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(Post writing started at 8:15pm. 8:15pm of July 26, that is.)
Over the course of the past couple of months or so, I've finally gone through all of The Real Ghostbusters (including the Slimer! stuff) and Extreme Ghostbusters, all of which is something I've been talking about doing for at least a decade now. So, I'm about to dump another big wall o' text here, like I did for the Dungeons & Dragons cartoon a few years ago.
So, let's get some meta stuff out of the way first. The first two seasons together contain more episodes than the last five seasons combined. The first two seasons are 78 episodes, 13 in season one and 65 in season two (the syndication season). Seasons 3-7 combined make up only 62 episodes. However, this does not include the Slimer! shorts. Depending on how you number those, there were either 13 episodes of that (which would still be less than seasons 1-2, at 75), if you count the combined shorts for a single segment as "one episode," or 33 episodes, if you count each individual 6-7 minute short as its own episode. As I'll get into later, I think the earlier stuff was much better.
Now, I'm going to talk about the casting, both initially and later on, because it's kind of interesting. The original four Ghostbusters and Janine in the first two seasons were voiced as follows. Lorenzo Music as Peter Venkman, Frank Welker as Ray Stantz (and also Slimer), Maurice LaMarche as Egon Spengler, Arsenio Hall (yes that Arsenio Hall) as Winston Zeddemore, and Laura Summer as Janine Melnitz. They were all pretty great.
Here are a few interesting stories about the casting. The show runners, depending on who you ask, initially didn't want voices that sounded like the original movie actors, apparently.
First, they hired Maurice LaMarche for Egon despite the fact that he sounds very close to Harold Ramis in the cartoon. The story goes that they asked him to tone down the impression a bit and he pretty much said it was impossible for him to do so because he couldn't see any other way to do it, and they hired him anyway. (By the way, Maurice LaMarche and Frank Welker were the only two actors to voice their respective Ghostbuster from the start all the way through to the end of Extreme. All of the others [including, strangely, Welker's role as Slimer] were replaced by different actors at some point along the way).
Second, Ernie Hudson himself read for the role of Winston in the cartoon. They hired Arsenio Hall instead, because, again, they apparently didn't want the voices to sound like the original actors. Or else they deemed that Ernie Hudson didn't sound enough like Ernie Hudson, which is how Ernie Hudson told it at one point. So, just to restate that, Ernie Hudson, who played Winston Zeddemore in the movies, lost out to someone else for the role of Winston Zeddemore in the cartoon. (Oh, and Hall was replaced by Buster Jones from season 4 onward.)
Third, there is the story that during a screening of the early stuff by Bill Murray, he asked a jokey, off-hand question about why he sounded like Garfield (who Music was well known for voicing at the time). At least partly as a result of that, they later replaced Music with Dave Coulier, starting from season three onward, because Coulier could do a Bill Murray impression. Also, this leads into the "funny" situation of Peter Venkman, played by Bill Murray, being voiced by Lorenzo Music, the voice of Garfield, in the RGB cartoon, whereas Garfield, voiced by Lorenzo Music in the cartoon, was voiced by Bill Murray in the "live-action" Garfield: The Movie. Hyuck.
Lastly, Laura Summer was replaced by Kath Soucie from season three until the end of RGB. (Janine was voiced by Pat Musick in EGB.) The reason for this was, apparently, because they didn't want Janine to have a Brooklyn accent anymore. Also, they were trying to tone down Janine's personality overall, because she was apparently too "abrasive" initially (and, supposedly, because pointy glasses could scare children or some shit, and I wish I was making that up). And so, Janine became more of a "team mom" or whatever in the later episodes of RGB. In any case, it was a load of bullshit. Much more on that later.
Oh, and I should point out that most of the characters from the movies show up in the cartoon, at least once. Louis Tully shows up quite a bit in the later seasons, Mayor Lenny is there, off and on, throughout the series, and even Walter Peck manages to get an episode devoted to him (and he is a much bigger asshat in the cartoon than he ever was in the movies, which says a lot). Out of all the characters in the movies, the only major character who never shows up in the cartoon is Dana Barrett.
And before I leave this section, here is a link to the unaired pilot episode.
Okay, with all of that shit out of the way (mostly), let's talk about The Real Ghostbusters itself. (I'll give the Slimer! stuff its own section later.)
It goes without saying, but I'm going to say it anyway: the first two seasons of RGB are better, by far, than the subsequent five. However, the later stuff isn't as bad as many claim it to be (including the Slimer! stuff).
