For starters, the characters (except for Yeager) have been aged down to grade schoolers and the majority of the action takes place at their school, Janine is a Ghostbuster also, and Winston is part of the group from the get-go instead of being a Sixth Ranger.
This book provides examples of
- Adaptational Badass: In the book, Janine is another Ghostbuster instead of their secretary.
- Adaptational Job Change: In the movie, Peter, Ray, Egon, and Winston are professional ghost hunters, Dana is a professional musician, Janine is a secretary, Louis is an accountant, and Walter is an inspector. In the book, they’re all elementary school students and their canon jobs are just hobbies.
- Adaptational Nice Guy:
- While Peter still teases Walter about not saying the “magic word”, the book leaves out his Con Man antics.
- While Walter smirks when the protagonists get suspended and rats them out to the principal, he doesn’t actively antagonise them the way he does in the movie, and at the end, he joins in on cheering for them.
- Egon was never a jerk to begin with, but the book leaves out the part where he shoves Walter.
- Adaptational Personality Change: Egon is more expressive than in the movie – he smiles widely in several illustrations, and his line “Don’t cross the streams” ends with an exclamation point.
- Adaptational Wimp: While the main characters still attack ghosts and defeat the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man, in the movie, this prevented an entire apocalypse, whereas no such thing is implied in the book.
- Adaptation Explanation Extrication:
- In the movie, the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man appears because a demon named Gozer wanted the world destroyed and asked the Ghostbusters to choose the form of the destroyer, then Ray accidentally imagined an advertising mascot from his childhood. In the book, he just appears out of nowhere.
- The book keeps Egon’s line “Don’t cross the streams”, and notes that “apparently, it would be bad”, but doesn’t explain further. The movie explains that “crossing the streams” is when the streams from the proton packs cross paths, and the reason it’s “bad” is because it might cause the end of known life.
- Adapted Out: Alice the librarian, Zuul, Vinz, and Gozer don’t appear.
- Adaptational Friendship: Winston and Janine are portrayed as pals with Peter, Ray, and Egon, as opposed to the source material, in which they saw them as just coworkers.
- Child Prodigy: Egon is only about eight in this story, but he still manages to invent a bunch of technology.
- Ectoplasm: Before the ghosts show up, Peter finds green goo in the library.
- Kinder and Cleaner: The movie it was based on had a few swear words (notably "piss", "ass", "shit", and "dick"). This book, due to being a kids' book, has no swearing at all.
- Pragmatic Adaptation: Since the main characters are kids, several things are changed:
- Zuul trying to seduce Peter is (thankfully) left out.
- The Ghostbusters being arrested is left out, since the closest thing to that with a kid is being sent to juvie, which they clearly didn’t deserve.
- Spinoff Babies: The main cast are written as children in a school.
