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And back to my Alternate Steves columns, where I look at how technology, politics, and culture could have diverged – told from the perspective of a “me” in those alternate universes. This one is about Ghostbusters and how the elements were there for a Star Wars/Marvel like Cinematic universe. It came from several conversations with friends.
Let’s meet another Steve Savage, a creative consultant for decades, who is currently on a speaking tour about the ups and downs of Cinematic Universes.
INTERVIEWER: . . . and my guest today is Steven Savage, a Creative Consultant and writer. So my first question Steve, is what does a Creative Consultant do?
STEVE: I help out people’s ideas for movies, TV shows, netcasts, and whatever they want to make and provide ideas, troubleshoot problems, or give warnings about bad choices.
INTERVIEWER: How much is just telling people it’s a bad idea?
STEVE: Give me five dollars and I’ll tell you if that question is a bad idea.
INTERVIEWER: (Laughs) I see. So since you’re in the spotlight for Culture Quickies, I wanted to ask you about your latest speaking engagement. You’ve actually given several talks on Ghostbusters. I’m sure my audience wants to know more, and maybe how you get paid to do that.
STEVE: Well we all know there are attempts to reboot the Ghostbusters franchise after it petered out. What I think is important is to understand just how formative it was, because Ghostbusters changed how we view media.
INTERVIEWER: Will you discuss the recent interview with the surviving stars?
STEVE: No, because that speaks for itself and for themselves and their lawyers. Anyway here’s the critical thing – Ghostbusters helped define what we call Cinematic Universes, and it nearly didn’t. It may be in its reboot phase now, but as someone who grew up in the 80s it’s hard to emphasize how formative it was.
Ghostbusters was a science-fiction action comedy with great effects and a fantastic cast. Parts of it have aged terribly, quite frankly, but at the time it was fresh, original, and fun.
Now the thing is what do you do after such a hit? Apparently there was some confusion and things could have gone different ways.
INTERVIEWER: Well there was the cartoon . . .
STEVE: Exactly, and that was part of it. And let’s not forget the cartoon was spectacular, though you can see the leftovers of the confusion. Let’s talk about that.
The rumor is that the execs weren’t quite sure what to do next. You had this big hit movie and you want to do more. But what’s the best way? The story goes that one of them brought up the line in the movie “Ask about our franchise opportunities” and the answer was go bigger.
The Ghostbusters cartoon – and people forget this – originally was a Saturday Morning affair. Some people still thought it was for kids. But the studio was getting a handle on what was going on and moved it to prime-time with a bigger budget and it became a hit.
INTERVIEWER: I know some people say Ghostbusters paved the way for The SImpsons.
STEVE: Well The Simpsons has gone on longer. Anyway, the studio decided to go all in on Ghostbusters with the idea that if you tied things together you’d get synergies. Bringing in some international animators was part of that. When they contacted West End Games to do the Ghostbusters RPG that was a critical one.
The Ghostbusters RPG could have been a shoddy affair, but they went all in. They called in creative consultants – not me, I was too young – and had some simple rules. As noted in Heading West, the idea was to make an RPG that was accessible to everyone, but also made for people into lore and RPGs. The result, let’s be honest, was slick but also easy to play.
INTERVIWER: I still have the lore books.
STEVE: West End turned out to be great at those. Remember how much detail their Star Wars game had? The funny thing being Star Wars inspired what happened to Ghostbusters.
The idea the execs centered around was to create an extended Ghostbusters franchise. Use tentpole movies to bring together properties, but also create stories and media tying into a larger universe. You’d see the movie, watch the show, get the game, but also get novelizations and even stories about other groups of Ghostbusters.
The idea was to have some continuing stories like Star Wars but old serials were also an inspiration – how do you keep people coming back? A lot of people cut their teeth on Ghostbusters – you know the old story we wouldn’t have Babylon 5 without Ghostbusters. We certainly wouldn’t have had X-files or The Hundred Year Chronicles.
INTERVIEWER: I remember how suddenly everything became Ghostbusters.
STEVE: Yes, and honestly it got out of hand since the franchise idea had stuck with the execs.
So you had an animated TV show, but wanted movies. But also wanted a presence, so the idea was to make movies with other Ghostbusters. So the studios carefully engineered other films with the idea of tying them together, fortunately they hit on a model that worked – for awhile.
