Background
According to Parker, he was approached by the film's producers to create a theme song for the film. Unfortunately, he only had a few days to do so and the film's title seemed impossible to include in any lyrics. However, when watching television late at night, Parker saw a cheap commercial for a local service that reminded him that the film had a similar commercial featured for the fictional business. This inspired him to write the song as a pseudo-advertising jingle that the business could have commissioned as a promotion.
Columbia Pictures was later the defendant in a copyright infringement lawsuit, also naming Parker which claimed "Ghostbusters" was too similar in musical structure to "I Want a New Drug," written and performed by Huey Lewis and the News (more specifically, the bass/guitar riff which runs through the song). "I Want a New Drug" was a U.S. top-ten hit earlier the same year and was extremely similar to "Pop Muzik" by M, a project by Robin Scott. The two parties settled out of court. Details of the settlement (specifically, that Columbia Pictures paid Lewis a settlement) were confidential until 2001, when Lewis commented on the payment in an episode of VH1's Behind the Music. Parker subsequently sued Lewis for breaching confidentiality.
In later years, AutoNation adopted the theme for their advertising campaign. In the United Kingdom, the song is parodied with Parker himself being featured in a commercial advertising direct enquiries line 118 118.
The song re-entered the UK Top 75 on 2 November 2008 at No. 49.
Lindsey Buckingham claims to have been approached to write the Ghostbusters theme based on his successful contribution to Harold Ramis's National Lampoon's Vacation (the song "Holiday Road"). He turned down the opportunity as he did not want to be known as a soundtrack artist. He mentions this on the "Words & Music" interview disk.
Read more about this topic: Ghostbusters (song)
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