Apples to oranges here. Comedy is by far the hardest genre to make a good sequel in since character arcs and plot are almost irrelevant to whether a comedy is good or not. Ask yourself how many good comedies have a good sequel or even a sequel at all. It’s a real short list.
My point really wasn’t about the quality or lack thereof of sequels. it was about the experience of disillusionment, I guess. Ghostbusters defined my childhood, the same way Star Wars defined the childhood of millions of other people.
I think the continued popularity of Star Wars--what keeps people coming back to it and revisiting it--is partly a way for people to recapture the magic and wonderment they felt as a child when they first saw the Battle of Hoth or the pod races or whatever. In effect, Star Wars is a time machine to the past, and the continuation of the franchise shows that there's still some spark of youth left, that their childhood hasn't completely disappeared in a bitterly cynical adulthood.
But there are three things to remember, three things that GB2 taught me: 1. There is no time machine. 2. There is no way to recapture what is lost. 3. Relying on a cultural product like Star Wars or Ghostbusters for an authentic emotional experience (which I think many people want) is ultimately a dead end. "
Where you come from is gone, where you thought you were going to was never there, and where you are is no good unless you can get away from it."
I suppose that's what I was trying to say. I dunno how well it came off.
