THE REAL GHOSTBUSTERS, Episode 1 “Ghosts R Us” (Class 7 entity out of 10) – Written by Len Jason and Chuck Menville; Starring Lorenzo Music, Marice LaMarche, Frank Welker, Arsenio Hall, and Laura Summer. Originally aired September 13, 1986, not to be confused with the short film released in 2011.
“Ghostbusters” recently celebrated its 30th anniversary, despite being born before I was, it has remained a shining point of light in pop culture. In honor of 30 years of awesome, today we watch “The Real Ghostbusters”
The episode begins with the Ghostbusters on the job, they arrive at a factory to a crowd of screaming, almost identical women. The factory ejects chocolate like a depressed bulimic teenager, which Slimer gladly ingests (gross). The crew enter the factory to discover three force five entities which they successfully capture without much trouble.
They return to HQ with a year supply of chocolate only to find that Slimer has eaten it en route. Ray gets pissed, that chocolate was meant for Janine and makes an ultimatum. If Slimer makes one more mistake or causes one more problem, he’s toast.
Now is as good a time as any to mention that they’ve altered the aesthetic of the four ghostbusters enough that it’s confusing at first. Like, why does Egon look like a blonde front man for a rockabilly band? And why does Ray sound like Garfield? But I digress.
Our four ghost hunting heroes hit the hay but Slimer can’t sleep because he’s starving, obviously. Which makes one wonder about the metabolic rates of protoplasmic organisms, it’s obviously super fast. Or Slimer is just a fat jerk who can’t control himself.
While hiding and gorging like a depressed bulimic teenager (this joke might be too dark to tell twice, but… here we are), Slimer accidentally flips a switch, opening the door to the containment unit. He manages to get it closed again but not before the three ghosts from the chocolate factory escape and hatch a plan to get revenge on the Ghostbusters by posing as a rival company called Ghosts R Us. Which should have been everyone’s first clue because they are literally ghosts.
The Ghostbusters arrive at the scene of a job only to find that Ghosts R Us have already handled the situation to the applause of the citizenry. After the second time they are scooped by this new ghost hunting duo, the Ghostbusters begin to realize that something isn’t quite right.
The phantoms plan to orchestrate one last job to put the Ghostbusters out of business once and for all when the GBs receive a call from HQ advising them that three ghosts have escaped from containment.
Our four heroes put the pieces together, because they’re geniuses capable of creating proton packs and ghost containment units, so they can totally use deductive logic, I hope. They then head off to the final job to stop the protoplasmic punks once and for all. What they don’t know is that the ghosts have enlisted help from an entity much larger, more powerful, and more frightening than themselves. The Ghostbusters might be entering a situation a little larger than they can handle. Or not, obviously, because it’s the first episode and the show would be over if they died. Unless they started to bring down bad ghosts from the inside, damn the man (ghost).
The trio of bumbling ghouls have unwittingly unleashed a class 10 entity which inhabits what looks like a giant building block monkey on a tricycle, or the worst Transformer since Michael Bay, and begins Deadzilla smashing the city.
The Ghostbusters launch a sweet helicopter and make chase.
Slimer is worried that the GBs will make him leave, or put him in containment because he was the cause of the ghosts escape and the subsequent emergency situation. So he puffs up his chest to attack the entity, suddenly everyone realizes that they actually love Slimer because despite him being a complete pain in the ass, he’s kind of cute, like a dog that constantly shits green goo onto the carpet but he’s like… the best cuddler, so what are you gonna do?
Egon puts his system into overload to capture the entity in order to protect their green friend, which totally works and doesn’t kill anyone or end the universe in the process.
In the end, it wasn’t Slimer, it was science killed (proverbially, it was totally already dead) the beast.
In short, the animated series loses some of the appeal of the movies on which it’s based, but mostly because you can’t tell dick jokes or have one of your heroes blown in a kid’s cartoon. That being said, it’s pretty good for what it is.