Entertainment
The Funniest Movie Ever Made Was Created By Accident
By Chris Snellgrove
| Published
The ‘80s were filled with plenty of killer comedies, including iconic films like Spaceballs, Goonies, and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. For my money, though, the funniest film of the decade was Ghostbusters, a sci-fi blockbuster with more quotable lines than New York City has spooky spirits.
Later movies tried and failed to bite this earlier film’s style, including future Ghostbusters installments. Ghostbusters II was a decidedly sophomoric sequel that came nowhere close to the original Ghostbusters’ brilliance. Ghostbusters (2016) tried to go all-in on comedic improv, and it became the worst remake in movie history. Meanwhile, Ghostbusters: Afterlife tried to reinvent the franchise as a Spielbergian nostalgia fest rather than a cynical comedy.
Why, though, has it been so impossible for any other film to capture the spirit (so to speak) of what made the first Ghostbusters so awesome? Simple: the chief creators of this movie all had wildly different goals.
Dan Akyroyd wanted to make a more serious horror film, Bill Murray wanted to make a snarky comedy, and director Ivan Reitman wanted to create a high-concept blockbuster. The result is a lightning-in-a-bottle movie whose magic has never and will never be captured onscreen, ever again.
It Started As A Horror Movie
Ghostbusters is arguably the funniest comedy ever made. It didn’t start out that way, though. Dan Akyroyd, who is a big believer in ghosts and the paranormal, wrote an early draft of the movie (then called Ghost Smashers) that was designed as a relatively serious sci-fi piece where our heroes busted ghosts across various planets. In Making Ghostbusters, director Ivan Reitman revealed that this draft didn’t exactly bring the laughs. “Although I could detect a comic attitude, the whole thing was written rather seriously.” On top of that, the movie was designed as a horror movie far more likely to make you scream than smile.
What happened? Reitman wisely encouraged Akyroyd to rewrite the film as a comedy about screwball scientists going into business for themselves, and he brought in Harold Ramis to help with the new draft. The two proved to be quite the team, as Akyroyd was better at coming up with off-the-wall concepts (he insisted on the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man over Reitman’s objections), while Ramis was better at crafting funny dialogue. Meanwhile, Bill Murray had been brought in to replace the late John Belushi. Murray barely looked at the script, but, in a fun twist, technically ended up writing most of the film.
Embracing The Comedy Apocalypse
In 2020, Josh Gad got several original Ghostbusters stars (including Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd, Ernie Hudson, Sigourney Weaver, and Annie Potts) together on a Zoom call, and they revealed some startling secrets about the film. According to Akyroyd, 80 percent of what we see onscreen was a result of improv, and he credits that to one cast member in particular. “When you bring a master comedian and charismatic leading man like Bill Murray into a project, you know there’s gonna be contributions on the writing side.”
In the final film, you can see the obvious tug of war between Akyroyd and Murray’s very different visions for Ghostbusters. Most of the movie is, of course, filled with Murray’s unique brand of snarky, quotable humor. But many of the more serious scenes echo Akyroyd’s desire to create a genuinely scary movie. The librarian’s ghostly jumpscare and Dana Barrett being kidnapped by a monster inside her couch is the stuff of childhood nightmares. To scare the older audience members, the film also includes a somber scene where Ray and Winston speculate that the ever-increasing number of ghosts is a portent of the biblical apocalypse.
Time Tables And Slime Tables
The final ingredient in Ghostbusters’ success was, of course, Ivan Reitman. In addition to directing the film, he helped with writing duties and also bluffed his way through studio negotiations. While pitching, he made up a budget (somewhere between $25-$30 million), choosing a number that was about three times what it cost to make Stripes, his previous comedy starring Bill Murray and Harold Ramis. Columbia Pictures exec Frank Price agreed, but on one condition: no matter what, this film would come out in June, 1984.
Reitman agreed, only realizing while walking out of Price’s office what a seemingly impossible task he had given himself. He had no idea if his arbitrary budget would be enough to bring Ghostbusters to life; he previously estimated that Akyroyd’s original script would have cost over $200 million to make. Furthermore, he had only 13 months to create a film that had no effects studio, no start date, and (most importantly) no finished script. Fortunately, he personally helped finish the script, keeping Akyroyd and Ramis on task by ensuring that the story had clearly defined goals, a memorable villain, and even mechanical explanations for why ghosts were suddenly haunting New York City.
Three Men, Three Visions
The rest is Hollywood history. Reitman met his deadline, and Ghostbusters became a blockbuster success, earning over $370 million at the box office. This success is even more impressive when you consider how everything about filming was rushed, that most of the dialogue was improvised, and that the final story (per Akyroyd and Murray’s competing visions) was a blend of silly and serious. On paper, these are all reasons why Ghostbusters should have been a disaster, but the opposite happened. With several creators trying to craft a completely different film (Akyroyd wanted serious horror, Murray wanted schlubby comedy, and Reitman wanted a high-concept blockbuster), they created a perfect movie.
