Last week, my daughter and I decided to watch a movie together. I suggested a newer Christmas movie. But, while only in her 20s, she’s recently decided to explore the 1980s, so she recommended a number of movies from that decade, including “Gremlins.” While it originally came out in the summer of 1984, the movie is set during the holidays. “Gremlins”? Why not? Then, while watching the movie, some of my daughter’s reactions got me thinking about technology, history and the holiday spirit.

The plot: While on a business trip, an inventor illicitly buys a small, cute creature for his son, Billy. Unfortunately, Billy doesn’t pay enough attention to the rules of caring for the creature, and soon, new but much less cute creatures begin multiplying and wreaking havoc on the once picture-perfect town.

A comedy-horror film, “Gremlins” has a couple of jump scares and some non-CGI gooey-grotesque scenes. Those visceral latex and glycerin practical effects impressed my daughter, but the movie doesn’t really come across as seriously scary unless you’re 12 and under. The death scenes are off-camera and played for laughs. The music is carnivalesque. The gremlins are threatening but also equally content to engage in pranks. They even appear somewhat naive, singing along with Snow White and play-acting characters from various films, like rowdy teenagers trying to impress each other.

The concept of gremlins came out of early aircraft manufacturing — creatures who infiltrate technologies and create havoc. A famous episode of The Twilight Zone features an airplane passenger played by William Shatner trying to convince people that a gremlin is destroying the engine. The gremlins of World War II had a bit of paranoia attached to them as the gremlins supposedly originated from the foreign lands of U.S. enemies Germany and Japan and were attempting to wreck the industrial war effort.

The movie makes references to this history through one character, a WWII vet, who keeps complaining about foreign cars. The source of his ire is Billy’s Volkswagen (and not, say, a Datsun, despite the real-world Japanese car “invasion” of the 1980s). In the end, however, the movie seems to mock xenophobic behavior as the vet succumbs to the gremlins, the car enables the hero to rescue the girl and the seemingly wisest person in the movie is an Asian man who implicitly criticizes the commercialization of Christmas.

One scene that struck my daughter comes after Billy’s mom expertly dispatches two of the gremlins using kitchen appliances. A third one attacks from inside the family Christmas tree. She survives (which, apparently, was a rewrite of the original script) and, while the tree lay on the floor, my daughter remarked, “Did people once use a lot of tinsel?”

Yes, they did. Tinsel, made from silver and gold strands, once adorned statues starting in the 1500s, and then Christmas trees in the 1800s. Its weight and sheen created the look of icicles. In the early 20th century, companies mass-produced aluminum and tin-plated lead tinsel, and soon, almost anyone could buy it.

Aluminum tinsel (its manufacture put on hiatus during the world wars because of the need for the metal) morphed into aluminum trees by mid-century. Their metal needles were illuminated by four-color rotating lights because light strings had ignited many of the aluminum trees. Consumer sentiment eventually turned against these decorations and toward a more natural look. However, one company’s discontinued product, Evergleams, is celebrated in the company’s hometown, Manitowoc, Wisconsin, every year.

Tinsel strands found themselves on artificial and recently harvested trees everywhere, with strands individually and carefully hung on the branches for the best aesthetic effect. In America in 1971, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration didn’t exactly ban the product but did declare that tinsel posed a risk to children and pets because of the lead content (and the likelihood of children and cats wanting to lick the shiny strands). Importers and manufacturers began scaling down and consumer sentiment, even with the introduction of plastic tinsel, turned away from the decoration.

A number of people still use tinsel strands. You can potentially purchase them in India. But Christmas fashions, like all fashions, come and go, and new traditions arise — like, perhaps, watching an old but weird Christmas movie with your daughter every year. Happy holidays to everyone!

Dr. David Ferro is dean of the College of Engineering, Applied Science & Technology at Weber State University. Twitter: DavidFerro9

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