The earlier seasons (I'd include season 3 in this) tended to be a little darker/more serious than the later stuff. Granted, it was still primarily a kids cartoon, for sure, with jokes and the like, but still. Compare antagonists like Samhain ([mis]pronounced as "Sam-hane" rather than more properly as "Sah-when"), the Boogieman/Bogeyman, or the Grundel (who was the only ghost to return in Extreme), or fucking Cthulhu (misspelled as "Cathulhu," apparently because some dumbass thought "Cthulhu" itself was misspelled and "fixed" it in the title card) in the earlier seasons, to shit like the Mean Green Teen Machine (blatant riffs on the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles) or the Grungie family (blatant riffs on not just The Simpsons but also Married... with Children) in the later seasons. In the later stuff, they really tried to tone down the scares and make the show more "kid-friendly." Even when they brought back the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man (who in the movie was the "Destructor Form" of Gozer, and not really his own entity), in his first appearance, he was portrayed as a threat that the Ghostbusters had to deal with, but in his later appearances, he was the Ghostbusters' and Slimer's good buddy.
Some of the characters were changed quite a bit from the earlier seasons to the later ones. Earlier Peter Venkman (Lorenzo Music version), for example, was more of a ladies man, more antagonistic toward Slimer, and more of just an asshole in general (so, like, way more faithful to the Bill Murray portrayal of him in the movies). The later Venkman (Coulier version) was greatly toned down on all those aspects, especially his relationship with Slimer (i.e. he became way friendlier toward the spud, almost to the point of being "out-of-character"). Winston Zeddemore was given the role of "the vehicle guy" in later seasons (i.e. he was a black guy whose main task, apparently, was driving around a bunch of white guys, and I'm certainly not the first to note the racism, unintentional or otherwise, that drips off of this), and... well... they apparently wanted to get rid of Ray Stantz altogether, because they found him superfluous, given that they had greatly toned down Peter's assholery and non-friendliness toward Slimer.
The one who was changed the most, though, was almost assuredly Janine. Like I said before, she went from the snarky, sarcastic Brooklyn-accented secretary to... the team mom, for lack of a better description. She became a lot nicer, less rough-around-the-edges, and just... blander. I have nothing against Kath Soucie. Kath Soucie is great. But I much preferred Laura Summer's version of Janine. (And aside from the above stated "more kid friendly" reasons for changing her, I really have to assume that at least part of what raised a red alert regarding Janine and the need to "tone her down" was the fact that she spent an entire episode in season 2 dressed like this. Not that it personally bothered me, mind you. ¬_¬ But I can easily picture it having gotten the Moral Guardians at the time in an uproar.) So, they changed Janine. This was one thing, among others, that really pissed off J. Michael Straczynski, the head story editor for the show during the first two seasons, enough so that he straight up quit. Until they all but begged him to come back later, after the show's ratings started tanking in the later seasons. One condition for him coming back (in a limited capacity) was that he was allowed to write an episode that "explained" why Janine had changed so much. Basically, the entire episode was a huge double middle finger to Broadcast Standards and Practices and to the consulting firm who suggested all the changes that had been made to the show. (Just to note, pretty much all of the episodes written by JMS were among the best of the entire show, including this Janine one.)
One "huge" thing that a lot of people claim "rUiNeD fOrEvEr" The Real Ghostbusters was the inclusion of the "Junior Ghostbusters," a trio of small kids who sometimes tagged along with the Ghostbusters (and/or got in the way). But... here's the thing. The Junior Ghostbusters were only ever in two (2) episodes of the main show. Three, if you count that one clip show, near the end. Hell, for that matter, they were only in two (2) of the Slimer! shorts as well (three if you count a brief non-speaking appearance in another one), which is weird because they would have fit in way better there than in the main show, but more on Slimer! later. As for me... I didn't mind the Junior Ghostbusters that much. It was a bit annoying that their only two main appearances coincided with the return of two of the bigger villains of the earlier seasons (the Boogeyman and Samhain, the only ghosts aside from Stay Puft to be reused from previous episodes, at least in the main RGB show), which kind of cheapened their reappearances. The main thing that bothered me about the Junior Ghostbusters, though, was that their presence was never explained. They never had an origin story, per se. The Ghostbusters just started talking about them as if they'd always been around. This, despite the fact that the show already had a tailor-made origin story for them that it could have used, but didn't, in the concept of the "Ghostbusters Auxiliary" (a thing that Venkman pulled out of his ass on the spot when that one kid randomly showed up at the Firehouse claiming to want to be a Ghostbuster). It would have been cool if Kenny Fenderman had been part of the Junior Ghostbusters, too, but oh well. Anyway, that's the only real issue I had with the Junior Ghostbusters, considering they only ever appeared twice, total. Hell, the recurring appearance of one of the villains from the Slimer! shorts bothered me more than the Junior Ghostbusters did. (More on that later.)
