Gilbert Gottfried’s Cameo Was Cut From ‘Ghostbusters II’

While it’s mostly been embraced by nostalgia-drunk Ghostbusters fans today, Ghostbusters II was generally regarded as a disappointment when it was initially released in 1989, with the primary complaint being that it followed the beats of the first movie way too closely. 

Both films conclude with a citywide ghost invasion that requires the Ghostbusters to fight a giant monster — the first time it was the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man, the second was the Statue of Liberty. The Ghostbusters are also locked up in both movies — in the first, they’re thrown in jail; in the second, they’re placed in a psychiatric institute. And finally, the Ghostbusters are disrespected by the city in both movies, which makes no sense in the sequel since they just saved everyone in the first film.

There was, however, one deleted scene from the sequel that would have made it utterly unlike the first film: an appearance by the inimitable Gilbert Gottfried.

On the still very active Facebook group for Gilbert Gottfried’s Amazing Colossal Podcast — which concluded when Gottfried died in 2022 — a member recently shared a passage from the 2022 book A Convenient Parallel Dimension: How Ghostbusters Slimed Us Forever. It explained that actor Kurt Fuller, who played the antagonistic mayor’s assistant Jack Hardemeyer, originally auditioned for another part — “a banker named Ed Petrosius whose irate nature is causing his office to periodically catch fire.” “The producers were looking for Gilbert Gottfried energy and that’s who got the part of Ed Petrosius over Fuller, though the sequence featuring the character was ultimately cut from the movie,” wrote author James Greene Jr.

From the sounds of it, Gottfried’s character only would have had the one scene, so he might not have saved the entire movie. That said, Gottfried certainly would have given Slimer a run for his money as the biggest-mouthed, most delightfully obnoxious character in Ghostbusters II.