Subtle Secrets of Ghostbusters 2016

I spent a lot of time working with Paul Feig's 2016 parody remake of Ghostbusters (Don't Answer The Call - It's Coming From Inside The House!) for reviews here on Spook Central and multimedia on the Ghostbusters Wiki. In doing so, I discovered a lot of subtle secrets that you may not be aware of. I'm not talking about the obvious Easter Eggs, like the original actor cameos, the Twinkie ad in Times Square, and the other overt pandering...err, references to the original movies. Some of the secrets I will be presenting today may be known to some, but there are a few that I personally discovered.


The cameos from original Ghostbusters actors Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd, Ernie Hudson, Sigourney Weaver, and Annie Potts are quite obvious, but one original actor cameo is rather hidden. When Slimer comes back from his joyride in Ecto-1, he's joined by his twin in drag. Lady Slimer, as she's named in the credits, is voiced by Robin Shelby (formerly Robin Navlyt), the little Spudette (love ya' Doreen) who was inside the Slimer costume in Ghostbusters II.



Slimer also has an interesting voice, one which you already heard in an earlier scene. His grunts were provided by Adam Ray, who was last seen on stage as the lead singer of the Beasts of Mayhem at the rock concert.



Harold Ramis make a cameo appearance in the film as a bronze bust outside of Erin's office at the university, but his family also appears in the film, too. His son Daniel Ramis is the "Metalhead" who comes up behind Rowan and screams, "OZZY ROCKS!", outside the theater. His daughter, Violet Ramis Stiel, and his grandson, Baby Harold, are much harder to find. When the ladies are shown the firehouse by the real estate agent, if you look really carefully on the right side of the screen, you can spy Violet and her baby.


Yeah, even when it's pointed out, they're still hard to see. Thankfully, The World of Ghostbusters featurette contains some B-roll footage from another angle, where they're much more clearly seen.


The man with the backpack that she's talking to is none other than director Paul Feig.



The scene outside the firehouse isn't Paul Feig's only cameo in the film. He was the voice of the hotel manager telling the "weirdo" Rowan that there's a "biblically bad" clogged toilet in room 1843 (clip embedded below), and he's the Thunder Gun Records representative in the "The Singer Gets High" deleted scene (image above).




In the film's epilogue, where the Ghostbusters are now occupying the firehouse, Jillian creates some new equipment. At the point where the "Music Supervision by Erica Weis" credit appears on screen, Abby walks over to the new containment unit, and if you look very closely (an HD copy of the film helps) you'll see the names D. Barrett and V. Clortho on the Recent Ingestations screen. Of course, these are the names of characters from the original Ghostbusters film: Dana Barrett and Vinz Clortho.



An even more subtle Ghostbusters reference occurs when the Ghostbusters look into the portal before attempting to fight Rowan in the streets. One piece of debris swirling around above the portal is a Terror Dog statue. It's a bit hard to see in the final film (look towards the top right at 1:37:33 in the theatrical cut), as you can see in the cropped image above, but is much more easily glimpsed in the MPC Effects Reel video (at 1:27). (Thanks to Matthew Jordan for the find.)



The Ghostbusters encounter a haunted Thanksgiving Day parade from years gone by. The majority of the possessed balloons are based on actual balloons from past Macy's Thanksgiving Day parades. (Thanks to Ghostbusters Wiki for the find.)









During the Times Square dance scene added to the Extended Cut of the film, if you look through the windows in the background (of the building that's supposed to be ABC Studios), you'll see posters for various Sony-produced series: The Goldbergs, The Blacklist, Shark Tank, Dr. Ken, and Better Call Saul (and a duplicate The Goldbergs poster). The Goldbergs has referenced Ghostbusters dozens of times, so it's only fitting that Ghostbusters repays the favor. (Thanks to MrMichaelT for identifying the Saul poster)





After Erin is vomited upon by the ghost of Gertrude Aldridge, she runs out screaming that "GHOSTS ARE REAL!"; a moment that Jillian captures on video. Abby later uploads the video to YouTube under the username "Ghost Busters" (way before the group is given that name by the TV reporter). Now if you watch the "Erin Gets Fired" deleted scene, you'll see that the username for the YouTube account was originally "OlgaKayGames", not "Ghost Busters".


The upload date was still Oct. 24, 2014. The description text that read "Other Games" in the deleted scene became "Other Names" in the final film, and the amount of comments jumped from 29 to 624, but everything else was more or less the same (just cosmetic differences).

The BIG REVELATION!!! is that the "Ghosts Are Real" video is REAL! No, it's not Erin and friends outside the mansion, but there is actually a video with that title and that upload date in the OlgaKayGames account at YouTube.com/watch?v=_6A-iFfF4ss with these details:

GHOSTS ARE REAL - P.T. #2
OlgaKayGames
Published on Oct 24, 2014

Please SUBSCRIBE if you are a human
Other Games
NAUGHTY BEAR

You can expand the description to see that there's a link to her review of Naughty Bear and other video games. I think that the Ghostbusters 2016 crew just did a YouTube search for "Ghosts Are Real", Olga's video was the first that came up, and they simply put their video over hers. For the final film, they went in and redid mostly everything in the graphic (likely for legal reasons), erroneously leaving in her original description (save for changing the "G" to an "N" in Games/Names), which makes no sense out of context.


In the deleted scene, she has 29 comments. As of my visit on November 14, 2016, it was 30. I guess no one has commented on the video in quite a while. By the way, Olga's original video is a review/preview of the game demo "P.T." (an interactive teaser for the canceled game "Silent Hills"). When I first found it, I thought it was "Part 2" and was looking for "Part 1" :-)

The 7 minute 5 second long video is nothing of any real significance. Olga comments while she stalks two hallways in an empty apartment in the game. She's freaking out by all of the scary sounds, though nothing really scary happens. Two brief, barely there, ghosts are "seen" at the end. One when she zooms in on a teddy bear in the floor (though that might be her character's shadow), and a ghost hand closes a door. That's it. Maybe you just had to be there experiencing it the way she was, because I saw nothing scary about it.

The other really interesting thing about the movie's "Ghosts Are Real" video, is that the background behind Erin in the deleted scene version shows a tented event (a street fair?) being held across the street, while the street is empty in the final video. Either they shot the scene twice, on two completely different days, or they digitally replaced the background.

I will close this overly-long post with both framegrabs of the "Ghosts Are Real" video from the "Erin Gets Fired" deleted scene and the final film. Click on each for the full 1920x800 Blu-ray image.