Why Answer The Call is a worthy sequel to Ghostbusters 2.

Yeah, ATC is coming up on 2 years old, so I can talk full spoilers about it now.

I've wanted to rant this for awhile, but the Trump election and its fallout, and the scandal shit we find out every single day has really clarified it in my mind.
So, I'm glad I let the rant age for awhile.

First of all, thanks to the multiverse of the comics, ATC is indeed Ghostbusters 3.

That out of the way, this will be about why it's a worthy and proper sequel to GB2.
Why GB2 specifically?
I'll get into that.
Here we go.

Okay first, here's a quickie spoiler recap of GB2.

A river of pink slime is forming under New York, and the slime is both a condesation of angry negative vibes, and grows when exposed to more angry negative vibes.
It's a psychic pollution.
If you're exposed to it, it makes you mean and nasty, and even violent, and then you feed more negativity into the slime river, and the cycle spirals.

Drawing on and focusing this energy, is a possesed painting of Vigo The Carpathian.
He's like a horcrux of the original Vigo.
Who's heavily based on Vlad The Impaler.
And the actor who portrayed him was a rapist.
But he's dead now.
So, when you watch the flick now, you get extra joy in seeing him destroyed.

The Ghostbusters gradually figure out the stuff between the slime and Vigo, learn how to change the polarity of the slime to positive, make backpacks that spray it, and use a mix of it, and classic proton beams, and beat Vigo.
Also, they make the Statue Of Liberty walk.
That's a thing.

Along the way, there's a side plot about Dana's baby, Oscar, another side plot about Vigo's flunkie, Janosz, and a side-side plot about Janine fucking Lewis.

All of this is tied up with the bow of Bobby Brown's "on our own", and laughter and joy is had by all.


Now, ATC.

In the broadest sketchiest strokes, it's the skeleton of the first  one.

Our characters come together, form the Ghostbusters, the powers of the big-bad gradually build, and they fight him at the end, and save the Earth from doomsday.

But with two important twists.

First, the villain is a human, and that human has used co-opted Ghostbusters technology to open a porthole to the spirit realm, and summon the ghosts to end the world.
So, he's an evil reverse-Ghostbuster.

Second, and this is what pissed off anti-feminist fedora wearing basement dwellers to no end, and made blood shoot out of their ears and eye sockets, he's an anti-feminist fedora wearing basement dweller. Minus the fedora. But we just know he has one tucked away somewhere.

Anti-feminist fedora wearing basement dwellers found this to be an unfair insulting stereotype.
Fuck them.
Fuck them with a red rubber dick.
Without lube.

Red pill, Incels, alt-right, they're Rowan through and through.
Rowan's villain rant is right out of the fucking Incel manifesto.

Incels look up to Elliott Roger, they come right out and say so.
You know, that fucking little murderer who felt entitled to pussy, and threw a homicidal tantrum when he couldn't get any, because women didn't like him, because he was a fucking creep.
Well, now he has clones, and they call themselves Incels.
Short for "involuntary celibates".
Oh, goody, the worst people ever have movements now.

This movie predicted the fucking little demons that would crawl out of the sewer once Trump got elected.
I don't think it meant to, but it did.

Rowan is the pink slime from GB2 with a face.

I smile every time the female Ghostbusters literally shoot him in the dick.

Anyway, Rowan commits suicide, comes back as the logo-ghost, grows to Godzilla proportions, the girls shoot him in the dick, throw him into his porthole in reverse, and the whole thing is tied up in the bow of Elle King's "good girls", and laughter and joy is had by all.

Oh, and the gaps are filled in with RGB references as much as actress improv routines.


So, what did the pink slime from GB2 stand for when the film actually came out?
There was no Red Pill/Incel/Alt-Right back in '89, what message was Dan Aykroyd conveying?

In broad terms, it was the negativity our culture was infested with, particularly in New York.
I don't recall Aykroyd ever getting more specific than that.

He always strived to keep the GB films a-political.

But OUTSIDE the films, he's pretty candid politically.

During the press tour for ATC, he came right out, and said that ATC haters were future Trump voters, and among their number were old fat KKK members.
He does not mince words.
Not anymore.

