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297: Ghostbusters Lore is Metal image

297: Ghostbusters Lore is Metal

E297 · PodCast Them Down: Heavy Metal Nerdery
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23 Plays6 months ago

A band could base their entire corpus on the Ghostbusters lore. 👻

#metalpodcast #ghostbusters #metal #deathmetal #blackmetal

PODCAST THEM DOWN - https://linktr.ee/pctd
https://patreon.com/podcastthemdown

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Transcript

Metal Ghostbusters Introduction

00:00:00
Speaker
Tonight on Podcast Them Down, Ghostbusters is metal as fuck! Time. Cast. Them. Down! Ahh, Viggo, the skull joke at Parfia, the sorrow of Moldavia command you. Command me, Lord! On a mountain of skulls in the castle of pain, I sat on a throne of blood.
00:00:29
Speaker
What was will be, what is will be no more Now is the season of evil

Is Ghostbusters Lore Metal?

00:00:40
Speaker
Hail, Metal Nation, it is I, Tim. This is podcasting down. That's Doug. And we are here to, uh, I'm here to try to convince Doug that the war behind Ghostbusters is actually incredibly fucking metal. And we could just stop now because that audio clip from Ghostbusters 2, when the painting is talking to the weird European guy. I can't believe I have to be the heel.
00:01:07
Speaker
Yeah, I'll try. You could just agree with me. Ghostbusters ain't metal. I mean, I don't think it's much of a swing to say that the lore isn't metal. And if it is, prepare to be convinced otherwise.

Ghostbusters Canon Levels

00:01:24
Speaker
But more importantly, I happened across the Ghostbusters wiki.
00:01:31
Speaker
Oh God. So ghostbusters.fantom.com and you're going to really appreciate this. So what they have is different levels of canon. Okay. And they go through the entire history of like all the characters.
00:01:50
Speaker
and break it down by primary canon history, secondary canon history, tertiary canon history. What's tertiary? Is that like the back of ecto cooler boxes? I think it's movies is primary. OK, so movies being Ghostbusters one, Ghostbusters two and Ghostbusters afterlife. Oh, fuck this.
00:02:19
Speaker
Well, the story is still metal even if you exclude Ghostbusters Afterlife, okay? Well, I mean, we can exclude definitely one of the movies and functionally two of the movies.
00:02:36
Speaker
Yes, it's just made the same one three times. Secondary canon history is Ghostbusters, the video game, realistic versions, whatever that means. The IDW comic series and then and then the tertiary canon history, I believe, is everything else, including the Ghostbusters board game and probably the probably the cartoon.
00:03:05
Speaker
So they're treating as tertiary, the real Ghostbusters? That's a good question because I saw it listed as primary somewhere else.

Gozer: The Antagonist

00:03:16
Speaker
What I want to do is go through a little bit of the page for Gozer, who was the enemy, the final boss, if you will, at the end of the first movie, okay?
00:03:32
Speaker
Redo some of this, and tell me it just doesn't sound like a morbid angel album, do you? So... Before Ghostbusters, gozer!
00:03:42
Speaker
Who is Gozer, for anyone who hasn't seen the movie? Gozer, also known as Gozer the Gozarian, Gozer the Destructor, Gozer the Traveler, Volgos Zidrohar, and Lord of the Cebuilla is the main antagonist of Ghostbusters and Ghostbusters Afterlife. It is an ancient, ultra-powerful, malignant entity from another dimension who was summoned to New York City in 1984
00:04:09
Speaker
and a Somerville in 2021 to destroy the world. I'm doing the more recent canon in a different voice for you so you can ignore it. You're welcome.
00:04:26
Speaker
Gozer. You'll probably get to it. Who was the architect who built the building to attract Gozer? Gozer was worshipped as a god by the Hittites, Mesopotamians, and Sumerians around 6000 BC. Gozer was gender-listened, could assume any form it wanted. Gozer had two trusted minions, themselves worshipped as demigods that were harbingers of destruction and primary agents for its arrival, Vince Clortho the Keymaster and Zool the Gatekeeper.
00:04:57
Speaker
Are you the key master? Are you the gatekeeper? That's the one, yeah.
00:05:07
Speaker
The Sumerians believed in a land of the dead, a dark and shadowy realm within the bowels of the earth where the souls of the dead were ruled by Gozer and protected by the Gatekeeper and Keymaster. Gozer also consumed the souls of those sacrificed to it. In order for Gozer to rise up and walk the human plane again, the Gatekeeper and Keymaster had to assume the form of beasts. During the rectification,
00:05:32
Speaker
of the Voldrani, Gozer became a large moving Torb. It just sounds like Dune now to me. Then, during the Third Reconciliation of the last of the Mekatrex supplicants, they chose the form of a giant Slor, obviously. Not much was known of Gozer and its travels for several millennia.

