Hmm.
It’s about their childhoods??
How? Is the remake of Ghostbusters (with – shudder – women playing the parts formerly played by men oh god I’m frightened) going to cause the original to disappear? Every single copy, including pirated copies, just poof gone like that?
No. So how can it be about anyone’s childhood?
Nobody’s going to arrest all the men and force them to watch the new pussy-based Ghostbusters. Nobody. They can all just ignore it. They can laugh and jeer and call it a chickflick, or Cunthunters, or whatever they want to call it. They can go on remembering the Ghostbusters of their childhoods, the manly man one, the one without all the bitches.
There there. It’s all right. It will be ok.
Manboobz collected some ragey commentary. I stole the meme from him.
The irony. It burns.
Yes, it really us about their childhoods. Which some of them never outgrew, apparently.
I’m trying to imagine any icons of my childhood or youth (which predates Ghostbusters by a decade or two) about which I would get that bent out of shape, were it to be re-imagined with a gender switch. And I can’t.
(Full disclosure: spouse and I only saw GB for the first time a couple of months ago. While it had its moments, overall wasn’t really that great a movie.)
Who, exactly, are the ones making it about themselves here? Feminists, who probably had fuck-all to do with the decision to cast women as the lead roles (except in that feminists have helped redefine the social landscape such that women can be cast in roles other than distressed damsel or eye-candy secretary)? Or is it the man-babies crying that Ghostbusters belongs to THEM and THEM alone, as though not a single woman in this world might consider Ghostbusters a part of her childhood as well?
And I’m not sure I even buy into the adulatory nostalgia as anything more than an excuse to woman-bash. It wasn’t THAT good a movie to begin with, it hasn’t aged particularly well, and I’m not aware of it having achieved any sort of cult status, nor the Star Wars/ET/Raiders reputation as a classic. It’s as if the whole 4Chan/Reddit crew blew a gasket over re-casting Romancing The Stone with Latinos or having a black guy take the lead in Big Trouble In Little China. It’s just not that big a deal, it was a popular movie for a month or two a long time ago — but it’s not as though George Lucas was going to present us with a HETEROSEXUAL relationship between R2D2 and C3PO. I mean, THAT would be heresy.
You know, I enjoyed the original Ghostbusters as a kid. I bet, though, that this reimagined version with women in the roles is probably not going to result in me forgetting the original, or the original being banned. I also enjoyed “Battlestar Galactica” as a kid, but–to be perfectly honest–Starbuck as a woman in the reimagined series, recently, was SO much better than the smarmy original Starbuck.
If you think an all-woman Ghostbusters is going to ruin your childhood, then I sincerely hope that it does – your childhood is broken.
But I was very amused by some of the complaints. I loved this one:
I honestly can’t tell if that was serious or a really clever parody. I suppose it’s not impossible for someone to be that stupid….
invivoMark, I have to believe that was superb parody. Surely no one could possibly manage to express that sentiment seriously.
…
Right?
Movies are remade all the damn time. I guess if the remakes don’t switch the genders of any major characters, nobody’s childhood is retroactively besmirched by cooties. Or something.
I am perpetually amazed by the blinding narcissism and stupidity of MRAs.
Meant to put this in the first comment, but this actually made me laugh out loud. Let’s just say the immediate image was a cross between the Care Bears and a very awkwardly placed proton pack.
Wat?
It’s their childhood? Ghostbusters belongs to them alone? I thought I remembered enjoying the films myself, but apparently this cannot be so, as I have no problem with a different cast. Hell, unless they’re Spengler, Stantz, Zedmore and Venkman, it doesn’t even have to be an alternate universe thing that takes their place, but just another group with the same idea… and even then, they could just be coincidental relatives.
I can’t think of any rational reason to be pissed off about this, and Ghostbusters was my childhood too. Maybe if it’s a bad film, but… they fought a marshmallow man… they made the statue of liberty walk… bad is relative.
my poster:
MEN-CHILDREN
About your childhoods:
They’re over.
Grow the fuck up.
