- Pay Homage to the Original Material
- Connect the New Material to the Original Story
- Set Up a New Generation of Characters
- Introduce a new Threat that is a Call to Action
- Pass the Baton from the Old Generation to the New Generation
- Give the Old Generation a Meaningful Send Off
Ghostbusters Afterlife
Good Morning Friends! I have been flailing around a bit game wise. My brain still wants me to be playing New World, but my frustration levels are to the point where that seems like a very anger filled proposition. Since I don’t have a lot of gaming discussion this morning I thought I would talk a bit about Ghostbusters Afterlife the continuation of the original Ghostbusters movies and by reference I guess the cartoon series. I have some thoughts about the movie but first I think we need to get something out of the way.
There has been a lot of vitriol about the 2016 Ghostbusters reboot, and this post is not going to be bashing that movie. I wrote my thoughts in August of 2016 and was probably less generous than I would be today if I wrote a similar post about it. As that movie has aged I have actually liked it considerably more, especially as I have come to realize that they are completely different products. Ghostbusters 2016 is far more the “Scooby Doo” interpretation of Ghostbusters, and it works and is carried in large part by the phenomenal comedians in each of the roles. I love Scooby Doo and I think Ghostbusters works in this more over the top interpretation.
If the 2016 movie is Scooby Doo, the original movie is more akin to Pop Cthulhu. There are some deeply serious and scary things going on, with some really interesting lore pulled from eldritch tomes of knowledge… that gets watered down by the comedic performances taking place when confronted by what would otherwise be deep horror. The tone is just different and as a kid it made me want to read Tobin’s Spirit Guide, Spates Catalog, and even the Necronomicon. What pulled me in was the universe filled with possibilities and the general cosmology of Ghostbusters, that thankfully was fleshed out and continued in “The Real Ghostbusters” cartoon series on Saturday mornings.
We’ve seen so much necromancy involving trying to resurrect a popular movie series from my childhood… aka the 80s. So many of them fall short of what my general goals for this sort of movie are. Essentially I am looking for it to do the following things: