HOLIDAY MAGIC: Gremlins

Why. Didn’t Spielberg. Just. Direct. This movie.

It’s become fashionable in the past few years to debate the worthiness of certain Christmas movies in the canon, mainly Die Hard. That discussion, however, often overlooks a Christmas classic that somehow blends It’s a Wonderful Life with monster flicks. There’s a lot wrong with Gremlins - the clunky script, the lost context in editing, and the lackluster acting. But all you need is a cute fuzzy sidekick and some awesome demon puppets, and you’ve got yourself a decent Christmas movie. A Christmas movie that explodes a gremlin in a microwave.

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Intro music taken from the Second Movement of Ludwig von Beethoven's 9th Symphony. Licensed under an Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Hong Kong (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 HK) license. To hear the full performance or get more information, visit the song page at the Internet Archive.

Outro music taken from"Put a Little Love in Your Heart" performed by the cast of Scrooged, Copyright Paramount Pictures 1988. Originally written by Jackie DeShannon, Randall Meyers (as Randy Myers) and Jimmy Holiday.

Jingle bells effect taken from “Jingle bells.wav” created by user ‘juskiddink’ on the Freesound platform. Licensed under an Attribution 3.0 Unported (CC BY 3.0) license. To get additional information or download the sound, visit Freesound.