Nate Dawg wrote: ↑September 23rd, 2024, 12:14 am
Can you talk about seeing the 2nd film in theaters? What was it like? Did the audiences laugh? Was it disappointing? It seems popular opinions has varied on it over the years. It went from “meh” to “horrid” to “it’s okay” to “it’s good”.
So you were 19 when GB2 came out? This is going to be a hard question to answer but a lot of people around here seem to think Ghostbusters was a flash in the pan. That it wasnt really a beloved by the masses the way other big franchises of the day and today are.
What do you think about that? It shocked me when Beetlejuice 2 came out and did so much business and yet Ghostbusters just doesn’t seem to be clicking like it was. I’d never think a BeetleJuice movie would do more than a Ghostbusters sequel. But it did.
What’s your read on this? I’m curious. As someone who was old enough to be there for it all, the original, the cartoon, the sequel. Was the sequel really anticipated in 1989? Was the first movie just some flash in the pan fluke?
I have so many more questions but I’d better stop before I get carried away. 
On opening day of GBII, my neighbor Craig and I were 19 years old and 15 years old respectively. One thing that's germane to this next story is that I didn't yet drive, and Craig wasn't old enough. Plus, this was a day and age where no one that I knew had a mobile phone yet. (That happened for my family just two years later, when my parents got these giant car phones that were housed in a black fabric case with lots of velcro. But the story of why I know precisely when they got those phones is another tale altogether.)
So what you had to do back then was make plans ahead of time for where and when you'd be picked up. We got dropped off at the movie theater behind the mall in a town just across the river, with the gung-ho plan to attend the noon AND 2pm showings!
I definitely remember not enjoying the sequel as much as I'd liked the original, so there was a tiny moment of "oh, we're going to watch it again?" but the die had been cast. We were gonna be there until 4pm either way.
I have long maintained that the edit I saw twice back-to-back, and then immediately got to read in script form before the day was out, was not the same edit that was released on home video. The differences were in the montages, and before anyone asks, no, I didn't see Slimer fly out of the Statue of Liberty at the end. Leastwise not that I remember. Too bad I wouldn't own my first videocamera until graduating college in 1992, or I'd probably have been tempted to bootleg it.
With no other way to record my memories, I took a small notepad with me and scrawled notes in the darkened theater. I looked that notepad over a couple of years ago and the most profound thing I found was me wondering why they didn't dedicate the film to the memory of Gilda Radner, who had just passed away about four weeks earlier.
I've told these stories a few times, if they sound a bit pat and perfect. But actually, I just unlocked a memory that I don't recall ever sharing here before. So if you'll indulge me, let's follow a fun tangent about Craig.
Remember I talked about how I would run the Ghostbusters role-playing games for my buddies? I always tried to make each session memorable. One time I told them they'd all been dosed with radiation, and needed to get into their radiation suits (which was one of the equipment cards) but to really immerse them in the game, I handed out paper painter's jumpsuits that I'd found somewhere or other. My classmate Doug in particular LOVED stuff like this. He'd been playing D&D since he was eight years old, so more than half his life, and I recall him grinning ear to ear as he shucked into the white paper 'radiation suit' saying, "Now I feel like a Ghostbuster!"
As I think back, I'm not sure we realized this back then, but it seems like rather than each of us owning every RPG, we sort of carved out niches for ourselves. One guy might have the Star Wars supplements, another all the D&D books, I had the Ghostbusters RPG, and Craig? Craig was the one who bought TOON.
Although I misremembered TOON as coming out sometime *after* Who Framed Roger Rabbit's popularity in 1988, I looked it up and in actuality TOON, like the first Ghostbusters movie, was also released in 1984.
So when the RGB episode "Who're You Calling Two-Dimensional" aired in 1987, Craig and I concocted a Looney idea for a role-playing session. The guys all came over to my house, we began a standard Ghostbusters game with them playing their normal characters, but at one point they get sucked into a portal to a cartoon dimension and...
I reached under the bed and hit play on my CASIO keyboard, onto which I'd previously recorded myself playing The Merry-Go-Round Broke Down and then looped it at ever-faster speeds. From under the other side of the bed, Craig pulls out the TOON game, with all-new character sheets we'd made up the day before for the guys as cartoon animal versions of their regular human 'buster characters. I was even in that game as a playable character, taking the spot in the group left absent by Craig switching over to the game master.
Once again, it was Doug who exulted, "You guys put a TOON game in the middle of a Ghostbusters game! I love it!"
Now back to your questions...
I was personally left unsatisfied by GBII. The RGB cartoon had shown just how many good stories could be told within that universe. Citizen Ghost literally picked up right where the 1984 movie ended (well, in a flashback) and showed the guys taking on fresh new villains week after week in a New York City that believed in ghosts.
GBII zeroed the counter on all that. And even with the episode Take Two providing the perfect alibi, that the cartoon was the real people and the movie/s were fictionalized Hollywood productions based on their lives, it was still a giant mental disconnect at the time, and not a pleasant one for me. The quartet had disbanded and gone their separate ways? No ghosts appeared after Gozer was defeated? People forgot about that giant marshmallow man? They could have done so MANY possible stories that continued with them in business, but instead-- and everyone in the world has made this observation-- they tried to repeat the same story beats of the first film almost note for note.
Having said that, they hype for the movie was arguably more fun that the actual film. Give that playlist a look if you haven't already. The tie-ins with Hardee's. Nick at Nite running lots of Murray and Aykroyd-centric episodes of classic Saturday Night Live. SCTV reruns were heavy with Harold Ramis episodes. Mtv gave the premiere lots of coverage.
The cast were interviewed by everyone on every conceivable channel who owned a microphone and a camera. Nighttime talk shows: Carson interviewed Aykroyd and Murray again, having likewise had the two on together in '84; his guest host and someday successor Jay Leno interviewed Sigourney Weaver; newcomer Arsenio Hall (formerly the voice of Winston on the cartoon, now turned late night talk show host) interviewed Sigourney too, and Harold Ramis on a separate episode. Daytime talk shows: Crook & Chase; Good Morning America; Oprah Winfrey had the entire cast on and she herself marveled saying "We never get the WHOLE cast!" Sitting in the audience is then-unknown Chris Farley and his fellow castmates from Second City, including an actor who would one day share the screen with Murray in a scene of the Ramis-directed Groundhog Day. (A perfect film, in my opinion.)
I'd been salivating for the movie ever since a People magazine in December of 1988 showed the cast and director Ivan Reitman on location in New York.
I couldn't get enough. I read every article I could find. Murray saying "We'll burn in hell if we call it Ghostbusters II," then suggesting they call it "The Last of the Ghostbusters" so a third one couldn't be made. It always made me chuckle that they had indeed gone with the title he disliked.
As for the success of Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, I can't speak to that, because I haven't yet seen it. I did see the Beetlejuice/Ghostbusters mashup at Universal Studios Florida in 1991, though.
I don't know that I'd call the first Ghostbusters film a 'fluke' or a 'flash in the pan'. I'd say they caught lightning in a bottle.
(Or pushed smoke into a bottle with a baseball bat. IYKYK.)
But that lightning was put in that bottle by a small group of extraordinarily talented people, all playing at the top of their games, helmed by a director with a judicious sense of what worked and what didn't. When they were given a nearly impossible deadline to meet and the pressure was on, they rose to the challenge and turned a lump of coal into a real diamond.
Why they couldn't repeat that success five years later is fuel for a debate that will never be fully resolved.
Alex
. I reread your response 3 times I love it so much. 
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