Gotta say, we love the hard core Tremors fans and appreciate their support.  Seems like we spend a lot of time explaining that the creators of a movie usually have no control of any kind after a studio buys it.  I guess we’d try to return to the world and rules that we established — and just ignore the other movies?  Or throw in a bad joke about Burt waking up from dreams about being in Africa and the frozen north?

And just to be clear,  a wildly successful Tremors video game (an idea we’ve always wanted to work on) would make Universal a fortune.  Not us.

Question part one: We don’t know the specific reasons Fred didn’t want to return.  These conversations are had between agents and managers and not in person.  So you don’t get much back other than something like, “Fred doesn’t feel this project is right for him at this time.”

Question part two: Thanks for the praise of Tremors 4!  We had great fun making it, and Michael had a blast playing the opposite of Burt.

We did not make or work on Tremors 5.  The new writer and director chose to break most of the rules we tried to maintain in the first four movies.  So no, in “our” version of Tremors biology, tentacles do not become shriekers.  Nor could a tentacle break off and become an independent organism.  But other people are now making those decisions.

We really had to think about this question.  We did not intentionally break the fourth wall by having the tourist say something they really wouldn’t say (sort of like winking at the audience or talking right to the camera).  We put the line in because we’d learned that many Tremors fans call Graboids “tremors,” as in, “The tremor crashes up through the floor.”  Since Tremors 3 is about Graboids becoming a tourist attraction, the line seemed totally logical to us.  But THEN we thought, oh wait, in the movie world of Tremors, there isn’t a movie called Tremors, so why would anyone use that term?  The question is correct!  We did break the fourth wall!  But wait, how about this?  Before Tremors 3 takes place, there were obviously many articles and TV stories about Graboids, and some of them no doubt had titles like “Mysterious Tremors Rock Small Nevada Town.”  Or, maybe Rhonda LeBeck’s first scientific report was called, “Incredible Source of Mysterious Ground Tremors Identified.”  So, we feel we can claim we dodged the bullet.  Great question, though!

After all these years, fans are still coming up with new ideas.  In truth, we did not even think of this possibility when we wrote and shot those scenes — and  it’s totally logical!  However, we’re always up for adding to Graboid lore, so here’s an explanation.  The young shriekers do eat most of the parent Graboid when they awake and burst out, but they need all that initial nourishment to become fully formed and get strong enough to walk on their own, etc.  When are they capable of reproducing, they move out into the world in search of more food.  The tough Graboid skin and bone they leave behind isn’t nourishing enough to allow them to reproduce.

Thanks for the kind words.  We have not seen the trailer or the movie.  One of us saw Tremors 5 and alerted the others that it’s too painful to watch where Universal has decided to take the franchise.

Yes.  And — very screwed.  However, as we’ve noted elsewhere, shrieker hatches are limited by the amount of food available in a given area, so it would have been bad, but maybe not a total shrieker apocalypse, since the oil field was fairly isolated.

Not really.  They are each driven by the desire to find and eat as much food as possible as fast as possible.  So they tend to behave in a way that only appears to be coordinated.  However, they will cooperate if it serves their main purpose, as when they climb on each other to reach the Earl, Grady and Kate on top of the oil tanks.

Absolutely!  The whole idea is that Graboids have been around a very long time, but they are so rare that they, and shriekers, and A-Bs have almost never been seen by humans.  Also, the eggs incubate for years, depending on conditions.  So A-Bs might have laid them decades or even a century before people arrived and established the town of Perfection of 1889.

Okay, this is a VERY long question, but we really appreciate the comments within, so we decided just to run the whole thing.  If the opportunity arose, it would be, frankly, hard to turn it down, as we love the world we created.  That said, we feel the task of trying to explain or incorporate terrible and inconsistent ideas we never would have approved would be too frustrating.  So, yes, it’s probably too much of a mess now.  One recourse would be to ignore Tremors 5 and 6, and try to pretend they don’t exist, but even that has its drawbacks.  Control was taken away from us and can’t really be restored now.

This is a valid point.  Our feeling is that when Burt refers to taking the high explosive  cannon round for his collection, he is caught up in the moment (having just talked the Mexican government into letting him have all this stuff) and isn’t really thinking it through.   Burt is a bit radical, but he’s not a law breaker, and none of his gun collection in Tremors 1 was illegal when we shot the original movie.

There were many props to fill the shelves of Jodi Chang’s store, since the plot had her selling Graboid memorabilia.   We believe Universal auctioned some of it for charity soon after production ended.   Other items were sold by individual cast/crew a different times.  But, except for stuff that might turn up on eBay, nothing is “officially” for sale any more.

Like most movies, Tremors 3 was shot in several different locations and we just made it look like they were near by each other.  If you are talking about the town site itself, it was near Valencia, California, actually not too far from  Interstate 5, north of Los Angeles.  We shot on private land, so it could have been bought, sold, or even developed by now.   None of us have ever been back out there!