When that insane gremlin has Billy sitting in a dentist chair and is attacking him with the dentist tool, at some point he asks, "Is it safe?", for many it must have seemed senseless, but it is actually a nod to the 1976 movie "Marathon man", in which, during a scene, Dustin Hoffman is sitting on a dentist chair while tortured with a dentist tool by an ex- Nazi (played majestically by Sir Lawrence Olivier) who keeps asking him the same question once and again.

The white-haired man who asks about the gremlin in the ice cream is the film's composer Jerry Goldsmith.