I love Ghost­busters. I have since I was a kid, rolling around in the back of my par­ents’ hatch­back — sans car seat because it was rural Mon­tana in 1984, you know — and lis­ten­ing to Ray Parker Jr. sing “Ghost­busters” on the radio, silently com­mit­ting the words to eter­nal memory.

I’m not a fanatic, though. I don’t talk about the movie like Kevin Smith char­ac­ters talk about Star Wars. My heart doesn’t start rac­ing at the thought of watch­ing the DVD. I don’t write fan fic­tion in the hopes that Bill Mur­ray will read my pis­sant lit­tle story and decide to revive the long-dead film series. I don’t own a prop replica pro­ton pack or dress up in tan jump­suits for Hal­loween. I don’t attend con­ven­tions or par­tic­i­pate in online forums.

I do none of those things, yet I still love Ghost­busters because the films and their car­toons, toys and other accom­pa­ni­ments haunt my child­hood and mark the point when I broke out of the con­tain­ment unit of inno­cence and flew head­long into a larger and less inno­cent world.

I wasn’t very old in 1984. I can’t remem­ber if I ever actu­ally saw Ghost­busters in the the­ater. I doubt it, con­sid­er­ing how reluc­tant my par­ents were to drive 25 miles into the city for any rea­son, let alone to take their son go a pop­corny block­buster. My aware­ness of the movie most likely came from HBO, which also intro­duced me to soft-core porn and Mel Brooks movies.

I can’t count the num­ber of times I have seen the movie since then. Ghost­busters is one of those films I feel com­pelled to watch when­ever I hap­pen upon it on tele­vi­sion. Like a man pos­sessed, I put down the remote and patiently wait for clas­sic lines like “Back off man, I’m a sci­en­tist,” “Print is dead,” and “Whoa, Egon, you said cross­ing the streams was bad!”

My enthu­si­asm for the Ghost­busters even slimed the sequel. I was present at the first show­ing of Ghost­busters II in August 1989 in Billings, Mon­tana. My poor grand­mother and I were, of course, the only peo­ple actu­ally wait­ing at the the­ater for the Fri­day after­noon mati­nee to start. I guess being the first per­son to see the new Ghost­busters film just wasn’t as impor­tant to any­body else.

Both movies were ulti­mately aimed at kids, or at least the mer­chan­dise that filled my child­hood bed­room was. I had all the toys I could get my hands on — all the toys I could con­vince my par­ents to buy for me, that is. I had the pro­ton pack, a hol­low plas­tic shell dec­o­rated with stick­ers and a long piece of yel­low foam that was sup­posed to be the weapon’s neu­tron beam. I also had the toy PKE meter, the sur­pris­ingly well-designed Ghost Trap, and even a lit­tle iron-on Ghost­busters patch secured to my T-shirt with scotch tape.

It was all the gear a soli­tary boy needed to pre­tend he was a Ghost­buster as he played in the hall­way of his family’s trailer house while his par­ents marched toward divorce or while his father drank him­self to death in his grandmother’s spare bedroom.

Oh, I had the action fig­ures too, some of the orig­i­nal fig­ures as well as the Ecto-1 car and some of the silly Ghostbusters-in-space action fig­ures Ken­ner put out once the toy com­pany real­ized that the Ghost­busters fran­chise was a cash cow.

Then there was “The Real Ghost­busters,” the car­toon based on the films (so named because some other show I never saw held the trade­mark on the name “The Ghost Busters”) I loved that show. It has prob­a­bly had more of an impact on my life than any other prod­uct of pop cul­ture dur­ing the past four decades. And that’s say­ing some­thing, espe­cially com­ing from a man who learned some of life’s impor­tant skills not from par­ents but from TV shows — like shav­ing, tying a tie, roundhouse-kicking drug deal­ers and dis­arm­ing bombs with duct tape.

I watched the show reli­giously, every Sat­ur­day morn­ing at my grandmother’s house, right after “Garfield and Friends” and right before “Looney Toons.” I care­fully noted details about the char­ac­ters’ lives — more note than the show’s writ­ers likely took, writ­ers who prob­a­bly didn’t give a hoot about con­ti­nu­ity on a Japan­i­mated children’s cartoon.

I remem­ber, for exam­ple, that Peter loved trains so much that he stud­ied engi­neer­ing for a year in col­lege before real­iz­ing the field had lit­tle to do with trains. I also remem­ber Ray’s the­ory, bor­rowed from some philoso­pher whose name, oddly, didn’t stick in my mem­ory, that if you sit in one place long enough, every­one you’ve ever known will even­tu­ally pass by.