And, of course, the later seasons brought on a much larger focus on Slimer himself. Slimer went from a gibbering, barely coherent, almost-pet of the Ghostbusters to a full-sentence-speaking straight up partner. And, in many of the later episodes, he was the star of the show (not even counting the Slimer! stuff). And... that honestly didn't bother me too much. Granted, it was a bit jarring the first time Slimer spoke an entire, complete sentence, rather than the word-mangling he'd been doing before (seriously, for some strange reason, the way he says "baseball?" in this one scene has stuck with me), but I got used to it. Slimer occasionally stealing the show truly didn't bother me that much.
On that note, let's move on to Slimer!
(God, how I hated that cover of the Ray Parker Jr. Ghostbusters theme. Not sure why they changed it, unless it was money reasons. It was probably money reasons.)
The Slimer! shorts were a whole other animal. While the actual Ghostbusters weren't completely absent from it, they appeared only seldomly. The main cast of Slimer!, aside from Slimer himself was as follows:
And... that was pretty much it for the Slimer! shorts. Just a bunch of goofy slapstick hijinks. It was... okay, I suppose, and I liked it well enough for what it was and what it was meant to be, but it was objectively dogshit compared to The Real Ghostbusters proper. Also, most of the shorts were only like 6-7 minutes long, with an occasional one or two that was double that (so still only around half of a normal episode of RGB proper).
(Not going to bother embedding the Slimer! and outro here, because it's the same as the one above, just with an instrumental of that shittier cover playing during it.)
Moving on to Extreme Ghostbusters.
I liked Extreme Ghostbusters. I think, prior to watching the entire series over the past few weeks, I had seen onlyonetwo entire full episodes, that being the two-parter that brought back Peter, Ray, and Winston. Having seen the whole thing now, though... it was pretty good.
Overall, it was way darker (both theme-wise, and more literally speaking, with how the art looked and how they "lit" the scenes they animated and such) than the old-school Real Ghostbusters was. Like, people (sometimes including the Ghostbusters themselves) often got super fucked up in this series, compared to the original. For example, having their bodies being drained of all water or having all the bones removed from their bodies or having their eyes forcibly sucked out of their heads, shit like that. Though simply capturing the ghost at the end of the episode almost invariably would magically return everything to how it was before the ghost caused all that harm to its victims (or grievous property damage), which was a bit of a cop-out. (Kind of made me wonder why, whenever Slimer broke something or made a big mess or whatever, they didn't just lock his stupid ass in a trap for an hour or so. ¬_¬) But still. Super fucked up.
In addition to being darker, it could be, at times, quite a bit more... ...risqué than the RGB ever dared to be. For one thing, there's a scene in one episode where Eduardo is having a dream about Kylie and before it gets hijacked by the ghost of the episode... well... just take a look for yourself. And there's this bit, too. Not to mention this from the two-parter first episodes. So... yeah, that's a thing.
The team. The team consisted of the following:
As far as the episodes go, I think EGB was more consistently good than RGB was, but it never quite hit the absolute highs of RGB, like the one where they fought goddamn Cthulhu. The only ghost to come back from RGB in EGB was the Grundel, and while that was pretty great, I would have liked to have seen others like, say, Samhain (outside of just the intro, I mean) show up again, too. Stay Puft never once appeared or was even mentioned that I can recall in EGB, not even during the episode or two where they had to go into the containment unit for whatever reason. Aside from that, there were a few continuity issues from RGB to EGB, like when the one time Janine put on a jumpsuit and strapped on a proton pack in EGB, they all, including Egon and Janine, acted like it was the first and only time she'd ever done so, when in RGB she'd done it several times. (But then RGB had continuity issues just within itself, too, especially in the later seasons, so... *shrug*) Oh, and where RGB was filled with a bunch of dated 80s references, EGB was filled with a bunch of dated 90s references, so that's a thing as well.
Oh, and I didn't like the new proton packs or trap nearly as much as the original stuff, mainly because it didn't sound the same. That's all I have to say about that particular point.
