If you have a Max subscription, don’t miss out on the fantastic Gremlins animated series that just dropped new episodes last week. After the streaming show brought Gizmo to a new medium for 2023’s Gremlins: Secrets of the Mogwai release, the story has continued with the second season titled The Wild Batch, and it has more George Takei and a solid homage to the original sequel to Gremlins.
In Season 1 of the Gremlins animated series, George Takei’s character is born when Sam accidentally gets Gizmo wet and spawns more mogwai before becoming a green Gremlin. The character named Noggin becomes a major villain in the series after he drinks a magic potion that allows him to speak like a human and be super intelligent. When CinemaBlend spoke to the Gremlins’ producers, Brendan Hay discussed working with Takei for the new season with these words:
George Takei has just been such a delight. Noggin was a character who I love Joe’s Brain Gremlin from Gremlins 2, so I always wanted to find some opportunity to do our own version or take on that as a little homage. So being able to do that was already, it felt like a win, and then getting George to voice it… [Noggin] is such a ridiculous character, but he gives you so much pathos and gravitas and emotion into it. It’s really why we’re able to do so much more with that character this season. ’cause his performance just gives that character so much depth in life.
What a fantastic nod to the original sequel to Gremlins! The title of the season of The Wild Batch, itself is a nod to the 1990 sequel (that is still hysterical 30 years later), considering it’s called The New Batch, but Hay also wanted to draw from the sequel for the main villain. As you may recall, Brain Gremlin, or “Brain”, is mutated to have a refined spoken voice and a fascination with human culture. Noggin is a suit-wearing lil guy who uses his powerful brain to lead an army of Gremlins, and Sam, Gizmo and Elle have to find a way to stop him. As Hay continued:
We can actually take a whole side episode to just focus on what is this character’s life experience. Because it dawned on us in the writer’s room, it’s a really weird position to be the smartest evil mogwai. So it’s like, what is that? What is the pathos? And the more time we spent with him, we all felt sympathy and empathy for him. So we wanted to bring that across the screen while still having him be the engine of a lot of problems for our heroes. So, the one thing I’ll say is the front half of the season is really all largely based around San Francisco as Chinatown. The back half is us getting out of the city to see more of the Wild West and kind of further explore the mystery of Elle’s mom and everything that’s going on there.
The first five episodes of The Wild Batch‘s new season are now streaming on Max, and fans can look forward to the second half of the season premiering at a later (undisclosed) date. Along with Takei having a major role in the series, Ming-Na Wen and BD Wong play Sam’s parents, James Hong voices his grandpa, and Simu Liu joins this season as Chang.
Joe Dante, who directed the original Gremlins movies, serves as a consulting producer on the series. He said this in our interview about the casting:
I’m just so impressed with the way that the show has been cast, the way people sound and the way they look are not necessarily the same thing. And, sometimes like listening to disc jockeys, you listen to a disc jockey and then you have a certain idea of what they look like, and then you actually see them and you go, ‘Oh, holy, this guy looks like that.’ You can’t ever imagine that that voice doesn’t go with that guy. But in this case, all the voices are so perfect for these characters and I think it’s largely because these guys, they know their characters and they know their actors and, they’ve managed to cast this show, I would say impeccably.
In CinemaBlend’s interview with the Gremlins producers, Dante also recalled how Steven Spielberg has been key to the franchise’s success and they shared their thoughts on Gizmo returning to live action, too. We also spoke to Ming-Na Wen about how her relationship with voice work has changed since first starting on Mulan.
Enjoy George Takei’s iconic and talented voice on Gremlins: The Wild Batch now!