Ivo Shandor and Gozerian Cult

00:06:00
Speaker
However,
00:06:02
Speaker
The god was not entirely forgotten on Earth, and by the early 20th century, a powerful Gozerian cult was active in New York City, led by the architect and physician, Evo Shandor.
00:06:14
Speaker
There you go. Following the end of World War I, Shandor decided that humanity was too sick to survive in throughout the 1920s. He and his cult built an elaborate paranormal mechanism in Manhattan with the intent of summoning Gozer back to Earth to destroy it. The cult conducted a number of bizarre Gozerian rituals on the roof.
00:06:35
Speaker
of the 550 Central Park West building, which Shandor had designed as a superconductive antenna for pulling in and concentrating spiritual turbulence. A second entry point existed in Summerville inside the Selenium mine previously discovered by Shandor. See, that's where they mined the metal.
00:06:59
Speaker
for the building, you see. Anyway, the mind concealed another temple dedicated to Gozer, watched over by Shandor's body, preserved in suspended animation. A sacrificial death pit served as the source of the interdimensional gateway in which Gozer can return. Inscribed high on the temple's walls were the years in which Gozer was predicted to return to Earth. The predicted years included 1381, 1432, 1501, 1596, 1607, 1782.
00:07:27
Speaker
1823, 1883, 1908, 1945, 1984, and 2021, and 2134. And then, okay, so yeah, we'll get Ghostbusters four or seven or six in that year. Well, you know, 1945,
00:07:49
Speaker
Obviously, Atomic Bomb, 84 was that movie, 21 was the other movie. I wonder if these other dates have any significance. Are there footnotes here? Because this is not all in those two movies.
00:08:04
Speaker
There are references, but but again, this includes the video games, which I watched out a lot of the backstory and like oddly connected all the like the second movie to the first movie as well, because like the slime had something to do with Evo and
00:08:26
Speaker
And you conveniently get to go to all of the locations again. Who would have thought the same places get haunted by different ghosts at different periods, but only those places. And yeah, so they, oh man, there is quite a lot about Evo Shandor as well. And he was a ghost for a while, apparently.

Gozer's Shapeshifting & Movie Critique

00:08:48
Speaker
That would track. I mean, yeah, he seemed to have a restless soul. And then, oh,
00:08:56
Speaker
So Gozer shape shifter, you know, eventually comes back as the, uh, state of marshmallow man, like as the avatar of destruction. Right. But then in the, in the new movie and afterlife, there was a little state of marshmallow man, you know, cause you have to take something and make it the opposite. That's why they had baby Yoda. What's, what is, what's the opposite of old Yoda baby Yoda?
00:09:28
Speaker
And the first half of that movie was fine. What, until they got out to the country? Well, whenever they started remaking, maybe that was even two-thirds of the movie. As soon as it just turns into Ghostbusters, it died. But I mean, the brilliance of Ghostbusters is it shouldn't work, right, at all. But you've got this funny cast and this
00:09:57
Speaker
super tight script that is a comedy script, but takes the whole mythos so seriously. And a lot of that comes from Dan Aykroyd, who is a descendant of spiritualists and is crazy and at sub-level believes all this stuff, not these specific facts, but the concepts. And it's just a total work of alchemy.
00:10:23
Speaker
a special effects-driven tentpole comedy. Who would have heard of that? It turns into, you know, Men in Black, you know, Aspond and something. But that first movie is just a work of genius.

