Ghostbusters/Headscratchers: Difference between revisions

**** "The more humaniod ones appear to actually BE the human that they once were." They may ''appear'' to be, sure. There is no evidence (and certainly not in the films) that they actually ''are''. The films are very much rooted in the modern parapsychological view of spectral activity, which very much refuses to view ghosts as souls. In such views they're more like residue left by living beings than the actual beings themselves.

**** There is one episode that may cover this, Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Ghost. They get called to bust a ghost by a ghost who doesn't realize they died. Comments are made this isn't the first time, and the ghost moves on after their business is finished. I believe the same thing happened in Citizen Ghost when they found the sled.

** The only ghosts that are even based on once-living people in the films are the Scolari brothers, and it's more probable that, given the properties of the pink slime in the courtroom scene, they were a psychic manifestation tied to the judge that sentenced them rather than the brothers' actual souls. Everything else is usually just some kind of violent, inhuman spirit. That ghost from the library is obviously a shape-shifter, so its librarian form could have very well been a mimic of a living person that it just saw the week before.

*** What about the Titanic and its passengers?

*** Most of what the Ghostbusters do is deal with ''unpleasant'' ghosts. If kindly old Aunt Agnes likes to manifest and chat from time to time, there's no real reason to call someone and pay them exorbitant amounts of money to get rid of her.

**** Yeah, you'll notice that we never see them bust Fiorella [[La Guardia]]. All he did was show up and have a long chat with the current mayor. He wasn't into wreaking havoc, and as a result we never hear of him being contested.

* Why don't the Ghostbusters put more research into a permanent way to get rid of ghosts? The Containment Unit has been proven to be a massive liability as every single ghost to get near the firehouse outside a trap tries to take a swipe at it. Seeing as they have demons, evil gods, and who knows how many plain vanilla ghosts just itching to cause Armageddon and able to wait thousands of years for it, you'd think they'd be spend at least a few weekends in trying to find a way to force them into a less fragile plane of existence than ours.

** Quite simple really, by the time the containment unit is forced to explode or open by outside forces the ghost free warranties they've given out have expired. Also it would probably cost a lot more to find a way to shove ghosts into another dimension or otherwise permanently remove them than it would be to simply capture them again(for a fee of course). If the good people of New York were willing to fund that endeavor I'm sure the Ghostbusters would turn a good portion of their research to it. The Ghostbusters are a company like an insurance company, not a charity.

*** In "Robo-Buster", Egon says outright that it's ''not possible'' to destroy ghosts; attempting to do so would merely scatter their PKE energy, and it'll just come back later as something else. That would also explain why the Slimer example above would still be a legitimate concern while still maintaining the premise that only containment is viable; Slimer could be destroyed by the centrifuge, but his PKE energy would just come back again later, and whatever it comes back as would probably no longer have the personality and morality that made Slimer an ally instead of an enemy.

*** [[Anvilicious|Might be they were trying to tell us something.]]

** What bothers me more about it isn't that someone with a grudge can shut the containment unit down, it's the the containment unit isn't a passive system and as such will inevitably, perhaps much later then sooner, but inevitably ''fail on it's own'' without outside tampering. If another "they did it in the cartoon" is still worth some speculative value instead of being a cop-out at this point, they...well, did this in the cartoon with an episode having Egon make a portal to the Netherworld, actually saying that the containment unit would one day run out of space. It didn't go well, but the issue was never brought up again. Of course, the solution to that seems to be quite simple and would effectively be started in any hypothetical spinoff to the game; build another containment unit.

** At least as far as the original films go, long-term safety considerations were likely not taken into account because these are films where [[The Eighties|people who stop dangerous supernatural entities for cash are heroes, private businesses automatically are morally superior to the government, and the EPA is the bad guy]]. Including any indication that Ghostbusters should have felt responsible for the accumulating waste-product of their particular industry would have interfered with the first film's ability to be a rags-to-riches lovesong to good old fashioned capitalism, and second film's ability to be [[Take That|a rehash of one]].

** The Ghostbusters never say in the films that the containment system they currently have has to be a permanent solution, only that SIMPLY shutting it off would be catastrophic. The presence of the word "simply" indicates that they have indeed considered the long term and have a safer alternative should the need arise.