Incredibly, they did so completely by accident. This is why there has never been a worthy follow-up to Ghostbusters: every subsequent movie has been trying to make a Ghostbusters film, but what made that first film special can’t be easily understood, much less copied. The people who made Ghostbusters were all trying to make different movies, resulting in a strange creative brew that can never truly be replicated. This is why Jason Reitman didn’t even try to recreate the magic of the original film and almost eschewed comedy entirely to transform Ghostbusters: Afterlife into Spielbergian schlock aimed squarely at nostalgic millennials.
While Afterlife has its charms, nothing beats the unflappable cool of the original Ghostbusters. If you’re ready to take a walk (Stay-Puft style) down memory lane, that ‘80s comedy classic is now streaming on Netflix. If you were disappointed by the Stranger Things final season, this is your chance to channel some nerdy nostalgia that actually delivers a satisfying third act. Just don’t try to watch them both at once; you never know what will happen to our dimension if you cross the streams!
Entertainment
The Most Banned Series In America Is About To Blow Up On Netflix
By Jonathan Klotz
| Updated
When someone says they’re an anime fan, it can mean anything. That’s the equivalent of saying “I like watching TV.” Anime is a huge swath of genres, stories, franchises, movies, and shows about anything you can possibly imagine. Who knew a show about giant, naked people would turn out to be one of the best anime of all time? And who would have thought that an anime about an ultrapowerful octopus who destroys the Moon and finds meaning in life working as a teacher for underprivileged children tasked by the Japanese government to kill him before he destroys the planet would be such a touching, thought-provoking, and humorous series?
That’s Assassination Classroom, and with its arrival on Netflix, it’s going to become even more popular. Then again, that also means even more people will judge it for its name, which, coincidentally, plays into one of the themes of your next favorite series.
Assassination Classroom Is Not What It Sounds Like
Assassination Classroom starts off with the mystery of how this strange, yellow creature managed to destroy the Moon. For what purpose? Why is the Earth going to be next? And why does the creature agree to become a teacher for a year, with the instruction that one of his students will be the one to kill him? Finally, why is the creature, named Koro-sensei by his students, so good at the job?
The Junior High students in Class 3-E are the real stars of the series, which quickly reveals itself to be more classroom than assassination. Sure, there’s other assassins that show up periodically, but the real joy of Assassination Classroom is to be found in the comedy of Koro-sensei’s hijinks while imparting real life lessons.
Season 1 follows the basic plot of the students bonding with Koro-sensei and grappling with the idea that, eventually, they will have to kill him. It can be a little slow, and the humor isn’t for everyone, but then Season 2 hits, and the entire series takes off with the speed of a bullet train. By the end, you’ll not only have your own favorite among the students of Class 3-E, but you’ll wish you had Koro-sensei as a teacher.
Assassination Classroom Faces Constant Bans And Boycotts
If Assassination Classroom is an emotional, comedic version of Dead Poet’s Society, then why has it joined a very different type of school anime and been banned in over 50 libraries and school districts across the United States? The name, for one, as Assassination Classroom puts an image in your head that’s technically correct, but there’s so much more to the story than that. Secondly, students having to kill their teacher sounds horrible in a vacuum, but in context, it’s an uplifting journey. Those who pushed for the bans never read the manga, never saw the anime, and, honestly, they likely haven’t read a book since eighth grade.
Now that Assassination Classroom is coming to Netflix in May, you can experience the journey of Koro-sensei and Class 3-E for yourself. Lerche, the animation studio behind the series, isn’t a huge name in anime, but they went on to animate Dangonronpa 3 and Classroom of the Elite, making them the go-to for a very specific anime niche. You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, you’ll be impressed at Lerche’s animation style, and in the end, you’ll wonder how one of the best series of the last decade could be hidden away from those who would enjoy it the most.
Entertainment
Ask.com shuts down after 30 years
Ask.com, originally founded as the Y2K stalwart Ask Jeeves, is officially dead.
“As IAC continues to sharpen its focus, we have made the decision to discontinue our search business, which includes Ask.com. After 25 years of answering the world’s questions, Ask.com officially closed on May 1, 2026,” the homepage now reads.
Ask Jeeves was launched in 1997 by the Berkeley-based duo Garrett Gruener and David Warthen, a year before Google’s now-dominant search engine debuted to the masses. At the time, Ask Jeeves’ natural language processing, combined with its personality-filled voice and branding, made it the go-to web search and answer engine for early internet adopters. The website’s butler mascot, Jeeves, modeled after the P.G. Wodehouse character, made appearances at the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, holding its own against other iconic corporate logos of the early 2000s.
