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Do you think Val and Earl would have survived a gunslinger battle with the graboids’ tentacles?

We’re not quite sure what this means.  Do the tentacles have guns, or are Val and Earl shooting at them like wild west guys?  If it’s the second version, we think it’d only work for a short time.  The Graboid would pull its wounded tentacles underground and attack from below unless they got to safe ground.  We sort of did that with Black Hand Kelly in Tremors 4.  But the tentacles didn’t have guns.

I thought Nestor was Melvins dad and that was why he was crying and so upset when Nestor was eaten. So if he wasn’t his father, apart from the loss of a friend.. why does he freak out more than the others?

Yeah, Nestor is not Melvin’s dad.  Melvin’s parents just left him alone a lot when they went to gamble in Las Vegas.  But we think Melvin’s reaction is still understandable.  He’s just a teenager, and he’s never seen anybody killed, let alone in such a scary way.  It makes him see how much danger they are in.

Why is it in T1 Graboids would suck the trucks down and pop the tires – even when the engines were off.. but in T2 they hunt from earls truck and they never get bothered?

There are two parts to this.  In Tremors 1, we don’t think a Graboid ever attacks a vehicle that isn’t making noise.   For example, after saving Mindy, Val jumps on their truck, and that makes noise, so that’s why the Graboid attacks it.  Later, at Burt and Heather’s, the Graboid doesn’t bother their SUV until the creatures bumps it accidentally, causing the car alarm to go off.   In Tremors 2, we tried to make the point that Earl, Grady and Burt have Graboid tracking devices in their vehicles.  They are deliberately making noise to attract the monsters.  So our logic was, any time they saw the signal of a Graobid, they’d stop the truck so it would remain safe, then use their remote control bait-bombs.

What happened with Earl and Kate?

They got married and lived happily ever after!  And used the money Earl made to start a better business than an ostrich ranch. The money also allowed Kate’s to continue doing research in geology without being tied to oil companies.

If Tremors had been rated R, what changes would you have made?

We never wanted it to be rated R!  We like to make fun family movies.  We were upset the first time we submitted it , because it DID get an R — for language.  We had let Kevin and Fred use too many unacceptable words, so we had to go back and make changes to get rid of enough to get our PG-13.

Did Earl and Val have some sort of falling out between movies? Was Earl resentful of Val since he made money it seems? Were they still in contact?

We tried to hint at the answer in Tremors 2, when Earl says Val “married a good woman.” We don’t feel they had any sort of argument.  Instead, Val went off to start a life with Rhonda.  They could no longer be partners in the way they had been, so Earl took his portion of what money they made and invested in his ostrich ranch.  We’ve always wanted to explore more of what Val and Rhonda did, but have never had the opportunity.

Why did Universal buy this movie series? Except for the very first one all others have gone directly to video/DVD, Is it that valuable? Isn’t often true that big studios buy a film and the series is then gone forever because some idiot executive decides it is not worth continuing?

Universal didn’t “buy” the franchise.  It has owned it from the beginning, when the first movie was made.  Universal has always made all decisions on what new versions get made and how the property is marketed.  Starting with Tremors 2, the studio felt the best place to make additional money with it was in direct-to-video.

How long would El Blanco live?

Well, we’re not sure.  There are many unanswered questions about Graboid biology.  For example, why were they seen in the late 1800s, then not again until the 1990s?  Were their eggs dormant all that time?   Unfortunately, nearly all Graboids have been killed (so  far) each time they’ve appeared, so El Blanco is an anomaly.  Our best guess is that he/she can live more than fifty years.  We’ll have to wait and see.

Where do Graboids really come from? In Tremors 2, you say they found a fossil from millions of years ago, but you never explained more than that. In the Tremors TV Series, the “mix master” monsters had a similar look. Couldn’t they related? Perhaps Graboids come from that military underground lab and they just read the date of the fossil wrong?

Well — NO!  Graboids are an ancient life form.   After all, they existed in the late 1800s, the time of Tremors 4.  So they could not have come from the military lab that wasn’t even built until much later.

In “Night of the Shriekers” why didn’t the chick from Night of the Living Dead 3 choose to use the Ass blasters instead of shriekers since Ass blasters have a more advanced heat detector?

Well — I guess the honest answer is that she was a victim of us writer/producers.  But here’s a writer/producer after-the-fact answer:  Shriekers are easier to mass-produce than Ass Blasters, because they are hermaphroditic.  She needed a life form she could just feed to get additional bodies, rather than one that would require her to wait for it to transform into an AB.

I know you and the Stampede crew went with CGI for the sequels in places where it would’ve been impossible to pull off with live creatures, but when you guys were doing the first film, was there ever talk about doing some stop-motion Graboid shots?

Since S. S. Wilson comes from a background in stop motion animation, yes!  We considered anything that would help us get the movie made.  But the fact that the creatures were always seen in dirt and kicking up dust made stop-motion an unsatisfactory choice, since those are hard elements to work with (or add in later) when doing stop motion.