This is why I don’t impale marshmallows over a fire.
Welcome to another melodious Monday, the day that honors only the finest in yesteryear’s forgotten ear pollution. That means it’s time to unseal the vault that contains all of the ghosts of pop music past on another slimy edition of the Dusty Vinyl Archive! Our gatekeeper and keymaster of lost songs, DJ Scratchy, has got her proton pack ones and twos strapped on and is teaching the Sponkies how not to cross the earworms. OK… the light is green, so the trap is clean…
Someone in Hollywood recently decided that it would be a nifty idea to remake reboot the classic 1984 film Ghostbusters with an all female team of eco-hunters rather than a bunch of comedy sketch show alumni. Desecrating a classic is never a good idea, though this is not the first time the franchise has had to endure studio cash cow blasphemy. In 1989, we were treated to a horrendous sequel to the stand-alone original… aptly named Ghostbusters II. To make this seem legitimate, they even monkeyed with the original logo that made the red slashed circle a staple of 80’s pop culture…
Not even soft serve ice cream headed ghost was safe from this abomination…
But as we saw in a DVA post last month, sometimes shitty sequels can be redeemed by the artists who are forced to work on the soundtrack. I don’t know why, but for some reason sequels seem to generate pop hits that blow away what appeared in the original film. Ray Parker, Jr.’s cribbing off Huey Lewis is a fine song, don’t get me wrong. It never gets old, and the totally tubular neon in the music video will always be cool…
I’d call the cops too if I were treated to that scene…
But five years after Ray Ray took the original Ghostbusters theme to the top of the charts, the kid who was cooling it then in New Edition would take Mr. Raydio Man to school. Bobby Brown, fresh off the smashing success of his solo debut Don’t Be Cruel that put New Jack Swing in the mainstream, made all of the torture that was GB2 totally worth it by contributing the main theme to the movie, “On Our Own”
Dance! You know it…
Not only is this a great song (it hit the runner up spot on the Hot 100) that seems to get buried today under Bobby’s earlier hits, but an excellent music video to accompany it that ALL movie montage videos should learn from. Don’t overdub the annoying audio from the damn movie over the music and give plenty of attention to the artist actually singing the song. Oh, and in a tribute to the original Ghostbusters video, there were plenty of celebrity cameos… including…
Alright… what joker put the YUGE black man on the side of my building?
Unfortunately, this song was pretty much the pinnacle of Bobby’s career as every little step he took after this landed in a pile of possumshit. Not only did he go to hell musically in the 90’s with all his humping around, but he was something less than a good influence on his even more famous wife Whitney Houston. Try to mess with your girl? That’s not legal!
Don’t Be Cruel seems so ironic now, doesn’t it…
I’ll be back to slime you all with another spooky earworm next Monday…
Evil Squirrel's Nest 
At least it’s a decent earworm this week…….had me tappin’ my toes! Something tells me the remake of Ghostbusters will be a giant Ghostflopster so I’ll be passing on that one.
Pam
A lot of flops end up making money though, because I guess people are just bored during the summer. GB2 was one of the more successful films of 1989 despite the fact that the critics panned it and fans of the original hated it…
“My name is Zuul.” 😛
Someone needs to cut back on the acid rock… 😛
Who me? Nah, I don’t do drugs, man…I just have a great memory of one-liners from 80’s flicks…
That video makes me feel so old! I didn’t think of Bobby Brown as being from that long ago until I saw how young the celebrities look.
It doesn’t seem possible that its coming up on 30 years since those days… I think someone yanked a bunch of years out of the calendar between now and then…
I think they must have! 30 years…that really doesn’t seem possible.
I’d completely forgotten there was a Ghostbusters 2. I can’t recall a single scene.
I read through its plot while I was doing this post and it barely seemed familiar, and I know I watched it one time when it came to cable. It was basically the same junk thrown together when the studio demands a sequel that nobody else involved with the film really wants to do…
Garry used to have a suit just like Bobby’s. Same color, too. I think we should bring back lapels. Big ones. And bell bottoms. Let’s hear it for the golden olden days!
Maybe it was Bobby’s once since he’s from the Boston area (or perhaps Bobby picked it up secondhand from Garry). If you saw what Chris Sale of the White Sox did when the team wanted them to wear 1976 throwback uniforms, I think the vote is to NEVER bring back fashions like that…
That was a great song! Like you say, it was pretty much downhill after that.
He was fun while he lasted…
Hahahaha!
LOL! I thought that clip was ROOLY clever when it came out! 😀
I love how well synched the action is with the music. And it’s also one time when I don’t mind seeing The Donald on TV!
Gosh, I’m old! Hahahahaha……
LOL, aren’t we all?
Interesting thing is, I don’t feel it until one of my kids have a birthday! My son just turned 24! Ack! 🙂
Hmm, not my kind of music at all. I had to turn it off halfway through as it was turning me homicidal, and while that might be helpful if i were at home playing Elder Scrolls, as it happens I’m round my friends’ babysitting so that wouldn’t be good at all 😦
No, that would be very hard to cover up. Don’t worry, I’ve got some good old fashioned disco on tap for next week!
Woo-hoo! Stayin’ Alive, Stayin’ Alive, ooh ooh ooh ooh Stayin’ Aliiiiiiive…