Ghostbusters Fans Agree The Marshmallow Man's Special Effects Still Hold Up
He is the most harmless thing. Something we loved from our childhood. Something that could never, ever possibly destroy us: Mister Stay-Puft, brand ambassador for the Stay Puft Marshmallow company and eight-story Sumerian destructor form of Gozer the Gozerian.
He's also, inescapably, a guy in a rubber costume — specifically, he's special effects specialist Bill Bryan, stomping through a miniature Manhattan in a costume that makes him look like a Pillsbury Dough Boy with a gland condition. He's a joke kaiju played straight, created for the benefit of a movie starring a bunch of ex-SNL cast members. On paper, this sort of thing should have aged with all the grace of, say, those Godzilla Doctor Pepper commercials from the '80s.
And yet, if commenters on the official "Ghostbusters" YouTube channel are any indication, fans of the 1984 cinematic masterpiece are just as impressed by the Mister Stay-Puft effects as they were when the movie came out. Just shy of 40 years after the film premiered, they're still calling the cloud-white monstrosity "hilariously and unpredictably terrifying," "much more credible than CGI," and "so much better than today's crap."
Ghostbusters fans still love Mister Stay-Puft all these years later
It takes a special kind of brilliance to make a blockbuster FX shot from the Reagan administration that'll hold up in a world of 4K resolution and that frame rate setting that makes classic movies look like cutscenes from "Mass Effect: Andromeda."
But somehow, director Ivan Reitman and a team of special effects artists, suit actors, and puppeteers managed to pull it off with Mister Stay-Puft. Rewatching the scene where the beast is first revealed, it's clear that it still works thanks to the craftsmanship of everyone involved. In a move that'll be familiar to fans of "Jurassic Park," another older movie with effects that still work, the audience hears the monster before they see it, glimpses it before they recognize it, and spends agonizing seconds of high anxiety trying to piece together what's coming before ultimately not being able to believe their eyes anyway. It's delightfully effective, even after decades of advances in CGI and practical effects.
Or as Venkman would put it, Mister Stay-Puft really is something you don't see every day.