From Reddit saved comment — r/AskScienceFiction, u/Pegussu, Dec 03 2025 https://www.reddit.com/r/AskScienceFiction/comments/1pcvl92/gremlins_never_feed_him_after_midnight_when_does/ns0p22g/ Comment on: [Gremlins] “Never feed him after midnight.” When does the clock reset? I was baffled when I first learned this, but there is an animated Gremlins prequel series for children called Secrets of the Mogwai. In that show, it's revealed the Mogwai were created by sibling gods, Fuxi and and Nuwa to test humanity. Fuxi believed humanity was mostly bad, Nuwa believed they were mostly good. So Nuwa created the Mogwai and Fuxi created the rules. They released them into a city they chose as a testing ground and humanity fell in love with them...so much so that they almost immediately broke the rules to make more of them, ultimately turning most or all of them into gremlins. Nuwa and Fuxi had to turn them back into Mogwai before all of China fell to the gremlins. Anyway, Nuwa explains all this to Sam (the kid who grows up to be the mysterious old man in the first movie). When she explains the rules, she mentions that you can't feed them "when the moon is highest in the sky." She's somewhat annoyed that humans dumbed that down to "after midnight."