It was an LP. It was a soundtrack. I had that whole thing memorized a few days after I bought it. Later would come Glenn Miller (my mom’s choice, since I was about to start playing the saxophone), and then Bon Jovi (yes, Slippery When Wet, I’ll admit it), Miles Davis, Guns’N’Roses (and then the famous backpatch jacket), and then John Coltrane (and then the tenor sax I still have with me), and much more…

… but this was the first album I bought for myself, with my paper route money, and man was I happy to have it so I could ditch the audiotape that I’d used to record the theme song off the radio on my parent’s old hi-fi:

Oh yeah. And it fucking rocked. I sang along with Air Supply. (No, really… this song.) I loved the freaky soundtracky track by Elmer Bernstein, too — too? hell, I think I loved it most of all, which should have been a sign to everyone around me that even if I had taken up the guitar, as I begged my mother to let me do, I would never have become some metal godling. I mean, listen to this:

In fact, as many Youtube commenters point out, this would be highly desirable as one’s personal theme song. One would go about mischievously triggering all kinds of spooky things, and though one would only walk down the street, all the churches would burst into flames behind one, all the schools would be flooded, and a slowly-burning ferris wheel the size of a city would be glimpsed on the distant horizon, ghostly and shrouded in smoke, and children would laugh and giggle with joy and point at it, and the adults would shiver and wonder whether this would affect their tax rate or job stability.

Er… huh? Back then, I was a hardcore Ghostbusters fan. I had the book they made about the making of the film. I had a pull-out poster from the book on my wall. I had the soundtrack.

And then there was the fanfic. Oh, the fanfic. This would have been 4th or 5th grade. I wrote Ghostbusters stories with my friends and me cleaning out a haunted house. Slimer was in it, but as a bad guy of course — I hadn’t even seen the original film, and Slimer hadn’t been made into a cute sidekick in the cartoons yet.

It’s not so odd that I’ve not tried the game, though I’ve heard (from this guy) it was supposed to be really cool, or was going to be (this was last summer). I don’t have a game console, and have very few games at home. But it is kind of odd that, all these years later, I haven’t even watched the film again, or seen the sequel.

Then again, for me, the film was a disappointment. The Ghostbusters adventures I made up myself were far more exciting… again, that should have been a sign to everyone around me, of things to come.