Jason Streetz
Gizmo was -- and in a sense still is -- the center of my private inner universe.
Yup. Gizmo.
As in the principle mogwai from the 1980's Gremlins movies.
This little guy became the nexus of my imagination, even though I wouldn't see the Gremlins movies until years after I first encountered him.
Laugh, sneer, or jeer if you must. I don't care.
As time wore on, Gizmo became merely the eye in a storm of imagined things that, years later, morphed into the fictional universe I call "Paradoxia".
Instantly, my mind mapped all kinds of heroic, fantastic things onto it, none of which were anything like the actual Gizmo as seen in the movies (Again, it would be years before I ever actually saw Gremlins).
So for some reason, I never put it down. Ever.
That 4" plastic Gizmo figure went everywhere with me. In various childhood pictures, Gizmo is either in my hand or very nearby. It went with me to school (tucked away), family vacations, everywhere.
As time went on, my imaginary Gizmo character acquired properties from various hero protagonists found in television, movies, toys and comic books of the day. Captain Kirk, Lion-o, Optimus Prime, He-Man, Superman and others were amalgamated into my personal imaginary all-in-one hero, Gizmo.
Thus,
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But, it didn't end there. I spawned other mogwai companions for the almighty Gizmo in my mind. And I guess my family and friends caught on, because I would receive additional, identical Gizmo toys at birthdays and holidays! So of course, each of them wound up with an identity of their own, until I had a small army at hand and in mind.
A few of the Gizmo-toy army. That's "Speedy", "Gizmo", and "Geos" left-to-right.
I wound up with a bigger, 8" Gizmo figure. I called him "Scrapper".
At some point, I encountered Dungeons & Dragons, and I was fascinated. Structured make-believe!
The prospect of a role-playing game suggested itself as the medium to express and explore Gizmo's world further.
I roped in some friends and we played using a custom set of rules (that were suspiciously like AD&D at the outset....).
Of course it must have been crude at first. But it wouldn't stay that way for long.
After playing, I felt compelled to made drawings of events and characters that had come up. So I drew, and this too started crude but got a bit better with time.
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Once the "Gremlin Force" RPG got into full swing among friends and we played often enough, it wasn't just Gizmo any more. It was the "mogwai" race of beings, the wellspring for many tales of heroism and adventure for more fictional characters.
As you can probably see from the progression of drawings through time, the depiction of mogwais took them more and more into human-like beings. This was in part due to something that occured about halfway along the way...
Later, when adolescence loomed around the corner, it suddenly got to be pretty embarassing to be tossing around such words as "Gizmo", "mogwai" and "Gremlin Force".
So Gizmo became "Galior" and "mogwai" became the "Alcorian" race.
(Somewhere during the transition from "Gremlin Force" to "Paradoxia", after the game had changed names, but not yet the mogwais, I had made an attempt to write a RPG on the Commodore 128 computer, on a completely different thread of budding childhood creative energy that revolved around this imagined universe of mine -- computer programming)
Along the way, the RPG raised above being merely an AD&D hack, through re-write after re-write, revision after revision, and had become a game all its own.
And there weren't just alcorians anymore, there was a whole palette of races and places grown far, far beyond the original Gizmo and the Gremlin Force.
As I got older, it morphed and morphed. Presently, Paradoxia and its universe bears virtually (and thankfully!) no resemblance to its early origins from Gizmo and the Gremlin Force predecessors. Time, experience, collaboration and neverending development has evolved my childhood imaginary setting into a robust fictional cosmology: the "modern" Paradoxia. And while "Gizmo" and his "mogwais" long ago gave way to "Galior" and his "Alcorian Race", the "Alcorians" continue to be the dominant race among many( the "humans", if you will, as most RPGs have them, central and "default").
But I remember that he started it.
So, I've taken to collecting bits and bobbles related to him over the years.
