The South Wing

Thrills, special effects and triumphant underdogs make the 1984’s box office juggernaut Ghostbusters. The comedy about three eccentric New York City parapsychologists turned ghost exterminators turned out to be one of Columbia Pictures’ highest-grossing films to date, fetching over $500 million in the United States and becoming the 31st highest-grossing film of all time.

Ghostbusters‘ popularity led to a 1989 sequel, and as we approach the 25th anniversary of the film’s release on June 8 there are talks of a third sequel in the making. Harold Ramis, who starred in and co-wrote the first two films, has confirmed that a script for a potential third film with Judd Apatow as producer is in progress. Additionally, video game publisher Atari has announced the launch of “Ghostbusters: The Video Game” on June 16. The game coincides with Sony Pictures Home Entertainment’s worldwide debut of the original motion picture on Blu-ray Disc, more evidence of the huge, current interest in this film.

And with reason: Ghostbusters follows a time-tested narrative graph: the failed underdog, the ensuing struggle, a chance to shine, and then–voilà!–it’s hero time. Not only that, it stars the lovable comedic trifecta of Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd and Harold Ramis as former Columbia University professors turned blundering ghost exterminators for hire ridding Manhattan’s buildings of slime-spewing spooks with their fancy contraptions.

But what seems to have worked for this Ivan Reitman-directed film is the idea of these rather unheroic men face supernatural creatures and treat them like a vermin or insect infestation. The equipment used, especially the proton pack, held a mass appeal and spawned numerous plastic toys–as well as three successful animated TV shows. It attracted a wide audience: Ghostbusters has the thrill of an action film without being really scary, hence rendering it safe for consumption by children.

Ghostbusters isn’t just a movie anymore: It’s a franchise. With the sequels, television series, toys and the upcoming video games, it functions as one big inter-referential nexus.
Many fans have approached the flagship film through other avenues. Luis Gonzalez, a voice actor and film enthusiast from Brooklyn in New York City was two years old when the movie released. His first exposure to everything Ghostbusters was the Real Ghostbusters animated series that first started airing in 1986. “It was an immediate hit with me, the idea of trapping ghosts with this strange equipment grabbed my fascination like nothing before it,” he says. He shares how he wanted to be a Ghostbuster much in the same way that other kids dream of being firefighters and recalls ripping out the full-page advert for Ghostbusters II from TV Guide to take it to school the next day. “I believe we each underestimated our passion for Ghostbusters when we all, at the same time, pulled out that folded advert from our pockets to surprise each other.”

Today, a search for the film on the social networking site Facebook yields over 400 searches by way of fan pages. About one-sixth are in languages other than English, indicating the worldwide nature of the film’s popularity.

One wonders what about this logic-bending film, ridden with male chauvinistic dialogue (Murray’s character says of evil monster Zuul: “Let’s show this prehistoric bitch how we do things downtown”) worked back then and still works today. The answer perhaps is in the question itself. Outworldly fantasy fiction when made as slickly as this is, has mostly worked for Hollywood . There is also a sort of mass hysteria in watching a film about the supposed destruction of a city–here, New York–that makes for edge-of-the-seat viewing. And we grow to empathize with the misunderstood, imperfect protagonists in this film; we don’t want them to die in that over the climactic fight sequence with Zuul. For children, it’s fun; and for adults, there is perhaps something freeing about watching ridiculous events unfold–in sequels, on television and in games–again, and again.