YMMV / Casper

• Awesome Music:
  • James Horner's score for the first film, with a special shout-out to the haunting and touching "Casper's Lullaby."
  • The natural result of combining Little Richard with the Casper the Friendly Ghost theme.
  • "One Last Wish" is simply beautiful.
  • Jordan Hill's "Remember Me This Way" beautifully underscores the reveal of Casper in his human form. And that's just the opening verse: the full length version crosses directly into heart-wrenchingly bittersweet 90s pop ballad territory.
• Big-Lipped Alligator Moment: The particularly odd scene where the Ghostly Trio goes inside Dr. Harvey and changes him into Clint Eastwood, Rodney Dangerfield, Mel Gibson, and the Crypt Keeper. It is never mentioned again throughout the rest of the film, nor do the trio ever use their apparent morphing-abilities again.
• Broken Base: The "can I keep you?" line from Casper to Kat as she's falling asleep. Some find it creepy and a little perverted, given that he kisses her while she's barely conscious. Others are more okay with it, since the movie treats his attraction to Kat as a Precocious Crush and he is eternally twelve years old.^note This is compounded by a pattern seen throughout the film, in which becoming a ghost seems to de-mature people: Dr. Harvey goes from being a middle-aged father to being a frat-boy wannabe, and Casper is a Kiddie Kid, who has a toy train named Hootie and sees a baseball as a "treasure". For what it's worth, him saying that in human form is what tells Kat that it's him - so she must seem to remember him saying it and appears to be okay with it.
• Harsher in Hindsight: If this film is to be considered canon to the Ghostbusters films, then with the events of Ghostbusters: Afterlife in mind, Ray's cameo makes a lot more sense.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • Devon Sawa plays Casper's human form. Years later, he spends an entire movie trying to cheat death.
  • In the pilot of Extreme Ghostbusters, Egon reluctantly breaks, in his own words, "the first rule of ghostbusting: never go solo." Sure enough, he's defeated. The same happened to Ray here.
  • The film was made by Universal, whose parent company MCA had a 20% stake in Casper rights-holder Harvey Comics at the time. 21 years later, Universal's current parent, Comcast NBCUniversal, bought DreamWorks Animation, who currently owns the Harvey Comics archives. Therefore, Universal now owns Casper the Friendly Ghost!
  • Dr. Harvey thinks he needs to have The Talk with Kat, and she assures him it's "not that late". Then comes Christina Ricci's very sexual roles in The Ice Storm and The Opposite of Sex - which she did to break out of her child star image.
  • Casper named his train after a witch's talking door knocker.
  • One scene has Dr. Harvey catch the Ghostly Trio with a red vacuum cleaner.
• Love to Hate: Carrigan is an incredibly entertaining villain, especially when she casually starts trying to murder Dibs to make him a ghost and retrieve the treasure.
  "Dibs, you're taking this way too personally."
• Memetic Molester: Casper's "Can I keep you?" is often taken out of context and used to portray him as a pervy stalker.
• Memetic Mutation: Ray Stantz's cameo line "Who you gonna call?...Someone else." has become a very popular phrase for lampooning the 2016 reboot of Ghostbusters.
• Moral Event Horizon:
  • Carrigan crosses this when she and Dibs steal the serum that can return them to life if they're killed, then tries to kill Dibs so he can steal the treasure from the vault as a ghost. She attempts this first with an axe, then with her Range Rover. Her attempts to kill him both fail and she ends up dying instead, but the fact that she tried twice to kill him just to get rich counts.
  • Dibs crosses this when he betrays Carrigan by stealing the serum and the treasure for himself, refusing to revive her. Granted, she'd put him through a lot - even tried to kill him - so it's not like he didn't have cause to turn the tables on her.
• Most Wonderful Sound: Dibs calling out "Carrigan!" repeatedly. The name Carrigan Crittendon is just fun to say and hear being said in general.
• Nightmare Fuel: The Ghostly Trio's first impression can be terrifying. Double for the way they scared Dr. Harvey, which also counts as a Funny Moment. The bathroom mirror scene deserves special mention, especially when The Crypt Keeper appears out of nowhere.
• One-Scene Wonder: Ben Stein, who else?, as the deadpan lawyer reading the will early in the film. Also, the hilarious cameos of Don Novello's Father Guido Sarducci and Dan Aykroyd's ghostbusting Raymond Stantz.
• The Problem with Licensed Games: The SNES/Famicom game is very bad, as the game starts you off confused with your surroundings as they are no cutscenes or directions that tell what you are doing or where you are going, making it easy for players to get lost, not to mention that the game has you controlling Casper as he must protect Kat from all items that may harm her, despite it having no effect on her while they constantly harm you. The game also came out at the end of the SNES lifespan, so cartridges are rare and super-expensive.
• Special Effects Failure:
  • In the first film, when the Ghostly Trio eat. The food they shove into their mouths are just as animated as they are.
  • The scene where Father Guido Sarducci has his head twisted around hasn't aged well.
  • In the sequels, the ghosts have robotic movements and are animated choppily.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: Some people hold this reaction towards the film, feeling that it could've been much better if it had cut out all of the other sub-plots and focused solely on the relationship between Casper and Kat, with Dr. Harvey's interactions with the Ghostly Trio being the main source of comic relief.
• Unintentional Period Piece: Hard Copy doing a spot on Dr. Harvey. It definitely shows this movie taking place in the 1990s as Hard Copy was cancelled in 1999.
• Vindicated by History: The film performed well (but not spectacularly) at the box office in 1995, but got severely mixed reviews from critics (Roger Ebert liked it, but Leonard Maltin hated it), and was generally seen as a decent but forgettable family film for many years after its release. Decades later, it's come to be sincerely regarded as a classic by many grown-up children of the '90s, who've proudly put it in the pantheon of great "Halloween movies" alongside the likes of The Nightmare Before Christmas and Hocus Pocus.
• Visual Effects of Awesome: Even decades after its release, the computer-animated ghosts are still very convincing. It helps that animated ghosts are very well-suited to the CGI capabilities of 1995; they float in the air, they don't have shadows, they don't have reflections, they don't have consistency to their weight or shape, etc.
• WTH, Costuming Department?: Why does Ray Stanz have a mustache? Potential copyright issue? Did Dan Aykroyd not want to shave it off? Either way, it kind of detracts from the cameo.

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