History Headscratchers / BeetleJuice

** The animated series gives him the respelling of Beetlejuice. You might also notice that he never says his own name in the movie, perhaps because he can unsummon himself, and doesn't want to risk it? So he unintentionally misspells his name to conform to the then current 'pronunciation' of that star... Maybe it works for him a bit like The Game, or Harry Dresden's vocal components?

** But "Betelgeuse" ''is'' the way you actually spell the red giant's name. (That or "Betelgeux", it's optional.) You'd think that an ''advertisement'' for Beetle Juice's services wouldn't be so hard to pronounce, since he needs people to say the name out loud, correctly, thrice. Perhaps he isn't aware of how much less of a well known term that star name is now compared to when he died, or maybe he just can't spell worth a fuck himself.

** Social workers in real life are overworked, undertrained, and given limited resources to do their jobs with. It's a crazy, stressful, thankless job that tends to seep out into their cases. There are obviously more people dying and wanting to talk to their social worker than there are people committing suicide to fill the positions.

* What happens after their 125 year haunting is over?

** They show up in their house wet, but dry off. If we apply a {{Fanon}} theory from Franchise/{{Ghostbusters}}, ghosts tend to take on a physical (well, ectoplasmic) state befitting their mental state. The Maitlands are wet at first because that's how they died... but they're still mentally whole so they dry off after awhile like they'd expect to normally. They'd probably start to look like drowned corpses if they obsessed with how they died.

* Does ''every'' person who die, except for suicide victims, have to go through a "haunting" phase before they can move on to the next step of the afterlife, or were Adam and Barbara simply required to for some reason? Otherwise, considering the number of people who die every day, one would expect that there are ''thousands'' of hauntings all around the world. If that's not the case, what made the Maitlands so special that they have to haunt their house, instead of simply moving on to wherever all the other ghosts are going?

* The theory I've always stuck by is that ''born'' monsters have different abilities than ''created'' ones. Think about it: a human turns into a vampire when they are bitten by one, but a baby born to vampire parents is twice as much vampire as a turned human. I always thought BJ's wider range of powers, plus being barred from the land of the living unless summoned, came from being born to two ghost parents--his mom and dad died, got together, and had a baby ghost that was twice the ghost any former human could be.

* The musical seems really confused about exactly what Beetlejuice is. Beetlejuice refers to himself as a demon from hell and everyone else as being either "the living" or "ghosts". BJ acts as if he doesn't know what it feels like to have been alive, but Lydia comments that BJ is "already dead" when she pushes him out of the window, implying him to be a ghost or at least alive at some point. So....is Beetlejuice the ghost of a person who was once alive or is he a demon who was never alive to begin with?

* Why does Lydia refer to Charles as "Daddy" throughout the musical? She's a depressed {{Goth}} teenager who holds a lot of resentment for him and she doesn't call her mother (whom it seems she was much closer to) "Mommy". Tt seems weird she'd use a term associated with a DaddysGirl or someone much younger than her age. Plus she isn't consistent about it, she says "Daddy" in several songs but in some of her spoken dialogue it's "Dad." I guess maybe "Daddy" is easier to fit into song lyrics but it just doesn't jive with her overall gloomy character.

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* The musical seems really confused about exactly what Beetlejuice is. Beetlejuice refers to himself as a demon from hell and everyone else as being either "the living" or "ghosts". BJ acts as if he doesn't know what it feels like to have been alive, but Lydia comments that Bj is "already dead" when she pushes him out of the window, implying him to be a ghost or at least alive at some point. So....is Beetlejuice the ghost of a person who was once alive or is he a demon who was never alive to begin with?

*** Tracheotomy removal doesn't involve slitting the throat from ear to ear. If you watch in the scene where she vanishes from in front of the town model, her throat is cut all the way across, and the cut runs well below where a tracheotomy scar would be.

* In the Creator/EdgarAllanPoe-themed episode, a lot of thematically terrifying things happen to Our Intrepid Antihero, including getting put in four-point restraints under a descending razor pendulum. Sure, it's a ShoutOut to ''The Pit And The Pendulum,'' but BJ frequently voluntarily dismembers himself with no lasting harm, and besides which, ''he's already dead''. He dwells in the Neitherworld. Why is he freaking out so hard about getting bisected?

** Saturn is clearly another part of [[Manga/{{Bleach}} Hueco Mundo]] and the Sandworms are Hollows, which is why they eat ghosts(Wholes).

** Such is the way of the Baldwin. It is far more enlightened and erudite than our own, to question a Baldwin in anyway is madness.

* Another element that JustBugsMe, though it's not really a problem with the movie, is that this troper always wanted to learn more about "Saturn" and the sandworms. Was it the real planet Saturn (seems pretty unlikely, with Saturn being a gas giant and all), or another dimension with the same name (since stepping out of the house takes them there, maybe it's a parallel ghost reality)? Wiki/TheOtherWiki says that in an earlier draft, it was called Titan rather than Saturn (which might explain the giant moon in the sky: that's probably Saturn itself), and that might still work, since Betelgeuse says "you've been to Saturn" (he didn't say they've been "on" Saturn, so maybe he meant the Saturn moons). The sandworms could apparently see and eat ghosts, which just adds to strangeness of it all. There's no way the movie could've gotten into the details without [[MST3KMantra bogging things down]], but there's so much mystery behind that plot element, and Saturn and its sandworms are just so weird and cool that I'd love to hear the writers talk more about what they had in mind.

* Even allowing for the passage of time while the Maitlands were in the waiting room, wasn't Barbara's greedy realtor cousin able to swoop in and sell the house pretty damn fast? One assumes they paid their taxes and were at least up to date on the mortgage, and a search for other possible heirs to take it over can't be done instantly, can it? I guess [[{{Headscratchers}} It Just Bugs Me]] all the more because the realtor-cousin is one of those annoying bit characters who never seem to be the targets of any comeuppance. It's one thing when a main character is a KarmaHoudini; it's another when it's this off to the side, never seen again maroon.

* What did Juno mean when she told the Maitlands "Seems pretty quiet here. You should thank God you didn't die in Italy."?

* Another element that JustBugsMe, though it's not really a problem with the movie, is that this troper always wanted to learn more about "Saturn" and the sandworms. Was it the real planet Saturn (seems pretty unlikely, with Saturn being a gas giant and all), or another dimension with the same name (since stepping out of the house takes them there, maybe it's a parallel ghost reality)? TheOtherWiki says that in an earlier draft, it was called Titan rather than Saturn (which might explain the giant moon in the sky: that's probably Saturn itself), and that might still work, since Betelgeuse says "you've been to Saturn" (he didn't say they've been "on" Saturn, so maybe he meant the Saturn moons). The sandworms could apparently see and eat ghosts, which just adds to strangeness of it all. There's no way the movie could've gotten into the details without [[MST3KMantra bogging things down]], but there's so much mystery behind that plot element, and Saturn and its sandworms are just so weird and cool that I'd love to hear the writers talk more about what they had in mind.