In the evening report, the “random film of the day” came up — Joe Dante’s Gremlins (1984), a comedy horror about a furry creature named Gizmo, from whom, if three rules are broken, a brood of toothy little pests hatches. I remember the film perfectly, and had no interest in recounting it for the hundred-and-first time. Something else caught me: the word itself. “Gremlin” sounds like a name from Celtic mythology, something from the world of fairies and redcaps, at least a thousand years old.
As it turned out — the opposite. It is Europe’s youngest major folkloric character, with an exact birth date, a known print address, and a biography in which the monster began as... a job title. And by 1984, the same arrow of fate that had released the gremlin from the military bureaucracy forced Hollywood to rewrite its entire ratings system. I wasn’t unraveling a film — I was unraveling a word, and its trail led through the Royal Air Force, Walt Disney’s studio, and one phone call from Spielberg.
The first printed appearance of “gremlin” can be dated to the day: April 10, 1929, the British aviation magazine The Aeroplane, a comic poem called “Flight-Lieutenant Hiawatha” — a parody of Longfellow’s The Song of Hiawatha. And in that first mention, the gremlin scares no one and breaks nothing. A gremlin is a junior officer. The authors complain that the phrase “all officers below the rank of squadron leader” is too long for everyday speech, and offer a replacement: call such men gremlins. The meaning is mournful, thoroughly military: gremlins “do all the work and all the flying,” while the honors are handed out above. A classic figure left unsaid: those who do all the work remain offstage.
Linguists still argue about where the word itself came from, and every elegant theory remains unproven. The most plausible is simply an alliterative echo of military grumbling: grumbling, grousing, gremlin — the sound practically suggests itself. The other candidates are delightful precisely because of their absurdity: the Fremlin Bros brewery in Kent — its name sounds like gremlin, and someone seriously proposed that the word grew from the name of an ale; the Irish gruaimín — “a gloomy bore”; grimalkin, a feline appellation from Macbeth; Dutch verbs meaning “to soil” and “to swarm boiling over.” Not one theory has documentary support — and that makes the word honest: the gremlin seems to have arisen as working slang in the place where there are lots of people and little authority, which is to say, on the airfields of interwar Europe.
Historians’ boldest assumption is that the word was born back in the First World War and lived in oral speech for fifteen years before its first appearance in print. It cannot be verified: oral speech leaves no archives, and wordorigins.org ends its etymology section with a straightforward hope that new collections will be digitized. But here is what matters: between 1929 and 1938, the word had time to change its meaning, and no one documented that transition either. The hardworking officer vanished from usage, and in his place a genuine little saboteur took up residence on airfields.
By the end of the thirties, the gremlin already had a profile: a little creature living in aircraft engines and wiring, fond of loosening nuts and biting through cables. One of the earliest descriptions in print is Pauline Gower’s Women with Wings (1938): its pilots enter “gremlin country,” where the creatures fly around with scissors in each hand, cutting wires. The detail of two pairs of scissors is also sound engineering logic: cutting two cables one at a time is an idle waste of time.
It is worth explaining where the female voice comes from in this story. Pauline Gower was not a collector of anecdotes but a combat pilot, later the founder of the women’s division of the Air Transport Auxiliary — an organization where women pilots ferried newly built aircraft from factories to front-line airfields during the war. In other words, gremlin folklore was recorded by someone who sat at the controls herself and took the same risks as men. In 1939, the Daily Mail published a wartime yarn about a squadron leader who, after a glass of pink gin, crashed his service car and blamed it all on “the blasted gremlins” at the inquiry. The author candidly warned that the story might have been invented right in the newsroom — and this is the first recorded case of the word being used as an alibi. A tradition that would survive into UFOs, poltergeists, and “it just fell that way” from accounting.
Why the myth took flight specifically in aviation is an engineering question, and its answer, to my mind, is the only honest one: the airplane itself. No machine of the thirties explained its failures. An engine stalled — the mechanic searched for weeks, found nothing, and the squadron still had to fly tomorrow. The gremlin perfectly filled the blank line in the report: it did not need to be found, it required no salary, and it remained the invisible cause of any unexplained disaster. Military aviation in the 1930s was, in that sense, an incubator for the supernatural: the highest possible cost of failure plus total opacity of causes.
