♪♫If there's something strange in the Museum...♪♫

...then it must be:

(In case you were wondering, the banner and tag image is a little something I cooked up in Paint a few days ago. It's a representation of the animated Ghostbusters title-card from the beginning of the movie, at the moment before the No-Ghost fully forms.)

2014 marks the thirtieth anniversary of a movie that needs no introduction. 1984's Ghostbusters has rightfully earned its place in the pop-culture pantheon with a tightrope act of smart-aleck laughs and effects-driven scares, an instantly-recognizable theme song, and a cockeyed take on the supernatural that pays homage to (and wittily punctures) earlier movies such as Poltergeist and The Exorcist.

Here at the Millennium Museum, we’re celebrating that anniversary by turning the clock back to 1999 with the 15^th Anniversary DVD.
 

The packaging itself (above) represents a complete departure from all other releases that came before. The plain, black box of old, decorated with the movie's original poster, is out the window; in its place is a splashy new cover with our four heroes in front of New York's skyline, ready for battle. This movie's tagline is their slogan, "We're Ready To Believe You;" the second movie's is "Be Ready To Believe Us."

The disc itself...now, this is where it gets interesting. I do believe that Ghostbusters was one of the first ones to demonstrate what the DVD format was capable of.  Immediately after the old Columbia/Tristar Home Video logo (before Sony Home Entertainment became the standard logo), viewers are presented with a wonderful animated menu based on New York City. Spirits swoop across the screen, Slimer whirls around Gozer's Temple atop 55 Central Park West, and the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man takes a stroll down the street. A virtual camera pans up, down, and across the main map with each selection.

It doesn't stop there: This baby is loaded with extras, from the original “On Call with the Ghostbusters” documentary from '84, to all-new (for 1999) featurettes on cast and crew. The “Visual Effects Featurette” is a particular highlight. There are also trailers for GB I and II; Stripes; and Groundhog Day, as well as a full complement of concept art, special-effects before-and-after comparisons, pop-up production notes (taken from Don Shay's book Making Ghostbusters), and the movie's signature feature, the “Video Commentary,” which marries fully animated Mystery Science Theater 3000-style silhouettes to an audio commentary by Harold Ramis (co-writer and “Egon Spengler”), Ivan Reitman (director), and Joe Medjuck (producer). The video feature can be toggled on and off, and it adds a further dimension to an already highly-entertaining audio commentary. Harold Ramis, who very tragically died earlier this year, proved himself a thoroughly engaging raconteur on this commentary as he shared wonderful behind-the-scenes tidbits (the one where science-fiction legend Isaac Asimov grouched at Dan Aykroyd because the filming tied up traffic springs to mind) and a few digs at costar Bill Murray (never named, but it's obvious who he's talking about). As far as I know, this was one of the only titles to use the "Video Commentary"--even the more recent DVD and Blu-Ray sets eschew the visual part.

As for the movie itself, this is its first mass-market widescreen release. There was a widescreen/letterbox VHS version in the early 90s, but this was hard to come by and only available through specialty stores like Suncoast and Saturday Matinee (ah, the good old days...). The earliest VHS release was horribly cropped for average TV sets, to the point of cutting Egon and Winston out of the picture most of the time and ruining some of the jokes!

The remastering and color-grading is top-notch, with a crystal-clear picture that eliminates the slight “grain” and pale coloring of the earlier release. It's pretty much as one would have seen it in the movies back in 1984. The sound mixing is first-class; the DVD and 15^th Anniversary VHS alike use Surround Sound.

And now, the million-dollar question:
Why do I list it on this blog?

Considering its 1999 release, many of the extra features reference the then-upcoming 2000 celebrations, and on the '99 Featurette, Dan Aykroyd muses that the change from 1999 to 2000 might stir up some thoughtful discussions about Ghostbusters' ideas on the afterlife and things like other dimensions and planes of existence.

One thing is certain: Its fears of apocalypse, especially in the lead-up to the climax, certainly resonated. In those scenes, people of all religious faiths—Jewish, Christian, Muslim, Buddhist, every faith—gathered in droves to pray for the safety of this world. All the differences between the faiths were, for a moment, secondary to the doom surrounding them. That sense of unity is what the Millennium Dream is all about, the idea that the individual groups of people that comprise humanity can focus more on what makes them alike and less on what makes them different. (During the commentary, Harold Ramis proves himself more down-to-earth about the whole thing: “All that money spent on DVDs for nothing,” he wisecracks.)

As an aside, it's worth pointing out that the front cover displays the two towers of the World Trade Center. To think that such an icon of the modern world would be erased from the landscape just one year after the dawn of a new century...This release of Ghostbusters is a testament to the innocence of 1984 and 1999 alike.