| Like most people, I was fortunate enough to have lived part of my life as a very impressionable youth. It was probably attributable to a lot of mitigating factors, like coupling my healthy imagination with a lack of other kids my age to play with. Any way you try to explain it, the product was inevitable--I spent a lot of my time pretending, creating adventures based on other people’s fiction. I was always taking in the stories to which I was exposed and letting my brain pick through them, siphoning out the most enjoyable and fascinating material, only to then try and inject it into my real life.
In 1984, I was seven years old--arguably at the zenith of my impressionable youth phase, my mind a tilled field just waiting to be planted. In retrospect, I might have even been more susceptible to external influence at the time because we had just moved out of my childhood home. For the next year or so, we stayed with my step-grandma as our new house was being built. I started second grade in a new school system, not knowing any other kids. Probably worst of all, my temporary bedroom was formerly that of a girl: I was sleeping in a frilly canopy bed. Yeah, maybe not the best time to be fixed on reality--so I was readily shaped by things that excited me, like pretending I was Alex P. Keaton from Family Ties.
So onto this mass of silly putty was introduced an image that would stay with me for years, even decades. My mom and step-dad took me to see Ghostbusters. I still recall going to see it at the McKinley theatre--it was one of the first movies I really remember seeing in a theatre (the first being, as it is with so many others my age, E.T.). I was awed by the special effects, from the proton packs that the Ghostbusters used to shoot the ghosts, to the enormous Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man that trampled the streets of New York. I also remember laughing at the jokes (the ones that I understood, at any rate), and even though I had no idea who Bill Murray was at the time, I recognized him as being a funny, funny man. Above all, though, I was absolutely petrified with fear from the Terror Dogs, those giant stop-motion beasts that Sigourney Weaver and Rick Moranis turn into at the climax. As brilliant and fun as the movie was, I was a mess for months because of those Terror Dogs--I would refuse to sleep with my closet door open for fear that they would come for me in the night, like the one had come through Sigourney Weaver’s refrigerator. I started sleeping with a cap gun underneath my pillow so I could try to defend myself from them if one should try to attack me, although I knew deep down that a cap gun would be useless. All the same, the presence of even minimal armament was reassuring to me as I lay there awake in the late hours, staring up through the darkness of the room to watch the frills of the blue canopy above me move with the drafts.
Boy was that movie quotable, too. I’m not sure exactly how many times I ended up seeing it during the impressionable years, but I knew the dialogue backwards and forwards, to the point that when the movie aired on network television, I would yell at the TV whenever lines has been edited for content. Bastards. The true verbiage would later live on, though, in the hallways of middle school, when I fell in with a buddy who knew the movie as well as I did. It felt cool to walk around, quoting one-liners.
“Ray, when someone asks you if you’re a god, you say ‘YES!”’
As time went on, other TV shows and movies would grab my interest--I had a Knight Rider phase, a Back to the Future phase, a Return of the Jedi phase--but those proved to be mere ripples on the surface of a persistent love of the Ghostbusters universe. They even developed a great cartoon show that ran for five years, and watching it on Saturday mornings--and then later discovering it in the afternoons in syndication--became a passion. Sure they were cartoons, but every full-length 30-minute episode was a good mix of drama, action, and comedy. And of course there was the swag--I had action figures, I had clothes, I even had (still have, actually, safe in my mother’s basement) the toy proton pack and ghost trap. I used them one year for Halloween. The soundtrack wasn’t omitted from the fun either, and I listened to it with such frequency that one day my mother, in a great “I’ve absolutely had it with this” moment, ripped it out of the car’s tape player and literally threw it out the window, forcing me to make another recording of the LP--which I kept safe from her hands by only playing in my Walkman.
Then came 1989, and with it came Ghostbusters II, which would become the first sequel that I absolutely couldn’t wait to see. (Nowadays this is an established behavior pattern, of course.) I read reviews, I obsessed over blurbs on TV, and not only did I watch, but I also recorded the entire-cast interview on Oprah. I hated watching Oprah.
I of course saw the movie at the first opportunity that I had, and loved every minute of it. I didn’t understand why all the reviews that I read in the paper didn’t like it was much as I did. Nonetheless, I clipped them out whenever I saw them and placed them into a scrapbook, which was filled with other miscellaneous pictures and would eventually be capped with a page-long testament as to why I thought that Ghostbusters was the greatest thing ever, and how I was going to be a parapsychologist when I grew up, so I could be just like Peter Venkman, Egon Spengler, and Ray Stantz. (Okay, maybe not Egon so much -- I knew it wasn’t cool to be that nerdy).
That testament to the Ghostbusters universe is gone now, sadly. I threw out the scrapbook at some time in high school, mostly out of terror that someone would find it and I’d end up being the butt of everyone’s jokes. (Okay, more frequently the butt of everyone’s jokes.) But even after my desire to become a real parapsychologist waned, I was left with a buried curiosity of the unknown and mysterious. Even though I no longer wanted to understand the spirit world in detail, I had come away with a belief that ghosts are real. They were not frightening so much as fascinating, although I say that having never seen conclusive proof of any kind of spectre.
So do I believe in ghosts? Absolutely. A seed that was planted by a movie over 20 years ago grew up inside of me, and even after all of the raw excitement, enthusiasm, and joy have been reaped and spent, I’m still left with, well... a little spirit. Belief in the supernatural is a gateway back to that youthful fascination, that innocent fun of being able to immerse yourself in an imaginary universe, that escape from the dreariness of reality to the excitement of being a badass hero with a proton pack. Adult as I may be now, I’ve discovered that maybe I need it more than ever.
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