In 1940, a figure enters the story who turns an airfield tale into a global industry. Roald Dahl, the future author of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, was by then a pilot in No. 80 Squadron RAF. His biography was already cinematic: an oil-products salesman in Tanganyika, black mambas, lions on plantations, sudden mobilization into colonial forces. On September 19, 1940, ferrying an obsolete Gloster Gladiator biplane across Egypt, Dahl failed to find his destination airfield, ran out of fuel, and landed in the desert, smashing the aircraft against a rock. His skull cracked, his forehead was shattered, six weeks of blindness in hospitals. And here is the detail — the RAF investigation later established that he had been given the wrong airfield coordinates, sent to a useless strip of ground between two armies. Dahl lost his route into combat missions because of bureaucracy — the very structure whose little word, incidentally, “gremlin” had once been.
And here is what is interesting: even reference books muddle Dahl’s later biography. Wikipedia says in one article that Dahl flew a Hawker Hurricane during the war, while the Smithsonian writes that he “crashed his Gloster Gladiator in the Libyan Desert.” In fact, both are right; the events simply form a sequence: he crashed in the Gladiator in September 1940, returned to service in February 1941 — now in a Hurricane, bound for Greece. That is how a story gets compressed into one line when you read diagonally.
In January 1942, Dahl, invalided out of service, arrived in Washington as assistant air attaché at the British Embassy. Out of boredom and pain from the crash, he wrote a fairy tale — his first children’s book — about little people living on the wings of RAF fighters. He gave them all names: gremlins’ wives were Fifinellas, their children Widgets and Flibbertigibbets. The manuscript reached Walt Disney himself through British Information Services, just as Disney, in the middle of wartime propaganda, was looking for fresh material. Disney was fired up: a feature film, a hybrid of live action and drawn animation, with Dahl under contract. In December 1942, Cosmopolitan printed the story; in spring 1943, Random House published the book — fifty thousand copies, of which Dahl sent fifty out according to his own address list: Lord Halifax, the ambassador; Eleanor Roosevelt, who read it aloud to her grandchildren; half of Hollywood. Another thirty thousand sold in Australia. The former insurance agent became a writer covered by the society pages.
And then lawyers killed the project, and killed it with real elegance. Disney’s studio conducted a standard rights check before investing millions — and discovered what could not be seen from inside the fairy tale. A rights checker named Chester Feitel wrote in a memo after meeting Dahl: “The Gremlin characters are not creations of his imagination. They are ‘well known’ throughout the RAF, and, as far as I can determine, no individual can claim authorship.” By then Dahl had publicly claimed that he had invented the word himself — and it was a lovely but verifiable lie. Walt and Roy Disney understood that they could not invest in a character that, on paper, belonged to everyone and no one: their own research traced the tradition back to the First World War. In August 1943, the film was quietly shut down, with the sole agreement that any future proceeds, should a miracle occur, would go to the RAF Benevolent Fund. The gremlin remained what it had been at birth — nobody’s.
Disney did give the project a second life, but in small change: studio artists drew gremlins for the insignia of more than thirty military units — from the weather service in San Francisco to the Dutch military flying school. Comics about Gus the Gremlin appeared in Walt Disney’s Comics and Stories, some drawn by Walt Kelly, the future classic and creator of Pogo. In 1943, Bob Clampett made a Bugs Bunny short, Falling Hare, in which the rabbit fights a gremlin for control of an airplane — and that short is now in the public domain; watch it free on archive.org. Meanwhile, the word grew without anyone tending it, as folklore should.
Among all the gremlin insignia, one proved fateful. In 1943, the female symbol from Dahl’s book — Fifinella, an elegant woman gremlin in flying goggles, with curly little horns and white boots — was adopted as the official mascot of the Women Airforce Service Pilots, America’s female aviation corps. WASP flew noncombat routes: ferrying bombers from factories, towing transports, testing repaired machines — and for all that, they were initially not considered veterans; that status had to be fought for separately until 1977. Fifinella appeared on patches, letterhead, matchboxes, and stickers — spontaneously, across the country, with no authorization from the studio at all: there was no rights holder.
