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| Saturday, May 2, 2009 09:53 AM |
| Book Report - The Gremlins: The Lost Walt Disney Production |
 by Fëanor |
This is a hardcover book from Dark Horse containing a short story by Roald Dahl with illustrations by Walt Disney Productions. It's a cute little story, but perhaps the most interesting part of the book is the introduction by Leonard Maltin, which tells the story behind the story.
Dahl was a Flight Lieutenant during WWII and claimed to have invented the stories of little creatures called gremlins that bust up airplanes by drilling holes in them, sawing at them, and just generally causing trouble. In fact, Dahl did not invent gremlins; he just picked up on an already existing idea and crafted some specific tales around it. Eventually his gremlin stories made their way to Walt Disney, who thought they'd make a great movie. Dahl was brought in and a lot of concept work was done on the animated film. But by this time the gremlin idea had gotten around Hollywood and a number of other studios had started work on animated shorts and other projects involving the creatures. So Disney made the rounds and asked everybody else to scrap their projects so they wouldn't sabotage his feature film. The very idea of somebody doing this in today's Hollywood is ridiculous, but things were different back then; everybody was happy to step aside for Disney. The only problem was Warner Bros., which already had two animated shorts about gremlins almost completed, including one starring Bugs Bunny entitled Bugs Bunny and the Gremlin. As an apologetic gesture to Disney, prodcuer Leon Schlesinger changed the titles to remove the word "gremlin" from them; the Bugs Bunny cartoon became Falling Hare, which is actually a pretty fantastic animated short, and one of the few Bugs Bunny cartoons where Bugs is the tormented one instead of the tormentor.
Sadly, even after all this, Roald Dahl's gremlin story never became a movie. Nobody seems to know exactly why, but it certainly wasn't due to any personal animosity; Dahl and Disney parted on the best of terms and always spoke well of each other afterwards.
Dahl's story opens with a British pilot having a run-in with a gremlin which forces him into an emergency landing. Later he tells his fellow pilots the origin story of the creatures: their forest home was cut down and destroyed to make way for an airplane factory, so now they destroy any airplane they come across as an act of revenge. We learn that female gremlins are rare and are called fifinellas, and that gremlin children are called widgets. All the pilots are fascinated by the gremlins, but upset by their destructive acts, so they slowly begin to make friends of them and teach them how to fix planes instead of destroying them. When the pilot who's our main character gets injured and is unable to pass his physical to fly again, he is deeply depressed - what is a pilot who can't fly? - so the newly reformed gremlins band together to help him pass and get him back in the air again. It's a cute and surprisingly moving conclusion.
I can definitely see how this story would have made a fantastic, classic Disney animated film, especially with the wonderful and evocative drawings and color illustrations accompanying the text. It's really a shame the movie never happened. |
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