Hacker Cinema
Gremlins
1984 · Film · 106 min
Directed by Joe Dante
After receiving an exotic small animal as a Christmas gift, a young man inadvertently breaks three important rules concerning his new pet, which unleashes a horde of malevolently mischievous creatures on a small town.
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22 comments on Hacker News
I don't know much about the movie industry, but I think the biggest commercial successes for early CGI was possibly Jurassic Park? I don't think it would have been nearly as good if it had all just been done with puppets.
Likewise, there's been a ton of movies since that could in theory have been done purely with SFX instead of VFX, but which is probably must better from having used VFX/CGI, titles like The Matrix, Lord of the Rings, Inception, Avatar, etc.
Obviously there was also charm in titles like E.T. and Gremlins, and I think there might still be a market for movies like that, such as the 2019 Netflix series The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance (I loved the 1982 version as a child, though this sequel wasn't for me).
I guess the question is: will generative AI allow new movies to be made, the same way that CGI has? Or will it just be an economic shift: the same quality CGI but at a fraction of the price?
There may still be people out there who believe that AI will never be able to create CGI as good as humans can, these might be the same people who used to say that CGI can never look realistic. And if you work in VFX, I bet that you can spot a fake mountain with the slightly incorrect shadows in the distance easily, but as a simple movie watcher, I really don't see it, especially when it's only on screen for like 3 seconds.
Sure.
I spent a lot of time in the hospital receiving treatment. Sometimes it was a few days, sometimes it was a month. My parents were working and so while I'd see them in the morning and evenings, most days I was on my own w/ the occasional nurse or doctor pop in. That led me to have a very independent (sometimes standoffishly so—mainly because I got tired of being poked at by doctors and nurses as a kid) personality and had to learn to amuse myself and be resourceful.
In addition to that, while I would attend school fairly regularly, I was "the sick kid" who was gone for weeks or a month at a time, so I didn't really form a lot of early bonds with the kids in my class. As an adult lone wolf type, I tend to smirk at that because that's essentially what I had to learn to be in those early years.
Another thing that I find amusing is that I would watch a lot of movies while I was in the hospital. I remember they would always play the same few movies:
- Willy Wonka (Gene Wilder version)
- Ghostbusters
- Gremlins
What's funny is that a good chunk of my personality is a mix of the characters in these movies. I like to have fun with people and keep them on their toes like Wonka, I like to invent/build/take risk on my own ideas like the Ghostbusters (my wife also said Pete Venkman reminds her of me), and I've always been a bit of a trouble maker/chaos monkey like a gremlin.
As an adult, I've noticed that I have an in-built preference toward self-sufficiency and tend to work/be alone most of the time and I'm hyper-sensitive to people "poking" at me (or someone else—I love going after a bully). I'd also say that I developed a high EQ and awareness of and for others (like an ability to quickly read people and know what they're feeling—my grandpa refers to it as "acute awareness").
Several years back the "why" of all this started to click when I read Maria Montessori's book—The Absorbent Mind [1]—on the first few years of childhood development (~0-6 years). She explains that kids are like sponges and their personality forms relative to what they experience in those first few years. When I think about the mix of experiences during those days, I can't help but laugh—that theory is dead on.
I also read Thomas Sowell's [2] late-talking children because I remembered being taken to a speech therapist as a kid because I refused to talk. I had no problem talking, I just didn't want to. Even today, I have quiet phases where I just kind of drift off into my own little world and don't really talk much.
Would I say that having Leukemia specifically gave me all of these traits? No, but I would say that the combination of circumstances in relation to my treatment definitely did.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Absorbent-Mind-Maria-Montessori/dp/0805041567
[2] https://www.amazon.com/Late-Talking-Children-Thomas-Sowell/dp/0465038352
Ask Russian-speakers to recommend a fun iconic movie to watch, and Ivan Vasilievich comes up all the time. I don’t see why, but it does.
Diamond Hand too.
It would be ridiculous if the same were true about Hollywood.
A Russian asks an American what movies to watch, and 8 out of 10 people go back to 1969 to recommend the same one? Impossible.
You’d get everything from Citizen Kane to Hitchcock to Rocky, etc. But you’d also get about 150 great picks from the 80s and 90s, and another dozen from after 2000.
And forget the greats. You’d get Zoolander, Demolition Man, Total Recall, Gremlins, Scream, John Wick, Legally Blonde even… there’s such a wide pool of fun iconic popcorn movies for any person.
Not to mention your Star Wars/Trek/Gate.
These movies aren’t “good” in the sense of being art. They’re good in the sense of people wanting to watch them.
Every n years I rewatch Commando, Con-Air, The Last Starfighter, etc just for kicks. It’s not pure nostalgia- they’re fun movies.
