I Ain’t Afraid of No Ghost – But Reboots Kind of Scare Me

October 30, 2014


Me: Guess what, guess what?

Tech Support: (tolerant expression of a man who’s preparing himself for some random factoid from the research for my next book)

Me: They’re making a new Ghostbusters and all the ghostbusters will be women!

Tech Support: (rapturous expression of a man who’s just seen a shiny new tech toy)

Me: What if all the women are the daughters of the original Ghostbusters, and they’re embarrassed by their crazy fathers who never shut up about the good old haunted days?

Tech Support: (who’s a huge fan of Auction Hunters) What if they’re not related at all, but they bought an old storage locker and Ecto 1 was inside?

Us: That would be SO AWESOME.

Egon Spengler

Egon is skeptical of reboots, too.

Then we found out that the plan is for a full reboot, and we got a little… worried. Granted, sometimes reboots are vast improvements over the original – in this house, we pretend there are no such thing as Batman movies that don’t start Christian Bale. But sometimes reboots come off as exactly what they are – sloppy disasters perpetrated by people who would rather cash in on an existing franchise than do the real work of creating a great story (I’m looking at you, The Amazing Spiderman 2).

The problem with a reboot is that it’s very difficult to avoid making comparisons to the original, and in the case of a movie that defined my childhood*, and that I rewatch every Halloween because it’s still utterly awesome, anything that might tarnish those memories makes me nervous. There’s so much potential for greatness here, and so much potential for epic fail.

What about you? Does a new Ghostbusters have you excited or terrified? Who would you like to see in the roles? For my part, I’m voting for either Janeane Garofalo or Emma Stone as Egon – they’ve both got the intelligence and the dry wit to pull it off. 

* I was 6 when we saw it in theatres – my 3-year-old brother was so scared by the library scene, he disappeared under his security blanket and we found him sound asleep there when it was over.



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