If you battle malevolent ectoplasmic entities for a living you can pretty much do whatever you want, consequences be damned.
At least that’s how Dan Aykroyd (Ray Stantz) and Bill Murray (Peter Venkman) felt on the set of 1989’s Ghostbusters II when they borrowed two police motorcycles for a noisy joy ride around Central Park.
Dan Aykroyd and Bill Murray Stole Police Motorcycles From Ghostbusters II Set
Aykroyd shared the wild anecdote on Instagram while wishing his co-star a happy belated 76th birthday Sep. 24 (Murray was born on the 21st).
“One night shooting GB2, we appropriated two fully-equipped police motorcycles from the movie’s motor pool and spent an hour chasing each other around a closed Central Park with full lights and sirens,” he wrote. “No consequences. After all, we were Ghostbusters.”
While universally considered by fans to be a step down from its 1984 predecessor, Ghostbusters II has achieved a cult following over the years.
“If it were the only Ghostbusters film, I think it’d have a much better reputation,” Den of Geek‘s Seb Patrick wrote in 2019. “It’s clever, it’s funny, it’s about good characters played by excellent comic actors, and it’s got a solid story that hangs together well”
The defense continued: “It’s got just about every ingredient to be a great film of its type—and if it’s true that it perhaps settles for “more of the same” rather than reaching for something a bit more bold, to say that it doesn’t do anything new at all is fairly wide of the mark.”
Aykroyd, Murray and Ernie Hudson (Winston Zeddemore) remain the surviving members of the original Proton Pack-wielding heroes following the 2014 passing of Harold Ramis (Egon Spangler), who was resurrected via CGI for the climax of Jason Reitman’s Ghostbusters Afterlife. Jason’s father, Ivan Reitman, helmer of the first two movies, died in 2022.
Of the living cast members, Aykroyd remains the biggest believer in supernatural occurrences, particularly encounters with departed spirits, which he explored as narrator in Travel Channel’s Hotel Paranormal.
“These are events that really actually happened to these people, traumatized them in many cases, scared them,” Aykroyd told Yahoo! Entertainment in 2020. “And here, Travel Entertainment offers them a forum to talk about that, to talk about the occurrences so that they can get it out of their minds and out of their souls and off their chests, and to have a sympathetic audience who understands that this stuff is real. And that it’s happened to people hundreds of thousands of times in the history of our planet, where there’s a vivid evidence of the fact that there is survival of life and consciousness after death.”
