Slimer on Coke, Muncher on Zoloft
Ghostbusters’ Slimer embodied the hedonistic greed of the Reagan era. But the reboot’s Muncher is a reflection of our sad and depressed 2020s.
Instead of Slimer, Ghostbuster: Afterlife’s creators have given us Muncher, a blobbish ghost who looks like Gudetama joined the Blue Man Group and became carbuncular with tumors.
On June 7, 1984, the first Ghostbusters movie was released in theaters. A smash hit — it grossed $229,242,989 on a $30,000,000 budget — the film became one of the cultural touchstones of the 1980s, spawning a sequel (which grossed $112,494,738) and two reboots, the second of which will debut in the autumn of 2021.
The sprawling satire stars three protagonists, the most important of which was Dr Peter Venkman. Played by a characteristically sardonic Bill Murray, Venkman was a self-aware fraud, exploiting his academic credentials in a field — paranormal psychology — that he considered a pseudoscience in order to grift Columbia University, flirt with women, and inflict pain and frustration on gullible study participants for his own amusement.
However, his colleagues, doctors Raymond Stantz and Egon Spengler — played respectively by Dan Aykroyd and Harold Ramis (who turned the sow’s ear of Aykroyd’s hard sci-fi version of the Ghostbusters screenplay into a silk purse by rewriting it as a comedy) — were true believers and dedicated scientists.
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