Ghostbusters Need Help1

long awaited Ghostbusters 3 is now in pre-production (which is Hollywood-speak for finding actors, money, a studio and a script). But what has taken so long? Considering the massive financial success that accompanied Ghostbusters 1 and 2, you would think producers would have been falling over themselves to jump on that money train as early as 1991. The problem seems to have been coming up with an original idea for the film. After defeating Gozer the Gozerian in the first film and Vigo the Carpathian in Ghostbusters 2, writers have had difficulty coming up with a suitable antagonist for the Busters to bust. Take a look at the following rejected plots and see if you don’t disagree with their decision to cancel each project:

• On a trans-Atlantic cruise Peter Venkman finds love with a poor, deaf but beautiful passenger. He helps train her to become a boxer but she becomes paralysed in a freak buffet line accident. When the ship becomes infested with spirits from the ghost ship Mary Celeste, the Ghostbusters must do battle before the captain (who has gone mad by this point for an unexplained reason, but his madness is crucial to the story) can run the ship into an iceberg.

• Having recently emerged from failed marriages/long term relationships, the Ghostbusters meet at a lakeside retreat to discuss life, love, friendship and the bonds that keep them together.

• Egon Spengler invents a ‘reality’ device that accesses an alternate reality pulling in the four Ghostbusters from another dimension. The new Ghostbusters are identical in every way except for being left-handed and preferring iced tea over cola and must be returned to their world before the Time-Space continuum collapses completely. Kenny Loggins had already signed on to write the title song when the project was scrapped.

• Jesus Christ returns to initiate The Rapture. The Vatican contracts the Ghostbusters to capture and eliminate the Son of God since his reappearance is bad for business. Despite the commitment of Tom Cruise to play Jesus, the movie was cancelled after massive protests from the Catholic Church and the SPCA (for some strange reason).

• A giant asteroid entirely inhabited by alien ghosts is on a collision course with Earth. The President asks the Ghostbusters to join a team of NASA and Soviet astronauts to destroy the asteroid and save the planet. One week before shooting began, “Armageddon” hit the theatres.

• The Ghostbusters join forces with the animated Ghostbusters (from the TV series) to do battle with villainous ghosts from classic fairy tales. The project was actually moving along well and would have beaten “Who Framed Roger Rabbit” in the live action/animated genre. However, as a result of a bizarre reverse copyright lawsuit, the producers were forced to include characters from the Hanna-Barbara cartoon family. The writers were able to accommodate The Flintstones, the Scooby-Doo gang and Yogi Bear, but the script broke down over the inclusion of Wally Gator, Atom Ant and Grape Ape.

• The daughters of the Ghostbusters are all cheerleaders for the New York Jets. Unaware of their fathers’ former careers, they stumble upon the coveralls and backpacks in the attic of Ray Stantz house. Discovering their heritage, the girls decide to revive the business: cheerleadres by day, sexy Ghostbusters by night. Frankly, this one sounds like a hit to me! Lights, camera action!