I knew the char­ac­ters’ voices. I noticed big changes in the show, like when dis­ap­point­ing new actors replaced the orig­i­nals. I noticed when the show replaced Ray Parker Jr.’s ver­sion of the theme song with a cover. I was ecsta­tic any time the car­toon ref­er­enced the movies — which hap­pened about four times that I can remem­ber. I didn’t know it at the time, but the show was prepar­ing me for a life spent sort­ing out the canon­i­cal details of ever geekier escapist shows like “Star Trek” and “The X-Files.”

But, just as I was grow­ing old enough to appre­ci­ate some of the darker humor in the car­toon (and con­cur­rently learn­ing a deeper appre­ci­a­tion for some of the adult humor in the movies), the end began. Just like Phillip Sey­mour Hoff­man says in Cameron Crowe’s Almost Famous when explain­ing that rock and roll is dead, “You got here just in time for the death rat­tle, the last gasp, the last grope.”

Ghost­busters’ slow death began in 1988, even before the dis­ap­point­ing and overly slimy Ghost­busters II hit the­aters, when a one-hour block of Ghost­busters car­toons was trans­formed into “Slimer and the Real Ghostbusters.”

Before the Slimer years, the show had cool plots involv­ing satanic forces, real urban myths and other adult con­cepts, such as Sam Hein, the spirit of Hal­loween, or the ghost of the fic­tional Sher­lock Holmes, made real by our belief in him. Heck, I even loved the fact that in the open­ing cred­its, Win­ston is enjoy­ing a beer and a burger before being inter­rupted by a call. Those lit­tle details helped me see, that dark forces and other bad things in life can and should be fod­der for com­edy. Those details about the show, the ones that didn’t assume chil­dren needed to be enter­tained by bright col­ors and sim­plis­tic plots, kept me com­ing back year after year.

But when Slimer usurped the Ghost­busters and “became the spe­cial man,” we lost the plots about cross-dimensional rips and Native Amer­i­can folk­lore. Instead we got Slimer and the mot­ley col­lec­tion of neigh­bor­hood kids try­ing to escape a bull­dog and some con­niv­ing, Gargamel-like vil­lain. Small-town antics in a show that used to be very much rooted in the New York of the movies. Seriously.

(Full dis­clo­sure: I did enjoy Slimer’s Ecto Cooler fla­vor of Hi-C for years and would drink the hell out of it if they still made it.)

But not even Slimer could save the Ghost­busters from the 1990s. Ghost­busters II did lit­tle to buoy the fran­chise, which was beset by rivals, espe­cially the Teenage Mutant Ninja Tur­tles. Then, in 1990, Con­gress passed the Children’s Tele­vi­sion Act, man­dat­ing that TV aimed at kids have some sort of edu­ca­tional con­tent, that it pass on “valu­able infor­ma­tion and skills.” By 1991, both “The Real Ghost­busters” and “Slimer” were dead and their ghosts were stowed safely in the con­tain­ment unit.

I grew up with the Ghost­busters. Not long after the car­toon went off the air, when my mom and I moved to a town a cou­ple miles away from where I spent most of my child­hood and when I no longer spent week­ends at my grandma’s house, I stopped watch­ing Sat­ur­day morn­ing car­toons. It was too dis­ap­point­ing with­out the Ghost­busters and other clas­sics like Bugs Bunny, and besides, there was puberty and girls to con­tend with.

The past always looks best, of course. I’m no doubt pin­ing away for some imag­ined past that always looks bet­ter in hind­sight, regard­less of what was actu­ally going on in the back­ground. Mem­ory is selec­tive in that way. Things in mem­ory are always painted in vivid col­ors than they reflected in real life.

Regard­less, the Ghost­busters were with me through those tran­si­tional years, and my late child­hood will always be haunted with pro­ton packs and Egon Spen­gler action figures.

And, thanks to the Ghost­busters, I know that death — like the death of Hamlet’s father or my own — lives just beneath the sur­face of every­thing we do. Even if we don’t talk about it, death reminds us sub­con­sciously of our mor­tal­i­ties and the imper­ma­nence of all things human. In the face of that undis­cov­ered coun­try, that ter­ri­fy­ing eter­nal sleep, the ulti­mate dis­so­lu­tion of all things we thought were per­ma­nent and last­ing, we are left with no other sane option but mockery.

We have to grant our­selves the strength to laugh at the things we can­not change, and when the ghosts of our buried pasts come back to haunt us, some­times we must remem­ber that the door swings both ways and have the strength to cross the steams and blow the damned things back to hell.