At the beginning of the film, when Billy is late for work, you see two films playing at the movie theater: "A Boy's Life" and "Watch the Skies". The former was the original title for "E.T." and the latter was the original title for "Close Encounters of the Third Kind". Two films directed by executive producer Steven Spielberg.

When the first nasty gremlin is scrabbling around the darkened schoolroom, at one point we see a scaly green hand reach up and grab an apple off the teacher's desk; we hear munching; and then the gremlin says something and throws the apple away. If you're not Jewish, and you saw this film with someone who is, they may have laughed, and you may not have known why. What the gremlin says is "Trayf.", which is a Yiddish word meaning "not kosher" - i.e., anything which doesn't meet Jewish dietary laws (pork, etc.).

At the inventors convention, you see many cameos: Robbie the Robot, The Time Machine from the George Pal version, Steven Spielberg as the man on a motorized wheelchair, and Jerry Goldsmith (the film's composer) as a man outside the phone booth wearing a cowboy hat.

The word "mogwai" means "evil spirit". http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mogwai

The original script featured a scene where the gremlins attack a McDonalds and eat the customers, but refuse to touch the hamburgers.

In an early version of the script, Billy's mom was decapitated, the gremlins ate the family dog and Gizmo became Stripe.