With int’l movies from any given country the list of recommendations is extremely shallow. It’s always one or two iconic revelations from a given decade. Or a couple auteur directors who won all the awards for their think-pieces about the human condition.
I distinctly remember a Rob Ager/Collative Learning YouTube video on Gremlins. It was very enlightening on how deep the Gremlin mythology goes, but alas I can't find it right now.
He does list three videos on his page. An 8-minute video, 30 minute video, and 93 minute video. You might have to buy them...
Even if you/I can't find the gremlin video, I highly recommend you watch any of Rob Ager's videos on movies you think you already know. He does do a lot of work on Stanley Kubrick. He will insist The Shining isn't his favorite movie, but that's hard to believe with how much he has focused on it. Anyways, Collative Learning is an excellent rabbit hole to fall down.
https://www.collativelearning.com/FILMS%20reviews%20BY%20ROB%20AGER.html
Edit: Okay I'm a doofus, on mobile I needed to scroll horizontally to find the watch links. I don't recognize the 8-minute video or 30 minute video, so it must have been the 93 minute video that I saw.
In the author's defense, the mogwai were advertised as gremlins:
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iUI891ejeYc
The magnitude of the Gremlins bait-and-switch still baffles me. They marketed it as a family/kids' film; it was a horror/comedy for adults. How did the studio think that was going to play out?
Anyway, unless you've seen the film or heard people like us rant about it, it's a pretty easy mistake to make.
> Forty years ago, Hollywood made gremlins loveable—portraying them as adorable, furry creatures.
Did the author even watch the movie?
The fluffy lovable creatures are mogwai, and they transform into the not-at-all furry or loveable gremlins if fed after midnight. They arent gremlins until they transform.
This inaccuracy invalidates the entire “Hollywood gremlin” discrepancy that is being made for much of the article.
Robby is prolific!
https://www.imdb.com/name/nm1119475/
For example:
Star Wars: Phantom Menace
Gremlins
Mork and Mindy
Columbo
Lost In Space (not Robot)
The Addams Family
The Twilight Zone
In the 1984 movie Gremlins, the protagonist is warned not to feed the titular creatures (a type of transformer) after midnight, otherwise they promptly lose alignment and begin to hallucinate.
> "Every time Software is used to fix a [Electrical/Mechanical] problem, a Gremlin is born"
Gizmo caca.
(...I just watched both Gremlins movies last weekend...)
I was expecting a video of the simulation at the end of training, but seeing those little guys running around in embodied robots was too cute. They're just little critters running around playing soccer.
If by chance embodiment is the secret to unlocking AGI and we're unlucky enough to encounter the alignment problem, our world is going to look a lot like the movie Gremlins than I want to admit.
I just watched Gremlins with my kids during the holidays. My older teen had to look away and hated it (they can’t do horror films), my other teen was abhorred by all the death, and my pre-teen had the full range of emotions from cracking up often and jumping at the surprises.
With that said, I was surprised to see how decisive, resourceful, and adaptable the mother was. Hears a noise in the attic, grabs a knife. Gets attacked, puts creature in nearest blender/microwave and hits switch. Hears another noise, grabs two knives because one wasn’t enough last time.
Having just re watched Gremlins with teenage children (for their first time), there is definitely something about that era of movies.
Dodgy animatronics were first scoffed at, and then forgotten pretty quickly as everyone just got into the pure enjoyment of that movie.
This is a nigh on 40 year old film, with a lot of target references, yet it still hits the mark..
That said, rewatched transformers too, purely for the joy of the initial transformation (childhood toys coming to life..), and thoroughly enjoyed it (though it's already feeling a bit dated).
Here is a collection of some of the movies that I have liked the most
- The Matrix (1999) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0133093/
- Gremlins (1984) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0087363/
- Hackers (1995) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0113243/
- Sneakers (1992) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0105435/
- Tron (1982) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0084827/
- Jurassic Park (1993) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0107290/
- The Terminator (1984) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0088247/
- Back to the Future (1985) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0088763/
- Dark City (1998) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0118929/
- WarGames (1983) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0086567/
- Starship Troopers (1997) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0120201/
And there are many more as well :D
> 1. SAFEs are convenient if everyone is amenable, but be careful about having SAFEs sitting around too long or with different terms. They're like the Mogwai in the Gremlins films. They're kind and cuddly unless you feed them after midnight or get them wet.
Your analogy is funny but you don't actually explain why SAFEs are dangerous, could you develop?
A few things I've learned:
1. SAFEs are convenient if everyone is amenable, but be careful about having SAFEs sitting around too long or with different terms. They're like the Mogwai in the Gremlins films. They're kind and cuddly unless you feed them after midnight or get them wet.
