द रियल घोस्टबस्टर्स

The Real Ghostbusters is the animated spin off to 1984's kick-ass classic movie "Ghostbusters" which deals with four ghost eliminators (Peter, Egon, Winston and Ray) catching all sorts of poltergeists and saving New York from destruction while at the same time not losing it's nerve to be a comedy. What's different about The Real Ghostbusters after the first movie's release was how they make the character of Janine Melnitz more developed and making her not afraid while adding the character of Slimer as the group's mascot. The highlights of the show were things that people of today wouldn't handle from spooky music; bringing in mythical creatures, classic fairy tales and spirits in the cartoons such as The Bogeyman, The Sandman, even a revised version of The Headless Horseman on a motorcycle was awesome. Even though the series doesn't come on cable anymore, The Real Ghostbusters was a real guilty pleasure in my childhood where every Saturday morning i would wake up to see the cartoons along with having my action figures to recreate the scenes.

That's a memory.

I grew up watching the Real Ghostbusters, and I gotta tell ya, it blew my mind. The voice acting was great, the stories were very original and the effects were incredible. What made the stories great was that the writers didn't insult the intelligence of the audience and presented it like the movie did when dealing with scientific problems. But what interested me were the episodes written by Michael Reaves, the man responsible for the two Bogeyman episodes. What I still don't know is what gave him the idea to not only reveal the reason why Egon wanted to be a Ghostbuster and why he didn't make the Bogeyman a ghost. Pure genius. Too bad he didn't write a Bogeyman episode for the Extreme Ghostbusters, but I guess that's my job. Well, till next time.

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.

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...

I'm 26.

"The Real Ghostbusters" is as good and as real as an animated TV series based off a popular movie franchise can possibly get. When I was growing up during the early 1990s, "The Real Ghostbusters" was one of four popular cartoon TV shows that helped shape my formative childhood years; the other three cartoons from that time were "Transformers," "G.I. Joe" and my personal favorite, "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles."

Toward the mid-'90s, "The Real Ghostbusters" was ultimately removed from an early-morning TV line-up on USA (that's now channel 35, if you have Comcast cable like I do) that included the other three aforementioned animated shows, which soon left me without a source of entertainment that would spark my wild kiddie imagination. But thankfully, the advent of TV-on-DVD in the last decade has brought this utterly fantastic TV series back from the land of classic TV show entertainment oblivion.

Of course, "The Real Ghostbusters" was spun off the wildly popular 1984 cult supernatural comedy "Ghostbusters," about three unemployed university parapsychologists who become New York City's leading investigators and eliminators of pesky poltergeists. Drs. Peter Venkman (Bill Murray), Raymond Stantz (Dan Aykroyd) and Egon Spengler (Harold Ramis) were eventually supplemented by a fourth member, Everyman Winston Zeddemore (Ernie Hudson), as they battled an ancient, malevolent, other-worldly entity that had designs on dropping in on Central Park West and laying waste to human civilization.

"The Real Ghostbusters" is a continuation of that exact same storyline with the same classic characters and a new legion of evil ghosts needing investigation and extermination from our four popular heroes.

"The Real Ghostbusters," like its original 1984 film-spawn, is a work of unquestionable uniqueness, brilliance, and originality. "Ghostbusters" was one of the most unique and original comedies to come out of the early '80s (and it's also one of my all-time favorite movies), so it's no wonder why it was the highest-grossing film of 1984 - after a cash-grabbing theatrical re-release one year later in 1985 to beat out "Beverly Hills Cop"; it's also no wonder why it also had a best-selling musical soundtrack, too, which featured the pop culture classic "Ghostbusters" by Ray Parker, Jr., and the song is featured prominently on the TV show as well. Also like in the movie, "The Real Ghostbusters" crackles with humor, strong voice-acting performances, action sequences, special effects, and imagination.

"The Real Ghostbusters" is real creativity and imagination from a time when TV shows were still willing enough to be daring and original.

10/10