MCI is celebrating gremlins for Halloween this year. Some of you will remember the films of the same name with fluffy creatures that mustn’t be fed after midnight. However, we are going further back into history than that, to WW2. RAF pilots sometimes had intermittent faults with their machinery. The urban myth created around this was that impish creatures called gremlins were attacking the machinery and causing the faults.
This myth caught the imagination of the famous children’s book author Roahl Dahl. As an RAF pilot during the war, he must have come across gremlin riddled machinery. He was so taken by the idea that wrote a short story about the gremlins. The main character, Gus is plagued by Gremlins attacking his plane. Eventually, he persuades them to team up with the RAF against the Nazis. It’s easy to see why this story was so important in 1943. He even sold the rights to Disney to make an animated film. Unfortunately, the film was never made, but the book became popular, and Eleanor Roosevelt was known to have read the book to her grandchildren.
The story of the Gremlins didn’t end there. In 1962 and again in 1983, gremlins appeared in episodes of the ‘Twilight Zone’. A passenger keeps seeing a gremlin on the wing of a plane attacking one of the plane’s engines. Even the Simpsons made a parody of the Twilight Zone called ‘Terror at 5 ½ feet’.
In 2006, the dust was finally brushed off the Roahl Dahl gremlins project. Dark Horse Comics published an updated and restored version of ‘The Gremlins’ called ‘The Gremlins: The Lost Walt Disney Production’. There was even a mini-series where the grandson of Gus meets the gremlins when inheriting his grandfather’s house in England. A sentimental end to the original Gremlins project.
If you are having gremlins in your machinery, just call MCI on 01324 611371 to see how we can help you remove them and repair the damage done. Have a good week everyone!