Ghostbusters/Headscratchers: Difference between revisions

**** 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.

** All of the above notwithstanding, several episodes involve the Ghostbusters dealing with the actual spirits of several famous dead people (Harry Houdini, Casey Jones, and an [[Expy]] of Agatha Christie) who are causing problems for the living. How do the Ghostbusters get rid of them? Simply by helping them complete their [[Unfinished Business]]. They help Harry Houdini catch the guy who had stolen his tricks, they help Casey Jones prevent a train crash, and they solve Agatha Christie's unfinished mystery novel. The Ghostbusters are effectively "busting" them without needing to use their proton packs or traps.

** 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?

*** [[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.

*** 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.