Born in 1970, saw it during its original theatrical run, the summer of 1984. I was fourteen, had just finished the eighth grade, I think.
I live in Alabama. While visiting my grandmother in Mississippi, the commercial for it came on television. My younger cousin from Texas had already seen it, and said it only had one funny line in it, when Bill Murray said a guy had no d*ck. So much for the sophistication of an eleven-year-old’s comedy tastebuds, I guess.
This delayed me going to see it for a few weeks. But then I went on a trip to Florida with friends of my Mom. They had two younger children and took me along as a built-in babysitter. (They’d also taken my older sister on a trip like this a few years before, but somehow skipped over my middle sister, which she perceived as an intentional slight, naturally.)
I remember a few things about that trip. There was another family from our town who went down with us. They had two daughters. One was thirteen, a year younger than me, and the older ladies all seemed to think there would be a summer romance. Alas, their matchmaking plans did not come to fruition. We didn’t spend a lot of time with the other family, and when we did there were zero sparks, but I can still remember she and her younger sister with their matching Dorothy Hamill-style haircuts. For one thing, I was newly adjusting to the need to wear glasses, which happened the year before, so it was the first time in my life that the swimsuit-clad girls were in focus, LOL.
I remember drinking a lot of Sprite that summer, because the dermatologist had told me it was better for my complexion than dark colas. To this day, the taste of a cold glass of Sprite carries along contextual memories of that summer.
At a Children’s Palace or similar toystore excursion with the two kids in my alleged care, I bought some Kenner Return of the Jedi toys; I think it was the Ewok Hang Glider and Ewok Catapult. I still have them to this day.
Of my charges, there was a boy just a few years younger than me: he was okay, we had a lot in common, and he behaved himself.
But his younger sister, always a hellion, popped the hotel’s sliding balcony door off its tracks and bent the frame, simply by repeatedly bumping her butt into it, despite being told not to. Thankfully, this happened while the parents were there, and did not reflect on my baby-sitting skills; it was her own folks’ warnings she was defying when she did it.
Sorry if all this scene-setting and connotation is boring you. It was two-thirds of my life ago, so I’m enjoying mentally reconstructing it. I already had to omit a couple of anecdotes because I remembered they were from a different trip (to Memphis TN) a couple of years before.
One night, their folks took us to the movies, and they selected Ghostbusters. Remember that thanks to my cousin’s bad advice, I was expecting it to stink. Haha. It’s funny, two of the biggest film franchises in my life were Star Wars and Ghostbusters, and in both cases I had to be nearly dragged to the theatre to see them.
[With Star Wars, my sisters and I were watching the Donny & Marie show and a Star Wars-themed skit came on. They insisted I would love the real movie, but watching the silly farce on the variety show, I had zero interest. Years later when I credited them with being the ones who introduced me to the movie whose toys I collected for decades, my eldest sister lamented, “And oh what a monster we created!” No doubt if these family friends knew of my Ghostbusters obsession, they would feel the same.]
So there I am, the summer of 84, probably one of the last people in the country to see this cultural phenomenon. Needless to say, I laughed many more times than just at the ‘d*ckless’ joke. I loved it. Thus began a lifelong distrust whenever people volunteer their opinion of a film.
Oddly, we looked the next day for Ghostbusters t-shirts in Florida, but could not find any legitimate offerings, just airbrushed ones. The guys at the airbrush kiosks had created clever stencils to crank them out faster, and were doing big business. If I recall correctly, one guy had added a tail to the Logo Ghost so his stencil was connected better… and no doubt to avoid copyright problems.
So to sum up. I was fourteen, suffering from acne, newly bespectacled, already a movie geek in training. I already loved Aykroyd and Murray since SNL, which my older sisters watched religiously. I’d seen Meatballs edited for television, but probably very little else of their film careers.
I was the perfect age at the perfect time for that movie.
Come to think of it, in a way, the predictions were right. I did fall in love that summer. Just not to the girl with the Dorothy Hamill wedge cut.
Alex
But anyway, we were walking in the store - or was it flipping through Netflix? - when I saw the No-Ghost logo holding up two fingers and I flipped. (Think, ‘There’s a Ghostbusters 2??? Why didn’t you tell me??? Can we watch it, can we watch it can we watch it???’ You can tell about how old I was when this happened.) We ended up getting the DVD gift set that came with both and that’s when I found out about