Thank you so much to everyone that joined us for our festive screening of 'Gremlins with Wine' at The Crescent.
Read on for details on all the wines from the evening, our gallery of photos, and a bunch of trivia.
As promised, these are the wines we enjoyed ...
Our Festive Wines
Taste the Difference Cremant d'Alsace, Cave du Roi Dagobert, France - Sainsbury's £11.50
A delicious drop to get us started, bursting with apple, brioche and lemon curd notes. Made in the traditional method featuring the local grapes Pinot Blanc and Pinot Gris.
La Battistina Gavi, Piemonte, Italy, DOCG - Online £12.45
From Araldica's magnificent Gavi estate, La Battistina. This is a high quality, complex white widely regarded as a benchmark for this DOCG.
This fresh, zesty, Gavi will stand up well to your Christmas Lunch. A perfect foil to cranberry sauce, pigs in blankets, turkey, veggies and rich gravy.
Johann Wolf Spatburgunder (Pinot Noir), Pfalz, Germany - Waitrose £10.99
Light and fruity, with a spicy finish. This is the red you've been looking for to pair with your turkey dinner. Like French Burgundy but better value.
Nero Oro Riserva, Sicily, Italy - Majestic £14.99 (or £12.99 as part of a mixed case of six)
Enjoying beef or goose on Christmas Day? .. this is the one. Bolder, more intense than the last red but still smooth and easy drinking. Nero d'Avola grapes from the very best plots and aged in oak for 18 months. Vanilla, plum and blackberry on the nose, damson, blackcurrant, dried fig and spice on the palate.
Krohn Tawny Port, Porto, Portugal - £14.45 online
Founded in 1865 by Norwegians Weise and Krohn, this wonderful port is aged for six years in oak barrels. A perfect match for Christmas pudding, mince pies or cheese.
The Gremlins with Wine Gallery
Gremlins Trivia
Some highlights from our movie trivia ...
Originally, Stripe and Gizmo were the same character. This changed when executive producer Steven Spielberg insisted one of the Gremlins be a good guy with whom the audience could identify. Director Joe Dante expresses that this decision was the reason why the film is fondly remembered.
Chris Walas suggested they use puppets instead of the proposed stop-motion idea. As a compromise, the studio suggested a spider monkey in a suit, which was tested at director Joe Dante's office, the animal went crazy, tearing the office apart and defecating everywhere. Dante screamed at the trainer to get the animal and then asked Walas, "So puppets?"
Filmmakers were pushing the envelope with technology for this film. It wasn't until director Joe Dante made Gremlins 2: The New Batch (1990) that it had advanced to the point where they could get Gizmo running and dancing. The sets were generally built up off the floor, so the puppeteers could be underneath operating the monsters. They used marionettes in a couple of scenes, but they weren't especially convincing. Dante explained "Good puppetry is an art. When it's done as well as it was in Gremlins, CGI technology can't do it any better."
In Cantonese, "mogwai" means "devil," "demon," or "gremlin." The Mandarin pronunciation is "mogui."
The set for Kingston Falls is the same one used for Back to the Future (1985). Both movies were filmed on the Universal Studios backlot.
One of the studio notes to director Joe Dante and executive producer Steven Spielberg on seeing the first cut was that there were too many gremlins. Spielberg suggested cutting them all out and calling the movie "People."
Zach Galligan recounted in an interview that when the movie was made, there was no CGI, so all of the Gremlins were animatronics, each costing between $30-40,000. When everyone left the lot for the day, security would have everyone open the trunks of their cars to make sure they weren't stolen.
Little to no actual dialogue for the Gremlins and Mogwai existed in the script. In addition to several instances of on-set rewrites changing or adding to much of the script, the voiceovers were mostly ad-libs, repeating snippets of just-performed dialogue or in reaction to other sound effects or environment. To this end, Howie Mandel recorded Gizmo's lines phonetically for foreign dubs of the movie, where localized dialogue and in-jokes helped make this movie successful with audiences worldwide.
Chris Columbus' script went through a few drafts before a shooting script was finalized. His original version had the Gremlins killing the dog and cutting off the mom's head and tossing it down the stairs. These elements were never shot due to the fact that director Joe Dante and Warner Bros. wanted the movie to be more family-oriented.
The original script contained a scene where the gremlins attacked a McDonald's, eating the customers instead of burgers.
The Gizmo puppets were particularly frustrating because they were smaller, and thus broke down more. Consequently, to satisfy the crew, a scene was included in which the gremlins hang Gizmo on a wall and throw darts at him. This was included on a list that the crew created known to them as the "Horrible things to do to Gizmo" list.
Executive producer Steven Spielberg had a great working relationship with screenwriter Chris Columbus on this movie, and he produced the next two movies Columbus scripted, The Goonies (1985), based on an idea Spielberg had, and Young Sherlock Holmes (1985), which was Columbus' idea. Altogether, three years were spent working on those three movies.
Mrs. Deagle, the richest lady in town, had named her cats after different kinds of currency including Kopeck, Ruble, Peso, Drachma, and Dollar Bill.
The film opened against Ghostbusters (1984), and while that movie did better in most cities, "in New York City where people were furious about having their traffic disrupted while that picture was being made for all those months we always did better than Ghostbusters."
There are many connections to executive producer Steven Spielberg's other popular movie, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982). One of the Gremlins says "phone home," there is a stuffed E.T., and at the begining, one of the movies on the marquee is "A Boy's Life," which was the fake name under which E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982) shipped to theaters.
Executive producer Steven Spielberg changed the design of the Mogwai from moment to moment, greatly upsetting Chris Walas' Workshop. He initially suggested they change the color to brown and white, rather than all-over brown, then hairless ears, and then he wanted Gizmo to become more of a sidekick to Billy's hero, doubling Chris Walas' already overstretched workshop.
Zach Galligan was the first to point out that the "don't feed after midnight" rule is silly because it's always after midnight somewhere. "Well, we make fun of all that stuff in Gremlins 2 anyway," says director Joe Dante.
After the films release, director Joe Dante stated, "I still have no idea why this picture was successful." He much preferred the sequel.
The dog Mushroom wouldn't follow Zach Galligan across the street. So, they attached the pair with a mono-filament line. Aside from that, director Joe Dante noted that the dog was a joy to work with a priceless talent of reliably creating the ideal reaction to particular lines that were perfect to cut to. In addition, Mushroom tend to work easily with the Mogwai and Gremlin puppets, moving in sync with them during shooting to produce believable reactions to their actions.
Thank you!
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Merry Christmas from Tony and the Wine Events Co Crew