Busting a Cap

Do you remember Ghostbusters? Of course you do. If you don’t remember Ghostbusters you are probably too young to know the meaning of the word ‘Atari’, or so old you are still chewing the remnants of your last meal while battling with the complexity of double-clicking and learning the plural of the word ‘mouse’.

Pretentiousness aside Ghostbusters was/is cool. Ghostbusters did for Bill Murray what The Royal Tenenbaums did for Wes Anderson. What’s not to like? You have a racially-diverse bunch of geeks running around with car exhausts strapped to backpacks trapping the remnants of people that died (while learning to double-click).

More than that, Ghostbusters (along with Napoleon Dynamite) taught us that geeks can be cool. They don’t simply have to offer themselves up to clichés involving lunch-money and good-looking girls that finally come around in the end. They can bust ghosts while wildly steering a stretched hearse / limousine through the streets of New York. The only difference between the previous sentence and the Bush Regime is that you can replace the word ‘ghosts’ with ‘ethnic minority.’

Ghostbusters changed ‘geek’, previously synonymous with Rick Moranis, into a word synonymous with Bill Gates and Google. In short Ghostbusters helped the modern world realize that it is cool to be different – particularly if you can make a shitload of money off merchandise and sequels to your original brainchild.