Nostalgia Time!

I forgot to mention this in Saturday, but it turns out that Best Buy isn't alone in the "exclusive" Blu Ray release department*. Target fired back by releasing Gremlins all on their lonesome, and boy howdy was the Cap'n pleased to see that.

Gremlins and Gremlins 2: The New Batch sit happily alongside Back to the Future, Ghostbusters, The Goonies, The Monster Squad, and Tron as "movies that made young Cap'n very happy." Still, it's been some time since I watched Gremlins, and despite having the dvd special edition, I'd never listened to the cast commentary.

I was quite surprised to discover that Back to the Future and Gremlins have something else in common; something I'd never noticed before. Both movies were shot on the Universal backlot (confirmed by the commentary), and the downtown in Gremlins is the same town square from Back to the Future. See for yourself:

There's the clock tower, just off to the right. When you see Zach Galligan running to his job at the bank, you can see him run past the diner and the movie theatre from 1955, although it's been dressed somewhere in between the 1955 and 1985 of BTTF. Crazy!

For comparison's sake, the closest corollary photo I could find:

It's been redressed a bit, but I'm almost positive they're one in the same.

One of the other things I'd honestly given thought to that comes up in the cast commentary (featuring director Joe Dante, Zach Galligan, Phoebe Cates, Dick Miller, and Howie Mandel - voice of Gizmo) is just how illogical the third Mogwai rule is. Technically, it's always "after midnight" somewhere, so how do you ever know when to feed a Mogwai?

Anyway, if you're wondering, Gremlins is pretty spiffy on Blu Ray, and the picture holds up surprisingly well for the 1980s. The prologue with Hoyt Axton is a bit grainy, but even in the shop you can see more of the trinkets for sale than I'd ever noticed. The gremlins themselves look great, especially Stripe, and I'm looking forward to seeing the more colorful New Batch hit high def. Well worth picking up.

---

Tomorrow brings Trick r Treat and Anvil! The Story of Anvil, two movies I've been waiting to see for a while now. Quite exciting.



* at one point, they were merely duking it out by adding extra discs or content, but then Best Buy dropped Hot Fuzz and Shaun of the Dead a month early, and then Children of the Corn. Now Target's hitting back with their own exclusive releases, which means we'll get more varied product faster. That's fine with me.