The Ghost Busters

I wasn't a kid when this aired ... I was in my 20s, and recognized it as the hippest kids TV around. You couldn't possibly have preferred Sid and Marty Kroft or Bob Denver's sad attempt at kid TV.

Full of bad puns, slapstick humor for kids, and the best gorilla suit in show business. Bob Burns was brilliant as Tracy. The file drawer schtick was good every time. My husband and I to this day still quote episodes, like Abby Dalton and Marty Ingalls with that campfire. "How'd you make coffee when there ain't no fire?" "I just left it on a little longer."

No, it's not sophisticated, and makes no apology for its silliness. But if you're intelligent, you can see how hip it is.

Larry Storch and Forrest Tucker did a wonderful job on F Troop. It is a cult comedy classic and they were as good as Bud Abbott and Lou Costello when it came to comic chemistry. This show holds a special place in my heart. I remember watching it as an eight year old and it brought me a lot of laughter and enjoyment. I watched it on Saturday morning cartoons (a golden memory of my childhood in West Virginia) and I also watched Far Out Space Nuts with Bob Denver and Chuck McCann. Storch and Tucker were a couple of bumbling ghost busters who had a guy in a gorilla suit as a partner. The thing I remembered was always the spoof of Mission Impossible that they did where they got blown up every time. Kids need innocent, fun programming like this now more then ever before and I wish they would put this show back so that new generations can have some good and innocent laughs as well. It was only a few years ago that I saw a video of this show in a Blockbuster at Fort Riley, Kansas. It has been so unfairly forgotten. Larry Storch and Forrest Tucker both served our country well in World War II. Tucker served in the Army and Larry Storch was a Navy submariner. They are heroes in real life as well as on the screen. I write to celebrities as a hobby and wrote to Mister Storch recently. I praised his fine services to our nation and he sent me a beautiful signed picture he said "To Sergeant David Tucker, thank you for the greatest letter I have ever recieved".

'Fraid the other comment has it all wrong. This was not a cartoon, but a live action Saturday morning program. "Spencery, Tracy, and Kong" were the original Ghost Busters, and they were played by real live TV stars Forrest Tucker (Keeper of the Flame) and Larry Storch (Koko the Clown), and famous sci-fi movie buff Bob Burns (as the Gorilla, Tracy - Forrest Tucker was Kong). Tucker and Storch had appeared together before in F-Troop. It was pretty silly, but for 8-10 year olds relatively entertaining. For a live action kids show in the 1970s it was pretty dang good - consider what else we had then: Sigmund and The Sea Monsters, and a bunch of psychedelic Kroft fantasies.

I just read someone else's comments about this show and apparently they were confused. THIS SHOW WAS NOT A CARTOON, IT WAS A LIVE ACTION SERIES. Filmation released a cartoon based on this show in the 80s. This program was on TV in the 70s.

As a kid, watching this on Saturday morning Television, I thought that it was the greatest show. Seeing episodes (available on a discontinued VHS tape from Continental Video) more recently, I found that the humor really didn't survive my growing up. It can still be fun to watch for its campy horror\comedy and Bob Burns did great as the Gorilla member of the Ghost Busting team! For those not familiar with the series, every week the characters would receive a message sending them on a ghost busting mission. The message would alway self destruct after they listened to it and Tracy the Gorilla would always get caught in the explosion. The characters would usually end up in a haunted house\mansion where they would solve whatever problem was going on in that episode, then find the ghost and send it on to the next plane of existence. Lots of silly jokes and guest stars that were familiar to 70s TV audiences.

The 1975 show of Ghostbusters ("The Original Ghostbusters") was an entertaining diversion for young children. Silly, in the campy style of the live-action Batman and other shows of the time, but the interaction between the old F-Troop chums did an admirable job of making up for the (serious, real serious) lack of plot. And this was enough, as it was a show aimed at little kids.

The briefly-run live-action show was left on the shelf for about a decade until the movies starring Ackroyd & Murray became popular enough to spin off a cartoon series. After two or three seasons of THAT series, the original show was dusted off and reborn into its own cartoon, featuring the sons of both Storch & Tucker -- along with the ape & a female character. "The Original Ghostbusters" cartoon also ran but briefly (believe it was put out by a group calling itself "KBN"); still, it ran long enough to apparently spur its competitor to change titles from "Ghostbusters" to "The Real Ghostbusters".