I think this has been brought up before but could not find it. I have two coppies both of them with copy right dates of 94 and they are rated PG-13. I thought the rating was always PG did they change it at one time then change it back?
Ghostbusters and Ghostbusters 2 are both rated PG.
The only thing I can think of is that the VHS you have, the rating was changed for some unknown reason. When Ghostbusters was released in June 1984. There were no PG-13 movies. The PG-13 rating system was actually added in July 1984. When Ghostbusters was released on Beta, VHS and Laserdisc in 1985-1990 they all had the PG rating. The 1996 and 1999 VHS had PG, and all following DVD and Blu-ray had PG.
Do you happen to have a photo of the box or the tape? I haven’t really seen any 92/93/94 releases… but my research does show that they do say PG-13.. which was an error.
I do not have a photo of it with me I will take one this week. At first I thought it was a flee market deal untill i got the second one with the plastic wraper on it still.
Interesting the VHS probably were all like that from 85-95.
i caught it on reddit a few weeks ago. my guess is a printing error.
Kind of strange how they have the tape and the box with two different ratings.
I dug up the 1994 copy I have… the box and tape both say PG-13. I’ll try to grab a pic later tonight.
my 1985 copy has pg on both the box and the tape (obviously), and my columbia tri star family home collection copy (gold clamshell box) has pg on the case and pg-13 on the tape
I too noticed a vhs copy of Ghostbusters 2 in the store with a PG-13 rating on it years ago. The VHS we bought though says PG.
I had a similar experience. My first copy of Ghostbusters 1 & 2 were the 94 editions I believe. Both had a PG-13 rating. I picked up original 85/90 copies of 1 & 2 at the thrift store a few months back- both of those are PG.
I’ve been wondering this back and forth switch myself for years!
Could it have been intentional?
The original 1984 crowd had grown up and they wanted to attract a new audience by making it a PG-13 movie? :lol:
I only just noticed the Australian VHS has parental guidance recommended for 15 years and under:
I believe this is under the old rating system though.
Gosh! They must have really strict restrictions in uk if they don’t want anybody under age 15 to watch the ghostbusters movies without a parent!
Oh man. I could have seen R rated movies when I was 17? I waited until I was 18!
Doing a little online browsing for dates, I come up with the following numbers that help illustrate the points AJ made at the top of this thread…
Ghostbusters premiered June 8, 1984.
The PG-13 rating was not created until July 1, 1984. This occurred because of concerns of extreme violence depicted in two PG films, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (May 23, 1984) and Gremlins (June 8, 1984, released the same date as Ghostbusters). The argument was that they didn’t quite constitute an R, but they were still too much for PG. Steven Spielberg himself, who directed TOD and produced Gremlins, felt there should have been an in-between option.
The first film to receive the new PG-13 rating was The Flamingo Kid, but it sat on shelves for some time before actually being released, so the first released PG-13 film was the original Red Dawn, which opened August 10, 1984.
Two other films received the new rating that summer: Dreamscape (August 15, 1984) and The Woman in Red (August 23, 1984). The Flamingo Kid was pushed back from a summer release to a Christmas release, finally opening December 21, 1984 as the fourth PG-13 film to hit theatres.
So, in its original release, Ghostbusters could never have been a PG-13 film, because it came out three weeks before the MPAA decided to create that rating, and nearly two months before it went into effect.
I’m not sure why movies that came out prior to the creation of a rating would have been subject to reclassification.
All dates in the above history lesson are from online sources, so they may be inaccurate. I actually caught one typo at a History Channel website which gave the release year of Red Dawn as 1983, in the middle of an article on the creation of the PG-13 rating in 1984.
Alex