I just watched Ghostbusters again recently, for possibly the 100th + time, and noticed something I had never noticed before. During the montage towards the middle of the movie (right after they capture Slimer) where their adventures are being reported on by various media, there’s a curious statement. There’s one mention by Casey Kasem while he’s doing the top 40 countdown, saying that “the boys in gray slugged it out with a pesky poltergeist”. I never thought of the uniforms as being gray. To me they look like they are some sort of light tan / light brown color. What’s the story here? Are my eyes just bad? Was the person who wrote Kasem’s line working off an old script?
I immediately thought ‘gray’ as soon as I read the post title. Then I looked online and immediately found a pic where they did indeed look tan (see first pic below). But in another pic they look gray (see second pic below). The first one is shot indoors and they look tan. In the outdoor shot, gray. So I think it’s just a lighting thing, and since outdoor lighting is more natural, I’d say they’re gray.
The actual uniforms were CWU-27 flight suits, and they come in khaki. So maybe it’s lighting, film color reproduction, and the like that make them look more gray in some shots. Because they definitely do look grayish a lot of the time.
Taupe.
Before looking, I thought “Beige”.
Yeah, khaki color.
All different in the cartoon, though:
In the section screencap it is a combination of the outdoor film stock and a filter (to reduce saturation and prevent the white fog from overwhelming the image) that makes the suits look grey and the image have a bluish tint. But the suits are definitely a khaki color.
Stranger
I imagine the prop folks also applied dust and whatever pretty liberally in many shots, and that can make clothing look gray/dirt colored.
There are generally multiple versions of a suit or outfit that is used in action scenes with any dirt or stains actually being dyed or painted into the fabric (and tears and other damage pre-applied) to maintain continuity between shots. There are also sometimes differences in color for different types of shots, but from the screen cap above it is clear that the overall image is biased toward blue tones which would make a khaki fabric appear to be gray.
Stranger
I found this information through Google research:
" The original Ghostbusters uniforms in the first movie were a khaki color. While the uniforms appear slightly grey in the film due to lighting and film stock, they were clearly khaki in real life and in production stills. The uniforms were CWU-27/P style flight suits."