Ghostbusters (1984)

This week, the Dads continue their 2 Dads 2 Decades march with 1984's Ghostbusters.

Steve has seen Ghostbusters well over a hundred times. He watched it on LaserDisc as a four-year-old, weekly through high school and college, and still has an autographed photo of Murray, Aykroyd, and Ramis hanging on his wall. Nic's history is a little more modest: he saw it young, lost track of it in the no-VCR, no-cable wilderness of his childhood, and circled back in high school when everybody was passing tapes around and quoting lines at each other. Both dads came in hot for this one, and the conversation has the giddy energy of two people who know they're about to have a really good time.

They dig into everything that makes the movie tick: how the practical effects hold up spectacularly because the ghosts actually affect the real world around them (proton blasts carve burning gashes in walls, Slimer eats real food off real plates), why Murray and Aykroyd are both operating at absolute peak here, and the way Dan Aykroyd's fast-talking pseudo-science sounds so confident you just nod along like he was a guy who walked into a building holding a clipboard. There's a deep appreciation for Ray Stantz's dangling cigarette, the eggs frying on Dana's countertop, and the fact that a concert cellist apparently makes enough to afford a corner penthouse on Central Park West. Nic, wearing his CPA hat, is particularly horrified by Louis Tully cheerfully broadcasting his clients' financial details at his own party, a fireable offense dressed up as Rick Moranis being delightful.

The Huey Lewis plagiarism saga gets a full airing, including the detail that Ivan Reitman accidentally planted the song in Ray Parker Jr.'s brain by leaving it as a temp track in early footage. Steve mounts a passionate defense of the "Dr. Venkman, not Mr. Venkman" principle, rooted firmly in being married to a doctor. And there's a solid minute spent reckoning with the fact that Dan Aykroyd apparently wrote himself a ghost blowjob into a PG movie, which is a power move that transcends decades. The dads land firmly on the same side of this one: Ghostbusters holds up, the jokes still hit, the effects (minus one rough patch with the running gargoyles) still work, and the whole thing ends exactly when it should, with marshmallow raining from the sky and Louis Tully asking who does your taxes.