Well, it’s about the same as I absolutely flat-out refuse to watch any of the LotR or Hobbit movies, because OF ALL THE MADE-UP SHIT IN THERE THAT WASN’T IN THE BOOKS!!!!!!1111!!!#!! THAT I READ AS A CHILD AND THAT NOW HAVE BEEN STOLEN FROM ME BY THAT AWFUL PETER JACKSON AND MY CHILDHOOD WILL NEVER BE THE SAME AGAIN!!!11eleventy!!!
Then again, I did watch most of the movies. Haven’t gotten around to the two last Hobbit movies, though; I thought the first one was quite amusing.
See, guys, it isn’t that hard.
Dunno if you saw it yet, but Wikipedia finalized the sanction list for the Gamergate page.
Eudomica Laughing gives a good overview of the people involved (https://eudaimonaiaclaughter.wordpress.com/2015/01/25/247/ . Note that this came out a day or so before the sanctions were finalized, and a couple of her predictions as to who would get what sanctions are wrong). Basically, Gamergate was advocating for 5 long-term feminist editors to be thrown off Wikipedia or otherwise punished for ‘ethics violations’, as well as one admin. Other people on Wikipedia were pushing for sanctions against three long-term editors who were on Gamergate’s side, as well as a couple throwaway Gamergate accounts (So the Guardian article stating that all the Gamergate accounts were throwaways is not true).
The sanction list is here. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case/GamerGate#Remedies . In brief:
* Of the six feminists Gamergate was trying to turf, one (the admin) wasn’t punished at all. Two were scolded and told to behave better next time. Two were given topic bans preventing them from editing Gamergate articles, or any articles about controversies involving feminism and/or sexism. One, Ryulong, was banned from Wikipedia.
(Gamergate has alleged that Ryulong was taking money to push an anti-GamerGate agenda, but it doesn’t appear that the Wiki admins considered those claims credible. Rather, Ryulong was banned because he had a long history of causing problems on Wikipedia and his battleground mentality here was the final straw).
* Of the three long-term Gamergate accounts, all were given the same topic ban as above. Additionally, one was also subjected to a host of other administrative sanctions, such as only being allowed one revert per article per day, and was essentially warned that he’s on his last chance.
* A fourth Gamergate proponent, Loganmac (the guy who runs the Gamergate subReddit KotakuInAction) was also given a topic ban.
* Lastly, it appears that some new accounts were given topic bans.
Eamon/#2:
I’m pretty sure I saw the original in first release, in a theatre. Presumably therefore in my mid-teens. Not sure if that makes this not exactly my childhood or something, or if this is somehow the reason, but as best as I remember, I think I saw it as at best intermittently funny, mostly pretty silly, not really that good. Effects seemed pretty good, by the standards I knew then, that’s about it. Seen bits on TV in passing, since; I’d say it hasn’t aged well, except that it wasn’t really starting from much to lose. So hardly particularly ‘sacred’, anyway. So can’t say I much care either way to hear they’re making a remake, or what else they’re doing.
Anyway/right our wrong, I find myself thinking the people who get this huffy about such things must have awfully untroubled lives, that they can manage to care this much about a throwaway summer popcorn film, never even mind what many of them do seem to reveal thereby about their gender politics.
Remarkably untroubled, even. Hell, I’m almost jealous.
On the bright side: cynical as I generally am about remakes, this one is starting well. To the point that hey, I’m not sure the company need trouble themselves with actually writing nor shooting it. They might as well wrap now, already so far ahead, seems to me…
Insofar as, really, the raging ragers going all head-explody over the casting have been comically entertaining enough, in their own little twisted way, already. So it’s hard to picture the actual film improving upon this much…
It’s a bit like The Interview, come to think of it. The real life drama around it being what it is, you almost feel bad for the filmmakers. However ambitious or not/deft or not is the actual production, it’s got a bit of a hard act to follow.
Soooo…. women didn’t have childhoods then? We were never girls who might have enjoyed the movie?
@12
Well, I do think Peter Jackson did a lousy job of turning LoTR into a movie (I won’t bore you with my reasons), and I did watch the first LoTR movie.
My revenge on Peter Jackson was to not watch any of the other movies. (That’ll learn you, you bad, bad Peter Jackson!)
