The Ghostbusters’ Risky Business Plan

It’s been a huge week for Ghostbusters. The movie, having just turned 25 years old, is finally available on Blu-Ray (or could we say “Boo! Ray” even though that’s a bad joke?), and its spirit lives on with the recently-released videogame on every console. I can’t speak for everyone, but I do know of a lot of people my age who had once imagined how cool it would be to be a Ghostbuster.

At the age of nine, I even had an outfit I’d wear on my imaginary adventures. It consisted of a tan spring jacket with a Ghostbusters logo taped to its sleeve. I’d have to draw the logo with marker each time I wanted to dress up in the costume, because sadly the tape would lose its stickiness and the logo would fall off somewhere outside. For a proton pack, I had a backpack. The “gun” part was just an empty tissue box with a paper towel roll taped to the front, the whole thing then wrapped in my dad’s electrical tape to make it look cool. He wasn’t a fan of that, but it was for the greater good. Ghosts had to be caught!

But in pretending to be a Ghostbuster, never once did my friends and I consider the financial problem associated with it. I did have the Sega Master System version of the game, and that involved a heavy asset management portion ““ but I seldom paid attention to such things. All that mattered was stopping that damn marshmallow man from stomping on the buildings when the PK Energy meter turned red.

The folks at Overthinking It, however, have thought about the financial woes of being a Ghostbuster ““ and in great detail. They’ve thought about it so much that it’s almost scary. While I do find the math behind the accounting a little intimidating, it’s still entertaining. If you’re a fan of Ghostbusters, it’s worth a read.