Gremlins: The Wild Batch Review

Eventually, a movie will attempt to reboot or continue the story of Gremlins, the Joe Dante horror comedy that hit big in 1984 and had a less profitable but even funnier cult classic spring from its back in 1990. But the lower-stakes animated Gremlins series that’s been quietly streaming on Max makes the case that sometimes a weird Saturday morning-style spinoff is more rewarding than a splashy legacyquel attempting to recapture an old movie’s old magic.

To be fair, Gremlins: The Wild Batch is more ambitious than most movie-related cartoons from the original Gremlins era. (The same goes for its predecessor/first season, which went under the title Gremlins: Secrets of the Mogwai.) Set in the 1920s, the show follows future curiosity-shop owner Sam Wing (Izaac Wang, recently seen in the affecting Didi) in the early days of his custody of the cuddly, apparently centuries-old Mogwai Gizmo. The first season was set in and around Sam’s native Shanghai, which was eventually, inevitably overrun by Gizmo’s accidental spawn: more mischievous Mogwai with a destructive drive to eat after midnight and transform into meaner, toothier gremlins. These antics adapt surprisingly well to a kid-targeted, TV-PG cartoon, where the violence is less explicit, but plenty of chattering beasts can still be squished into green goo, aided by 3D animation with its own cutely caricatured style. At times it’s almost like a Gremlins version of a DreamWorks fantasy cartoon.

The Wild Batch follows Sam, his reformed-thief pal Elle (Gabrielle Nevaeh Green), his adventure-minded grandfather (James Hong), and the ever-adorable Gizmo on an extended trip to the United States, where a ship full of gremlins fled at the end of the first season. This second season has been split in half, which seems unnecessary for a total of only 10 22-minute episodes. But the two batches of five (one dropped last fall, with the rest premiering on Max this week) do make sense as mini-seasons, moving from San Francisco to the fading American West for the final five.

While the first season started out building its characters before unleashing plenty of gremlins mayhem in its later episodes, The Wild Batch evidently feels comfortable enough to make the creatures almost secondary in some episodes. The main storyline involves Elle’s attempt to free her sort-of dead mother Margot (Yael Grobglas) from the clutches of Kung-Kung, the Water God. The whole season entwines Chinese mythology with American iconography, and the final five episodes go especially heavy on this technique, with a ghostly cowboy (Keith David) serving as a prominent supporting character. At times, these elaborations threaten to overwhelm the simple urban-legend appeal of the original movies. It’s almost as if the show’s creators had a whole other idea for an animated fantasy-adventure series and have been forced to figure out what available franchise could possibly accommodate it.

On the other hand, Gremlins is as rich and relatively untapped a world as any, and who can resist Timothy Olyphant voicing the ghost of Johnny Appleseed running a casino populated by spirits and trickster animals? Even as The Wild Batch goes lighter on the anarchic Looney Tunes energy that powered Gremlins 2: The New Batch, it maintains a certain try-anything spirit that feels compatible with that movie. (There’s even a direct homage to a pair of prominent, desert-appropriate Warner Bros. cartoon characters.) The only non-Gizmo Mogwai to carry over from last season is also a New Batch homage: a talking gremlin nicknamed Noggin (George Takei) cleary meant to evoke Tony Randall’s “brain” gremlin from that movie. While some killer instinct remains, Noggin also does a stint as a benevolent crime boss and a psychological counselor for Gizmo, who feels stirrings of his wilder side in these episodes.

That subplot gets a little repetitive, but The Wild Batch makes enough weird detours – gremlins at Alcatraz! A haunted house connected to the ancestors of Gremlins 2 villain Daniel Clamp! Magical travel portals! – that it doesn’t matter too much when the season’s second half takes its time in unleashing the inevitable mayhem. So many spin-offs go heavy on the lore out of some misguided sense of fandom obligation. Gremlins: The Wild Batch does it with true-believer conviction.