Read Online The Irregulars by Jennet Conant - Free Book Online Page A

RAF pilot. Called “Gremlin Lore,” it was another vaguely autobiographical story about a pilot named Gus, who is happily chasing German Junkers in his Hurricane when his plane is sabotaged by a little six-inch creature bearing a large drill, who puts four neat holes in his wing and then bores straight into the engine, causing it to sputter and stop. The story introduces the reader to the existence of gremlins, the tribe of tiny mythical rogues who live amid the clouds, riding on fighter planes and bombers, and whom the RAF blamed for everything that went wrong with their aircraft, particularly crashes. The RAF had been rife with gremlin stories since the start of the war, and mentions of the bad-luck imps who annoyed RAF pilots dated back to India in the 1920s. The popular press had begun picking up oft-repeated tales of mischievous aerial pixies who hindered pilots in battle, interfering with radio transmissions, jabbing them in the back, and punching holes in their fuselage.
    Aware that Disney was in the midst of making a propaganda film about military aviation called Victory Through Air Power , and that the strength of the Allied air forces had become a hot topic with Americans, Sidney Bernstein of the BIS sent Dahl’s unpublished story to the studio on the chance that it might be a timely subject for an animated feature. Dahl’s little troublemakers were a perfect fit with Disney, whose top box-office performers were tiny creatures from old folk tales—that year Dumbo led all other Disney films in gross income—and the studio was already working on the big-screen version of another British import, Peter Pan . In the unstable and unpredictable economic climate of 1942, Disney’s war films had provided a steady source of income, from aircraft identification cartoons for the army and navy to short-subject films satirizing the Nazis, including Der Fuehrer’s Face, which was originally entitled “Donald Duck in Nuzi-Land” and dealt with Donald’s exasperation with the Hitler regime. On July 13, 1942, Walt Disney cabled Dahl confirming that the gremlins had potential: “ BELIEVE IT HAS POSSIBILITIES. WOULD BE INTERESTED IN SECURING THIS MATERIAL ”
    Disney acquired the rights to the story, with the British Air Ministry demanding final script approval, and royalties to be divided between Dahl and the RAF Benevolent Fund. Throughout that summer and early autumn, Dahl eagerly corresponded with Disney about their plans to turn his gremlin tale into a movie that would combine live action and cartoon animation, and he commented on photostats of early sketches in an attempt to help “overcome the difficulties you had in deciding what a Gremlin was like.” After much back-and-forth, Dahl was delighted to hear that Disney had decided that the project should be made “one hundred percent cartoon,” and he sent a quick note to Walt expressing his relief at the decision. Given the green light to make suggestions to the studio animators, Dahl could not stop himself and giddily boasted of his expertise. He presented himself as an expert “Gremlinologist,” and offered to travel to the West Coast to provide an accurate physical description of “the little men”—regulation green bowler hats, and so on—“because I really do know what they look like having seen a great number of them in my time.”
    That fall Newsweek, Time , and Life all did stories on gremlins, tracing the origin of the name to the Old English word greme, meaning “to vex”—though according to some pilots, the bad-luck imps most often appeared after one too many Fremlin’s, a popular brand of beer—and offering various descriptions of their appearance and jaunty attire. Rumors that the head of Disney was working on a gremlins picture and planning to travel to England to hear fairy stories firsthand caused so much excitement that the British Air Ministry was deluged with inquiries. As the London Observer commented: “It will seem strange indeed