By now you’ve probably seen the new Ghostbusters trailer. . .and you’ve probably heard what seems like everyone on Earth bashing it. What can I say, some people just don’t like retellings. Or reimaginings. Let’s face it, some people just don’t like AUs period.
AUs – Alternate Universes. What happens when someone sees a story and thinks, ‘You know, that was great, but I wonder what it would be like if the main character was a honey badger? Who fights Nazis! Wouldn’t that be awesome?!’
You are saying to yourself: I do not do that, I have never done that, you are crazy. And to you I say: Picture Indiana Jones as a honey badger. And Marcus as an old European badger. And Sallah as a mongoose. And doesn’t that head Nazi guy already look kind of snake-like? Which of course would totally play in with Indy’s fear of snakes. . .
Ha ha, made you see it! And unfortunately I made me see it too, and now I want it to exist as an actual thing. Somebody get on that.
Anyway, what gets you AUs – the retellings and reimaginings and rebootings – is always ‘what if’. What if things were different? What if the story happened now, or a hundred years ago? What if this character was a man, or that character was a woman, or those two characters over there were gay? What if that one guy didn’t die, or this other guy did? What if that character over there was really evil the whole time, or the supposedly evil character was actually the good guy? AUs can be brilliant explorations of an infinite multiverse, where every step you take changes things just a little bit, and then the ripples go on from there to change more and more things in strange and unexpected ways, endlessly, forever.
Some people, however, absolutely hate AUs. Won’t touch them with a ten-foot pole. Hate it that they exist at all, and hate the people who create them. Some people even go so far as to compare the creators to rapists, and not in a funny way. They want things to stay exactly as they are, untouchable and comfortably familiar. And you know what, that’s fine. There is nothing that says you have to like AUs. Or that you can’t have a sacred cow or three you don’t want reconfigured into a T-Cow 4000. Just don’t be an asshole about it, m’kay? Your sacred cow may be someone else’s epic honey badger, and neither one of you is wrong.
Okay, back to Ghostbusters New. I am a huge fan of the original movie and the cartoon series, and I was not at all open to Dan Akroyd making a third Ghostbusters movie because Ghostbusters II happened and I blame him for that. However, I did my best to watch the trailer for GBNew with an open mind, and I’m glad I did because it looks like it might be a pretty entertaining movie. It’s a genderbent modern-AU retelling of the original Ghostbusters, and to my retelling-experienced eye it looks like they’ve hit a lot of the nails on the head. Good casting, for starters. Kept enough of the feel of the original to have the familiarity there, but tweaked and updated as necessary so the story (and the backstories) would make sense. 
Lots of little callbacks not only to the first movie but also to The Real Ghostbusters. Not to mention, someone will almost certainly make out with the secretary, and if we’re very lucky there’s going to be a tongue-in-cheek Thor reference in there somewhere as a bonus. 😉
I did have one major disappointment with the trailer, however: Because of the way the intro is worded, it sounds like this is a continuation of the original Ghostbusters universe and I was excited about that. What happened to the guys? Why was the firehouse abandoned? Where did all the ghosts go? I was already imagining an elaborate Ghostbusters Expanded Universe in my head. . .and then I found out that the American trailer just has a bad intro (no, for real, Winston wasn’t a scientist – he was an out of work veteran) and GBNew is just a genderbent modern-AU retelling of the original movie.
And you know what? That’s okay too.