Ghostbusters Day busts out Bill Murray, a mini Stay Puft army & 'spatial reality' look at Afterlife's Ecto-1

Happy Ghostbusters Day! What kind of holiday is that, you may ask? Even Bill Murray who played original Ghostbuster Peter Venkman wasn’t too sure either, but the day ended up with a Murray cameo, some new mini Stay Puft toys coming to a retail store near you, and some new tidbits about how director Jason Reitman put together Ghostbusters: Afterlife’s Ecto-1.

The Ghostbusters official channel kicked off the day with a short video of Bill Murray and the original Ghostbusters director Ivan Reitman (Jason's dad) discussing what the heck Ghostbusters Day is all about. Neither seemed to have too much of an idea, but Murray encouraged us all to be more diligent in our busting of ghosts.

Need some more Bill Murray in your life? Check out the clip here:

The cast and crew of the upcoming Ghostbusters: Afterlife also got in on the Ghostbusters Day action during a Twitter Space chat hosted by IGN. One topic that came up during that conversation was everyone’s favorite ghostbusting car, the Ecto-1.

Afterlife director Jason Reitman shared how he approached putting together the iconic car for the film. “We want to get every single detail on this movie right — I just respect the people who love Ghostbusters way too much, and I want to try to get every detail right for them,” he shared. “I’ve loved this car my entire life. I just think it's one of the coolest cars in film history…we worked with amazing car people to bring it back to life and as [actor Finn Wolfhard] said, we juiced the hell out of it.”

Reitman has previously shared why one detail from the original Ecto-1 was altered. The ladder was moved to the opposite side of the car to make room for a gunner seat revealed in the movie’s first trailer. In the Q&A, Reitman expanded on his thought process for the addition to the car. “One of the great thrills of writing [Afterlife’s] script is you get to kind of do fan fiction. You start to think about how would they have worked on this equipment, and that's where the gunner seat came in,” he explained. “We wanted to put ghostbusting into motion. When I thought about the three previous films, the characters were often standing on their feet and holding a line...there was something static about ghostbusting.”

In addition to having a real-life, "juiced up" Ecto-1 that the actors got to ride in, Reitman also used spatial reality technology to design what we’ll eventually see on screen.

Curious to see more of the Ecto-1 in digital form? Check out the new featurette here:

Last but not least, no Ghostbusters Day would be complete without a nod to Stay Puft, and today, Afterlife’s mini pufts got some love in the form of a new toy released by Hasbro.

No matter how you celebrate, however, the most important thing to remember is that Ghostbusters Day is every day, really. Even Bill Murray thinks so, as he says in the clip above. So when you’re still in the ghostbusting spirit later this week, be sure to watch the first two movies on SYFY, starting on Friday June 11 at 7:30 p.m. ET/6:30 p.m. CT.

Ghostbusters: Afterlife, the next installment in the Ghostbusters franchise, is set to premiere in theaters on Nov. 11, 2021.