The Really Real Ghostbusters

On one of the free digital signals we get down here in the Southland seems only to play at night, later night anyway, and is called Qubo.

Qubo has all sorts of cartoons that are designed to get the viewers like me specifically into waxing nostalgic over and leaving the channel tuned to Qubo. They are the 'toons of us early-30s guys' childhoods.

They show He-Man, She-Ra, something I never heard of called BraveStarr (it sounds cool enough: a Native American sheriff-type on an alien world with a laser blaster and maybe a mechanical horse), and, of course, the show from which this picture's taken, Ghostbusters:

This is not the Ghostbusters that most of us know and love, but I'll get to that in a second.

First let me say that all these shows suck sweaty balls. Holy shit are they bad. Poorly animated, poorly voiced, poorly written, trite from every angle. I suppose the fantasy-meets-and-drunkenly-humps-sci-fi universe that He-Man and She-Ra romp around in is novel---in theory...but goddamn. These Ghostbusters do go in and out of some netherworld dimension, but I wasn't drunk enough to give half a shit.

So, the Ghostbusters...There was the 1984 smash hit Ivan Reitman movie. It's canon for being a kid in the '80s. It spawned a sequel, which was also beloved by us stupid kids, although there have been plenty of worse sequels out there. It also spawned an animated show, starring the same main four characters from the movie. And Slimer. It was great.

Another show arrived around the same time, in between the two movies, in 1986, calling itself "Ghostbusters", and starring an ape, a fat idiot, and the blond hero. Their car was ghostly, had a mind of it's own, and was a scaredy-cat like C-3PO. 

This show surfed on enough of the attention and buzz created by the "main" franchise that they caused that "main" franchise to rename themselves "The Real Ghostbusters".

I remember thinking, even at that time, this seems weird. How can this show be getting made? There were things about it I preferred to the Real Ghostbusters, namely their frequent trips to the ghost-lands. But even as a kid, it just seemed illegal somehow to make a show and call it the exact same name as a different highly popular franchise.

The very first episode was on the other night, and I caught a little bit more that I had of the other shows I'd surfed through before going to bed. The fat idiot and the blond hero both were reluctant to become Ghostbusters, but were forced into it by the Gorilla after the original Ghostbusters, both guys' fathers, had been kidnapped. They showed the fathers, and I remembered a picture I'd seen somewhere:

Each of those two guys were animated, and were supposed to be the fathers of the young men who are in the animated cell from above.

See? Who was the real Real Ghostbusters?

There was a television show 1975 called the "Ghostbusters". Larry Storch was the star. It turns out that they sued, and won (or it was settled) Columbia Films over the name of the 1984 movie kids my age consider classic, and somehow were able to retain enough rights over the name of the property that they could produce an animated show pretty quick after that '84 movie.

While I preferred the fake "Real Ghostbusters" to the real "Fake Ghostbusters", I never hated the one with the Gorill, like some of my cohorts did. Maybe it was easier for kids to hate and talk shit, but for me, that show had some neat aspects lacking in the other, more popular show.

I always imagined them coexisting in the same universe, going about their ghostbusting business in separate circles, as there were enough ghosts to go around.