Walt Disney was impressed when he met Roald Dahl (whom he nicknamed "Stalky") for the first time, and for a while it seemed that a Disney film based on Dahl's gremlins was a shoe-in.

Within months of his arrival in Washington, Dahl had written his first book entitled at the time Gremlin Lore. As a serving officer he was required to submit for approval everything he wrote to the British Information Services (BIS) based in New York.

He sent the rough draft manuscript to Sidney Bernstein at BIS. Before the war, Bernstein had been a British film entrepreneur who built many movie theater palaces and would later found Granada Television in England.

On July 1, 1942, Bernstein, sensing a project with fanciful similarities to Disney’s animated feature films, sent the draft to Walt Disney. He included a brief note that stated:

Flight Lieutenant Ronald [sic] Dahl has written a story about a New Dream Community that has risen in the Air Force, and I am enclosing you his effort which has been submitted through literary agent to a magazine.

The idea, I think, has great possibilities, as a film, if done in your own inimitable style. I have no personal interest in the matter, and if you would be interested in communicating with Dahl, his address is the British Embassy, Washington. I hope to be in Hollywood during August and have the pleasure of meeting you again.

By the beginning of 1942, the Disney studio was having both financial and creative challenges. The closure of the foreign market for American films and Walt’s agreement to make military and government training films “without profit” (only the cost of actual production) for the war effort resulted in a deficit of over a million dollars.

Money was going out but little if any was coming back in, and many of Walt’s most talented and dependable artists were serving in the armed forces or were in danger of being drafted soon.

After years of experimentation and artistic growth, Walt and his staff were now feeling constrained by the restrictions of limited animation, technical jargon, unrealistic deadlines, and interference by military advisors. Because of time, labor, and expense, more creative options such as the developing of a new animated feature had been shelved for the duration of the war, although a small handful of commercial entertainment animated shorts were still being made.

When Walt received the Gremlin Lore manuscript, he supposedly saw an opportunity to do a feature that would allow his staff to utilize the military expertise they had developed, maintain their commitment to the war effort, explore Walt’s recent fascination with the possibilities of aviation, and perhaps recapture some of the financial and creative rewards of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937) with characters that had some superficial similarities to the dwarfs.

It would be a wartime fairy tale and seemed ideal for Disney’s animation expertise and talent. In addition, it would have the cache of being from a well-known decorated RAF pilot.

Walt immediately cabled both Dahl and Bernstein on July 13, 1942, to inform them of his interest. The telegram to Dahl stated:

Sidney Bernstein has sent me your story of the Gremlins. Believe it has possibilities. Would be interested in seeing your material and will have our Mr. Feitel in Washington contact you regarding same.

Chester D. Feitel was a sales representative for the Disney studio assisting marketing executive Kay Kamen with merchandising. He was based in Washington, D.C., and so geographically had easy access to Dahl.

That same day, Walt cabled Bernstein his thanks for locating the story:

Gremlins idea has great possibilities. Am contacting Dahl in Washington. Hope we will be able to work out something so we can produce it. Many thanks for sending it on to me. Looking forward to seeing you in Hollywood in August. Kindest regards, Walt Disney.

Three days later, Feitel’s written report of his meeting with Dahl was being read by Walt and Roy in Burbank, California:

Dahl is a young fellow…does not regard himself as a professional writer…. Gremlin Lore has not been copyrighted, and is not in the hands of any literary agent. The Gremlin characters are not creatures of his imagination as they are “well known” by the entire RAF and as far as I can determine no individual can claim credit.

Therefore, I doubt that the name “Gremlin” can be copyrighted.

Feitel added that the payment for the story would be shared by Dahl and the RAF, but that Dahl probably “would accept any reasonable deal on our usual basis.”

Two days later, on July 18, Kay Kamen wrote to Feitel:

Walt phoned and instructed me to see Dahl, obtain a copy of manuscript Gremlins and forward copy to you for conference with Roy.

Despite this fevered interest, it still took awhile to formalize the deal. Kamen’s note to Feitel dated August 3, 1942, states:

As per copy of letter to Roy which I sent to you, you will understand the present situation. Apparently Dahl’s contacts with Walt through Mrs. Mercier-Fairre [a Washington socialite that Dahl flirted with and who knew Walt casually] are interpreted by him as a proposition—one more liberal than my understanding of Walt’s and Roy’s wishes.

However, an arrangement was made with Dahl, and the Disney studio started devising ways to acquaint the American public with gremlins, develop a workable story with appropriate character designs, and establish a copyright for Disney’s version of gremlins just as it had for Disney’s versions of the foreign folk tales of Snow White and Pinocchio.

In an essay by Dahl entitled Lucky Break (1978), the writer remembered his first two-week excursion to the Disney studio in November 1942:

Because of the Gremlins, I was given three weeks’ leave from my duties at the Embassy in Washington and whisked out to Hollywood. There, I was put up at Disney’s expense in a luxurious Beverly Hills hotel and given a huge shiny car to drive about in.

Each day, I worked with the great Disney at his studios in Burbank, roughing out the story-line for the forthcoming film. I had a ball. I was still only twenty-six. I attended story conferences in Disney’s enormous office where every word spoken, every suggestion made, was taken down by a stenographer and typed out afterwards.

