Saturday Night Showcase: The Ghost Busters

Sony’s Ghostbuster movies are not the real Ghostbusters, no matter what their cartoon tried to tell you. They’re just the ones that admittedly did it best. Yes, I do still enjoy the Filmation Ghostbusters cartoon and wished somehow we could get a crossover with The Real Ghostbusters but Ray and the crew at the firehouse, and their failed attempt to re-imagine them (I hear the jokes are terrible but it’s still on the Finally Watched list to see for myself), would have been called Ghostsmashers if they hadn’t licensed the name from Filmation, making this an early example of not-stalgia if anyone had been nostalgic for The Ghost Busters.

Not that the live-action series was bad mind you. It just wasn’t as good as the movie or even their own animated continuation with the namesake kids of Jake and Spencer. Still, there is some humor to be found but it has a lot of differences from the cartoon. Instead of getting the call over a phone that doesn’t like to be answered and all the other strange gear they got their missions by going to the store and getting a recording Mission Impossible style. The car doesn’t talk and wouldn’t fly either until the cartoon (the Junior’s Ghost Buggy itself was not their original car but it does show up in one episode), and Tracy was smarter in the cartoon. It was however a good chance to see F-Troop‘s stand-out team of Larry Storch and Forrest Tucker together again. “Tracy” was obviously a guy in a suit, credited as his trainer. The episode in tonight’s Showcase also features Billy Bardy, a popular bit part villain or antagonist in both kids and adult-targeted media. In tonight’s episode the Ghost Busters must deal with real-life criminals as well as a gangster ghost (Prime Evil and his recurring baddies were introduced in the cartoons…ghosts in this version usually stayed zapped) in an episode parodying the not-villain from Casablanca and other famous gangsters. Enjoy.