Daniel Knox
Get ready for a wild ride! The second installment of the Max animated series, Gremlins: Secrets of the Mogwai, is back with a bang. The new season, aptly titled Gremlins: The Wild Batch, is set to premiere its first part on Thursday, October 3, 2024.
A year after the thrilling events of the first season, “Gremlins: The Wild Batch” takes us on an exhilarating journey with Gizmo, Sam, and Elle. Leaving their home in Shanghai, they embark on an adventure to San Francisco, promising more magic, mystery, and Mogwai mayhem. Hot on the heels of a new brood of evil Mogwai, our heroes delve deep into the American West, encountering new supernatural creatures and intriguing characters along the way.
Simu Liu joins the stellar voice cast in the second season, alongside returning stars Ming-Na Wen, James Hong, BD Wong, Izaac Wang, AJ LoCascio, Gabrielle Nevaeh and George Takei. Liu will lend his voice to the character of Chang, a charming bootlegger and the son of one of San Francisco Chinatown’s most influential families. His adventurous life has led him to spend a significant amount of time in Alcatraz, leading his family to believe he’s dead.
After a twist of fate brings him together with Sam, Elle, and Gizmo, Chang will attempt to return to Chinatown while also serving as the trio’s roguish guide through America.
Bloody Disgusting had the opportunity to chat with showrunner/executive producer Tze Chen, executive producer Brendan Hay, and consulting producer Joe Dante ahead of the much-anticipated Season 2 premiere.
While “The Wild Batch” brings Sam and Gizmo to San Francisco, the series is still decades ahead of the film’s timeline. This opens up a world of possibilities for new storylines and mythical monsters. Tze Chen explains, “There’s still about 60 years in between the end of [season] two and Gremlins one. Brendan, Joe, and I have really talked about the potential for numerous adventures. Just because they’re in the U.S. this season doesn’t mean they can’t travel to any number of locations and fight spirits and creatures from any number of cultural mythologies and have the Mogwai wreak havoc all over the world.
“That’s one of the fun things about the Mogwai: they can destroy and cause havoc anywhere.”
When Bloody Disgusting spoke with Chen about season one, he compared the “anything goes” spirit in the writers’ room to the beloved “Key & Peele” Gremlins 2 sketch. “I think it applies more than ever for the second season,” Joe Dante confirms. “The second season is quite different from the first season. It’s cool in the sense that it’s really well-directed and well-animated, and the characters are really interesting. But it goes places that you just wouldn’t assume that the first season was going to go. Not just the location but also the mythology and, dare I say, the monsters. It’s wild and wacky, which is why it’s called Gremlins: The Wild Batch.”
That means you can expect the shift from Shanghai to San Francisco’s Chinatown to present a whole new set of creatures for Sam, Elle, and Gizmo to encounter.
“It was a chance to really try to do Chinese mythology meets American West mythology,” Hay says of the new season. “In the front half of the season, which is a little more Chinatown-centric, we still have a lot of Chinese mythology, and it was Big Big and Little Big. The Ice Dragons was an idea that I think originally came up for an episode in season one that they ended up not fitting, but it always stayed in the writers’ room. But then, as we got to go on with the season, it was a chance to, it’s a different story, even with the Chinese mythology. When we got to the lions, it was a little bit of what’s their immigration story: what’s them trying to fit into this new culture while still being Chinese mythological creatures? So yeah, it just gave us a different window to play with and opened up what we could do.”
“We really tried to create a structure for the second season where there’s a lot of obstacles for our main characters, and there’s a lot of bad guys,“ Chen adds. “There are a lot of people who may seem like bad guys but turn out to be allies and vice versa. We’re always trying to keep the audience guessing. What’s great about setting it in the American West is that there’s no shortage of creatures and spirits from American tall tales and American mythology that they can kind of come up against. The question when they come up against these creatures and spirits is, what do they want? Who are they? Are they going to be a friend? Are they going to be a foe? And then you have on top of that just the Mogwai chaos of Mogwai multiplying and doing what they always do, which is creating havoc.”
Chen also credits the universal love for Gremlins when it comes to his impressive voice cast for the series. “This has really been a dream,“ he tells Bloody Disgusting. “We’ve talked about this with the other producers, Brendan and I, and the writers. I’ve never been on a show where, in the writers’ room, you say, ‘Well, maybe it’s a Simu Liu type, or maybe it’s a Ronny Chieng type, or maybe it’s a Sandra Oh type. Then, a few weeks later, they actually accepted the offer and they’re cast. It is really a testament to how many fans the original Gremlins movies have because we’ve never had this experience where almost every character has been cast with our first choice. I think it’s just that people love Gremlins.”
It may help that Joe Dante remains on board as a guiding star. “I did have a lot of sway,“ the consulting producer confirms. “I would come into a room, and they would look at me as if I knew something; ‘Say something, inspire us.‘ But I can’t say that I had an overarching influence on the show because it really belongs to Brendan and Tze and all the people who work on it. I was there sort of as a link to the original picture and also as a sort of a fact check occasionally, like, ‘Oh no, they wouldn’t do that. Don’t do that. Make sure he doesn’t get wet. There’s too much water on that scene.’ But I really enjoyed it, and I’m very proud to be associated with this series.”
The producers leave us with one final tease: should Sam, Elle, and Gizmo trust Chang (Simu Liu), the friendly ally they meet at Alcatraz early this season?
“Never trust anybody you meet in Alcatraz,“ Dante warns. Hay offers, “Sidestepping the trust part, I will just say Chang is the best worst mentor you could ever ask for.”
