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Old 10-13-2021, 01:27 AM   #649
Leo656
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I get what you're trying to say, but we both know that wasn't the thinking behind the decision to minimize the relevance of Part II.

For good or ill, the writers of this movie settled on a plot that necessitates the whole history of the Ghostbusters to be a forgotten urban legend that nobody remembers. I'm not sure they NEEDED to do that, but that's what they chose to write. I'm sure there's some "meta" reasoning behind it, too, but anyways. For that plot to work at all, Part II probably couldn't have happened. The Statue of Liberty strolling through Times Square on New Year's Eve 1989 isn't the kind of thing that could be written off as "mass hysteria"; only the four Ghostbusters (and Dana and Louis) know exactly what happened on the roof of Dana's apartment building, and sure, the giant marshmallow man could've been a publicity stunt gone wrong. You can write off the entire first movie as "mass hysteria" if you want to and are trying to deliberately bury that whole event. But if Part II happened, that complicates things.

So it's different from the movie series you're mentioning, which is a thing called "continuity by omission"; basically, how that works is "Obviously those things still happened in our canon, but they're not relevant to Right Now so we won't mention them."

That's not the case with what's going on with this movie ignoring GBII. The reason this movie ignores GBII, is because this movie's story has more holes in it if you count GBII, and the filmmakers would prefer that you look forward and not backward. With a dash of "We're all supposed to hate GBII anyway (even though most people don't)."

It's not "Continuity By Omission". It's just "Eh, we didn't wanna write around it, and it breaks our present fiction, so just kindly ignore it. Our Story works better if you ignore That Story."

Again, subtle distinctions, but distinctions of importance.
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