I AIN’T AFRAID OF NOSTALGIA: REVISITING ‘THE REAL GHOSTBUSTERS’ BY RICHARD MARTIN

20/4/2021

How many times have you revisited a former favourite childhood TV show, only to find it completely and maddeningly unwatchable? You wonder what the appeal was to your younger self, someone you’d previously considered to be something of a cartoon connoisseur.

I grew up in the 1990s and cartoons such as ‘He-Man’, ‘Captain Planet’ and ‘Biker Mice From Mars’ were well-loved favourites back in the day. Some of you reading this may be unhappy to hear that, in my opinion at least, they haven’t aged all that well. The animation looks a little wooden, the messages and morals are a little on-the-nose and the fact that so many were clearly long-running advertisements for a toy line is a little difficult to get past. They still have their charms but, let's be honest, they aren’t all that great in the cold, hard light of adulthood. I may not be that kid getting up early on weekends to watch his Saturday morning cartoons anymore, but I do still like my animation and I wish there were more of these shows from my youth that I could re-watch relatively pain-free.

While these cartoons were ones I watched every week, there are two that we’re ones I actively looked forward to, the absolute best of the best. These were two cartoons that every kid I knew watched. Cartoons featuring characters we pretended to be in the playground when we weren’t talking about the latest episode we’d watched. They were ‘Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles’ and ‘The Real Ghostbusters’

Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles (yes, ‘Hero’ Turtles. Sorry America, but your Ninja Turtles were deemed too violent for us UK kids and they were renamed here so as not to warp our fragile minds) was an absolute phenomenon in my younger years. Everyone had a favourite Turtle (mine, controversially at the time, was Donatello) and most of my friends had a Turtles lunchbox or t-shirt or toy they’d bring to school. We even dressed up as Turtles for a school play once. I’ll be damned if I can remember what the logic behind it was, but it was a great day nonetheless. Watching the cartoon now, it totally holds up, but that is a different article for a different time.

What I wanted to talk about today was my favourite cartoon growing up. The Real Ghostbusters. This was my introduction to the Ghostbusters franchise and was a pretty big deal for me. I was always the one encouraging my friends to play Ghostbusters in the playground (a game that basically entailed chasing an imaginary ghost around, shooting at it with imaginary Proton Packs until we arbitrarily decided that we’d ‘caught' it, only for another ghost to conveniently appear for us to catch all over again). I’m not going to lie, I’d always been reluctant to go back to this particular show because if this one held a special place in my heart. The others, I could live with, but if this didn’t hold up, that would’ve stung.

Thanks to DVD and Blu Ray re-releases, sites like YouTube, and the seemingly infinite number of new streaming services, it is tantalisingly easy to check out cartoons from yesteryear, even obscure ones nobody else seems to recollect (you all remember ‘Samurai Pizza Cats’, right? No? Just me?). Thanks to Time Life and their fantastic boxset of the complete series, I had a chance to catch up with my childhood heroes and I’m pleased to report that, not only does the show hold up, it’s actually way better than I remember it being.
Here are six reasons why seeking out this series again is well worth your time.

It’s Smarter Than You Remember

It seems like more of a modern approach to media aimed at children, to include things that would also appeal to adults, something perfected by studios like Pixar, and it is fun to see throwaway lines or small jokes that are there just for the grown-ups. It was something that The Real Ghostbusters were doing spectacularly, way back in the 1980s and into the 90s.

It actually started with the very first episode of the show. Titled ‘Ghosts R Us’, where a trio of ghosts set up a rival ghostbusting company in order to discredit the Ghostbusters, effectively taking the shows core concept and flipping it on its head, in the very first episode!
Fans of the show would probably agree that it started to take a dip in quality in later years (when it was renamed ‘Slimer and The Real Ghostbusters’ in an attempt to make an already successful show appeal to a younger audience). One of the changes made was to make the teams receptionist, Janine, was ‘toned down’ to be less sarcastic and abrasive and became a little blander as a result.

When the change didn’t stick, the writers came up with a canonical explanation in ‘Janine, You’ve Changed'. In the episode, it is revealed that Janine has a fairy godmother who has been granting her wishes, gradually changing her personality and appearance based on how Janine believes she should be. The team ultimately help her to defeat the fairy godmother (actually a demon called ‘Makeoverus Lotsabucks’, in a sly jab to the studio). I’m hard-pressed to think of a children’s show that could get away with effectively airing behind the scenes issues on screen in such a funny and overt way.

It Was Genuinely Scary

This was probably a big part of the appeal for me as a kid. The strong characters and big action set-pieces were all great but when The Real Ghostbusters wanted to scare you, it was pretty damn effective! There were a surprisingly large number of episodes that I remember giving me nightmares and I’ve picked out just a handful of the most terrifying.

The Thing in Mrs Faversham’s Attic – This was a classic episode all around and did a lot to ground and humanise the larger-than-life egomaniac that was The Real Ghostbuster’s Peter Venkman, but what stuck with me is the creepy attic and the creature trapped there by an occult ritual. This one was tense and, when it got going, surreal and disturbing.

