Corrected entry: The movie takes place in the fall of 1984, but when Dana visits the Ghostbusters for the first time, Janine to kill time is intently reading her copy of People Magazine with Cher on the cover. It's the January 23 issue; it's not an absolute impossibility, but it's obviously a magazine they picked up the day of the shooting (which happened late 1983 to early 1984). (00:21:15)
TedStixon
4th Feb 2022
Ghostbusters (1984)
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Correction: I'm sorry, but this is highly far-fetched. No mistake is sight in any way. There is absolutely nothing wrong about someone reading a magazine, new or old.
lionhead
To add to what the others said, I'll also add that most businesses, doctor's offices, etc. don't usually have new magazines on the magazine rack. They tend to keep old ones around for people to read instead. Weirdly enough, there's actually a reason for it - studies/polls show that places that put out new magazines tend to get most of them stolen. So they purposely just put out whatever old magazines they have lying around. Chances are, that's one of the only magazines they had sitting around the Ghostbusters HQ.
TedStixon
Oh absolutely, as anyone who's been to the doctor's or even the barber shop has experienced (newspapers are usually the daily ones instead, it's cheap and makes sense), but it's not as if there is a waiting room or magazine rack there, and their business freshly opened so it's not a leftover. Again, I personally find the justification of the magazine clashing with the fictional timeline but matching perfectly the one of the shooting less straightforward than the explanation, but of course it's my own view and as I said with full disclosure and honesty in the entry, it's not a complete impossibility. We don't see the whole place so there can be a waiting table somewhere with magazines from 9 months prior that one of the Ghostbusters picked up somewhere and I don't deny it.
Sammo ★
So why post it?
lionhead
This is getting a little redundant but again; simple, it's her desk, there are no other magazines or magazines rack nor a waiting room in a place that just opened for business, and I find more believable by a very good margin that they used whatever magazine they had handy when filming, which happens to be the time when that magazine is from, than thinking that it was a deliberate choice coherent with the fictional world to have her read at her desk a random old thing. I respect the objections I have read so far, but I already weighed them before posting and anyone can make their own judgement on that weighing them differently.
Sammo ★
I think you need to look up the word mistake before posting something new. Because it makes completely no sense to post this.
lionhead
Ah, well, I explained more than abundantly why I thought it relevant to post the objectively verifiable detail with a caveat and I wouldn't randomly do it whenever characters happen to read a magazines in movies - the 'meta' explanation is by far more linear, and I say it as someone who had months-old mags in their backpack when I was a teenager. I respect other people's evaluations and I don't mind if the entry is downvoted based on a disagreement about its relevancy on grounds of not being sufficiently incongruous to be a mistake. I think we can leave it at that and refrain from suggestions on what other people need to do.;).
Sammo ★
Sure, I said it all in the entry already. There's no law of nature or man-made that forbids a secretary from bringing at work a 9 months old weekly magazine. I think the real (or less far-fetched, if you will) reason is more than apparent, but do what you want with the information.;).
Sammo ★
The fundamental problem is that you yourself said it's not necessarily a mistake... ergo, it's not a mistake. Sure, in a meta context, it probably was just a magazine they picked up before filming... but that doesn't make it a mistake in-movie. There're many reasons why someone might be reading an old magazine, which invalidates the mistake. Case in point, we keep old newspapers and magazines at my house to re-read, because sometimes they have good articles, recipes, etc. It's totally possible and even likely she might be reading an old magazine.
TedStixon