Original Ghostbusters' Success

00:10:36
Speaker
The first time I saw it, I was too young to have seen it. You didn't know it was meant to be funny. I was going to say, I didn't realize it was supposed to be a comedy. Yeah, exactly. Until I was much older. Because the lore is so done, so well done.
00:10:51
Speaker
And when you're a kid, especially, a ghost being kind of a green thing, you know, it all just works because it is pretty scary. There are a lot of, like, if you watch that opening scene, if it wasn't for the Ray Park Jr. song kicking in, that scene is terrifying. Yeah. I don't remember the episode, but
00:11:17
Speaker
What still gives me nightmares is, and I understand now that the degree to which it's ripped off of The Shining and things, but there's a haunted house episode of the cartoon with the hedge creatures from The Shining. I can't even articulate the plot, but it still terrifies me. Point of order, that wasn't in the Kubrick film. Yes. Yes. Okay.

Cult of Gozer vs HP Lovecraft

00:11:47
Speaker
Let's quickly, just briefly, move over to the Cult of Gozer. This is out of the secondary canon history. And again, I'm not sure where all this comes from. I assume this is the comic books. Anyway, the first known reference to Gozer, the Gozerian, is a brief phrase in an Egyptian legend believed to reach back to the end of the Middle Kingdom.
00:12:09
Speaker
2040-1650 BC. This particular chronicle, dated to approximately 1600 BC, warns about a powerful deity of the Hyksos known as Zul or the gatekeeper, Minyan of Gozer. The menace of Gozer did not end with the passing of the Hyskos, the Egyptians, overthrew their masters in 1567 BC, though its worshippers remained quiet for more than 3,000 years.
00:12:37
Speaker
Hawthorne Bent, another fanatical Gozer worshipper, founded the Elnwick School in 1871. The ruins of Elnwick can still be seen rising from the English Moors today. The most striking feature is the odd pyramid-like shaped roof of one of the buildings. One also notices the strange stone arch that is the entrance to the ruined school grounds on one side of the arch.
00:13:02
Speaker
crouches a large stone statue of a deformed dog. The other side of the arch is empty, making for a curiously unbalanced structure. The school was a front for a Gozerian cult statements, which the poor students made to investigating officers, as recorded in county court records, indicate the bent trained each of his charges in the sinister practice of Gozer worship.
00:13:30
Speaker
blah, blah, blah. It goes on for quite a while, but this, I mean, you could either take this as the premise for the next season of Wednesday or you, that's totally a metal song right there. Yeah. I mean, it's, it's basically HP Lovecraft light. They do go up against the old ones in the anime, in the cartoon. Oh shit. Really? They directly do.
00:13:57
Speaker
So I think you have the makings of the entire body of work of the death metal band here. I think it can be done. It should be done. I just don't have time to do it. I bet the kids are ahead of us. Kids who have time to do this are going to misunderstand the point of the movies. Yeah.

Ghostbusters: Accidental Heroes

00:14:19
Speaker
And botch the death metal band.
00:14:24
Speaker
The correct read of the first movie, which I think is lost on people, is they're grifters. Yes, ghosts exist.
00:14:35
Speaker
Yes, they use grants or whatever from where Columbia, wherever they were teaching to finance this stuff. But it's all a lark, you know? It's a scam. Where are the ghosts in Baltimore? But it just happens that New York right at this period is haunted, overly saturated with ghosts all being sucked in there.
00:15:00
Speaker
Because of Ivo Shandor and the Gozer cult and they're accidentally heroes. I mean, you're not wrong. He's a one-off. No, I've convinced you and our audience how great the lore is, and I will not listen to any comments to the contrary. Anyway, just to wrap it up.
00:15:25
Speaker
This will be my side-side project. The Ghostbusters death metal band.

The Gozerians: A Death Metal Band

00:15:31
Speaker
Probably call ourselves the Gozerians or some kind of a reference to the cult or something. Join the Patreon so I can afford to release this thing. All right, until next time, Metal Nation, shortly before your head dies, make sure you subscribe and listen and twist the bell and so forth.
00:15:59
Speaker
And listeners, do not expect to review a frozen empire from this channel. Unless Tim surprises me on that too.