I mooched around the rooms where the gifted and obstreperous animators worked, the men who had already created Snow White, Dumbo, Bambi and other marvelous films, and in those days, so long as these crazy artists did their work, Disney didn’t care when they turned up at the studio or how they behaved. When my time was up, I went back to Washington and left them to it.

Dahl apparently made quite an impression when he was at the studio. By all accounts he played the role of the dashing, enthusiastic war hero and was very personable.

Walt threw a party in Dahl’s honor on his first night in Hollywood. Among those attending were actors Spencer Tracy (Walt’s polo buddy), William Powell, Dorothy Lamour, Greer Garson, and even Charlie Chaplin. One of the party games was having these distinguished screen stars act out different gremlins with Charlie Chaplin taking the prize for his interpretation of a Widget.

Dahl even hooked up with the first of many of his Hollywood affairs, an actress and socialite named Phyllis Brooks nicknamed “Brooksie,” who he treated so badly that she reportedly wanted to kill him just a few months after he had first succeeded in taking her to bed.

Walt was fond of nicknames and since Dahl was six-foot six-inches tall, Walt dubbed him “Stalky.” Walt also had trouble pronouncing the name “Roald” correctly, so this helped him alleviate that situation.

Continued in "Gremlin Trouble"!

How, indeed, do you create a warm family film about creatures that revel in damaging and downing British aircraft, and sending pilots to their doom? Even Walt was stumped, and Stalky was no help at all.

There is no one “smoking gun” for the death of the gremlins project. However, it is apparent that a combination of challenges contributed to its cancellation.

In his article “Walt Disney and The Gremlins: An Unfinished Story,” animation historian John Cawley wrote that as quickly as the public had embraced gremlins, they had now tired of them just as quickly:

By February [1943], it appeared that all the forces on Earth were fighting the completion of the film. Polls showed that filmgoers were tiring of war theme pictures. An Associated Press article titled “Gremlin Stuff is Getting Tiresome” echoed many media columnists when it stated that “They’ve been whimsied to pieces,” and that “very soon any member of the general public who ventures to wax coy about them will run the risk of getting his itsy-bitsy block stoved in.”

In March, an aviation magazine editor also complained about the constant attention to Gremlins. The problem was not so much the overabundance of material, but the image they gave the RAF: “Surely, the greatest flying and fighting service is not going to ape Sir James Barrie at his worst.”

By July, Walt told Dahl that instead of a feature, the Disney studio wanted to do the gremlins subject as a short cartoon and again expressed his concern over the infamous Clause 12 suggesting the British Air Ministry approval.

In a letter to Dahl dated July 2, Walt suggests:

Because of its timely nature and the fact that it should be out now, everybody thinks we ought to put it out as a short…. The complications that arise with the R.A.F. are other reasons why we do not want to consider the feature angle.

Every time I refer to Clause 12, I become a little apprehensive of what I may be facing. With the amount of money that is required to spend on a feature of this type, we cannot be subjected to the whims of certain people, including yourself. I do not mean this unkindly or in any sense as a criticism, but we feel it is simply not good business to undertake the production of the Gremlins as a feature at this time with so much risk involved.

I might fly to Canada to look things over and whatever information seems pertinent I can pass on to the boys. I believe they can get a lot out of films—when you get too authentic on the Gremlins, I feel it handicaps the subject for cartoon entertainment.

Dahl had planned so that Walt and some of his staff could visit the Royal Canadian Air Force headquarters to obtain material for the film. He had made arrangements for Walt’s crew to see Spitfires flying and an operational squadron of Hurricanes on the job with the pilots at readiness and in the dispersal huts in hopes of getting them all excited again about doing the feature. Walt never went.

A lengthy story conference on the project was held August 20, 1943, with Jim Bodrero, Ted Sears, Ham Luske, Wilfred Jackson, Dave Hand, Bill Berg, Dick Shaw, Bill Justice, Perce Pearce, Dick Kinney, and H.C. Holling in attendance trying to see if there was any way to go forward.

While Walt had already decided a month earlier that the material would be used to quickly produce a short, these men had put so much time and effort into the project that they decided to have one final meeting to see if there were any possibilities of still doing a feature.

Luske championed the approach of using live action combined with animation. He stated:

If you put [animated] fictitious pilots and fictitious Gremlins together, I don’t get any punch out of it.

Wilfred Jackson brought up the concern of trying to animate a realistic human figure, even if only the hands and feet were shown or just a silhouette from the back. Even the use of rotoscoping (shooting live action as a reference and then tracing over it, perhaps with some artistic exaggeration) had resulted in very stiff figures that did not move naturally.

Perce Pearce remarked at the meeting:

Basically if these little guys are the pilots’ alibis for their own stupidity, dereliction of duty, neglect, then you are taking some of the glamour off the RAF for me….

These Gremlins are very, very heavy villains to me…. They’re cute little guys that are nasty, and the crew doesn’t have a chance to pay them off. The fact that they’re representing the German bullets is enough to tell me that they are the spirit of the enemy.

Others agreed that any attempt to try to create some sympathy for the gremlin mayhem just resulted in trying to get audiences to accept and perhaps cheer for damage to Allied planes and pilots.

While the pilots may have had a certain concept of the gremlins and how they helped alleviate some of the stress of combat and other challenges, communicating that same feeling to an audience completely unfamiliar with the pilots’ culture was almost impossible.

Continued in "Gremlin Trouble"!