Still, I would say that Extreme Ghostbusters certainly holds up today, easily. It's just too bad it only ever got the one season, even if that one season got 40 episodes in it.
So, in conclusion, for the most part, I would say that The Real Ghostbusters, Extreme Ghostbusters, and maybe even the Slimer! stuff (if you like Tom and Jerry/Itchy and Scratchy-style slapstick) is worth watching today. Just know what you're getting into if you decide to watch the Slimer stuff, is all.
Maybe now I'll go through all of The Ghost Busters and Ghostbusters at some point, too. Just... don't hold your breath on me writing a gargantuan post about those like I did here, though. ¬_¬
(Post actually finished andpostedmade public at... 3:20am the next fucking day, July 27. God damn it. -_-)
Over the course of the past couple of months or so, I've finally gone through all of The Real Ghostbusters (including the Slimer! stuff) and Extreme Ghostbusters, all of which is something I've been talking about doing for at least a decade now. So, I'm about to dump another big wall o' text here, like I did for the Dungeons & Dragons cartoon a few years ago.
So, let's get some meta stuff out of the way first. The first two seasons together contain more episodes than the last five seasons combined. The first two seasons are 78 episodes, 13 in season one and 65 in season two (the syndication season). Seasons 3-7 combined make up only 62 episodes. However, this does not include the Slimer! shorts. Depending on how you number those, there were either 13 episodes of that (which would still be less than seasons 1-2, at 75), if you count the combined shorts for a single segment as "one episode," or 33 episodes, if you count each individual 6-7 minute short as its own episode. As I'll get into later, I think the earlier stuff was much better.
Now, I'm going to talk about the casting, both initially and later on, because it's kind of interesting. The original four Ghostbusters and Janine in the first two seasons were voiced as follows. Lorenzo Music as Peter Venkman, Frank Welker as Ray Stantz (and also Slimer), Maurice LaMarche as Egon Spengler, Arsenio Hall (yes that Arsenio Hall) as Winston Zeddemore, and Laura Summer as Janine Melnitz. They were all pretty great.
Here are a few interesting stories about the casting. The show runners, depending on who you ask, initially didn't want voices that sounded like the original movie actors, apparently.
First, they hired Maurice LaMarche for Egon despite the fact that he sounds very close to Harold Ramis in the cartoon. The story goes that they asked him to tone down the impression a bit and he pretty much said it was impossible for him to do so because he couldn't see any other way to do it, and they hired him anyway. (By the way, Maurice LaMarche and Frank Welker were the only two actors to voice their respective Ghostbuster from the start all the way through to the end of Extreme. All of the others [including, strangely, Welker's role as Slimer] were replaced by different actors at some point along the way).
Second, Ernie Hudson himself read for the role of Winston in the cartoon. They hired Arsenio Hall instead, because, again, they apparently didn't want the voices to sound like the original actors. Or else they deemed that Ernie Hudson didn't sound enough like Ernie Hudson, which is how Ernie Hudson told it at one point. So, just to restate that, Ernie Hudson, who played Winston Zeddemore in the movies, lost out to someone else for the role of Winston Zeddemore in the cartoon. (Oh, and Hall was replaced by Buster Jones from season 4 onward.)
Third, there is the story that during a screening of the early stuff by Bill Murray, he asked a jokey, off-hand question about why he sounded like Garfield (who Music was well known for voicing at the time). At least partly as a result of that, they later replaced Music with Dave Coulier, starting from season three onward, because Coulier could do a Bill Murray impression. Also, this leads into the "funny" situation of Peter Venkman, played by Bill Murray, being voiced by Lorenzo Music, the voice of Garfield, in the RGB cartoon, whereas Garfield, voiced by Lorenzo Music in the cartoon, was voiced by Bill Murray in the "live-action" Garfield: The Movie. Hyuck.
Lastly, Laura Summer was replaced by Kath Soucie from season three until the end of RGB. (Janine was voiced by Pat Musick in EGB.) The reason for this was, apparently, because they didn't want Janine to have a Brooklyn accent anymore. Also, they were trying to tone down Janine's personality overall, because she was apparently too "abrasive" initially (and, supposedly, because pointy glasses could scare children or some shit, and I wish I was making that up). And so, Janine became more of a "team mom" or whatever in the later episodes of RGB. In any case, it was a load of bullshit. Much more on that later.