2. Stay in touch with your angels even if they don't initiate. It'll help in tons of ways and they can interpret lack of contact as a sign that you're dying and that they shouldn't think about you anymore. This isn't good.
3. Be careful about any terms (e.g. in side letters) that might allow someone to stand in the way of a priced round in the future. Even if someone doesn't use them to play hardball for terms (they can), it might make things inconvenient and add dangerous delays.
4. Have a lawyer look things over BEFORE you get into priced round negotiations with VCs or you might end up dragging the process out and risking losing the deal because the lawyers find a problem that needs fixing.
5. If you use standard/canned documents, check (3).
Generally all this boils down to: keep terms simple and universal as much as possible, be communicative, and don't let things sit too long.
It's possible to do a priced round without a lead if you have SAFEs/notes sitting around too long. You can use standard documents to minimize legal. It may be necessary to clean up your cap table.
For these particular services I think
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol%27s_cost_disease
is more like it. That is, a Raspberry Pi is a much more powerful computer than the IBM 360/75 that planned the moon mission and costs orders of magnitude less but there has been no productivity improvement for baseball players.
Movies are an entirely business than they were back in the day. I remember Ghostbusters being in the theater for more than a year, and back then there were not just the first-run theaters that charged full price but many second-run theaters that had cut-rate double features (I remember seeing one of Gremlins and The Dark Crystal)
Today home video "competes" with theaters in some sense, a month of Netflix costs less than one movie ticket but the consequence isn't downward price pressures on theaters but exactly the opposite because home video demolished the second-run theaters leaving the first-run theaters to go on their own trajectory.
(And as for TV sets and things to plug into TV sets... Today's TV offers better quality than was imaginable in the 1960s and is cheap in comparison. It's astonishing what people spent for old game consoles like the Atari 2600, what a VCR and tapes cost in 1980, ...)
Gremlins is good Christmas movie too.
I remember a one-man-show of 1998 where the comic pretends he “succeeded to start cigarette” and how stylish he became. In the middle of the scene he says: “Before starting? I used to go to dates, and when the person was late, I was waiting like this, on the street, arms pending, didn’t know what to do with my hands. NOW I SMOKE!”
Joke aside, it highlights that people used to wait a lot. “Meet me at 6 at the library” meant that you might be on the wrong side of the library, you’ll try the other entrance and the person does the opposite, using another path, so you don’t meet, and you don’t know whether they had to cancel. We did far fewer things because anything took a lot of time.
Movies were much slower too. Watch Gremlins again, an action movie: It’s so slow! (Counter example: Die Hard is correctly fast-paced for an action movie). To summarize, qualities you’d require would be reliability in appointments and being able to wait a lot without getting bored.
We could even make the case that it is now possible to fill loneliness with a mobile phone, whereas it drove more than one into dementia pre-iPhone.
Deeper down in the comments you get a story about how this sound came to be. Who knows if it's true, but it's more fun to give the benefit of the doubt.
Scott Chapman:
> The actual origin of the Uh Oh sound: My ex wife and I used to talk in Squeaky Voice a lot and were quite good at it. I used both WS_FTP and ICQ back in the day and I made the original recording of this sound and sent it to one or both of those companies. I think I sent it to WS_FTP first where it was used to indicate an error in connecting to a remote host. I don't recall if I sent it to ICQ or if they got it from WS_FTP. Someone below said it came from Gremlins. That is not the case. Happy Trails!
DJHEADPHONENINJA replies:
> Why would you just record your voice and send out to companies? Sounds pretty weird man. I'll go with Gremlins because I just watched the movie and heard this sound effect so I had to google the true origin of the ICQ sound.
Scott returns:
> Go with gremlins if you like but the sound is not the same. Back in those days it was not about remuneration.
It's also probably not related to the 1984 movie "Gremlins" or the 1970's car of the same name (listed as one of the ugliest cars of all time[0])
[0] https://www.cbsnews.com/pictures/worlds-15-ugliest-cars/7/
If you get down to the root of it, those labels are there so Parents don't actually have to watch / listen to / referee the material before allowing their children to see it. Or, they don't watch / listen to the material with their children to be there to provide context and guidance like an Adult.
They're a way to shift responsibility. "Oh this should be okay, it's PG!" is what happened with "Gremlins" and then it scared the shit out of kids. Now we have PG-13 because of that movie. True story.
Best quote (IMO):
-snip-
Remember the movie Gremlins, featuring cute fluffy creatures that turn into evil demonic beasts if you feed them after midnight? One of the rules for owning a gremlin (in its fuzzy, lovable form) was "But the most important thing, the thing you must never forget... no matter how much they cry, no matter how much they beg, never, never feed them after midnight!"
Marketing and Sales personnel can be very similar to this. ...
-snip-