Early drafts of the Ghostbusters screenplay even included explicit references to these movies, underscoring that its core premise was an homage to those classic comedies.
Columbia Pictures
And the ghostbusting concept goes back even farther than that; there was also the 1937 Disney cartoon Lonesome Ghosts, in which Mickey, Goofy, and Donald Duck are professional “Ghost Exterminators.” While never officially cited as an influence, it’s hard to imagine that it wasn’t. The bulk of the short in which the trio split up and explore an abandoned house isn’t wholly dissimilar from the hotel scene in Ghostbusters, not to mention that both stories end up with the heroes slathered in white goo: floury molasses and marshmallow, respectively.
Disney
Columbia Pictures
And then there’s this …
Disney
The story of how Aykroyd got the idea for Ghostbusters isn’t so dissimilar from the plot of Afterlife either; he discovered some stuff his grandfather had stashed away in an old house. But it wasn’t proton packs and ghost traps; it was “psychic journals and magazines.” So Aykroyd decided to combine his childhood love of ghost comedies with the “real research” of his grandfather’s journals.
There’s nothing wrong with exploring nostalgia, but importantly, the original Ghostbusters used nostalgia to create something that recalled earlier works in some ways but was distinctly new in most others. They didn’t, say, cast a Bob Hope lookalike or have the Ghostbusters stumble upon Abbott and Costello’s old car.
Many of the best movies of all time have created something new out of nostalgic reverence for old material; George Lucas made Star Wars after he was denied the rights to Flash Gordon, for example. But these days, it seems as though big-budget filmmaking is so locked into a closed circuit of familiar intellectual properties that we rarely get blockbusters that are inspired by the past, only the ones that strive desperately to repeat it.
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Top Image: Sony
Related: Why The Nostalgia Of ‘Cobra Kai’ Actually Works
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Even The Original 'Ghostbusters' Was Fueled By Nostalgia
Source: Pinoy Daily News
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