Ghostbusters II - Why were Spengler & Stantz working on slimeblowers?

[Turd Ferguson]

I picked up the Ghostbusters/Ghostbusters II Blu-Ray yesterday (both look AMAZING, btw). Ghostbusters is my all time favorite movie, I've probably seen it at least fifty times. Ghostbusters II, I feel, was a huge letdown, but there was no way they were going to match the brilliance of the first one.

I was watching it, and I noticed after the montage, when Spengler and Stantz are showing Venkman and Zeddemore the dancing toaster, there is a slime blower sitting on the table. Why, at this point in the movie, are they building the slime blowers? We know they use them later on at the Statue of Liberty and against Janosz and Vigo, but why were they blowing slime around at this point in the movie? Was it part of their experimentation with the mood slime? Were they planning on experimenting with using the mood slime to animate larger objects like the Statue of Liberty?

I don't know, it just struck me as odd

 

[Reverend]

Re: Ghostbusters II - Why were Spengler & Stantz working on slimeblowe

Animating Liberty wasn't the only use of the slim blowers. They were also used to break Vigo's hold on Janosz and weaken Vigo himself. IIRC by that point they'd already begun experimenting with "positively" charging the slime, presumably they came up with the slime blower concept as a logical next step....or they already had those things to suck up the slime they were finding all over town and Egon was simply modifying them to work in reverse.

 

[Tosk]

Re: Ghostbusters II - Why were Spengler & Stantz working on slimeblowe

when Spengler and Stantz are showing Venkman and Zeddemore the dancing toaster, there is a slime blower sitting on the table.

Or that's just whatever device they were before being turned into slime-blowers.

 

[Gaith]

Re: Ghostbusters II - Why were Spengler & Stantz working on slimeblowe

Maybe they read the script!

What - what is that? Is that the script?
Did she read the script, too?
​

 

[Trekker4747]

Re: Ghostbusters II - Why were Spengler & Stantz working on slimeblowe

It's probably hard to really say, maybe they had some practical application when it came to catch ghosts that made them work well in conjunction with the proton packs? Maybe they made a surface opaque to a ghost, preventing it from leaving an area or something.

Ray and Egon were sort of nuts, and obsessed with slime so maybe they had no "real" application for the slime-blowers and just thought they'd be neat to build and have.

 

[Reverend]

Re: Ghostbusters II - Why were Spengler & Stantz working on slimeblowe

^Pretty much. Remember that Egon is the type of person who'd attempt the drill a hole through his head just to prove it'd work.

 

[Tosk]

Re: Ghostbusters II - Why were Spengler & Stantz working on slimeblowe

That would've worked if Pete hadn't stopped him.

 

[Kibbin]

Re: Ghostbusters II - Why were Spengler & Stantz working on slimeblowe

Slightly off topic but what features has the dvd of GB2 got, in particular any commentary tracks as my old dvd doesn't. To try and tie what I'm asking into the post isn't it feasible that like most inventions they created it first and found a practical application later.

 

[Trekker4747]

Re: Ghostbusters II - Why were Spengler & Stantz working on slimeblowe

As for a "practical application later", IIRC the cartoon -more or less- took from the second movie to a degree or another even though the cartoon was in it's separate continuity and the movies *we* saw were fictionalized versions of the cartoon characters. (the first movie, at least, existed in The Real Ghostbusters universe as a fictional take/adaptation of the Ghostbuster's origins and first big job.) The cartoon suggests a different sequence of events after the encounter with Gozer (namely, the Ghostbusters repaired their equipment and firehouse and went on as normal, not suffering any legal ramifications of what happened from the end of the first movie) and I'm not sure it's ever made clear how the events with Vigo happened in the cartoon.

Obviously the movie people and the cartoon people weren't working together so that things made sense but at the same time cartoon acknowledged the movies to a degree or two. It's possible the events of Ghostbusters 2 are a hyper-fictionalized and dramatized for the sake of a movie version of what "really" happened with Vigo in the "Real Ghostbusters" universe. (It made more sense in the movie to make them gone out of business than to suggest years of work and other world-saving events.)

Anyway, I don't really recall the slime-blowers being used in the cartoon after GB2's release but it's been a while since I've seen the cartoon, especially that late in it when the cartoon-iness of it was ramped up from the earlier seasons where the show tended to be pretty dark at times.