The Real Ghostbusters

When I was three and four, I used to watch "The Real Ghost Busters" on TV, so I was surprised when I learned that the "Ghostbusters" movie was live-action!* As for the show itself, it's OK, although now I wish that they could have had Dana Barrett (Sigourney Weaver's character from the movies) as a character. It seems that Egon was always getting turned into something creepy - a monster chicken, a warlock, etc. I still wonder why the Slimer was on the Ghostbusters' side on the show. Maybe my favorite episode was the one where they got transferred into a ghost version of New York, although that one where they got stranded on the haunted island was also neat.

All in all, not great, but a pretty cool part of TV history. So just who are ya gonna call?

*The first time that I watched the movie (when I was seven), it scared the hell out of me. I was a little thrown off when I saw that it wasn't a cartoon, and by the fact that it was black and white. The lion statue threw me off further, and after the woman saw the ghost in the basement, I could only interpret the movie as horror. When it was over, I never wanted to watch it again. I watched it again when I was nine and thought that it was one of the funniest things that I'd ever seen. As for the black and white part, it came out black and white on the tape when my parents taped it; their only explanation is that the tape was haunted (in which case, that was the perfect movie to record onto it).

Like most animated shows, The Real Ghostbusters got off to a bit of a shaky start and things really improved soon after. Like the movie, there's more to it than just silly stories. The writers took many of their ideas from works of HP Lovecraft and made up their own wild but imaginative plots.

There were some slight changes made to the characters. Peter Venkman became younger, Ray Stantz shorter, fatter, ginger and more enthusiastic, Egon Spengler became blonde with round, red glasses, Winston Zeddemore looks nothing like Ernie Hudson, Janine Melnitz become hotter and Onionhead/Slimer became good instead of malevolent. And they also had different colored overalls. Why? Because kids respond better to colors.

Though it did bug me that there weren't many references to Gozer, why Dana and Louis disappeared and how all of a sudden the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man was good.

Animation fans will be unable to not think of Garfield or Fred from Scooby Doo whenever Peter or Ray talk as they are voiced by the same guys and sound exactly alike.

The show did go on for a good while and spawned a new generation of Ghostbusters toys and merchandise. There have been many bad animated TV shows made out of movies (The Mummy, Evolution, Ace Ventura, The Mask…I could go on) but The Real Ghostbusters ain't one of them. Extreme Ghostbusters followed in the mid-90's, but it didn't catch on too well.

I do wish Columbia would release season box sets on DVD but for now there are ultra-cheap 4-episode DVDs available from Columbia only in Britain. They'll do for now.

How do I even begin to describe how much a love affair I have with this series? The darker tone of the first couple seasons was great. It wasn't nearly as dark as Batman the Animated series,another favorite of mine was,in comparison.

One of the things that I heard of which may've affected the series in the last couple of seasons was parents complaining about violent content,which is funny when you compare it to series like He-man and TMNT which were both running around the same time. I say this is funny when you consider that both of the other series I've mentioned used more common weapons as well as attacking things that were sometimes human like living creatures.

Anyways back to Ghostbusters,before a lot of shows started having a chronological plot, I feel like Ghostbusters had some major first steps in that some of the episodes actually did connect,Samhain and Boogeyman are the ones I'm thinking of at the moment,might be others as well.

I also enjoyed waking up each Saturday morning to have the show to look forward to, the plots were good,the ghosts creative and just having a continuation of the first movie was great for a start of interest in the paranormal and supernatural and to find out what is actually out there.

With completely imaginative stories, and top notch writing, The Real Ghostbusters was far superior to Ghostbusters 2. This show benefitted from an excellent cast (Lorenzo Music, Arseno Hall, and cartoon workhorse Frank Welker,) as well as an incredible cadre of writers, including Babylon 5 creator J. Michael Strazynski, and Star Trek Tribble-meister David Gerrold.

Unlike the lackluster movie sequel, The Real Ghostbusters assumes that the increase in supernatural activity in New York doesn't subside after the banishment of Gozur the Gozerian. Instead, the series assumes that the guys stayed in business. Now, with most kids shows, this would have rapidly devolved into a series of stupid plots and repetitiveness. However, the production team for the first two seasons managed to avoid this. Instead, they dug into the deepest wells and pits of human folklore to find storylines (Indeed, this is the only 'kids' series that I have ever seen which borrowed from the works of HP Lovecraft, Clark Ashton, and August Derlith!) Gerrold, Strazinski, and the other writers (many of whom are extremely well known within Science Fiction circles) managed to construct plots which were always funny, exciting, and genuinely engaging, ranging from a spoof of Gerrold's own 'The Trouble with Tribbles (Attack of the 50 foot Slimer) to a top notch tribute to one of the greats of early 20th Century Literary Horror (Collect Call of Cuthulu) Also, the characterizations were top notch (even though Peter Venkman's lecherousness had to be toned down, obviously)

Unfortunately, after the second (?) season, the show underwent a major upheval, and most of the original creative staff left, along with some of the cast (Lorenzo Music was replaced by Dave Coulier, who, while he did a dead on Bill Murray impression, didn't have the ability to give the character as much personality.) And with the staff, so went the soul of the show. The writing went downhill, and, while the show was still above average, it just didn't catch the viewer's interest like it used to. By the time of it's final season (on the heels of Ghostbusters 2) it just wasn't worth watching...

