Hilarious In Hindsight / Ghostbusters

• Ghostbusters (1984): Peter is the one who had the idea to found the Ghostbusters, having to talk Ray and Egon into it, even saying "The franchise rights alone will make us rich beyond our wildest dreams." Flash forward a few years; Dan Aykroyd and Harold Ramis were pushing hard to make a third Ghostbusters film, but Bill Murray was the lone hold-out.
  • The film was released on the same day as Gremlins. Guess what both later appeared in LEGO Dimensions together?
• Ghostbusters II:
  • At the trial, Judge Wexler gruffly states that "Before we begin this trial, I want to make one thing clear: The law does not recognize the existence of ghosts, and I don't believe in them either." Just two years after the film was released, New York state law did recognize the existence of ghosts. See Stambovsky v. Ackley 572 N.Y.S.2d 672 (1991) (holding that "as a matter of law, the house is haunted").
  • One of the psychics interviewed by Peter near the beginning predicts the end of the world to be in the year 2016... which happens to be the year the female-led Continuity Reboot was released. (Valentine's Day, the date pegged as the day in question, was actually the day that Sony released a teaser for the trailer...and some rather unfortunate things did happen around the world.)
  • Louis asks Janine if she wants to play Super Mario Bros.. Twelve years later, Nintendo brings out Luigi's Mansion, a game largely centered on vacuuming up ghosts to capture them. ^note The name Luigi is the Italian equivalent of Louis.
  • This wouldn't be the last time New York got infested by a mass of slime, as it happened again in Parasite Eve.
  • Like Escape from New York and countless other pre-1990s films, the subtext that New York City is an irredeemable and crime-ridden shit-hole full of hostile people is almost quaint nowadays.
• The Real Ghostbusters:
  • Venkman gets possessed by a demon in an early episode. The symptoms? Spiky hair and a yellow complexion.
  • In "Xmas Marks the Spot", Venkman has to play the part of the Ghost of Christmas Past. Three years later, Venkman's live-action actor Bill Murray had his own run-in with the very same ghost.
  • The story goes that Lorenzo Music was dropped because Bill Murray was concerned about Peter Venkman sounding like Garfield and executives sought to accommodate him. If indeed true, well, that makes a later Murray role very ironic.
  Bill Murray later claimed that he just made a comment, about Venkman sounding like Garfield, and did not necessarily wish for Music to be re-cast.
  • Speaking of Garfield, Frank Welker^note voice of both Ray and Slimer. would later go on to replace Lorenzo Music as Garfield after his death, from The Garfield Show onwards.
  • Welker also provided voiced for Garfield and Friends, though mainly the US Acres segments.
  • In "Revenge of the Ghostmaster", the titular spook taunts the Ghostbusters using his own personal television channel, GMTV - no relation to the British breakfast-time show which started a few years later.
  • "Troll Bridge" involves the Queensborough Bridge being attacked by Trolls, which takes on a whole new meaning nowadays:
    Venkman: "It's Monday morning. Where else would trolls be but the Queensborough Bridge?"
  • In "Janine The Ghostbuster", Janine says that she should go into business for herself, while in “Janine’s Genie” her first wish is to be the boss of the Ghostbusters. In the IDW comics, she's now the leader of The New Ghostbusters.
  • In the season 2 episode "Egon's Ghost", a Freak Lab Accident destabilizes Egon's molecular structure, turning him into, for all intents a purposes, a ghost, even though he's still alive. The side-effects of this half-ghost state include permanent intangibility, turning invisible at will, and, for no explained reason whatsoever, the ability to sense ghosts. This would later become the entire premise of the iconic ghost hunting show of the next generation. Crosses over into Harsher in Hindsight with Ramis being the first of the original cast to pass away, and then back to this given a plot point in Ghostbusters: Afterlife with Egon's ghost assisting his granddaughter Phoebe.
  • The opening to the show features the Logo Ghost walking the streets of New York... without revealing spoilers this might remind some people of the climax of the 2016 reboot...
  • In "Take Two", one of the movies being made at the studio the Ghostbusters visit is called Space Avengers of the Galaxy. The movie also has a giant robot called the Megazoid.
  • The episode "Follow That Hearse" involves a benign Earth spirit being mutated by recklessly dumped toxic waste, which sounds an awful lot like an episode of Captain Planet and the Planeteers. For bonus points, DiC Entertainment, which animated this series, ended up producing the first three seasons of Captain Planet.
  • The episode "Venk-Man!" had Peter gain superpowers from a device Egon built. Someone gaining superpowers from technology built by a ghost hunter? One wonders if someone else took inspiration from this.
  • In "Hard Knight's Day" Slimer ruins the dress shirt Peter planned to wear on a date. Ray loans Peter a shirt that is hilariously inappropriate: a red Hawaiian shirt with yellow flowers. The shirt is a dead ringer for the trademark shirt worn by another animated ladies man introduced over a decade later: Glenn Quagmire.
  • There was an episode featuring an infamously Shallow Parody of The Simpsons messing with the Ghostbusters. Years later, the Ghostbusters would be able to meet the real Simpsons in LEGO Dimensions.

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