Oh, and I should point out that most of the characters from the movies show up in the cartoon, at least once. Louis Tully shows up quite a bit in the later seasons, Mayor Lenny is there, off and on, throughout the series, and even Walter Peck manages to get an episode devoted to him (and he is a much bigger asshat in the cartoon than he ever was in the movies, which says a lot). Out of all the characters in the movies, the only major character who never shows up in the cartoon is Dana Barrett.
And before I leave this section, here is a link to the unaired pilot episode.
Okay, with all of that shit out of the way (mostly), let's talk about The Real Ghostbusters itself. (I'll give the Slimer! stuff its own section later.)
It goes without saying, but I'm going to say it anyway: the first two seasons of RGB are better, by far, than the subsequent five. However, the later stuff isn't as bad as many claim it to be (including the Slimer! stuff).
The earlier seasons (I'd include season 3 in this) tended to be a little darker/more serious than the later stuff. Granted, it was still primarily a kids cartoon, for sure, with jokes and the like, but still. Compare antagonists like Samhain ([mis]pronounced as "Sam-hane" rather than more properly as "Sah-when"), the Boogieman/Bogeyman, or the Grundel (who was the only ghost to return in Extreme), or fucking Cthulhu (misspelled as "Cathulhu," apparently because some dumbass thought "Cthulhu" itself was misspelled and "fixed" it in the title card) in the earlier seasons, to shit like the Mean Green Teen Machine (blatant riffs on the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles) or the Grungie family (blatant riffs on not just The Simpsons but also Married... with Children) in the later seasons. In the later stuff, they really tried to tone down the scares and make the show more "kid-friendly." Even when they brought back the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man (who in the movie was the "Destructor Form" of Gozer, and not really his own entity), in his first appearance, he was portrayed as a threat that the Ghostbusters had to deal with, but in his later appearances, he was the Ghostbusters' and Slimer's good buddy.
Some of the characters were changed quite a bit from the earlier seasons to the later ones. Earlier Peter Venkman (Lorenzo Music version), for example, was more of a ladies man, more antagonistic toward Slimer, and more of just an asshole in general (so, like, way more faithful to the Bill Murray portrayal of him in the movies). The later Venkman (Coulier version) was greatly toned down on all those aspects, especially his relationship with Slimer (i.e. he became way friendlier toward the spud, almost to the point of being "out-of-character"). Winston Zeddemore was given the role of "the vehicle guy" in later seasons (i.e. he was a black guy whose main task, apparently, was driving around a bunch of white guys, and I'm certainly not the first to note the racism, unintentional or otherwise, that drips off of this), and... well... they apparently wanted to get rid of Ray Stantz altogether, because they found him superfluous, given that they had greatly toned down Peter's assholery and non-friendliness toward Slimer.
The one who was changed the most, though, was almost assuredly Janine. Like I said before, she went from the snarky, sarcastic Brooklyn-accented secretary to... the team mom, for lack of a better description. She became a lot nicer, less rough-around-the-edges, and just... blander. I have nothing against Kath Soucie. Kath Soucie is great. But I much preferred Laura Summer's version of Janine. (And aside from the above stated "more kid friendly" reasons for changing her, I really have to assume that at least part of what raised a red alert regarding Janine and the need to "tone her down" was the fact that she spent an entire episode in season 2 dressed like this. Not that it personally bothered me, mind you. ¬_¬ But I can easily picture it having gotten the Moral Guardians at the time in an uproar.) So, they changed Janine. This was one thing, among others, that really pissed off J. Michael Straczynski, the head story editor for the show during the first two seasons, enough so that he straight up quit. Until they all but begged him to come back later, after the show's ratings started tanking in the later seasons. One condition for him coming back (in a limited capacity) was that he was allowed to write an episode that "explained" why Janine had changed so much. Basically, the entire episode was a huge double middle finger to Broadcast Standards and Practices and to the consulting firm who suggested all the changes that had been made to the show. (Just to note, pretty much all of the episodes written by JMS were among the best of the entire show, including this Janine one.)
