“I wanna know more about what you do here! Frankly, I’ve heard alot of wild stories in the media and we want to assess any possibility of dangerous and possibly hazardous waste chemicals in your basement.”
An overzealous government official risks the fate of the world by shutting down the power to the one thing holding an interdimensional rift together, allowing an ancient god to enter our realm to try and conquer it. And only four scrappy scientists with nuclear accelerators on their backs can stop it.
Ghostbusters (1984)
Directed by Ivan Reitman
Written by Dan Aykroyd and Harold Ramis
I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve seen this movie, or how much time I’ve spent in the Ghostbusters universe overall. Not just watching the original film from 1984, but also the SEQUEL, the 1980s cartoon and the COMICS put out by IDW. I really enjoy the characters, and going back to where it all began is fun, especially since so many of my favorite quotes come from GHOSTBUSTERS.
Let’s take a look at some of the classics, some lines I use in every day life on the regular:
Human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together… mass hysteria!
Ray, when someone asks you if you’re a god, you say YES!
Ah, if there’s a steady paycheck in it, I’ll believe anything you say.
We came, we saw, we kicked its ass!
Back off, man. I’m a scientist.
And that’s just the first five I saw on IMDb! I’ve barely cracked the surface of all the quotable likes from GHOSTBUSTERS!
Watching the movie multiple times has also allowed me to pick up on the little things that there was no way I would have when I watched it the first time. For instance, there’s the bag of Stay Puft marshmallows that Dana Barrett puts down on the counter of her apartment. Or the Stay Puft ad painted on the side of the building later in the movie, giving viewers a bit of foreshadowing of what’s to come. It’s completely subtle, and they don’t beat you over the head with it, just letting you discover it as you watch it again and again.
One thing I bumped on during this most recent viewing was the relationship between Ray (Aykroyd) and Peter (Bill Murray). Early in the movie, after Dean Yeager kicks Ray, Peter and Egon off the college campus, Peter and Ray are outside, commiserating over a drink. In that scene, the two of them strike me as a couple of old friends who have already been through a lot together.
The comic books produced by IDW have done a great job expanding on the team lore, but generally they’ve added to the post-movie world. Unless I missed it somewhere, no one has really gone into how these three guys met. Maybe they just met at the university, with similar interests, and just formed a bond. But I like to think that they’ve known each other much longer. Maybe Egon was there, too, but he feels like someone who would have joined up with Ray later.
A GHOSTBUSTERS YEAR ZERO comic book miniseries sounds like a lot of fun, actually. But don’t reboot the movie universe. That didn’t work out all that well LAST TIME.
I’m always in favor of more GHOSTBUSTERS, though. With the new movie directed by Ivan Reitman’s son Jason coming next summer, it’ll be nice to see a new entry into the cinematic universe. But even if the movie doesn’t live up to the hype, I’ll probably end up watching this one a couple dozen more times.