Friday, May 21, 2010

Not Yeti Friday - Twilight Zone Gremlin

In the Twilight Zone episode "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet", William Shatner looks out a plane window during a flight and sees this:



Is that a yeti?



Sure looks like one.



OK, a pretty weird one.



But it's not a yeti. It's a gremlin. Here's the whole clip:



This episode was so popular that they remade it in the 1980s with John Lithgow. The gremlin looked a little less yeti-ish:



They also started making a lot of merchandise of the nostalgic variety, like action figures:





Look at this last one. If you didn't know it referred to this episode, you'd just be like, "That's a yeti!"

In fact, people often refer to the creature as an Abominable Snowman when describing this episode, rather than a Gremlin, just 'cause it's SOOO YETI.


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(And we have much bigger touchstone for the concept of Gremlins now in the popular culture. These gremlins, I might point out, are diminutive, cold-blooded reptiloids. They are transformed from their polar opposites (the white furry, yeti-ish mogwai) when fed after midnight. So in some sense our concept of the yeti (large, furry, mammalian) is almost the complete opposite of what we now think of as gremlins.)

1 comment:

Raven said...

I love Twilight Zone and that episode! Classic! I never realized that it was so Yeti-like.