Now what would be a real head turner for an ectomobile would be an old AMC Pacer or Gremlin. Or for something newer an Aztec.
I think they should have used a 70s model Ambulance, which are just as common as an 84 and replicated the original car’s rack more closely.
Thought about this the other day - Honda Element would be cool if they wanted to go early 2000s.
I think the make and model are perfect, just the livery (logos/colors) and the gizmos (that horrendous yellow bucket) let it down.
The stock version of that car has a yellow siren thats pretty suitable but it is much more subtle and less clownish.
Love the Ecto-1, love the Ecto-1a, love the reboot Ecto-1.
The Cadillac SS Victoria (1984) is a great choice for the new Ghostbusters’ transportation; I especially like the view from the back Feig posted on Twitter.
All three Ectos are awesome in my opinion and the car is the strongest thing to come out of the reboot set so far.
Ecto-1.. 10/10.
Ecto-1a.. 9/10.
Ecto Reboot…8/10.
I can’t tell if you’re just trolling real hard or not. If not, people are of course entitled to their own opinion. But my goodness…
I kind of doubt he’s trolling. I actually agree with him.
The Ecto-1 is my absolute favorite movie car bar none. The Ecto-1A is a bit more garrish for my taste but not bad. Now I like the new Ecto-1 it has the same spirit of the original while doing its own thing.
Not trolling at all. It’s an awesome design, much better than I expected.
Exactly! I like the fact that the original Ecto-1 is a car from the 50s…I wasn’t alive for that, it seems old-fashioned, cool, and exotic.
The new Ecto-1 is a car from my childhood. It’s an 80s car. I remember seeing cars that looked just like that driving around my hometown when I was a kid. I think it’s amazing that a car from my childhood is the new Ecto-1.
Also just for real world reasons I dont think this team would be able to get a hold of a working 1959 cadillac to use as a vehicle. This works for this team. And Im glad they went with a sort of wacky old car as opposed to a H3 or something.
Ecto 1A is supposed to look ridiculous.
It’s for comedic effect, just as Ecto 1 was.
Disagree with that. It’s not supposed to look “ridiculous”. Maybe a bit overdone and elaborate, but not ridiculous.
In fact, if the new movie has anything that’s “supposed to look ridiculous” it will be a sure sign that the creators don’t understand Ghostbusters and the movie sucks.
A talking ape with a vacuum cleaner is ridiculous.
The REAL Ghostbusters are not.
Yeah I disagree as well. Those cars weren’t built to look “ridiculous” or be comedic. Sure they were supposed to look “man made”, but they certainly weren’t designed to be laughed at. Even as over the top Ecto 1A was, I’m more than positive Ray/Dan had a backstory for every piece of equipment on that car.
So here’s the thing;
Reading about the history of how it was designed, there’s no doubt in my mind that the designer had a meeting with Reitman / Akyroyd to discuss the overall vision and general direction he should go with the car. I can imagine Akyroyd had some specific visual elements he wanted to see in the overall design. Reitman also approved the concepts as they were being developed. Portions of the car were also altered from the approved design during fabrication.
All that being said, any story that Akyroyd may have had for the equipment on the car came after it was designed and delivered. Akyroyd himself didn’t sit there and design the roofrack equipment. He wasn’t looking over the designers shoulder. He didn’t build the car himself. The only reason the Ecto-1 has any cool ‘history’ or technobabble for the equipment is because Akyroyd himself is great and an extremely creative person. Other than that, the equipment is just randomly placed on the car to look cool, just like any visual design.
We went through this very thing with the Proton Packs in the game. Akyroyd basically let us design what we wanted, then we provided screenshots for him and he added the history and technobabble on top of them. It’s how production design works.
The new Ecto-1 has just as much history attached to it’s equipment as the original Ecto-1 did at this phase. It’s up to the story tellers to attach history and story to it all.
That’s actually incorrect. It was very much for comedic effect. The crazy look of the 1A was part of a deleted bit where Venkman wanted to go over the top on new GB company branding. They had new logo, tagline, military-inspired dress blues, crazy merchandise, yadda yadda. Obviously very little of this stuff made it over to the shooting script. It was actually a pretty funny, almost self-deprecating bit.
Skanker-- you’re like the voice of reason in this mad house.
I always try to be.
There’s a big difference in replicating props and designing props from scratch. Even more of a difference when doing it in a production environment.
This is why I roll my eyes when I see comments like, ‘They spent 5 minutes on the design’. That shows ignorance.
The original designs for Ghostbusters are amazing, but they’re no more functional than the new ones. The benefit of the old ones is that they’ve had 30 years of lore put behind them. There are plenty of things on the original packs / car that make absolutely no sense yet its ok to overlook that for some reason.
Makes no sense.
I’ll second that.
I think the most striking difference between the props of the 1984 and 2016 movies comes down to how much money we can assume was or wasn’t used to start the company up.
Ray took out a huge loan to finance the operation. Buying an entire three-story building in Tribeca (let alone the cost of living in New York in general) wasn’t as exorbitant as it would be today. Stantz, Venkman and Spengler apparently had enough start-up cash to acquire vehicle, all of the equipment they’d need, branding and even television air time. We know after the Sedgewick that they were making money hand over fist, but the only indication of that new cashflow is the illuminated sign they hung on the exterior of building. The original team had all of the neat, well polished and handsomely crafted toys they needed from the get-go because they had the start-up capital. We see no prototypes or modifications.
This crew looks much more like a start-up just scraping by and making upgrades as they go along. The patches don’t show up on their coveralls in some photos, suggesting they are a later addition to the uniform.. if they even have uniforms when they begin working with particle accelerators. Ecto-1 gets a new LED lightbar and another piece of hardware added somewhere along the line, as the two-Ectos-on-a-flatbed photo indicates. The sets, props and overall aesthetic make them look low-rent. What makes long-term fans recoil is a style that’s regarded as careless design, but is very clearly a deliberate look integral to the new story of how they got started.
Put another way, the 1984 crew was Ghostbusters, Inc, and the 2016 crew looks like Ghostbusters LLC.
In my opinion ESPECIALLY when you’re talking about a movie, perception almost always supersedes reality. Whether not as much thought or not enough thought was put into the design of the new Ecto-1, is irrelevant. (Again to me and some others), in comparison to the original Ecto-1 and the Ecto 1A, the new car simply looks like it was thrown together last minute by whoever happened to have the most free time on their hands.
Yes, the final visual is all that really matters in any visual media.
You want to know a secret though? Often times, the design work we view as ‘thrown together’ is the one that was worked on the most. It’s the phenomenon of getting too many cooks in one kitchen. Generally when a design has to involve a ton of people, the process is much slower and involves more iteration due to increased feedback. So you end up with the inverse of what everyone suggests.
Bad designs are usually a result of spending TOO much time on them.
One example; i was designing an outfit for a Twi’lek for a Star Wars game. This outfit was pretty critical and thus was passed back and forth internally and with the publisher. I did many iterations and ended up beginning to stray from my original concept. So I threw it away and decided to start fresh with a new design. I had basically ‘overworked’ the design and it looked bland and uninspired.
Well said Skanker good work on the game by the way! You’re statement reminds me of all the design work that went into Doc Brown’s delorean in BTTF. The time travel components were worked on by Ron Cobb and Andy Probert.
VERY well said!