If these guys hate the idea of remaking GhostDusters with switched genders, they should follow my example and not watch it.
(What “feminists” have to do with all of this I have no idea. I mean, these feministies can’t even get a @#$% ERA passed, you can hardly expect the Gods of Hollywood to pay any attention to them.)
Oh, and this comment (by “L”) is priceless:
“Stop making this about YOU, it’s interfering with our ability to make it about US!” Are these wankers even grown-up enough to be called hypocrites?
Seriously, I LOVED “Ghostbusters” when it came out — it was both hilarious and almost totally new and non-derivative, like someone got this crazy silly idea and ran with it, without letting anyone else inflict their “conventional wisdom” on any of it. It’s not new anymore, of course, so I probably won’t be seeing the new version, or re-watching the old one — but damn, throwing a tantrum about how a remake would take away their childhoods? I really don’t have the words to describe how much sense that doesn’t make, on any level. If you can’t cherish your childhood memories without screaming at other people for remaking a movie, then you need serious help, and screaming at moviemakers won’t give you what you need.
I also enjoyed “Battlestar Galactica” as a kid, but–to be perfectly honest–Starbuck as a woman in the reimagined series, recently, was SO much better than the smarmy original Starbuck.
I always thought of the original series as “CHiPs in Space.” The new version was a pleasant surprise, and much deeper and grittier than anyone could have hoped, given how obviously derivative, shallow, lazy and substance-averse the original material was.
Oh, and from AMM’s cite, here’s a pretty good indicator of these guys’ grasp of reality:
I’m not going to suspend disbelief and say that a gender that will jump on a chair when they see a mouse…
Yep, they really do get their “understanding” of women from stereotypes dating back to the 1950s, if not earlier (like the time when women had to wear floor-length dresses, and therefore rightly feared mice because they could get inside said floor-length dresses and then be an UNSEEN potential rabies threat).
Perhaps these man-babies were too busy watching old cartoons to notice that: a) women have been in actual combat roles recently; and b) other man-babies are complaining about female violence. If you’re even more childish than other MRAs, then, again, you need major help.
It’s worth noting that these guys are explicitly ignoring someone who might very well have some claim to ‘ownership’ of the Ghostbusters franchise–namely, Bill Murray, who not only said he’d be cool with all-female version, but specifically named four actresses who he thought would be good for the parts. Two of those actresses are actually on the current list being linked to the project.
So, not only are they being petulant, whining man-children, but they are also silencing a man to do it. The irony is like a Russian nesting doll–you pop it open and there’s another layer….
Ghostbusters is my favourite movie of all time. It’s also thrilling to see the third movie coming together with all-female leads. Every other male fan I know is pretty excited about this, too.
The Twitter rage that made me laugh the most was the one that called the women cast ugly, as if their looks had any bearing on how funny the movie would be. Because, you know, the original cast were a full flotilla of dreamboats, right?
This quote pretty much winds the thread AMM cited above:
it’s official: MRAs are living in a vintage Tom & Jerry cartoon.
It’s worth noting that these guys are explicitly ignoring someone who might very well have some claim to ‘ownership’ of the Ghostbusters franchise–namely, Bill Murray, who not only said he’d be cool with all-female version, but specifically named four actresses who he thought would be good for the parts. Two of those actresses are actually on the current list being linked to the project.
I’m guessing the MRAs will write off Bill Murray with either the word “mangina” or the phrase “female brain.” That seems to be their standard default excuse for pretending to care about all men, while pathologically hating the huge numbers of men who don’t agree with them.
Remakes of beloved shows almost always fail, but so what? When I heard that Matthew Broderick was going to star in a remake of The Music Man, my thought was, “Why? We already have the amazing Robert Preston movie, what can Broderick possibly do better?” And when it came out, I watched it for about ten minutes and then shut it off. It was not only not better than the Preston one, it was much, much worse. But who cares? Broderick did nothing to harm my memories of the original, in fact he made me appreciate it more.
An all-woman Ghostbuster team might be fun. It might be dreck. Let ’em make it and then we can see it and decide.
I can’t imagine why these wankers think I should give a rat’s ass about their childhoods.