The movie came out in what for me was the Summer of Movies. I don't think I've ever been to movie theaters as much in one season as I was then. I wasn't working much, and I had enough allowance money to pay for what was then probably about three or four bucks a ticket. A lot of pretty awesome movies came out that summer, and a few crappy ones, but Ghostbusters is the one we all go back to, the one we quote obsessively.
It was one of many projects Dan Ackroyd had conceived for himself and John Belushi before Belushi died. (Another one was Spies Like Us.) Once Bill Murray was signed on, Ackroyd and Harold Ramis (who'd directed Murray in Caddyshack and co-starred with him in Stripes) re-worked the script, with probably a little help from director-producer Ivan Reitman. It was one of the first comedies to use bigger-budget special effects, which were pretty cool in 1984 (and impressive enough for my kids nearly 30 years later).
The story is engaging if completely silly. It probably is of a piece with Reagan-era entertainment, as the left-leaning critics of the old British film magazine Movie maintained, with interdimensional apocalypse standing in for the nuclear one that pop bands were writing about, and a pretty crude, boyish sexism to boot. But of course what matters is the personality of Bill Murray, and the way his cohorts feed off him. After that, it's all about the classic lines:
(i know some of these are from the inferior sequel, but what the hey.)
And of course the most important advice anyone has ever given anyone in the movies:
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