Things You May Have Missed in Ghostbusters: Afterlife - Walmart Revelations

As a result of doing 1,550 Blu-ray framegrabs from Ghostbusters: Afterlife for the Spook Central VIPs, with some extra movie framegrabs and behind-the-scenes images for the Spook Central Facebook page, I became intimately familiar with the movie on a shot-by-shot and frame-by-frame basis. This familiarity has lead me to discover things about the movie that you may have missed from a normal viewing, and thus I am writing a series of articles to present these discoveries to you.

It should be noted that, for the most part, these "Things You May Have Missed in Ghostbusters: Afterlife" articles will not discuss the myriad of references and Easter eggs in the movie, most of which are illustrated in the "We Got One! Easter Eggs Revealed" featurette on the Blu-ray release. Also, it probably doesn't need to be said at this point, but just in case some of you still have not seen the film, let's just say SPOILER WARNING if you read any further. Finally, all images can be clicked on for the original Blu-ray framegrab. Now that all of that is out of the way, let's get to it...

At 1:13:21 - Gary Grooberson (Paul Rudd) goes shopping in the local Walmart store for a little Baskin-Robbins Jamoca ice cream with Blue Velvet topping. The first shot of him in the store reveals quite a few things. (I originally revealed these back in January on the Spook Central Facebook page, but it's time to do this properly.)


Let's take a better look at the left side of the shot. I circled two areas of interest.


Showing that Ghostbusters: Afterlife is unexpectedly meta, in the left-most area is some signage inside the store advertising a "Slime Time" shirt bearing an obvious Ghostbusters No Ghost logo for $7.97. While the Ghostbusters DO exist in this movie's universe, we were lead to believe that people (in general) had forgotten all about them in the past few decades. I guess they didn't really forget if Ghostbusters shirts are still being sold to the public.


Although the film takes place in Oklahoma, United States, it was filmed in Canada. This scene, specifically, was filmed in the Walmart "Deerfoot City Supercentre" store (Store #3013) at 1110 57 Avenue NE in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. There are two details in this part of the shot that reveal the Canadian origins. First, a sign partially obscured in the background reads "Vision Centre", which is where the optometry department is. A Walmart in Oklahoma would have spelled it "Vision Center".


You will also notice the Walmart price signs are yellow text on a red background. That is the color scheme for Canadian Walmart stores. In the United States, it's white text on a black background with a blue header.


I bet you didn't realize there was so much revealed in just this one shot.

Join me next time as I look at more Things You May Have Missed in Ghostbusters: Afterlife.