The Ghostbusters Franchise

I agree and disagree. I get why she thinks it is unfair. Like she saved the world and then a man pulled a law out of nowhere to stop her from doing so again because he had a petty grudge against her grandfather and his friends. The problem is that the film glosses over the apposing argument.

Edited by Bullman on Apr 8th 2024 at 7:48:56 AM

Fan-Preferred Couple cleanup thread

As I said, Protagonist-Centered Morality rears its head. The story insists that because Phoebe believes it's her right to do it, that should just automatically be accepted by the audience without question. That doesn't stop us from still seeing the point that Callie and Gary have to concede: Phoebe's underage, Ghostbusting is dangerous and Peck being the Mayor and being fully aware of the bit about Phoebe's age at least means it has to be taken into account and can't be ignored—and that whether Peck likes them or not (and obviously doesn't), the Ghostbusters do use technology that can be dangerous.

Not saying it's fair to Phoebe. Saying that while it's a sad fact of the situation that she does indeed blatantly disregard it too though.

Edited by futuremoviewriter on Apr 8th 2024 at 9:48:50 AM

That opening action scene, intended to wow audiences with the sheer spectacle of it all, fully convinced me that the Ghostbusters should be disbanded and reformed by people who have any qualifications for the job whatsoever other than happening to be there.

Phoebe is only one part of the problem, albeit a major one.

In the original Ghostbusters, their destruction of the ballroom is implied to be first-job jitters, so to speak, and they get it together afterwards. Otherwise I'm not so sure people would be celebrating them as heroic figures instead of reviling them as Destructive Saviors.

The one new idea this movie has is the suggestion that catching and imprisoning ghosts might not be a morally good act. It sparked some interest in my jaded little heart. Sadly, it doesn't go anywhere. Maybe the third movie will pick it up...?

Edited by Fighteer on Apr 9th 2024 at 8:36:50 AM

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

Sounds like someone on the writing staff saw AVGN's Ghostbusters video.

"They don't do anything to you, so why are you busting them? Cause bustin' makes you feel good? Well, don't the ghosts have a right to death?"

With all the memes about women choosing a bear over a man, Hollywood might wanna get on an 'East of the Sun and West of the Moon' adaptation

In fairness, the ghosts can be very destructive if left to roam free. If someone is engaged in active harm, the cops need to stop that before figuring out what their deal is.

But real criminal justice systems at least pretend to be engaged in rehabilitation. (Please no politics derail.) With the Ghostbusters, there's no trial, no sentencing, no attempt at figuring out what's keeping the ghosts bound here. After all, we now have proof that at least some of them will "go away" if they resolve their issues.

The franchise writers can make all my doubts vanish if, in the next film, Phoebe is running a ghost rehabilitation service and the core conflict is between those who want to bust them and those who want to help them.

Edited by Fighteer on Apr 9th 2024 at 9:08:06 AM

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

In the first movie, the ghosts seemed more like wild animals (Slimer) or weird phenomena/monsters (the librarian). I think it worked because it fit the blue collar "ghost exterminators" vibe. I wasn't thinking about the ghosts as people but rather as rats or any other type of housing problems people would call a 1-800 for and that also fit the cheese commercial vibe. The only ghost that seemed "alive" was Gozar who was already evil.

I think the animated series found a compromise to have intelligent ghosts work. The ghost that could talk were either evil ( and usually very high tier) and got busted/tricked/banished or were good and the ghost busters came to an agreement with them.

Edited by Freshwater on Apr 9th 2024 at 10:07:58 AM

It could work if the writers decide that certain ghosts are just "remnants" of someone's spirit that obey primal instincts or whatever, and thus can't be reasoned with. Unfortunately, they seem too preoccupied with giving us meaningless conflicts and cameoing all of the characters from previous films.

It just keeps bugging me that Melody is not only sapient and conscious, but aware of the containment unit and what it represents. She acts like she hates it, implying that she believes the ghosts trapped inside to have some kind of moral weight. That's hard to reconcile with them all being mindless monsters.

Maybe she's just afraid of her own fate if she gets caught, but the movie doesn't explore this enough. I wanted more Melody, dammit!

Edited by Fighteer on Apr 9th 2024 at 1:16:19 PM

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

Melody is definitely a weird elephant in the room when it comes to some of the world building in the live action movie universe. It seems like a good compromise would be to make the new containment unit that sends ghosts off to the afterlife. It could even be a good metaphor for releasing animals back into their native habitat instead of the old extermination methods.