One "huge" thing that a lot of people claim "rUiNeD fOrEvEr" The Real Ghostbusters was the inclusion of the "Junior Ghostbusters," a trio of small kids who sometimes tagged along with the Ghostbusters (and/or got in the way). But... here's the thing. The Junior Ghostbusters were only ever in two (2) episodes of the main show. Three, if you count that one clip show, near the end. Hell, for that matter, they were only in two (2) of the Slimer! shorts as well (three if you count a brief non-speaking appearance in another one), which is weird because they would have fit in way better there than in the main show, but more on Slimer! later. As for me... I didn't mind the Junior Ghostbusters that much. It was a bit annoying that their only two main appearances coincided with the return of two of the bigger villains of the earlier seasons (the Boogeyman and Samhain, the only ghosts aside from Stay Puft to be reused from previous episodes, at least in the main RGB show), which kind of cheapened their reappearances. The main thing that bothered me about the Junior Ghostbusters, though, was that their presence was never explained. They never had an origin story, per se. The Ghostbusters just started talking about them as if they'd always been around. This, despite the fact that the show already had a tailor-made origin story for them that it could have used, but didn't, in the concept of the "Ghostbusters Auxiliary" (a thing that Venkman pulled out of his ass on the spot when that one kid randomly showed up at the Firehouse claiming to want to be a Ghostbuster). It would have been cool if Kenny Fenderman had been part of the Junior Ghostbusters, too, but oh well. Anyway, that's the only real issue I had with the Junior Ghostbusters, considering they only ever appeared twice, total. Hell, the recurring appearance of one of the villains from the Slimer! shorts bothered me more than the Junior Ghostbusters did. (More on that later.)
And, of course, the later seasons brought on a much larger focus on Slimer himself. Slimer went from a gibbering, barely coherent, almost-pet of the Ghostbusters to a full-sentence-speaking straight up partner. And, in many of the later episodes, he was the star of the show (not even counting the Slimer! stuff). And... that honestly didn't bother me too much. Granted, it was a bit jarring the first time Slimer spoke an entire, complete sentence, rather than the word-mangling he'd been doing before (seriously, for some strange reason, the way he says "baseball?" in this one scene has stuck with me), but I got used to it. Slimer occasionally stealing the show truly didn't bother me that much.
On that note, let's move on to Slimer!
(God, how I hated that cover of the Ray Parker Jr. Ghostbusters theme. Not sure why they changed it, unless it was money reasons. It was probably money reasons.)
The Slimer! shorts were a whole other animal. While the actual Ghostbusters weren't completely absent from it, they appeared only seldomly. The main cast of Slimer!, aside from Slimer himself was as follows:
- Manx - an alley cat (voiced by Frank Welker) whose entire existence seemed to be dedicated to inconveniencing Slimer. Of all the new characters, Manx was the one I liked the least, by far. He sucked. At the very least, he almost always tended to get his shit obliterated by the end of any given episode he was in, so there was that. He appeared in too many of the episodes for my liking, though.
- Chilly Cooper - an ice cream truck driver and friend of Slimer (voiced by Cree Summer). While I didn't necessarily hate any of the new characters (aside from Manx), Chilly was the only one I actively liked, and the only one I would have wanted to see show up in The Real Ghostbusters proper, though she never did. Alas.
- Luigi - a pizza chef and friend of Slimer. And, that's about all I have to say about Luigi, as he didn't really stand out to me all that much. He was just a generic, stereotypical Italian, "it'sa me, I makea the pasta pizza" kind of dude, and that was pretty much it.
- Bud - a "surfer dude"/slacker and friend of Slimer who worked as a bellboy at the Sedgewick Hotel. He was often involved in and helped with any hijinks that Slimer and Fred got up to.
- Fred - a blue/purple dog who is good buddies with Slimer and Bud. Most of the episodes involving him dealt with Slimer helping him to temporarily get away from his owner to go on adventures.
- Rudy - a sort of grifter/con-man who would often rope Slimer into his get rich quick schemes. He was a bit of an asshole most of the time, but he was sometimes more friendly toward Slimer and his other friends as well.
- Professor Norman Dweeb - this fucking guy. He was a "scientist" whose sole purpose in life was to capture Slimer. For Science! His one-note "must capture Slimer! For Science!" thing was... fine for his role in Slimer!, but this dumbass, and his dog, were the only characters out of Slimer! to appear in The Real Ghostbusters proper, and... I kind of wish he hadn't. Admittedly, he was only in a few, but the RGB episodes involving him pretty much invariably sucked (and one of them was the aforementioned clip show, with Dweeb's involvement being the framing device for it).
- Elizabeth - Dweeb's little pink dog, whose sole purpose in life was apparently to follow Dweeb around and just be so completely done with Dweeb's stupidity. Rarely was the episode in which she didn't end up straight attacking Dweeb at some point. I actually kind of felt sorry for her at times, because she clearly didn't want to be there, but usually ended up getting fucked over whenever Dweeb's schemes would inevitably backfire.
- There were other characters (like the Junior Ghostbusters) who showed up occasionally, but I don't care to list them here, because they interested me less than even most of the above did.
