As a fan, I feel served. But I hope there's a tie-in to the recent reboot as well, which I enjoyed more than Ghostbutsers II.
Well there was that in the AMAZING IDW comics! Ghostbusters 101 was fun!
Sadly, apparently to 'consolidate the brand' they pulled the IDW license basically without fanfare last year or so and now all the comics are no longer on sale on Comixology -_- the IDW comics were basically THE sequel people wanted to see!
This leans way too hard on Ghostbusters I for me. Demon dogs, Stay-Puft marshmallows, etc., and the hyper-reverent tone (pretty sure the original was a comedy created by a team of folks coked-up to their eyeballs) all feel like big red flags.
I know a lot of people didn't like the Paul Fieg Ghostbusters reboot, but it least it was a comedy that took an original approach to the core ideas.
At the same time, I totally take your point. It's easy for people to forget how much of a goofy, all-out comedy the original Ghostbusters was. I watched it recently and I was amazed at how short the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man scene was. Which was good! A standard present-day take on that whole sequence would have been five times longer with tons more explosions and CGI acrobatics. In my head the whole movie was way heavier on the action. It's a comedy, through and through!
That was the thing with Paul Fieg: he saw it (Ghostbusters I) only as a comedy. He saw it as an adult and appreciated it on that level, so he just... made a comedy. And in a way, this is also the way the original cast saw the movie when they came back to do Ghostbuster II... and I think it's why it was so disappointing.
But here's the thing... the first movie was enjoyed by kids for whom ghosts and monsters were scary, the super natural was scary, and the boogey man was still hiding in their closet... and here's this gang of schlub who show you that with enough knowledge and know-how, anyone can face the Darkness and put a stop to it. That impact was important to a whole generation... And that angle was kept for the long running
The Real Ghostbusters cartoon. We don't hear it mention much, but that show, and its toyline, did FAR more to crystallize the Ghostbusters in the public consciousness than the repetitive sequel. Hurray for J Michael Stracinsky (spelling?) I guess.
This movie, to me, speaks far more to what the kids who saw Ghostbusters in the 80s took away from the movie than what Akroyd and Murray did.
I'm not sure how to articulate it well, but basically this movie doesn't want to remake the first movie. Instead of a superficial structural remake like
Ghostbusters: Answer the Call that just took the basic formula of the 'four funny people tell jokes and fight ghost'. It want to remake the IMAGE the first movie left in the mind of kids. It seems like it want to tap into that essence more than into the superficial structure.
In my mind, Ghostbuster as a franchise SHOULD be bigger than just the four dudes from the first movie, and waiting on Murray to accept a script instead of forging ahead without him is why we'll never have Egon on the movie screen again. It was, IMO, a mistake to wait to expand its universe. Ghostbuster can easily, by it's simple premise of 'Supernatural Blue Collar Exterminator" be expanded to happen anywhere in the world, featuring any kind of people you might want, thanks to a very VERY simple concept: Franchising opportunity.
You really think that, after proving ghosts are real to the entirety of New York, Venkman wouldn't start selling Ghostbusters franchises all over the place? Answer the Call could have easily have been about a team in Chicago or New-Orleans or plenty of other city all over the world with a rich History to make into its own character. It's not rocket science!
