Joe Dante consulting on Gremlins animated series!

February 17th 2020, 7:00pm

Last Updated on August 2, 2021

HBO Max will be bringing us a GREMLINS animated series called GREMLINS: SECRETS OF THE MOGWAI sometime in 2021. And today we hear that original GREMLINS and GREMLINS 2: THE NEW BATCH director Joe Dante has been brought onboard the series as a consultant.

Dante says:

Yeah, I'm consulting on it. It's good. It's going to be good, yeah. I'm very pleased with the way it's going. It's a prequel. It goes back to the character Mr. Wing when he was a boy, and when he first discovered the Mogwai. It's set in China in the ’20s, and it's animated and it's very big in the sense that if you tried to shoot it as a theatrical film, it would be outrageously expensive. But in animation, you kind of get away with almost anything you can think of. And it's probably not going to be done until 2021 or maybe the end of 2020. It's for HBO Max, a new streaming variant of HBO. I think this is a really clever way to get back into that. I think that they found it pretty difficult to make a sequel to Gremlins 2, because of just the way I made it. And they just could never really quite figure out how to do it. So I think this is a great way to sort of get the franchise back on people's minds.

RELATED: FIRST LOOK: GREMLINS ANIMATED SERIES SECRETS OF THE MOGWAI!

The ten-episode first season is written by Tze Chun and

travels back to 1920s Shanghai to reveal the story of how 10-year-old Sam Wing (future shop owner Mr. Wing) met the young Mogwai called Gizmo. Along with a teenage street thief named Elle, Sam and Gizmo take a perilous journey through the Chinese countryside, encountering, and sometimes battling, colorful monsters and spirits from Chinese folklore. On their quest to return Gizmo to his family and uncover a legendary treasure, they are pursued by a power-hungry industrialist and his growing army of evil Gremlins.

GREMLINS: SECRETS OF THE MOGWAI is produced by Amblin Television in association with Warner Bros. Animation. Darryl Frank, Justin Falvey, and Sam Register are executive producers while Brendan Hay is co-executive producer and Dan Krall is a supervising producer. Once again for the cheap seats, the ten-episode first season of GREMLINS: SECRETS OF THE MOGWAI will be unleashed onto HBO Max sometime in 2021.