Getting Real.

Have you ever gotten something REALLY special, something you weren't looking for at the time and didn't plan on getting, and wondered how you could have such good luck? My bad luck is so legendary that I tend to doubt and question when things seem too good to be true. More often than not, my choices are wrong. Just this morning, I decided not to go to the post office before work, taking the back roads. It takes me five minutes out of my way and I was already late. I decided to take the direct route, only to run into a major lane closing on the only road out of my area, and sat in the heat for a full half hour before making it through an intersection 1,000 feet ahead of me. If I ran my errand and detoured, I actually would have gotten to work sooner. I'm wary when things go well, but I appreciate them twice as much.

The most important aspect of lunch to me is GETTING OUT of the office in the middle of the day. I don't care where we go most of the time; I just hit a point where I don't want to be THERE. It's especially important to get out during extra busy days. I'd rather work late than work straight through. So when my friends told me yesterday that they were heading for Best Buy, I was definitely interested. As far as I knew, there wasn't any new media out that I wanted to buy, so it would mostly be browsing in an air conditioned store, making mental notes of DVDs to rent at some point, and maybe playing some video game demos. I didn't PLAN on getting anything, but I picked up a few things I'd considered before, and one thing I didn't know existed until my friend Rey pointed it out to me. There on the shelf in a shiny green box was a boxed set of Ghost Busters and Ghostbusters II.

Granted, to some this wouldn't present a difficult decision. The first is one of my favorite films, after all, and I've even wondered why I didn't own it. But the second one is one of the most unwatchable, disappointing nonsensical sequels ever made. They get the Statue of Liberty to walk into town? What WAS that?! I was torn, but $12.99 seemed like a good price for two movies and a collectible scrapbook. When I finally got around to opening it this afternoon, I discovered I'd gotten more than I realized.

The scrapbook was very cool, filled with early sketches of the logo and comic book style concept sketches of the characters, uniforms, and technology. I was about to pop in the first disk, the only disk I figured I'd watch, when my eye caught something written on the back of the second DVD: “Contains 2 Episodes From the Animated Series.” I couldn't believe it. The Real Ghostbusters ranks highly among my favorite cartoons from the ‘80s. The animation quality was great and I remember some of the stories being darker than those in the movie, and as I watched them this afternoon I realized the writing was at a level I didn't fully appreciate as a child. There was some genuinely witty dialogue. The late Lorenzo Music did such a great job of voicing Peter Venkman, Bill Murray's character in the film, that it's an awesome homage that Murray provided the voice for the film version of Garfield, whom Music voiced in the cartoons. I might have to rent that at some point. One thing some may recall is another cartoon called Ghostbusters in 1986, produced by Filmation. This is why the other cartoon added “Real” to the title, a reference that often made it into episode scripts as an in-joke. I did some research, and this link elaborates upon the legal situation. How could Filmation get away with it, and why did the other show have to modify it's name? In short, in 1975 another unrelated series called The Ghost Busters already existed. Featuring two guys better-known from F-troop and their pet gorilla, the show's trio faced ghosts long before Murray and company, and it was upon this series that the short-lived Filmation cartoon was based.

As I drove home from work, thinking about my DVDs, another surprise crossed my path, quite literally. A red car whipped past me on the left and cut in front of me, swerving in front of a car in the left lane and blocking both lanes at an intersection just as the light turned red. The shattered remnants of a mirror dangled from the driver's side door of the fairly new car, and as a large middle-aged black man got out, I'm ashamed to admit a momentary fear of being car-jacked took hold. He approached the left side of the car alongside me as his passenger door opened, and a woman, presumably his wife, emerged. She walked over to the other car on the right side, and I could hear her yelling at the woman inside that she'd hit them. She pointed out a red scuff on the woman's white car, indicative of where it had hit. I couldn't hear the other woman's side of the conversation, but the man's wife filled in the blanks for me when she said, “What? Go home? You can't just go home. You gonna wait here until the police come, and fill out a report. You HIT us!” At this point, the husband got back in his car and pulled completely into the left lane in front of the offender, blocking her but clearing my path for when the light changed. As this spectacle shrunk in my rearview mirror, I marveled at the bit of entertainment I had not expected on my routine commute. It can be scary, but life is most real when we don't know what we're getting into.