'89, he had to be a little sneakier though.
So, you have to decode it a little.

'89 we were coming to the end of the Reagan years.
And his "it's morning in America", and "the shining city on the hill", shit hadn't exactly happened.
Not for the lower middle working class.
Not for anyone I knew or grew up with.
Yuppies however, had a big old coke orgy.
They always do when the Republicans roll into town.

And New York was still a corrupted polluted nightmare Hell city where you were really likely to be murdered and/or raped.
Since then, to the shocked and awed disbelief of many, New York has been cleaned up, and become managable!
People WANT to go there now!
SANE people, not just hipster assholes who romanticize misery, and want to write a novel about the seedy underbelly of life while they take lots of heroin.

Hey, maybe the Ghostbusters fixed it!! :-D

Anyway, yeah, America had Reagan hangover.
And who else was the poster boy for Reaganism, but Donald fucking Trump?

And oh, lookee here!
Look who's in the music video to "on our own", on the GB2 blu-ray!!

Surpriiiise, surpriiiise!!!

And who was sneering at ATC before anyone else on Twitter?
You fucking guessed it.

The biggest hint in the actual film we get is Aykroyd as Ray calling those bratty kids at the birthday party "ungrateful little yuppie larvae".
Well, what else did those yuppie larvae grow up into but the beasts that besiege us now?
Whether it's the fuckers from "The Wolf Of Wall Street", or Trump's goon squad, or a bottomless blackhole of social media trolls who claim to be Libertarian, but pull the lever for the Elephant every fucking time.

Now, at the time when ATC came out, when all the fevered white-knuckled internet misogyny was going on, I and other GB fans compared the hate to the GB2 slime river.

But as we can now see with just a couple year's distance, GB2 and ATC were forecasting the same exact shit.
Just different facets of it.

I think ATC will be more prophetic and dead-on the further out we get.

The pink slime is the hate, Rowan the Trump voting Incel is the source.
As are Rowan's real life clones.

And their 1989 counterparts were middle class dopes on Reagan burnout that refused to blame it on Reagan burnout.


So, if GB2 and ATC line up as political forecasts, what's GB1 about?
No one really knows.
I mean, there are themes of being a plucky small business owner following your dreams, but they don't really carry through the whole movie.
There are themes of government bureaucracy being inept, but they're only sprinkled in there, not the main focus.

I guess it's just about guys with laser beams fighting ghosts!

Although, GB1 does have a Rowan, but he's offscreen, and only talked about.
Dana's apartment building was built by Ivo Shandor, and he designed it to be a ghost energy attracting machine.
Like Rowan's machines.
And like Rowan, Ivo decided that society was too sick to survive, and its destruction needed to be accellerated.
With ghosts.

In an earlier draft of the GB1 script, Gozer was supposed to manifest as Ivo Shandor, and he was supposed to be played by Paul Reubens (AKA Pee-Wee Herman).

The comics put the Pee-Wee version of Ivo into the arc/graphic-novel called "Mass Hysteria".

Also, we find out in the 2009 video game, co-written by Aykroyd BTW, that the slime from GB2 was made by machines built by Shandor on a sunken artifical lisland that pulled vibes out of the air like the Shandor tower, and concentrated them into the slime, and then pumped it into the New York sewers.

So, Shandor is the secret villain of GB1, GB2, and GBTVG.

So, the whole trilogy has had a human villain.
Gozer and Vigo were just pawns.
And Rowan is a pretender.

Now, I can just hear the crocodile tear laced cries of making the films a partisan axe grinding thing.

Well, sorry, evil in the world is wearing an elephant skin right now, and you have to be blind, deluded, or lying not to admit it.

Maybe some day, it'll wear a donkey skin.
It has before.
Back when Republicans were like Lincoln.
I'll point out if/when it does again in my lifetime.

So, yeah, that's the running theme of at least two of the films as I see it.
If not all three.
I'm drawn to that message, so it helps me enjoy the films even more.

If you agree with me, maybe you'll get more enjoyment too.

Food for thought.
Mull it over.
Enjoy.