On the same note, it does feel like the ghostbusters have become more "superheroes" then exterminators. One thing I liked about the original movie, the video game, and the animated series was that the ghostbusters saved the day but they were also working folks just doing a job until some big event happened that needed their expertise. Outside of the big time gods and demons, most ghosts were more like a rat infestation or wild animal than a supervillain attack.

Edited by Freshwater on Apr 9th 2024 at 10:36:00 AM

I mean, ghosts are not normally a big deal in-universe. It's a retcon they are or making it more Real Ghostbusters.

The only reason ghosts are a big deal in the late 20th century is Gozer and Vigo.

Author of The Rules of Supervillainy, Cthulhu Armageddon, and United States of Monsters.

It's been a while, but I think that even Real Ghostbusters treated normal ghosts as a casual job rather than a big problem. I remember an episode that had the team get annoyed because jobs that should have been super easy paydays were taking longer (it turned out a demonic spirit of Halloween was emerging making the ghost stronger).

Also, the Ghostbusters world's humor has always been the fact it's a humorous take on a Lovecraftian world.

There's ancient evil gods trying to enter the world and kill everything.

The afterlife is maybe an evil hellscape where you become horrifying monsters or semi-intelligent remnants of yourelf.

And the people when faced with this, decide to use it to make money.

Egon would fit fine at Miskatonic University.

Author of The Rules of Supervillainy, Cthulhu Armageddon, and United States of Monsters.

The definition of "ghost" has always been pretty loose. The idea of a ghost in Ghostbusters is that it's a sort of psychic residue, not actually, like, the soul of a living person that would otherwise go to the afterlife if it wasn't here.

That's why, for instance, the Scoleri Brothers in GB 2 were able to pop out of slime like that. They're not, like... the slime isn't the afterlife. They were not trapped inside of the slime for eternity until the judge got mad and released them. The slime absorbs and reacts to psychic energy. When the judge started losing his cool in front of a jar of slime, the psychic energy from his anger concentrated into the slime until it all burst out in the form of a psychic echo of these two murderers he put away.

Other types of "ghost" include Slimer, who was never a living person to begin with, and Gozer, an extradimensional deity really straining the definition of catching "ghosts". Vigo the Carpathian was a more traditional type of "spirit lingering beyond death", in that he left behind enough psychic residue attached to his portrait to manifest his personality into it.

This is why the Ghostbusters' key detection tool is a PKE Meter. They're literally scanning for an animate mass of psychokinetic energy, which is what a traditional zap-it-and-trap-it ghost is. Basically, life in this universe leaves behind traces of feelings and ideas like dust and grime, and the Ghostbusters are janitors whose job is to periodically clean that shit out.

They aren't literally imprisoning your grandma and stopping her from going to Heaven or whatever. They're cleaning out the bitter feelings your grandma left behind over the fact that you never visited her.

This is something I don't think either of the revivals, 2016 or Afterlife/Frozen Empire, really understood.

Edited by TobiasDrake on Apr 9th 2024 at 12:15:36 PM

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In Frozen Empire, there's a machine in Winston's lab specifically for extracting "spiritual residue" from objects. So the point isn't lost on the writers, even if it's not really followed up on.

It's just that Melody, by being a bona fide once-living spirit, kind of messes with the system.

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

Wasn't there a TV series that had a plot like that? Someone who could see/communicate with ghosts, and helped them with their unfinished business so they could move on?

I know there's a movie called Hearts & Souls (starring Robert Downey Jr.) that was essentially that, but wasn't there actually a tv series with that plot?

With all the memes about women choosing a bear over a man, Hollywood might wanna get on an 'East of the Sun and West of the Moon' adaptation

I don't know about TV shows, but there are quite a few films whose plots are premised on the idea that ghosts have "unfinished business" and move on once that is completed. Ghost (1990) and The Sixth Sense come to mind, but there are plenty of others.

As I said, I would probably dig Phoebe finding a new calling as a paranormal investigator who tries to help ghosts earn their rest instead of throwing them in prison. Heck, given the franchise's premise, she could bring a scientific approach to the process. "My detector says your unfinished business is tied to that pack of matches."

If the ghosts are mindless or turn out to be really evil, then bust away.

