comics restored Dahl’s story in 2006 with new illustrations by Dean Yeagle.
1943: Looney Tunes
By 1943 gremlins had hopped stateside. In “Falling Hare,” a single gremlin plays tricks on Bugs Bunny, ultimately sending a plane into a dramatic spin-dive Bugs can’t recover from. At the last second, inches from the ground, the plane runs out of fuel — a reference to the Class A ration card that allotted only so much gas per week.
1963: Nightmare at 20,000 Feet
Gremlins go quiet during the Sputnik era and the early Cold War, fitting their MO of lurking when technology leaps forward. Then in October 1963, William Shatner comes face-to-face with what might be the largest gremlin on record in the Twilight Zone episode “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet.” Written by Richard Matheson, the episode has been remade and parodied dozens of times.
1984: Spielberg
When gremlins reenter the cultural milieu in fall 1984, Spielberg has room to show us they’re actually just hangry mogwais. The film expands the creature-lore out of the forest and down from the sky — and in doing so, erases most of their original association with aerial mischief from the public eye.
Gremlins Today
For nearly a century, gremlins have represented chaos and uncertainty. As technology continues to shrink, as drones take over the skies, as artificial intelligence takes over our work, the gremlin story persists. They might just be settling in again.
They have always embodied some of the fears we have about losing control over our own creations and our respect for the natural world around us, be it other cultures or simple gravity. — Guthrie Allen, Skyways Journal