Ghostbusters Blu-Ray Multimedia Bonanza

I finally had a chance to spend some time with the Ghostbusters Blu-Ray that was released last year. If you have not yet picked it up, you should. If you don't have a Blu-Ray player, you can get one dirt cheap now. Here in New York, two popular electronics stores (P.C. Richard & Son and 6th Ave. Electronics) are selling name-brand Blu-Ray players for just under $100 (these are in-store deals only). Players weren't even going for that cheap when I bought mine for $150 from BestBuy back in October. If you want cheaper, you can buy a Blu-Ray drive for your computer for $70. So if you have the money, there's really no excuse not to buy a player.


In lieu of writing a full-on review of the Ghostbusters Blu-Ray, here are a few notes that I made.

* There are too few chapters in the movie. There's only 16 compared to the DVD's 28. Slimer Mode, on the other hand, has too many chapters: 71 of them.

* In regards to all of the grain, it doesn't look too bad on my 22" 1080p HDTV, but it'll probably look much worse on a bigger TV. Still, it doesn't look good. Surely a better print of the movie exists. If the print for the 1999 DVD were this grainy, we would have definitely seen it, even in the standard definition of the DVD images. So why didn't Sony use that print - unless they lost it!

* The GBVG Making Of featurette would have been a great unlockable video on the PC/PS3/X360 copies of the game. It would have been nice for the PC version to have a real unlockable.

* I could have done without all of the "this is archival footage from an old DVD release" that precedes just about all of the old DVD bonus features that's included. Sony didn't put up any such notices on the archival DVD bonus features on their Resident Evil and Resident Evil: Apocalypse Blu-Ray releases (those are the only other Sony Blu-Rays that I have) - and those bonus features look more standard-definition than what's on the Ghostbusters disc.

* If I had to recommend this disc for one reason, and one reason only, it would be Slimer Mode. I was actually quite pleasantly surprised by all of the people they got to sit down for interviews. I wish they would have included some of the full-length interviews as full-screen bonus features.

I also took the time to add a lot of stuff from the Blu-Ray to Spook Central. For starters, I completely updated the GB1 Blu-Ray page. A gallery of scaled-down menu shots are on that page (link in the Multimedia section), and there are four new subpages on which lots of multimedia has been added: Slimer Mode, Ecto-1 featurette, Ecto-1 Restoration Gallery, and Making of Ghostbusters: The Video Game.

Updates have been made to several Cast & Crew pages. Ron Jeremy now has a new headshot showing off his appearance in the film, along with a new HD full frame to go with it. Debbie Gibson has now been properly identified. Thanks to the Blu-Ray, I can clearly see that she wasn't the girl we all thought she was. In fact, if I didn't read that article about her appearance in the film in one of those teen magazines in the early 1990s (and man I wish I remembered which one it was and kept the article), I would never know that she was in the film because you never get a really good look at her face. Remembering that the article mentioned her as having a pink bow in her hair, definitely confirms that I found her this time. I also updated the headshot to a magazine pin-up from the 1980s, as that better reflects what she would have looked like when she did Ghostbusters. Michael C. Gross now has a fun fact on his page with respective multimedia. Each of the following people now have new headshots showing off their roles in the film: Alice Drummond, Cheryl Birchenfield, Christopher Wynkoop, Eda Reiss Merin, Frances E. Nealy, Joe Franklin, Kathryn Janssen, Lenny Del Genio, Michael Ensign, Patty Dworkin, Paul Trafas, Sam Moses, and Timothy Carhart.

Since I don't care for the quality and look for the film print used on the Blu-Ray, I didn't bother recapturing all of the screen captures on the Ghostbusters Multimedia page. However, I did recapture all six magazine covers directly from the Blu-Ray in order to take advantage of the higher resolution picture. You can actually, barely, read the text on the USA Today and New York Post covers. And who knew there was a slight blue drop shadow behind the yellow text at the bottom of the photo on the Time cover. We also now know for a fact that the movie takes place in October 1984. Thanks to an error in the now semi-readable text on the USA Today cover, we can tell that Mike McWillie put the covers together on or around March 6, 1984. The USA Today cover, dated Oct. 8, 1984 lists an obituary for Thin Man actor William Powell, who actually died on March 5, 1984. Mike probably used the actual March 6th USA Today cover as the basis for his mock-up.

All of you deleted scene and Ecto-1 lovers will want to take note of a few new stills that were added to the Fort Detmerring exterior page showing the Ecto-1 pulling up to the fort, which were taken from the Ecto-1 featurette and Slimer Mode. This essentially gives us the car's entire procession from the fort entrance to the guys getting out.

And finally, since I know that someone, somewhere will undoubtedly ask me at sometime how I did the captures from the Blu-Ray, I have put up a very extensive page detailing how I do still and video captures from VHS, DVD, and Blu-Ray. I also compiled some lists detailing where the content on the various digital releases of the various Ghostbusters productions can be found.