As The Mandalorian And Grogu rightly puts puppetry centre stage in a movie, a look back at Gremlins 2’s astonishing creature effects. Just when he thought he was out, Warner Bros pulled him back in. Joe Dante famously hated directing his 1984 comedy horror, Gremlins, and it famously took a great deal of convincing before ... Gremlins 2 | Before Grogu, there was Gizmo, and some of the most elaborate puppetry ever committed to film
As The Mandalorian And Grogu rightly puts puppetry centre stage in a movie, a look back at Gremlins 2’s astonishing creature effects.
Just when he thought he was out, Warner Bros pulled him back in. Joe Dante famously hated directing his 1984 comedy horror, Gremlins, and it famously took a great deal of convincing before he agreed to make a sequel. In the end, he only relented because Warner promised to give him final cut.
Released in 1990, Gremlins 2: The New Batch featured perhaps the most elaborate puppet sequences ever committed to film. While plenty of other movies featured physical creature effects in the 1980s and 90s – Return Of The Jedi and Labyrinth contained some spectacular work by Jim Henson’s workshop – the sheer number of mischievous critters in Gremlins 2 is nothing short of astonishing.
The antic comedy reaches its technical zenith in a late showstopper in which the titular monsters, having taken over a Manhattan office building, pull off a febrile rendition of New York, New York. Even viewed in 2026, with an eye jaded from decades of digital VFX, the level of artistry is gob-smacking. Every shot is filled with movement, with gremlins dancing and partying in the background as lead critter, dubbed the Brain Gremlin, sings down the lens.
A few seconds later, the action cuts to a Busby Berkley pastiche, then Brain Gremlin (voiced by Tony Randall) performs on stage with a big band, his fellow monsters clouting each other with their brass instruments.
These shots and others like them, needless to say, took absolutely ages to execute. Rick Baker and his team of designers and puppeteers worked for as long as two years on all those creatures; the shoot itself took some seven months according to Dante; there were weeks of shooting with the flesh-and-blood actors, including returning Gremlins stars Zach Galligan and Phoebe Cates, before attention turned to the scenes that featured the puppets by themselves.
Starlog magazine caught up with an evidently tired Dante in 1990, just before Gremlins 2’s release that summer.
“It seemed like it would go on and on and on,” he said of the lengthy shoot, which lasted for the entirety of 1989’s second half. “Empires tumbled while I made this film, Communism fell while I was doing this movie, the world changed while we made this movie, people died, people were born and cast in the film.”
Read more: Gremlins 2 and its fourth wall-breaking genius
One of the sequel’s other technical highlights is Gizmo, the good-hearted gremlin who, as in the first movie, has a habit of inadvertently birthing dozens of evil doppelgangers. As Dante noted, the adorable creature moved far less in the first film; partly due to technical limitations and budget, he was often carried from scene to scene by Galligan’s protagonist, Billy.
The sequel had a then-huge $40m budget to play with, much of it set aside for those creature effects. As a result, Gremlins 2’s version of Gizmo was more elaborate and capable of far greater movement. Dante and his collaborators had so much confidence in their effects, in fact, that they devised an entire section in the film – essentially a mini silent movie – in which Gizmo goes off on “his own little adventure” as Dante put it.
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“That’s a whole separate kind of movie, and it has to be shot silent,” the director said. “He doesn’t talk much anyway. It was endless weeks of just shooting stuff with Gizmo.”
Improvements in animatronic technology between the two films meant that Gizmo and the other gremlins could be given more personality in their movement – leading to a delightful Rambo pastiche in which Gizmo dons a red sweatband and shoots evil gremlins with a bow and flaming arrow.
Said Dante, “The amount and quality of the gears that you can stick in their little heads has gone up so much that the small ones really do stand more scrutiny than they did the first time.”
Gremlins 2: The New Batch was not, sadly, a hit when it came out in June 1990; it was unfortunate to come out against the much-hyped Dick Tracy, and shared multiplexes with the likes of Total Recall and Days Of Thunder.
A cult classic these days, Dante’s wilfully chaotic sequel still stands as a high watermark for practical effects and puppetry. This writer would argue that there’s more than a hint of Gizmo’s DNA in Grogu, the cute baby alien in this spring’s The Mandalorian And Grogu. Sure, he’s the same species as Yoda, a character dreamed up way before even the original Gremlins, but his movement and personality are strikingly similar to Dante’s similarly adorable fluffball. And, like Gizmo, he’s a character brought to life almost entirely with physical puppets.
The Mandalorian And Grogu also features an almost wordless sequence in which its Baby Yoda goes off on his own cute adventure – one that is strikingly like Gizmo’s mini film-within-a-film in Gremlins 2, even if the tones are entirely different.
It’s possible that The Mandalorian And Grogu’s team of puppeteers had Gremlins 2 in the backs of their minds as they worked on these disarming sequences. (In 2022, Dante himself noted Grogu’s resemblance to Gizmo, describing the Star Wars character as being “completely stolen and… just out-and-out copied” in an interview with the San Francisco Chronicle.)
Dante appeared to treat Gremlins 2 like a kind of exorcism – throwing in so many ideas and so much chaos that nobody would be tempted to make another sequel. For decades, he got his own way, not least because of those disappointing box office returns.
Then, in late 2025, Warner Bros announced that it’s finally going to make Gremlins 3. Dante, unsurprisingly, won’t return as director; instead, monster-wrangling duties will go to Christopher Columbus, who wrote the 1984 original. The film’s due for release in 2027.
It’s currently unclear whether Gremlins 3 will use physical effects or re-create those monsters digitally. If Columbus does go down the puppet route, he’d have to go some way before he could match the vast scale of the 1990 film’s set-pieces. He’ll also have to bear in mind the mental toll that overseeing those puppets might take.
Some 37 years ago, Starlog writer Bill Warren was on the sound stage when the New York, New York sequence was in the process of being filmed. The set was about 150 feet wide by 250 feet high, he wrote, and positively filled with dozens upon dozens of puppeteers, their heads and bodies clad in black, their hands clutching their grinning, green skinned puppets.
“There are Gremlins everywhere,” Warren wrote. “Gremlins galore, gremlins by the dozens, by the hundreds, wearing flowered hats, Gremlins in leather jackets…”
Surveying the scene’s delicious mayhem, Dante simply quipped, “Madness let me do it.”
