Zach Galligan, Phoebe Cates, Dick Miller, Jackie Joseph and Keye Luke reprise their roles from the first film; Belinda Balaski also returns, this time playing a different character.

Whereas the first film depicted the gremlins wreaking havoc on the town of Kingston Falls, The New Batch has them spawn from Gizmo within a skyscraper in New York City after his owner dies.

These new gremlins thus pose a dire threat to the city should they be able to leave the building and the story revolves around the human characters' efforts to prevent this disaster.

There are also a number of parodies of other forms of popular culture, including the Rambo franchise, The Wizard of Oz, Marathon Man and The Phantom of the Opera.

At the mercy of chief researcher Doctor Cushing Catheter, Gizmo is rescued by his former owner, Billy Peltzer, and his fiancée, Kate Beringer, both of whom work elsewhere in the building.

Gizmo is left in Billy's office, where water from a broken drinking fountain spills onto his head and causes him to spawn a quartet of new mogwai.

The gremlins drink genetic serums in the lab; one gains high intelligence, another becomes female and a third is transformed into a being of pure electricity that murders Catheter before Billy traps it in the building's telephone system.

Murray Futterman, Billy's neighbor from Kingston Falls who is visiting New York City with his wife Sheila, is attacked by a bat-like mutated gremlin immunized to sunlight by the intelligent one with a sunscreen-like formula.

Kate and Marla are attacked by Mohawk, now mutated into a centaur-like spider hybrid after drinking another serum, but Gizmo saves them by killing him with a makeshift arrow with an ignited bottle of white-out.

Clamp soon charges in with the authorities and press, only to discover that the threat has been neutralized; thrilled by the outcome, he promotes Billy, Kate, Fred and Marla and hires Katsuji as a cameraman as the former two return home with Gizmo.

The film includes animated segments written and directed by Chuck Jones and featuring Looney Tunes characters Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck and Porky Pig.

This material was removed from the theatrical release because early audiences expected a live-action film and were bewildered by the lengthy animated sequence.

After Daffy says the slogan, the back of the Warner Bros. shield – with the words "Title Animation Written & Directed by Chuck Jones", as well as featuring his signature – smashes him.

As the filmmakers noted, this was a time when cable television, genetics and frozen yogurt were becoming more common in popular culture, hence are all parodied in the movie.

[10] Screenwriter Charlie Haas introduced the concept of moving the gremlins to New York City and a corporate head (Daniel Clamp) as Billy's boss.

When the Warner Bros. executives grew concerned about the expense of portraying the gremlins attacking an entire city, Haas came up with the idea of confining the action within Clamp's "smart building".

[14] The original version of the film was longer, but executive producer Steven Spielberg claimed that there were too many gremlins, and several scenes were cut as a result.

[11] Several actors from the original film returned to make Gremlins 2: The New Batch, including Galligan, Cates, and Dick Miller.

Character actress Jackie Joseph returned to play Mr. Futterman's wife, and there were also brief reappearances in the movie theatre sequence from Belinda Balaski as a complaining mother and Kenneth Tobey as the projectionist.

Lee imagined his role as light-hearted; but Dante encouraged him to portray the scientist as evil to better match the atmosphere of the laboratory set.

Two of the mogwais were George, black without a stripe and a caricature of Edward G. Robinson, and Lenny, buck-toothed, named for the principal characters in Of Mice and Men, whom they resemble in both appearance and demeanor.

[20] Hal Hinson of The Washington Post caught on to how the Looney Tunes animation is meant to imply "anarchic wit," but nevertheless felt both the cartoon short and the film itself are failures.

A critic for National Review called the film "much freer and wittier than the first one," though he felt the sequel shies away from becoming an important piece of satire.

The cover of an issue of Entertainment Weekly in July 1990 also exclaimed that "actor John Glover... and director Joe Dante made Gremlins 2: The New Batch wittier, better, and more subversive than the original."

... director Dante presents a less violent but far more campy vision, paying myriad surreal tributes to scores of movies, including "The Wizard of Oz" and musical extravaganzas of the past.

The site's consensus states; "Gremlins 2 trades the spiky thrills of its predecessor for looney satire, yielding a succession of sporadically clever gags that add some flavor to a recycled plot.

As one critic wrote, "it's a savvy, off-the-wall comedy that acknowledges, yes, it is just one more silly rip-off sequel, produced to sell off the merchandise inspired by the first film.

Much later, action figures by the National Entertainment Collectibles Association (NECA Toys) based on characters such as the Brain and Mohawk gremlins were released.

[34] The Spanish company Topo Soft developed a side-scrolling Gremlins 2: The New Batch video game for Amiga, Atari ST, Commodore 64, DOS, MSX, Amstrad CPC and the ZX Spectrum, distributed by Erbe Software in Spain and by Elite abroad, being the first time a Spanish video game company got an exclusive license from a Hollywood movie to make a videogame.

[41] In a December 2016 interview with Bleeding Cool, Galligan said that Chris Columbus had been "aggressively working on a Gremlins 3", which had writer Carl Ellsworth on board.