What deserves its own paragraph is that gremlins, alone in their genre, managed to survive an encounter with science. Folklorist C. E. Hazen, in a peer-reviewed academic publication, left his own testimony: he said he found a broken cable “bearing marks of teeth” in an inaccessible part of a fuselage, then heard a “rough voice” (“How many times must I tell you: don’t take on work you aren’t qualified to do!”), after which a second cable snapped with a musical twang. The respected journal did not verify this and could not have verified it. I can neither confirm nor refute Hazen’s tale — but the very fact that a semi-fantastical creature managed to pass peer review says something about how deeply the gremlin had embedded itself in the culture: it is no longer a metaphor, it is no longer a metaphor, but a character with eyewitness testimony.
Then comes a chronological leap of forty years — straight into the summer of 1984. On May 23, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom opens: a scene in which the high priest rips a living heart from a victim traumatizes moviegoers who brought seven-year-old children. Two weeks later, on June 8 — Gremlins: the advertising showed cute Gizmo, stylistically almost spoofing trailers for Spielberg’s own E.T., while inside the theater viewers got a story about a little animal exploding in a microwave. Director Joe Dante later admitted that people felt they had been “sold a family movie, and the film wasn’t quite a family movie.” Yet the box office of both films — 180 and 150 million dollars — showed that audiences, including teenagers, liked exactly that kind of movie. The problem was not demand. The problem was that the MPAA ratings system had no box between “PG: watch with parents” and “R: 17 and over only” — all children from infants to seventeen-year-olds lived in one basket.
This fork in the road has a short genealogy: two films and one phone call. MPAA head Jack Valenti would later call the heart scene the catalyst: “By today’s standards it was nothing, but then it was sufficiently repulsive.” Spielberg — producer of Gremlins and director of Temple of Doom — found himself in the rare position where a conflict of interest coincided with competence: “Everybody screamed that the movie needed an R, and I disagreed. I created the problem and then offered the solution... I invented this rating.” Then it all happened in one phone conversation: “Jack, why not make a PG-13 rating — just for films like Gremlins and Indy 2?” — “Leave it to me.” Valenti went around theater owners, guilds, studio bosses, and religious organizations — not asking, but consulting, as he himself emphasized. He chose the number “13” on an argument that today sounds suspiciously scientific for a movie-distribution boss: by thirteen, he said, children could already distinguish fantasy from reality.
On August 10, 1984, the first PG-13 film was released — Red Dawn, a military fantasy about a communist occupation of America and schoolchildren turned guerrillas. By the end of the year, Dune and The Woman in Red had also received PG-13 ratings. The box devised as a warning to parents became, over forty years, the most coveted label in the studio business. Spielberg coined the famous metaphor: the rating adds spice before the viewer has even bought a ticket. Dante put the same mechanism more cynically: older children will never go see what younger children watch, but younger children will go see anything at all — so studios aim their films straight at thirteen, sometimes even inserting one profanity solely for that letter on the poster.
And here the circle closes, because the arrow of 1984 does not run from Hollywood to the RAF, but the other way around. The PG-13 rating was born from a conflict around a film based on a folkloric character invented by RAF sergeants to complain about their superiors — and owned by no one. The lawyers who sent Dahl’s film packing in 1943 could not write the legend themselves, but the legend came to them: the age-rating system is the same gremlin behavior, only rationalized. A gremlin is a way not to fill in the column marked cause; PG-13 is a way to fill it in formally, drawing a boundary where someone “distinguishes fantasy from reality.” Thirteen years is neither physiology nor sociology; it is the internal judgment of one distribution boss, cemented by decades of box-office records.
There is also a purely dictionary-level conclusion. The word is the only case in which a folkloric character was born in a document with an exact day, month, and page; lived as a job title; worked its way up to monster; survived an attempt to patent itself; and in the end rebuilt the tax and distribution architecture of an entire industry. And all its twists are explained by one fault that scripts write off as copyright and aviation protocols examine every day: if a failure occurred without a cause, the cause is still assigned to someone. Before 1929, that someone was a junior officer. Then came the time of the monster with scissors for wires — and today, whenever the industry wants to say “teenager, wallet, and a little more spice,” it writes thirteen.