And... that was pretty much it for the Slimer! shorts. Just a bunch of goofy slapstick hijinks. It was... okay, I suppose, and I liked it well enough for what it was and what it was meant to be, but it was objectively dogshit compared to The Real Ghostbusters proper. Also, most of the shorts were only like 6-7 minutes long, with an occasional one or two that was double that (so still only around half of a normal episode of RGB proper).
(Not going to bother embedding the Slimer! and outro here, because it's the same as the one above, just with an instrumental of that shittier cover playing during it.)
Moving on to Extreme Ghostbusters.
I liked Extreme Ghostbusters. I think, prior to watching the entire series over the past few weeks, I had seen only
Overall, it was way darker (both theme-wise, and more literally speaking, with how the art looked and how they "lit" the scenes they animated and such) than the old-school Real Ghostbusters was. Like, people (sometimes including the Ghostbusters themselves) often got super fucked up in this series, compared to the original. For example, having their bodies being drained of all water or having all the bones removed from their bodies or having their eyes forcibly sucked out of their heads, shit like that. Though simply capturing the ghost at the end of the episode almost invariably would magically return everything to how it was before the ghost caused all that harm to its victims (or grievous property damage), which was a bit of a cop-out. (Kind of made me wonder why, whenever Slimer broke something or made a big mess or whatever, they didn't just lock his stupid ass in a trap for an hour or so. ¬_¬) But still. Super fucked up.
In addition to being darker, it could be, at times, quite a bit more... ...risqué than the RGB ever dared to be. For one thing, there's a scene in one episode where Eduardo is having a dream about Kylie and before it gets hijacked by the ghost of the episode... well... just take a look for yourself. And there's this bit, too. Not to mention this from the two-parter first episodes. So... yeah, that's a thing.
The team. The team consisted of the following:
- Egon Spengler - the only one of the original Ghostbusters to be in the new show (aside from the above-mentioned two-parter thing that briefly brought back the other three). He's a little bit older now, but still sometimes goes out on calls with the new, younger Ghostbusters. He's rarely the main character of any given episode, though he does get one or two. And he's still voiced by Maurice LaMarche, which is great.
- Janine Melnitz - she's once again more like she was in the movies and in the first two seasons of RGB, i.e. the snarky, sarcastic, take-no-guff receptionist who still has the hots for Egon, and much less the bland "team mom" she was in the later parts of RGB. She even has a bit of an accent again. While Pat Musick is no Laura Summer, she's better (at least for the role of Janine, specifically) than Kath Soucie.
- Slimer - he has been reverted back to being the team pet again, more like he was in the first two seasons of RGB... except even dumber and less coherent, which was a bit of a shock, in reverse, after I'd gotten used to Slimer just straight up talking like a mostly normal-ass person in the later parts of RGB. And that... kind of really sucks. Honestly, EGB succeeded in making me actually somewhat dislike Slimer, where Slimer! and failed at that. He got ever-so-slightly better as EGB's one and only season progressed, but he never became much more than pure comic relief, and more often than not, any scene with him in it was worse for his presence, and that's rather unfortunate. Also, he's not voiced by Frank Welker anymore, for whatever dubious reasons, which is a big part of why I didn't care for him nearly as much. The new guy voiced Slimer with an even higher pitched voice than Welker did, which is really saying something. At times, it was like fingernails on chalkboard to me. Fortunately, Slimer almost never took center stage, outside of maybe one or two episodes that sort of focused on him a little. Slimer's biggest fear is broccoli.
- Kylie Griffin - voiced by Tara Strong. Kylie is one of the very few things I remembered from the very limited exposure I had to Extreme Ghostbusters as a kid. (Er... no, not "as a kid," since I had fucking graduated from high school before the show ever originally aired.) She's the goth girl and occult nerd of the team. She's pretty much just as smart as Roland is (and the two of them together could almost make up one entire Egon). She's also usually the one who translates Egon's ectobabble into English for those more intellectually-challenged. There's quite a bit of ship teasing going on between her and Eduardo, which was mostly kind of meh, as far as I cared about it. I didn't hate it or anything, but I could've done without it, too. Also... the show runners, for whatever terrible reason, decided to saddle her with what looks like football padding whenever the Ghostbusters are out on the job (which is most of the time), and I am not a fan of it at all. Also, having the trap strapped to her back gave her a kind of turtle-ish look, which wasn't great, either. Whenever they show her in civvies, it's almost always a way better look. The other guys just get to wear mostly normal Ghostbusters jumpsuits. Also, she (usually) uses that little pistol looking thing, rather than a proper proton pack, which was a bit lame, too (though there was, at least, one episode where Eduardo makes fun of her for it, so she switches with him and wears his actual proton pack for most of the episode, which made for a pretty fun episode). She has a cat named Pagan (with whom Eduardo body-swapped in one episode). Kylie's biggest fear is maggots.
