Original Ghostbusters Star Ernie Hudson Says Sony Made a “Mistake” Rebooting the Franchise in 2016

I agree with your entire post 100% but I have to specifically reply to this part: If anything, today's board is positively tame compare to the early years when things were very toxic just in general.

 

Yeah, I've been here since like 2000 or so with some periods of absence (during which my old logins would be deleted in purges). I don't see it any more toxic than before. Remember the fights over Genre Babe of the Week and Hunk of the Week when Genre Babe of the Week became the biggest tag on the forum for years and people starting calling for them to be shut down for years?

Edit:. And the genre babe body parts threads

 

The fan films, however cheesy, actually got something right - the Denver Ghostbusters, with Egon's nephew Ed heading it up, in a totally new city with new members, but completely based in the original universe. It was done with such love and care (and cheese) that its even canon-ajacent, getting a shout-out in an Easter Egg of Ghostbusters - The Video Game.

 

Embracing nostalgia is hardly new. The 1970s started that trend and slowly but increasingly since, and going in different directions. (The 70s with "Grease" was pretty much cashing in on nostalgia of the 1950s and reminding not all families were like the Cleavers...)

Or is adapting old comic books. "Superman" was a risky venture (and Donner nailed it the first time, but while they made it they understandably had trepidation over whether or not mass audiences would embrace and appreciate it.) There's also a lesser known film, which is pretty much a Flash Gordon reboot but with different character names and a couple new creations, but all were using 70s-deco designs - and with flashy laser swords and big space scenes the likes nobody had seen before, called "Star Wars"... the novelty of the effects actually had a big hand, since the movie (a) was never intended to be multi-part (even "Episode IV" was tacked on a couple years later!), (b) they did a ton of editing to tighten up a lot of loose material, and (c) they were worried it wouldn't be popular with general audiences (actual nerd culture wasn't "a thing" yet, just "Star Trek culture" and other franchises followed to create the overall gestalt) as well as not expecting it to be as HUGE as it was (thanks to the effects and tightening up the script, though they could have had nothing more than Luke and Leia do goo-goo eyes at each other with an hour of pew pew effects and would still have raked in zillions. That was one of the oopsies in the "one-off-that-wasn't" as Luke/Leia/Han were originally a love triangle, which was revised during editing (with one kiss left in by accident...) In short, nobody in the industry really knows what will or will not work and later installments tend to gel in a way they didn't think of originally. In the OT, Leia pretending they never did it when she said she always knew is probably a better example of "canon violation", which proves (and rather entertainingly too) this was hardly a new thing as of the 21st century...)

Spoiler: So, about that kiss

(blink and you'll miss it)



(blink and keep 'em closed throughout and you'll miss it)



(oh dear...)

And, of course, obvious fan parodies as a result become a movie unto their own:

Why would one's gender make a difference just for the sake of it?

The improv worked for some people more than others, and of the improv jokes utilized, not all were flops.

^^this

I'd rather see a sequel with them, more properly developed, than a sequel they didn't seem to want to do in the first place but are doing now. If Battlestar Galactica (2004) started badly but just good enough to get a proper series, at which point it was quick to make an impressive turnaround - enough to even bring in Richard Hatch for its second season and in a completely new character he made his own... They crafted that series with some care and improved on it. So it's hardly impossible, they just need to make their own spark.

After all, the hit movie was based on... a live action kid show from 1975 but evolved it with the spark necessary to make it special. So it's not like reboots haven't been done before.

Well, apart from "the multiverse". It's too easy a crutch that everyone's been using - too faddish and an incredibly cheap one at that. (I liked it originally in ST2009, until they did nothing more than skate on catchphrases and flanderzised antics in the truest nostalgiawank, which did more to turn people off after STID that hampered STB as a result, and STB is clearly a better film... the makers made an entirely new universe, so what do they do with it? Regurgitate and juggle old movie content like what the 90s Brady Bunch movies were except those were comedies by intent, and STID was tackling some new issues decently and John Harrison was even a decent villain in his own right before they turned him into (Khan, really??).

 

The movies are not related to the old Ghostbusters TV show. They had to pay the studio that owned to the old show to use the name.

 

A shortcoming of the fanbase, not the movie.

 

I was always so disappointed as a child when the TV guide channel said "Ghostbusters" and when I turned it on there was that damn ape.

 

Oh, tell me about it. As someone who didn't know the history of that show, I was quite taken aback by it. Didn't know it had even been a live-action show until rather recently.

This is a great video about it:

 

(As an addendum, expanding on the trivia - the Easter Egg is a child's drawing on a refrigerator, to Uncle Egon, signed Ed. If the VIdeo Game, which was made with the entire original cast's involvement, is truly part of canon, this arguably makes the fan films, and by extension, Freddy Kruger himself, a part of the overall Ghostbusters Universe.) The Fanfilms being, Freddy Vs Ghostbusters, and the Return of the Ghostbusters, available in all of their cheesiness on youtube.