The release of Beetlejuice 2 36 years after the franchise’s original movie answered a lot of the questions we were left with at the end of Beetlejuice. Many key details about the backstory of the film’s eponymous bio-exorcist, Betelgeuse, are explained in the sequel, for instance, including the way he died. However, there are certain details from the first movie that the sequel doesn’t elaborate on, including one confusing detail from the final sH๏τ of Winona Ryder’s character Lydia Deetz in Beetlejuice.
The original Beetlejuice movie ends with Lydia dancing and miming along to Harry Belafonte’s calypso classic “Jump in the Line”, backed by a line of ghost football players who suddenly appear before her on the staircase of the Maitland house. Beetlejuice’s football players are first introduced in an earlier scene, featuring the Maitlands’ ᴅᴇᴀᴅ caseworker Juno. Their apparent confusion at what they’re doing in Juno’s office is among the movie’s standout comedy moments. However, their sudden reappearance at the end of Beetlejuice doesn’t work nearly well, and how little sense it makes still bothers me every time I rewatch it.
How Do The Football Player Ghosts Suddenly Appear From The Afterlife In Beetlejuice’s Final OG Dance Scene?
Their Sudden Appearance Breaks The Rules Of The Recently Deceased
Although Tim Burton ultimately meant for Beetlejuice to be funny, which is why the movie’s script toys with its own internal logic for comic effect, it wouldn’t be as wonderfully captivating if it didn’t at least set some ground rules for its ghoulish premise. Most of these rules are actually explained in the “Handbook of the Recently Deceased”, a book which both guides the characters Adam and Barbara Maitland through ghosthood, and provides us with the exposition we need to understand the world of the movie. Yet the sudden appearance of the footballer players at the end of Beetlejuice breaks one of the book’s main rules.
When the ghost football players serve as Lydia’s backing dancers in Beetlejuice‘s closing scene, they appear out of nowhere, without entering the world of the living through a door or being summoned.
Every ghost in the movie, with the notable exceptions of caseworker Juno and Betelgeuse himself, must pᴀss through a door to go between the afterlife and the world of the living. This rule is explicitly laid out in a scene where the newly-ᴅᴇᴀᴅ Maitlands must draw a door on a wall to enter the afterlife. Even Betelgeuse himself can only enter the world of the living when he’s summoned, by someone saying his name three times in quick succession.
On the other hand, when the ghost football players serve as Lydia’s backing dancers in the movie’s closing scene, they appear out of nowhere, without entering the world of the living through a door or being summoned. In this way, their appearance breaks the ground rules for the afterlife laid out earlier in Beetlejuice, undermining the movie’s plot. This apparent contradiction is never clarified or explained in Beetlejuice Beetlejuice either.
The Football Players In Beetlejuice’s Ending Strangely Have A Much More Ghostly Appearance Than The Other ᴅᴇᴀᴅ Characters
They’re See-Through, Whereas Other Ghosts In Beetlejuice Have Solid, Opaque Bodies
What’s more, the football players at the end of Beetlejuice don’t even look like the other ghosts in the movie. In fact, they actually appear different from how they looked in the earlier scene in Juno’s afterlife office. In every scene prior to this last sH๏τ, the ghosts in Beetlejuice have a solid appearance akin to living human beings. But when they suddenly arrive to dance along with Lydia to “Jump in the Line”, the football players are semi-transparent, more like the appearance of ghosts in other movies than the ones we see elsewhere in Beetlejuice.
Even when Barbara and Adam Maitland fall victim to an exorcism at the hands of the Deetz’ interior designer, Otho, their appearance doesn’t become more transparent. Instead, their skin shrivels and their bones begin to show, but they still appear just as solid as living beings. The translucent ghost football players certainly add a bit of extra off-the-wall humor to the final moments of Beetlejuice. But this split-second sH๏τ isn’t worth cutting across the internal logic of the entire movie’s carefully crafted horror story for the sake of a moment’s comedy.