The Boogieman Cometh – Ask any fan of the show what the scariest episode is, and this will likely be your answer. A cloven-hooved demon squeezing itself through a door half its size to sneak into kid’s bedrooms at night with the express purpose of scaring the shit out of them is pure nightmare fuel, child or adult.

Victor the Happy Ghost– If I had to pick the one episode that scarred me as a kid, this would be it. The concept is basically, what if Casper the Friendly Ghost wasn’t all that friendly and could transform into a Gozer-Esque roid monster with a face that’s at least 60% teeth. This one caused me more than one sleepness night!

Things Get Very Meta

One of the most fun aspects of The Real Ghostbusters is how it not only embraced the film franchise but actually incorporated it into the show in a very meta way. In the cartoon, the movies exist as a fictional version of the REAL Ghostbusters featured in the cartoon. So, the cartoon versions of the Ghostbusters are the real Ghostbusters and Bill Murray, Dan Ackroyd, Harold Ramis and Ernie Hudson just play fictionalised versions of them in the movie!

There is a whole episode dedicated to this concept (‘Take Two’) where the Real Ghostbusters visit the set of the 1984 movie in order to bust a ghost plaguing production. After a (mostly) successful mission they attend the movie premiere, where Peter hilariously declares that the actor they have chosen ‘looks nothing like him', but not before Winston gets a killer line declaring that the names Ramis, Ackroyd and Murray ‘sound like a law firm’. It’s such a ballsy, fun take, and one that completely passed me by as a kid that was sadly unfamiliar with the films.

It Does An Incredible Amount Of World-Building

Ever wonder what’s inside the Ghostbusters containment unit? What became of Gozer? What the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man is up to these days? Well, worry not, because the Real Ghostbusters has answers to all these questions, and more you didn’t even know you needed answers to until now!

It’s no secret that the writers on The Real Ghostbusters were largely given free rein to go as big as they liked and that freedom comes through in the finished product. Movie references aside, the rules set in the cartoon universe were clearly defined, always followed, and constantly circle back around, and the work that went into creating the additional lore is a big reason why the show has stood the test of time.

All of the team get standalone episodes (even secondaries like Janine and Slimer) to develop their characters and we’re even introduced to extended family. Peter Venkman’s dad was a particular stand-out in episodes such as ‘Venkman’s Ghost Repellers’ and ‘Cold Cash and Hot Water’ He’s a likeable con-man who makes a great foil for Peter, who is obviously uncomfortable with how similar they both are. It is such a rich and vivid world, with so many recurring characters (even ghosts like Sam Hain and the Boogeyman make multiple appearances) that it was far more immersive and developed than a movie spin-off cartoon had any right to be.

It Had A H.P Lovecraft Themed Episode

The episode that stood out most to me as a horror fan, and one whose references completely went over my head when it first aired, was ‘The Collect Call of Cathulhu’. I know what you’re thinking, massive points for the title already, but it gets better!

This whole episode is jam-packed full of H.P Lovecraft references and features Cults, the Necronomicon, Shuggoths, the Old Ones (which Egon helpfully posits ‘made Gozer look like Little Mary Sunshine’) and Cthulhu himself. There are even references that only the most hardened horror lit fans would get. A Professor called Ted Klein? A library official called Clark Ashton? The Ghostbusters are even assisted on this case by Alice Derleth, hailing from Miskatonic University and get some supplies from Wagners Occult shop!

The team ultimately defeat the cultists and the Old Ones using an old issue of Weird Tales for guidance. It is so jam-packed full of obscure references that would have been so thoroughly meaningless to me when I first saw it, that I’m sure even horror fanatic present-day me missed a ton of them on the rewatch.

Winston Is Awesome

Please don’t think I’m speaking ill of the movies here. I love them both but, I’ve got to be honest, I found my first watch of Ghostbusters to be a little jarring having started with the cartoon, largely because of Winston. I don’t think it’s unfair to say that he’s not given a great deal to do in the first film, and it’s hardly an issue the sequel takes great pains to correct. This was weird for me as a kid, because Winston in The Real Ghostbusters is the glue that holds the whole team together.

In the cartoon, Winston is the capable, ever reliable member of the team. He’s the one you want with you on the difficult cases, the one who never loses his cool. He was the team’s everyman and by far the most relatable of the team. All the rich back-story in my head about the character came from the Real Ghostbusters. He was accepted into the National Space Program (‘Spacebusters’), is a big baseball fan (‘Night Game’) and an avid reader of mystery novels (‘Boo-Dunit’,’Elementary My Dear Winston’). It’s the little details that made Winston so memorable and it’s a shame that the films never took full advantage of him as a character.

With the latest movie (Ghostbusters: Afterlife) on the horizon, I can’t help but hope we’ll see a new animated iteration of the team in the not-too-distant future or, at the very least, the new films puts a well-deserved spotlight back on the well-loved and sorely missed masterpiece that is The Real Ghostbusters.

*A big thank you to ghostbusters.fandom.com for the links

Richard is an avid reader and fan of all things horror. He supports Indie horror lit via Twitter (@RickReadsHorror) and reviews horror in all its forms for several websites including Horror Oasis and Sci Fi and Scary