Just barely a week since the original Ghostbusters celebrated it’s 30th anniversary, Ghostbusters 2 is celebrating it’s 25th anniversary today. Although it never reaches the heights of the first movie, Ghostbusters 2 is still filled with hilarious one-liners, new gadgets, a Nintendo controlled Statue of Liberty and the most evil painting in movie history. Check out a bunch of fun facts and trivia below.
The movie was heavily influenced by the The Real Ghostbusters cartoon: The cartoon, which debuted in 1986, had been on for three years when Ghostbusters 2 was released. Since it was a massive hit and more kids would be coming to the movie, Ivan Reitman toned down some of the innuendo and frightening aspects of the original. The Ghostbusters all quit smoking and Janine’s look was changed to make her look more like her animated alter-ego. Slimer’s cameo was a direct result of him being a sidekick in the cartoon. After he helps the guys in the climactic battle, Louis Tully was added to the cartoon as an on/off fifth Ghostbuster.
Some scenes that were cut from the first movie were added to 2: The scene where the evil slime makes a woman’s mink coat come alive and attack was originally storyboarded for the first movie but was never used. A TV commerical for the movie featured Louis and Janine in bed getting attacked by a ghost, which was originally supposed to be a Slimer scene in the first movie where he interrupts a honeymooning couple at the Sedgwick Hotel, who then call the manager, who in turn calls the Ghostbusters to investigate.
The term “Proton Pack” is used officially for the first time in this movie: Egon says that the guys should get their Proton Packs when he, Ray and Winston are investigating the subway tunnels.
Peter MacNicol went full on into creating his character: When MacNicol first got the script, his character was a boring art historian named Jason but he came up with the idea with Ivan Reitman for him to be from Carpathia, the same fictional country as Vigo is from. MacNicol created a whole backstory and worked for hours on his accent in his trailer and even created a fictional Carpathian flag, with a snake crushing a man.
There are tons of deleted scenes: From the trailers, there was a scene of Egon using a PKE meter to investigate a floating crystal and dialogue shifted around to different characters or different scenes. Ray was supposed to become possessed by Vigo earlier in the film and drive Ecto-1 like a madman across NYC but the subplot was cut. There was also supposed to be a gag where Peter shows up at Ray’s bookstore to prank him as a weird customer looking for a book after also prank calling the store but it was cut down so that Peter just shows up and acts weird at the store when he first arrives.
There are cameos galore: Bill Murray’s brother Brian Doyle-Murray is the psychiatrist at the mental hospital Ray, Egon and Winston end up at, Cheech Marin is the dock worker who witnesses the arrival of the Titanic, Chloe Webb is a guest on World of the Psychic and Ben Stein is one of the city officials. Ivan Reitman’s son, Jason, is the kid at the birthday party who tells Ray and Winston that his dad told him they were phonies. Max Von Sydow provided the voice of Vigo the Carpathian while actor Wilhelm Von Homburg was the on-screen actor in the role.
The movie could not hold up to the Batman: Ghostbusters 2 was considered a commercial disappointment as it had the ill timing to debut one week before the phennomenon that was Tim Burton’s first Batman movie. Ghostbuster 2 set the record for best three day opening in history but Batman destroyed that record the next weekend and went on to become the number one movie of 1989. Ghostbusters 2 had to settle for seventh place overall for that year. Bill Murray was especially disappointed by the movie saying that, “it was a whole lot of slime and not much of us” The movie’s new hit song, On Our Own by Bobby Brown, did hit number one on the Billboard charts though.