That '70s Show Had A Clever Gremlins Easter Egg In A Christmas Episode
That '70s Show holiday episodes tend to feature homages to the best Christmas films, with the movie reference from the season 6 episode “Christmas” being an Easter egg to a pivotal Gremlins scene. That '70s Show paid homage to holiday movies such as the Bass & Rankin Christmas specials, A Charlie Brown Christmas, and It’s a Wonderful Life. The episode "Christmas" is different, however, for including a reference to a non-traditional Christmas movie.
The majority of references on That '70s Show are geared toward '70s pop culture, but the writers would sometimes sneak in an '80s or '90s Easter egg. Spoofs of moments from films that would come years after the show’s timeline such as Titanic, Spies Like Us, and The Karate Kid are anachronistically featured. That '70s Show has a confusingly redundant timeline: the episode "Christmas" is actually the second Christmas special to be set in 1978 after “An Eric Forman Christmas'' in season 4. The series portrays five Christmases over 8 seasons and supposedly four years, so one has to suspend disbelief in the '70s timeline when watching.
In the last few moments of “Christmas,” a short five-second transition scene between the Christmas party and the gang’s activities in its aftermath shows a peaceful snowy neighborhood at night with Christmas lights on every house. The shot happens to be a zoomed-in moment from the 1984 Christmas horror film Gremlins when Mr. Wing walks through the neighborhood after retrieving the Mogwai Gizmo from the Peltzers, though That '70s Show removes Mr. Wing's shadow. The surrounding neighborhood of the Formans is never really shown so there is no reference to what it looks like, though it is obvious the scene is not attempting to pass it as their town.
The Easter egg occurs in the That '70s Show episode under similar circumstances as it does in Gremlins: the calm after the storm of a wild Christmas day turned into a peaceful Christmas night. The snowy neighborhood landscape is shown toward the end of both, within the last few minutes after all of the conflict has resolved. For That '70s Show, the chaos occurred at a high school dance and a Santa Claus mall display, while for Gremlins the town had just been terrorized by a group of frenzied gremlins — not exactly the same, but both chaotic nonetheless.
Surprisingly, this episode had no overt references to Christmas movies like in past seasons. Most traditional Christmas films had already been referenced in the previous holiday episodes, with little others to choose from that would be popular with the gang at the time. The blink-and-you’ll-miss-it reference to Gremlins was most likely not explicit in dialogue because the film was released six years after the episode's timeframe, so was not chronologically reference-able. Considering the gang, and especially Eric, were huge pop-culture and horror film fans, it's plausible they would’ve enjoyed Gremlins had it been released during That '70s Show's titular decade.
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