Today I thought I’d write about…hey what’s happened…my screen has frozen and my internet connection has failed…Gremlins!
No doubt from the first time humans tried to light a fire and the flint they were striking resolutely failed to spark, people have blamed their misfortune on other worldly entities, but the idea of gremlins, those pesky critters who love to make sure machinery has a mind of its own, are fairly recent entrants into the folklore family.
Gremlins came to the fore when people started flying; the early planes were basic affairs and prone to mechanical problems so the early flyers humorously ascribed their failure to the intervention of gremlins. During the Second World War the RAF took gremlins to their hearts and the annoying fairy folks were often blamed when planes refused to function properly. When America air crews joined the war and came into contact with the RAF they soon caught the gremlin bug and gremlins went transatlantic. Gremlins reached a wider audience when Ronald Dahl wrote The Gremlins in 1942, it was so popular it was snapped up by Disney, although it was never made into a full length film, nevertheless in 1943 Merrie Melodies produced a Bugs Bunny cartoon Falling Hare in which Bugs is plagued by a gremlin. But it wasn’t until 1984 that gremlins finally made their film debut in Gremlins.
Now all I have to do is publish this article and…..oh no…
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