* Has anyone ever considered the fact that, in spite of the happy ending to the second Ghostbusters film, they are probably going to be out of business again within a few months? Think about it. In the first film, the ghosts only start popping up en masse because of Gozer. Once Gozer is banished, the large scale appearance of ghosts ceased, and people were eventually convinced it was some kind of hoax. Then, several years later, we get Vigo, another powerful ghost who, on the verge of ressurecting himself, also causes a huge amount of ghostly activity. With his defeat, surely the ghosts will go away again, and people aren't going to need the Ghostbusters anymore.

** They didn't have a plan at all - they didn't have time. Gozer springs on them without warning: "The next time any of you thinks of anything, the world will end." They reacted the natural way: "Think of nothing! Think of nothing!"

** Yeah, and they don't really blame Ray that much: they panic and take it out on him when he first admits it, but they let it go as soon as they actually see Staypuff on the horizon. One bit of [[Fridge Brilliance]] I love is that, though it catches them by surprise when it happens, Vinz did tell Egon about it. The way he said it just didn't make any sense until later...

*** Now if only we knew what a [[Noodle Incident|large and moving Torg]] was...

*** [[Sluggy Freelance|Isn't he that doof with the lop-eared rabbit?]]

** The thing is, if they all thought of 'nothing', Gozer may have just come in the form of a massive nothing. Say, a giant black hole? With arms and legs?

*** There's a big difference between thinking of 'nothing' as a commodity and thinking of 'nothing' as in not thinking of anything. The latter is what they were trying to do.

**** You guys are taking the expression "think of nothing" too literally. Their plan was not to mentally *select* anything, and that's what Ray semi-accidentally did. When he said, "I couldn't help it; it just popped in there," he's just sort of making excuses. Remember that a moment later he admits that he was *trying* to think of something.

*** When Venkman was explaining the trick, why didn't Gozer come in the shape of a 60 foot J. Edgar Hoover? Surely there is some sort of specific mental process that distinguishes any thinking and choosing. Ergo, Ray must have thought something to the effect of "I choose Mr. Stay-Puft."

*** Venkman didn't imagine a picture of J. Edgar Hoover, he just came up with a random famous person's name to explain the trick. Most likely, Gozer needs you to clearly imagine a form for it to take rather than a name that probably means nothing to it.

**** Great. Now you guys have got me thinking about how it bugs me that they didn't have a giant sock puppet or 300-foot J. Edgar Hoover attack the city!

*** I always just assumed Ray thought of Mr. Stay-Puft instantly, and was pretending he hadn't while everyone else was prattling about Hoover.

* This may be because I'm black, but it bothers me that in many of the "group" shots, Zeddemore is off screen. However, it's not just him. There seems to be a lot of trouble in capturing several characters across the screen.

** I haven't watched the widescreen version in a long while, but I think this might be a pan & scan problem. I noticed on the network TV versions, they do this awkwardly jerking slow pan, or just outright cut out some of the characters. Winston definitely gets chopped off the picture a lot during the Gozer fight, and Peter ends up having conversations with himself sometimes because the pan & scan shot didn't including Ray or Egon.

** Alternatively, the "Return of the Ghostbusters" fan film gives the explanation that Ray theorized that the eyes were literally the "window to the soul" and that a person looking into the trap while it's closing will cause the trap to pull that person's soul into it.

** It's really really bright and could hurt your eyes.

* Why do the ghosts run from the particle beams? Even Gozer avoids them as powerful as it is. Did they know that it could catch them before the ghostbusters did? Just doesn't make sense to me as to why they would run and try to avoid the beams when nothing else has been able to touch them up to this point. Or maybe the Busters are just really, really bad shots after all. The only ghost we see that really doesn't result in massive damage(When beams are involved) in it's capture is Vigo, but they don't really capture him in a trap or anything.

** Why do people duck or run when someone fires a gun at them? Preservation instinct. Presumably, the ghosts ''do'' sense that the beams are in some way harmful or debilitating to them. Regarding the 'Busters being bad shots, to be fair whenever you see them firing the particle beams they're clearly struggling with them; they're obviously not easy to direct or controi.

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[[Category:Ghostbusters]]

[[Category:Headscratchers]]