A different time....a better time.

Memories of your first viewing on these?

I saw both Ghostbusters and Gremlins in Fresno, CA while on summer break visiting my grandparents. I had started watching Siskel and Ebert and persuaded my parents to take me and my sister to see both of these. Ghostbusters was a big hit with the family. I remember the theater being crowded with lots of loud laughter throughout. The biggest laughs were for Bill Murray's line, "He slimed me" and for the Stay-Puff Marshmallow Man reveal.

Gremlins was another matter. The theater was so crowded that there weren't four seats together so my parents, not knowing the content of the movie, decided to let my sister and I sit by ourselves while they sat elsewhere. I was thirteen at the time and my sister was eleven. This was my first "scary" movie and I was very tense, especially during the kitchen fight. I ended up loving the movie though. After it was over, we found my parents who were not happy. They hated the dark turn the movie took and told us that if we hadn't been there, they would have walked out.

Like every Starlog reader I knew about both films months in advance. Gremlins was the one I was more eagerly awaiting, as Jerry Goldsmith would e re-teaming with Joe Dante and I was eager to hear the score!

I saw Ghostbusters opening night -- and saw it again at least four more times that summer. It was so unlike anything you'd seen before, the way it combined comedy, sci-fi and horror. More than any other movie that summer it captivated the public consciousness and impacted the popular culture lexicon. It was (and remains) fantastical, sometimes scary, and always hysterically funny.

Gremlins I saw the very next day at a matinee. I thought it was great, though perhaps I was a bit biased, as I was really into the burgeoning "Amblin" genre, and I loved Jerry Goldsmith's score (Goldsmith's cameo as a background extra was also a lot of fun).

However I was grievously disappointed with the soundtrack releases of both movies -- Gremlins was issued as a "Specially-Priced Mini LP" with 17 minutes of Goldsmith's score on one side (and three crappy songs on the other). Seriously, Warner Bros. couldn't afford a 40-minute LP with 25 minutes of score?

Ghostbusters was an even more crushing disappointment, containing only two bands of Elmer Bernstein's score (when he recorded four tracks expressly for the album), and then a bunch of songs that were only included in the film to justify putting them on the album. It's too bad Varese Sarabande couldn't have stepped up to the plate and done a Ghostbusters re-recording (as they'd done for Brainstorm, The Right Stuff and then Bernstein's own Black Cauldron a year later).

1984 was a lousy summer for soundtracks in general. No album releases for The Bounty or Red Dawn, Half of Klaus Doldinger's score for The NeverEnding Story replaced with Giorgio Mororder, Conan The Destroyer a disappointing follow-up to its predecessor -- and even tho we got a full album of John Williams' Temple of Doom score, if you ask me he left most of the best music off that album!

Then again, there were a few nice surprises that summer, namely Richard Hartley's Sheena and Randy Newman's The Natural.

GREMLINS I recall seeing right after school on opening Friday at the Showcase Cinemas Warwick (which opened in 1983, and which I still see all my "major" movies at), with I believe my Dad, best friend George and his dad -- who was a local radio movie critic and got free passes. We saw EVERYTHING back in 83-86 pretty much I was scared but loved the movie.

GHOSTBUSTERS I saw at the small Pier Cinema in Narragansett, RI. It may have been that weekend or a week or two later. It was a 2-screen complex that only played at night and "rainy day matinees" as they used to call them. I vividly remember the audience going bonkers at that one, especially Murray's line at William Atherton, which was followed by lots of cheering.

I really enjoy reading all of your recollections of seeing these films in the theater. Sadly, I didn't see either Gremlins or Ghostbusters in the theater in 1984, but saw them on home video much later (in jr. high or high school, I think) and absolutely fell in love with them. I thoroughly enjoy both to this day.

I must say that I don't have any childhood recollection of Ghostbusters at all (strangely), but I remember seeing Gremlins promotional material at the local Burger King (at least I think it was Burger King) and wondering about the movie.

The movie I saw in the theater in 1984 that is still one of my favorites was The Last Starfighter. I adored that film and the 11-year-old me was disheartened that I couldn't go to Wal-Mart and buy a toy Gunstar!

I never saw Gremlins and still haven't. I saw Ghostbusters, but honestly I have a bittersweet memory of that experience because I was 15 and my father had suggested seeing a movie and he was suggesting "Neverending Story" which I didn't want to see because that had the vibe of being a film for a much younger audience so I said I'd go with him but I wanted to see Ghostbusters instead.

I look back on the experience and I feel kind of bad that I didn't go along with his suggestion. Not because I felt negatively about Ghostbusters (and to this day I still haven't seen Neverending Story) but because I feel like my minor act of rebellion kind of lessened the overall experience of going with him to the movies and I guess because I spent the last six years of his life being his caregiver and seeing him in a declining mental state, it made me regret more the moments where I didn't appreciate doing something he suggested.