We are pleased to bring Retro Thing readers the following public service. Retro Thing will finally unravel the mystery of the four different pieces of media named something like "Ghostbusters". That's right... four... and we'll be ignoring the 1940 Bob Hope movie "The Ghost Breakers", and the 1946 Bowery Boys comedy "Spook Busters" just to keep things simple, okay?
The episodes are all remarkably the same. The trio would leave their shabby office to receive their supernatural assignment at a local junk shop. Whatever secret object they picked up had a tape recorder hidden inside with their instructions (voiced by Lou Scheimer, one of the show's producers), a la Mission Impossible. The tape self destructed a la Mission Impossible, but always in the hands of the Gorilla who always forgot to simply let go.
Sounds a little familar, doesn't it?
Remember that this was 1975, nearly a decade before Columbia's big-budget "Ghostbusters" (note the difference in spelling) hit theaters. The CBS show was shot entirely on video, like a sitcom, and was created by Filmation. You know Filmation as the creators of Fat Albert, the Star Trek cartoon, He-Man, and tons of other quasi-animated fare. I say "quasi" as they specialized in low budget TV animation. Their stock-in-trade was limited animation, rotoscoping, endless walk cycles... you catch my drift. In the 70s they experimented with live action. Their other efforts were shot mostly on film, but this 15 episode opus was shot as cheaply as possible. I remembered it well into adult life, and no one ever believed me that there was a rickety old TV show called "The Ghost Busters".
[Okay, here's some Real Ghostbusters trivia for no good reason. None of the original Hollywood actors voiced their cartoon counterparts in "The Real Ghostbusters". Bill Murray complained that his character's voice artist, Lorenzo Music, sounded too much like Garfield the cat... and with good reason. Music voiced the lasagna-loving, Monday-hating feline in cartoons. BIll Murray was later the voice of Garfield in the 2006 feature film.]
If you'd like to see the original Ghost Busters series, and I don't recommend it, just poke around on YouTube. I did buy the DVDs, and the show looks as good as it ever did (because it was shot on video, Ghost Busters looks far more like a Krofft TV show than a Filmation TV show). Since it was a childhood favorite of mine, I plunked down the money for the DVDs. Instead of a trip down memory lane, I was sort of mad at my younger self for making such poor TV choices. I probably missed some perfectly good Scooby Doo time just to watch a gorilla blow up... which I hasten again to point out sounds much better than it really is.