“If you aren’t supposed to feed gremlins after midnight, when exactly can you start feeding them?  What about Daylight Savings Time and time zone issues?”

What do we know?

First of all, the instructions don’t say when they can eat again.

Second, I don’t think we know at what time the feeding was, just that the clock stopped a little after 11:35pm, that they were in NY, and that it was close enough to Christmas that Daylight Savings Time was not a factor.

Third, the instructions were not written by a legal team; they were passed on by the shopkeeper’s grandson who was selling the Mogwai against his grandfather’s wishes.

Finally, the creature must be able to survive in China and New York.

Any guesses on when they can start eating again should take into account that a second time in the instructions from the guy at the shop is not clearly necessary. If it’s 11:30am before you can feed them, that’s something you tell the average customer so they don’t have a nasty surprise over their Sunday waffles. It has to be fairly early in the morning to account for early risers, too, maybe 4am or astronomical dawn.  Both 4am and astronomical dawn occur before any normal family eating occurrences, so the grandson might not have felt obliged to mention this in the original instructions.

One might be tempted to consider what happens near the poles when there are months of day and months of night, but the more important thing to consider is that we have no reason to believe that Mogwai can live there in the first place. Maybe Mogwai would find polar winters uninhabitable.

So, why is food bad after midnight?  Midnight is important for two reasons: midnight is nearly opposite of the solar noon (astronomy), and midnight is typically marked by an absence of light in the parts of the Earth where Mogwai are reputed by the movies to exist (photobiology).

First hypothesis: it has something to do with the sun. Perhaps it’s not safe to go by Universal Coordinated Time or anything derived from it, and further experiments would show that sometimes it’s OK to feed Mogwai at 12:04am and sometimes 11:56pm would still cause problems. This is something we should have learned in the movie, if Billy or his science teacher hadn’t shown the same scientific rigor we see in some of Newton’s less impressive cronies. (This is not a compliment. Seriously, go look up what the Royal Society was doing in late 1600s sometime. Dead frogs abounded. Some of it was like Oddities for science.)

If the important Do-Not-Eat-After time used the word “midnight” to mean the opposite of solar noon instead of a time derived from a world standard, then the time when they’re allowed to eat again would also presumably involve more calculations than can be answered with a simple clock.

The old shopkeeper said that owning a Mogwai was too much responsibility, and any pet that requires an astrolabe or a computer to feed is more pet than most people should be buying for their son. “Mogwai” is Cantonese for devil or demon, but the word predates Christianity in China. These creatures aren’t related to Satan; these are creatures that are just enough of a nuisance that you would not sell one to Billy’s father because he’s kind of an idiot. Specifically, Billy’s father is the kind of idiot who buys an animal with these rules and doesn’t ask why the rules exist, the ramifications of failure to follow the rules, or how to handle time zones.

Under this hypothesis, midnight starts when the Mogwai’s distance from the sun has peaked for that day. If the Mogwai’s orientation on the Earth in relation to the Sun is the reason for the rule, then it’s plausible to think that the time when they can eat again is also affected by the sun.  It might be halfway between the solar noon and “midnight” (The quotes are fine–I’m being ironic. Saying I’m being ironic is fine, too, because I know what the word “ironic” means. I play fast and loose with my punctuation, especially around quotes that are used for purposes other than to indicate dialog, because I’m a wild man who does these crazy irresponsible things with commas.) which is about 6am, and sometimes it’s light out and sometimes it isn’t.  Or it might be when the Mogwai has reached solar dawn because, hey, why not?  Either way, moving very quickly to the East after midnight has passed might help feed the Mogwai earlier, and Daylight Savings Time is not a concern because you’re getting your time from an astrolabe.

Second hypothesis: photobiology is the cause for the laws. We already know that light affects their mortality–why couldn’t sunlight affect their digestion? If that’s the cause, then like medicine, the effects of light remain in the system for some time after the last exposure to light.  The rules use midnight as the earliest time in China or in Kingston Falls, NY when the sun’s radiation no longer helps the Mogwai digest food because the rules are trying to simplify things. Without that solar radiation stored in their bodies, their body mutates, possibly as a survival mechanism when food enters their system, and all hell breaks loose. With that stored radiation, Mogwai use digestive processes similar to those found in other vertebrates to digest food and no one mutates.

If this is the case, then let’s assume for the time being that the sun doesn’t set any earlier than 4pm anywhere that Mogwai have been known to live. That would mean the solar radiation causes metabolic changes that remain active for 8 hours after the sun has disappeared, keeping everyone safe. Both movies both take place around Christmas, so the sun is going to be going down fairly early at that time of year, a few days after the winter solstice, making midnight an appropriate time for them to mutate as it’s about 8 hours after the sun set. Had Gremlins taken place on June 21st in London–or even better, Aberdeen, because who hasn’t wished that more movies took place in Aberdeen?–then there would have been lots of sun and they could all eat throughout the night without and it would have been a much less interesting movie.

If that’s the case, then midnight is the earliest “latest you can feed them” time, and you have to be careful when traveling through time zones to the West when it’s dark out. In the US, DST happens at 2am, so midnight’s already happened, no worries there.

To explain how sunlight is required to avoid mutation but any light can cause pain (death?), one may assume that non-visible parts of the sun’s spectrum help in digestion (X-rays? Infrared? Gamma rays?), but intense visible light causes adverse effects. We could take this one step further and question whether or not their digestion is the cause for their mortality; direct sunlight might increase their metabolism so much that it’s instant starvation, or that their own digestive system starts to eat their vital organs in the presence of bright light, but unless I forgot something from the movies that suggests this, I think that this line of reasoning is overly complicated. (Yes, after writing approximately 1200 words about a hypothetical situation involving imaginary creatures from a movie that’s approaching its 30th anniversary, I’m calling something overly complicated.  Also, when I was trying to think of a culturally familiar place at a more extreme latitude than the continental US, I came up with London, and that is when my internal monologue voice switched to the voice of David Tennant.)