The idea was that you find a group of actors and writers who can pull it off – within constraints. There were actually rules for how to do a Ghostbusters film. This all fed back to a central group that was trying to arrange a cinematic continuity. What we called a Cinematic Universe now.
Star Wars gave us a linear set of films. What came out of this was a relative explosion of films, tied together with crossover movies. Each film however was left in the hands of people to do their best – within constraints.
INTERVIEWER: And the other countries . ..
STEVE: Yeah thats where it got weird. Because why not give the rights to do a Ghostbusters show in Canada? In the UK? Have another franchise going! And let’s be entirely real here, more than a few of these “franchise” shows just involved someone repurposing another script or idea.
It also got hard because the cartoon was technically continuity. So people started handing off ideas and side characters to the cartoon. Then the films. But it worked as you had a lot people trying to make it work.
It was also insanely profitable.
INTERVIEWER: But it didn’t last.
STEVE: No, you hit a saturation point, but there was a lot more, which is in my speech. Which I need to plug.
INTERVIEWER: I’ll do it at the end.
STEVE: The problem is that you have many independent films and shows, some of which are good, but you can’t innovate. Everything has to feed into a tentpole movie.
Also it was hard on the original stars and the stars that came later. I mean do you want to keep getting dragged back into these films? Do you want to play second fiddle to an animated interpretation of your character? Plus are you getting your cut properly?
The lawsuits that came out didn’t help, but they didn’t kill Ghostbusters. I honestly think the idea overstayed it’s welcome and couldn’t evolve. If you had some continuing plots, if you made the shared Ghostbusters universe more of a soap opera, it could have gone on. Instead we had that crashout in the 200s..
INTERVIEWER: Oh the numbers . ..
STEVE: Terrible. And the execs panicked, the MMO they planned never happened and everyone cut their losses.
Star Wars, you’ll notice kept going. Even if it seems we’re suddenly a bit saturated with it today. It stayed steady. Which is the final thing I want to talk about.
INTERVIWER: Yeah, the nature of the CInematic Universe.
STEVE: Star Wars had the seed of the idea, but Ghostbusters solidified it. They gave us the idea of tightly linked media properties that weren’t linear or one show after another. Ghostbusters wore itself out, but so many imitated them.
We saw how the comic book movies suddenly wanted to do crossovers – that’s supposedly why Tim Burton quit the second Batman film. Star Trek The Next Generation had it’s short-lived “parallel” show. We also saw plenty of actually good attempts to adapt things or make original works.
Did they work? Well, somewhat. I was pleased about Highguard because it was low-level fantasy and honestly it was a breath of fresh air. DC outsourcing work to Japan to make some animated shows using Legion of Superheroes as a kind of “far future” touchstone was clever. But there were a lot of dismal failures, most of which we don’t see because they didn’t get made.
Oh, and there’s what Disney did. Try to retroactively build a cinematic universe. Which is both insane and almost admirable even if all they do is churn out their own fanfic.
I think the issue is that to build a Cinematic universe you need people to be into it. Existing properties may get attention, but also you’re constrained by choices. You need a lot of talent or money to pitch a new idea or to retrofit an old one.
And as always, there’s the exhaustion Ghostbusters experienced. There is nothing permanent here unless, maybe, you go the soap opera model, and I invite you to ask how we’ll that’s going.
INTERVIEWER: Do you think these Cinematic Universes or the reboot make sense?
STEVE: (Pause) Honestly? No. I’ll be frank here, we need more original works and more standalone or tightly bound works. There’s a time to do something and a time to end it. The hope to recreate the Ghostbusters gamble is a risky one and people are leery. There’s a reason we’ve seen that small press and small film explosion, and it’s not just the internet. There’s a reason that Netflix has made bank with their Skunkworks projects.
So before you ask, my advice when I consult is, if someone wants to do a Cinematic Universe of SOME kind, is to think hard. What do you want to do and why should people care and keep caring. Again, the soap opera model.
Not of course that for awhile having everything Ghostbusters wasn’t fun. I wonder if it’s success was one of the reasons I got into Creative Consulting in the first place. People wanted to make their shows work and I knew my nerd stuff.
INTERVIEWER: Well we’re at time, and you can see Steve’s Nerd Stuff this Friday . . .
I’d love to hear what regular readers think. Could Ghostbusters have become a Cinematic Universe before others?
Steven Savage