Mashable Trend Report
“Can one man have all the answers?” If he has access to the entire internet, absolutely.
But while many still refer to the site by its 1990s name, Ask.com hasn’t been “Ask Jeeves” for nearly 20 years, with the brand dropping the latter word and its valet logo in 2006. The shift came after a change in ownership, when the brand was transferred to American holding company IAC. In 2009, Ask.com was dubbed the official search engine of NASCAR.
“We are deeply grateful to the brilliant engineers, designers, and teams who built and supported Ask over the decades. And to you — the millions of users who turned to us for answers in a rapidly changing world — thank you for your endless curiosity, your loyalty, and your trust,” Ask.com reads. “Jeeves’ spirit endures.”
Amid an overwhelming shift toward generative AI-powered search engines and a repositioning of AI agents as the future of web browsing, the loss of Ask.com feels like a true end of the early dot-com era. So long Jeeves, hello AI.
Entertainment
How Charisma Carpenter's Horrific Childhood Accident Led Buffy The Vampire Slayer To Nearly Kill Her
By Chris Snellgrove
| Published
One of the earliest events in The Empire Strikes Back is Luke Skywalker being attacked by a Wampa on Hoth. It’s a sobering moment signaling a more serious sequel. Even though Luke saved the entire galaxy in the first Star Wars movie, he got nearly taken out by some local wildlife in the second.
However, that sudden Wampa attack also had an important purpose: it helped provide an in-universe explanation for why our hero’s face looked different. You see, Mark Hamill had gotten into a car accident, and the onscreen attack helped cover up the fact that the Luke Skywalker actor had facial reconstruction surgery.
Using an onscreen incident to explain an actor’s real-life scars is a pretty clever trick. It’s also one that was used in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, though most fans never noticed.
In the episode “Lovers Walk,” Cordelia falls onto a piece of rebar, leaving the character with a nasty scar. A few years back, Cordelia actor Charisma Carpenter revealed that this was a case of art imitating life, as she was impaled by rebar (and subsequently gained her own gnarly scar) at the tender age of five years old!
A Girl Walks Into A Rebar
“Lovers Walk” was a Season 3 episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer that focused on wacky romantic drama. Spike is trying to use a love spell on Drusilla to make his old girlfriend love him again. Resident witch Willow, meanwhile, is having an emotional affair with Xander, despite the fact that she’s dating Oz and he’s dating Cordelia. After they are kidnapped and believe they will die, Willow and Xander share their first kiss; a horrified Cordelia sees this and runs up some stairs in disgust. Unfortunately, the stairs collapse, and she is impaled on some rebar. She survives, but Sunnydale’s ultimate mean girl is left with a major scar.
When “Lovers Walk” first aired, this seemed like nothing more than a classic case of misdirection. The audience is worried about Willow and Xander dying, and the last thing they expect is for would-be rescuer Cordelia to nearly get killed. But in 2019, Charisma Carpenter revealed that she had suffered a very similar injury when she was a small child. In retrospect, it seems that this very specific event may have happened to Cordelia to explain away Carpenter’s real-life scar in case it ever appears onscreen again.
Giving The Fans What They Want
On X, Carpenter responded to a fan who felt bad about scars on their body. “Hey Kiddo, late 2 this tweet but I want U 2 know I get scar shame. I have a thick, wide scar about 4″ on my belly. I was 5 when I was impaled by a rebar,” she wrote. “My scar is a part of my story, but it’s not who I am. It doesn’t define me. It makes me unique. Just like urs makes U unique.”
It’s a fairly touching response, one that shows just how much this Buffy the Vampire Slayer actor cares about her fans. But it also provided us with an answer to a decades-old fan question: in a show filled with vampires, werewolves, and other nasty demons, why the heck was Cordelia injured by something as simple as some rebar? Now we know that, for whatever reason, the Buffy producers wanted to give the character a scar that corresponded to Carpenter’s own injury.
Even though Charisma Carpenter’s scar didn’t make many more prominent appearances onscreen, the producers were likely thinking ahead. Soon, the actor would be one of the leads in the popular Buffy spinoff Angel, and they had no way of knowing if future episodes would require her to show where she is scarred.
Thanks to the rebar incident in “Lovers Walk,” they didn’t have to worry about covering that old injury up. But they might never have thought to do this if nearly two decades earlier, George Lucas hadn’t thought to explain Mark Hamill’s own scars by having his Luke Skywalker character get injured onscreen!
The Most Banned Series In America Is About To Blow Up On Netflix
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