- Eduardo Rivera - he's the slacker of the team, though he can be smarter and more proactive than he pretends to be most of the time. Other times, he really does seem to be actually that dumb, though. He has an obvious thing for Kylie, which she occasionally seems to reciprocate, but he tends to have a thing for most of the other girls they meet on their adventures (often competing with Garrett), too, of which Kylie tends to take a dim view. He has an asshole cop for an older brother, who shows up in one episode and who learns to be slightly less of an asshole by the end of the episode. Eduardo is a Latino character voiced by a Canadian actor who is demonstrably not Latino, just to throw it out there. Eduardo's biggest fear is death.
- Garrett Miller - the jock of the team. Also, he is disabled from the waist down and uses a wheelchair. He's still a jock, though. One of the early episodes has him run a basketball con with one of his old friends (who only shows up for that one episode, which makes sense given how that episode ends) on a couple of rubes. Like Eduardo, he has a thing for the ladies, though he never shows much if any interest in Kylie in that way. He's usually the first to rush into a situation, even to the point of sometimes being the Leeroy Jenkins of the team. He almost never lets being stuck in a wheelchair hold him back at all, and if it ever comes up at all, it's usually because he's making a joke about it. Also like Eduardo, he usually needs Egon/Kylie/Roland-speak translated into basic English. He can be stubborn and hotheaded, but he usually comes around by the end of any given episode. Garrett's biggest fear is small, enclosed spaces.
- Roland Jackson - voiced by Alfonso "Carlton Banks" Ribeiro. Where Kylie is the occult nerd of the group, Roland is the tech nerd of the group. (And, again, between the two of them, they just about make up one whole Egon.) Unlike Eduardo and Garrett, Roland has just about no interest in the ladies, Kylie or otherwise (and there is a whole episode devoted to this). Unless you count Syren, but that was due to supernatural shenanigans. Roland is typically way more serious-minded than the rest of the group (with the possible exception of Kylie). Roland has a kid brother, who is a nosy little shit who almost got turned into a second Grundel because he is also a bit of an asshole, which is obvious to pretty much everyone but Roland, until the end, anyway. Kid brother, of course, learns to be slightly less of an asshole when it's all over, same as Eduardo's older brother did. Roland is sometimes shown to lack self-confidence, and not just in the fear episode where it was shown that his biggest fear is equipment failure.
As far as the episodes go, I think EGB was more consistently good than RGB was, but it never quite hit the absolute highs of RGB, like the one where they fought goddamn Cthulhu. The only ghost to come back from RGB in EGB was the Grundel, and while that was pretty great, I would have liked to have seen others like, say, Samhain (outside of just the intro, I mean) show up again, too. Stay Puft never once appeared or was even mentioned that I can recall in EGB, not even during the episode or two where they had to go into the containment unit for whatever reason. Aside from that, there were a few continuity issues from RGB to EGB, like when the one time Janine put on a jumpsuit and strapped on a proton pack in EGB, they all, including Egon and Janine, acted like it was the first and only time she'd ever done so, when in RGB she'd done it several times. (But then RGB had continuity issues just within itself, too, especially in the later seasons, so... *shrug*) Oh, and where RGB was filled with a bunch of dated 80s references, EGB was filled with a bunch of dated 90s references, so that's a thing as well.
Oh, and I didn't like the new proton packs or trap nearly as much as the original stuff, mainly because it didn't sound the same. That's all I have to say about that particular point.
Still, I would say that Extreme Ghostbusters certainly holds up today, easily. It's just too bad it only ever got the one season, even if that one season got 40 episodes in it.
So, in conclusion, for the most part, I would say that The Real Ghostbusters, Extreme Ghostbusters, and maybe even the Slimer! stuff (if you like Tom and Jerry/Itchy and Scratchy-style slapstick) is worth watching today. Just know what you're getting into if you decide to watch the Slimer stuff, is all.
Maybe now I'll go through all of The Ghost Busters and Ghostbusters at some point, too. Just... don't hold your breath on me writing a gargantuan post about those like I did here, though. ¬_¬
(Post actually finished and
