I just saw ET and Elliot fly over the cityscape yesterday. Now I have to keep an eye on it to see what else they put in there.
Also, the film had to show that Venkman was shocking the guy even if he guessed right. Pete was determined to get rid of the guy and didn’t care about any data. But yeah, Dr. Hornypants was ruining a potentially solid experiment.
You’re assuming the experiment had any purpose other than luring in attractive women. Until the ghosts actually showed up I doubt Venkman was any kind of believer in psychic phenomenons.
In his defense, it was Jennifer Runyon.
What’s amazing to me is that this guy somehow carried the movie. I mean he’s arguably the central protagonist, and whereas most movies try to endear the audience to the protagonist right away, Ghostbusters is like, “get a load of this asshole” - and it works!
I wonder if it had anything to do with tapping into American anti-intellectualism and the feeling that scientists might be full of shit. There are a lot of libertarian messages in there too. I should hate this movie.
But I don’t. It’s one of my favorites.
It’s most because of Murray’s bad boy charm.
And don’t forget he brought Thorazine along on a date.
Bill Murray was, not gonna lie, one of my first ever girlhood crushes. I think I discovered Ghostbusters at about six years old and I remember loving Bill Murray. Him and Eugene Tackleberry from Police Academy. I watched both of those movies on repeat at that age. But I’ve only appreciated Ghostbusters more with time. I’m guessing Police Academy hasn’t really held up…
I’m a huge Back to the Future fan. While I never saw it in the theater when it was released, I watched it on vhs a million times on my 13” CRT tv, from a EP recording off of Showtime.
I finally saw it on the big screen in 2015, and only then realized:
Goldie Wilson is called “Goldie” because he has a gold tooth. 
I think his purpose in the movie was to provide the skepticism and be the foil for the others and the audience identifies with him because of it. Yeah, he didn’t have to be a jerk. But he was a very funny jerk. And he was the guy that Ray and Egon explained everything to.
IMHO it works because when the weird shit hits the fan, Venkman goes along with what the intellectuals recommend instead of doubling down on the “everyman common sense” approach. Sure, he gives Ray a hard time every now and then, but he never thinks that he actually knows better than Ray or Egon*. He comes across as likable due to his willingness to change course rather than being a bullheaded jerk when it’s obvious he’s in over his head.
*At least not when it comes to the technical stuff. He probably thinks he knows better with things like how to deal with the university dean that kicked them off campus.
And when someone asks if you are a god…
This is a very minor one. With the death today of Rob Grant I was reminded that for a while I thought that Red Dwarf was created by a guy named Grant Naylor. Thats what the production company was called. I didn’t pay attention to the credits where it named Rob Grant and Doug Naylor as the writers.
Similar to this on the 1970s TV show Little House on the Prairie the “actress” who plays Carrie Ingalls is credited as Lindsay Sidney Greenbush.
Despite watching it multiple times over past decades it was only this past year I learned the it was twins LIndsay and Sidney Greenbush who played the character and not one actress.
Well, that’s partly on them, because they published their original novels under that as a nom de plume.
You might want to sit down while I tell you about The Expanse and James S.A. Corey…
I thought about mentioning that one too!
For god’s sake, nobody tell him about Monty Python!
Huh, a game I play has an NPC named “Grant Naylor”. I didn’t realize it was meant as a reference.
They did the same thing on Full House for the character of Michelle. She was credited as “Mary-Kate Ashley Olsen” to obfuscate her being played by twins.