ghost muncher

MasterChef España/YouTube

Say hello to Muncher, the hideous new ‘Ghostbusters’ ghost

Twitter is obsessed with this miserable blue gremlin.

 

Gavia Baker-Whitelaw

Internet Culture

Posted on Jan 22, 2021

Pour one out for the marketing department behind movies like Ghostbusters: Afterlife, whose release date has now been delayed for over a year. Armed with a dwindling supply of teasers and promo images, it’s hard to keep the buzz alive for this long.

Then along comes a gift from the content gods.

For some reason, people are fixating on one of Afterlife‘s background ghosts, a depressed-looking gremlin named Muncher.

Muncher made his debut in a recent episode of Spanish MasterChef Junior (for some reason?), capturing hearts and minds with his evocatively exhausted-looking face. As Ghostbusters ghosts go, he’s pretty standard. These movies are not known for their complex world-building or character design.

muncher ghostbusters
MasterChef España/YouTube

This Masterchef cameo was somehow enough to warrant a “reveal” post on Slashfilm, which sparked something in the exhausted brains of Film Twitter.

There’s something perversely hypnotic about promoting a film using a character like Muncher. Unlike a Star Wars alien, he has no past and no future. Ghostbusters ghosts don’t need personalities or backstory. He’s just a blob with a tired, miserable face, hanging in there like the rest of us. His main role is to sell merchandise to hardcore Ghostbusters stans, which invites the question: What kind of person would buy Muncher merch?

If the pro-Muncher memes flying around Twitter are any indication, the answer is, apparently, a lot of people.

https://twitter.com/willmenaker/status/1352394418133807106
https://twitter.com/willmenaker/status/1352389855490301954

Congratulations to Muncher on gaining more social media attention than the actual human characters of Ghostbusters: Afterlife, a film that’s definitely going to come out at some point.


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*First Published: Jan 22, 2021, 7:34 am CST