Tuesday, October 19, 2010

Spooktober: The Real Ghostbusters (1986)

In an effort to retool its Saturday morning lineup, ABC had retired the Super Friends after 13 seasons, and plugged the hole with The Real Ghostbusters.

2 years after the first movie, Real Ghostbusters picks up where the movie left off, but in order to attract the kids, the team now has a pet ghost, if you will, Slimer, which in truth was a deterrent. But, considering that this franchise managed to last 5 seasons on ABC, and Slimer was included in "Ghostbusters 2" (1989), DIC and Sony appeared to make the right call. Superherocartoonsite uploaded the open, with the theme sung by a Ray Parker, Jr. soundalike:



After the first season, the series added a weekday, syndicated run, and there were some cast changes. Lorenzo Music (ex-Rhoda), who'd been cast as Peter, left to work on Garfield & Friends, and the producers brought in Canadian comic Dave Coulier (Full House) to take his place. Voice-over vet Buster Jones stepped in as Winston, replacing-----wait for it----Arsenio Hall, who was still a year and a half away from his late night talk show.

One other note. As the series progressed, a relationship developed between Egon and Janine, the team's secretary. As we know from "Ghostbusters 2", Janine flirted with lawyer Louis Tully, but that didn't translate into the cartoons. A decade later, in the weekday series, Extreme Ghostbusters, there was the implication that Egon & Janine had in fact gotten married, or at least were working together in charge of training a new team of Ghostbusters. The Extreme series, however, lasted just 2 seasons. They're still planning a 3rd movie, so maybe another animated series will follow. Stress maybe.

Rating: A.

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