Despite its troubled development history, this show does have a lot of redeeming features. Lower your expectations and this series is good. Living up to the impression created by the Ghostbuster movie may have been a tall order for a cartoon and could not really be plausible on technical grounds even if some would like to entertain a flawed perspective that this series was better than the movie simply due to quantity of content thrown at you. The series was however, explicitly treated as a continuation of the movie rather than a spin-off. The second movie however, pretty much ignored every single event or progression that happened in this series.

But you cannot help but compare this series to the movie which started it all. RGB almost completely lacks the primary strengths of the movie ie Bill Murray, Dan Ackroyd, Harold Ramis and Ernie Hudson. Admittedly, trying to make animated equivalents of the mentioned would have been an impossible task. What you get are a downgraded and very different bunch of characters for the show, more tuned towards catering to younger audiences instead of adult audiences that the movie was intended for. Their personalities considerably changed towards the more negative towards the end of the show.

Somehow or the other, they've managed to close most of the gaps between the animated Egon and Harold Ramis as well as the animated Janine and Annie Potts, and they are one of the primary reasons to watch this show. However, the other three characters are nothing like what you saw in the movies and have been severely dumbed down for the kiddies. Sadly, the character of Stantz suffers most from this change. Winston is no longer God fearing and curious, Stantz is one dimensional, performing the occasional technical tasks and Venkman is a wise crack spewing flirt with not a fraction of Bill Murray's charm or lechery. Getting to the positive, they have included Slimer in the mainstream, who is a great addition as a character. The annoying Lois Tully is gone for the most part.

Even so, these are a fairly good bunch of characters when you compare them with characters from other cartoons of the time. Heck, this animated series was actually better than most shows of the 80s, including the ones which were and are far more popular than it, including Thundercats, Transformers, TMNT, GI Joe, MASK and a bunch of others. Who can complain when you get to see your favourite team, or something resembling your favourite team, go up against all sorts of generic ghosts and Lovecraftian creatures from a vast beastiary? Don't expect scares though as the ghosts are really on the wackier side, which is actually a plus.

The story lines of each episode are fairly simple and straightforward and the most interesting ones were the ones which had hilarious circumstances rather than those that tried to squeeze in a serious plot. They are imaginative enough but not really gripping. J Michael Stracenzki of Babylon 5 fame has even written 21 episodes for this series, but his episodes are by far the worst and most boring episodes in the series, even though those particular episodes would be the most well known, for reasons both good and bad. It is very sad that after the first two seasons, this show became further dumbed down and both writing and production values plummeted. This resulted in two questionable spinoffs, namely the "Junior Ghostbusters" and a show focused on Slimer, neither of which were well received leading to the ultimate flop of this show. Even so, this series had some great and memorable episodes and out of 140 episodes, 20 to 30 were really good.

The animation is passable, ranging from decent to mediocre to sometimes poor, depending on the setting, scenes and complexity of character and object motion. As the seasons progressed, its Japanese flavour began to intensify and it ultimately yielded a anime look. Overall, by 80s standards, it was good and perhaps barely passable by today's animation standards. Dialog was however, always well written, even though the voice acting and syncing was not so good.

Sound and Music was very well done. The Music is also one of this show's strengths, it even included some cheesy but charming battle sequences set to pop music tracks by a dedicated music group called Tahiti. Not many of their tracks had a paranormal flavour though, and some of them were completely unrelated to what was actually going on during screenplay.

Overall, the RGB series is an extremely entertaining one, despite many flaws and shortcomings. While the Real Ghostbusters series may be the weakest albeit longest running part of the franchise which includes two Live Action movies and another brilliant cartoon called Extreme Ghostbusters, approaching the RGB series with a open mind should give it the credit it deserves. It may not be on par with the movies and as a cartoon, it is far inferior and not even comparable to the Extreme Ghostbusters (XGB, which incidentally had a lot of the original RGB team working on it as well) series but its still very good, all things considered. If you've seen XGB and not RGB, please lower your expectations even further and keep a really open mind before viewing RGB for the first time.