Character Analysis
Uber-nerd
Dr. Egon Spengler's a guy who collects
EGON: Spores, mold, and fungus
for fun. That about says it all, right? Yeah, he's not as geeky as Louis Tully—who could be?—but Egon is still a nerd-deluxe. No joke; if Harold Ramis hadn't died (RIP, you magnificent man) we wouldn't be surprised if Dr. Spengler made a cameo on Big Bang Theory. He'd probably meet some of his biggest fans.
Complete with thick glasses, the nerdiest of the Ghostbusters seems like the main man behind most of the high-tech equipment that makes spectral extermination a viable profession. Ray is totally his right hand man, but Egon comes off as the real expert on the ecto containment unit, the ghost trap, the PKE meter, and the proton packs.
Whenever the movie wants to give us some technical-sounding details about a piece of equipment, it's Dr. Spengler who steps in to give us a lesson in weird science. A fan favorite is when Egon explains the dangers of crossing the proton pack streams...
EGON: Try to imagine all life as you know it stopping instantaneously, and every molecule in your body exploding at the speed of light.
Yikes. There's also Egon's classic Twinkie analogy when he's worried about the containment grid holding up against the PKE disaster he's detected is on the way...
EGON: It's getting crowded in there. And all my recent data points to something big on the horizon. [...] Let's say this Twinkie represents the normal amount of psychokinetic energy in the New York area. According to this morning's sample, it would be a Twinkie thirty-five feet long weighing approximately six hundred pounds.
Whoa, don't you ever have any good news, Egon? Anyway, point proven. When it comes to the Ghostbusters, Dr. Spengler is kind of like the IT guy. Well, the IT guy that knows his way around a nuclear accelerator.
Mr. Roboto
Like a lot other science-guy characters, Egon comes off as being almost robotically unemotional. He's so cerebral and in his head the whole time that he sometimes seems to not notice (or care) when other characters are getting emotional. When Janine is trying to flirt with him by talking about how many books she reads, his only response is to coldly say,
EGON: Print is dead.
Even when things get crazy with Gozer and Egon is seriously freaked out, the most emotion we get out of him is him flatly saying,
EGON: I'm terrified beyond the capacity for rational thought.
Even this moment of emotional weakness doesn't last too long, as directly after this Egon's brilliant brain comes up with the risky idea of crossing the proton streams to banish Gozer.
Brain Farts
Despite his hyper-intellectual personality, Egon does have a few Nutty Professor-style moments where he misses some pretty important details. Like, oh say, the fact the Ghostbusters go to their first gig without ever testing their proton packs and the fact that Egon didn't think to warn the other guys beforehand that they might be annihilated if they accidentally crossed the streams.
Then, of course, there's the fact that Egon and Ray designed a containment grid that could potentially cause a massive explosion in the middle of New York City if somebody flipped one little switch. Wow, Egon: for a great thinker, sometimes you really don't think things through.
Egon's Timeline