Also, this film tells us in canon that ghosts have a proper place: the spirit plane or the "cosmic universe" or whatever. So isn't holding them in containment sort of interrupting that process? Shouldn't the tech instead be focused on finding a way to send them to that permanent destination?

Edited by Fighteer on Apr 9th 2024 at 2:48:26 PM

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

Something recurring in the franchise is that the paranormal events are not static but seen to escalate in the lead up to key events before retreating. The first film has Winston and Ray discuss biblical implications, the second film said most people wrote off the Gozer incident when things settled down and Afterlife said business died off after the Vigo incident. That idea is not very conducive to The Real Ghostbusters so it was largely ignored there. But Frozen Kingdom is the first film to open with busting ghosts, which indicates ghost sightings have become commonplace again. That, plus throwing the family into being the new team, just didn't mesh with the recurring theme of Peck's "You're frauds and charlatans acting without proper licensing" schtick. With Winston financing a new crew and dedicated research labs you would hope he would be better with the paperwork and zoning laws, but alas.

With Melody she is the first ghost to both look mostly normal and communicate casually with people (the only other ghosts who looked naturally human was Egon in Afterlife and Ray's dream ghost in the first film). With all other ghosts looking like monsters, the effort to make her sympathetic is heavy handed. But going this direction does demand an evolution of Ghostbusting strategies, Ackroyd has long wanted the franchise to visit alternate dimensions and perhaps having them start depositing ghosts back in another realm is one option. The Real Ghostbusters did portray the main containment unit as an endless void where they could wander around and not all ghosts crammed against each other.

Do you not know that in the service one must always choose the lesser of two weevils!

x3

Ghost Whisperer or Medium would be shows I can think of that cover that.

Uh tbf those shows did it in like weirdly opposite manners. As Melinda would just help ghosts pass on but Alison helped send evil ones to hell

Which you know real Ghostbusters and ide also did at times since the only people they catch thir are evil spirits. But they do help in some cases good ones pass on.

"That's right mortal. By channeling my divine rage into power, I have forged a new instrument in which to destroy you."

Yeah, this film brings up a lot of interesting ideas but never really discusses them in depth. You have people bring up laws about child workers, which is a fascinating thing to discuss, but never really discuss them. You have Melody and the idea that ghosts can be good and just want to move on, which brings into question the Ghostbusters tactics, but that is confined to one ghost and even she is barely explored. The idea of freezing to death out of fear is horrifying but then easily undone.

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It really does look like they're freezing in the normal sense of being at low temperature. Nobody looks particularly terrified.

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

Exactly.

I also... don't know if some of these ideas are even appropriate for Ghostbusters. Is this the right franchise for it?

Like, I love the idea of questioning the Ghostbuster's ethics of just tossing ghosts in a place and forgetting about them. But... it does kinda "ruin" Ghostbusters. It fundamentally changes the nature of the franchise. I can also see value in not questioning it because that's not the story they want to tell and not a question they should have ever asked.

I mean not really if only one ghost in a million is good.

And Melody isn't even an example because she was working for Aztec Cthulhu.

Author of The Rules of Supervillainy, Cthulhu Armageddon, and United States of Monsters.

The comics had a plot where Ray fell in love with a woman, she died, and then she just like immediately came back as a ghost and they continued their relationship.

I think the idea is that some ghosts are just traces of psychic energy, but some particularly strong or lucid ghosts may genuinely be the person’s consciousness remaining after death.

Vigo, for instance, was always heavily implied to be the actual guy refusing to move on to the afterlife.

Edited by KnownUnknown on Apr 10th 2024 at 1:53:28 AM

"The difference between reality and fiction is that fiction has to make sense." - Tom Clancy, paraphrasing Mark Twain.

My issue isn't "good" vs. "bad", but "Hey, I'm a conscious rational being and I don't want to be tossed in a drawer for eternity" is maybe more the question here. It feels like it pulls a "Are we the baddies?" on the Ghostbusters. Maybe not to such an extreme degree as the reference origin, but it undermines what I do think is the core fantasy/concept/premise of the franchise- Treating ghosts as little more than a banal problem to be solved by exterminators.

Vigo was apparently a wizard in life so it seems less like being a special ghost and more like being a lich.

Author of The Rules of Supervillainy, Cthulhu Armageddon, and United States of Monsters.