- by Owen Morton
Well, hello and welcome to Heath the Rat’s Silly Page once again, all ready for a brand new year! Okay, we are two weeks into said brand new year and this is the first article yet, but that’s just because I’ve been busy. Still, now I’m ready to rumble, as you might say, and have some great things planned for the year ahead! Well, actually, I’ve got nothing in particular planned other than some more reviews of very bad cartoons, but I suspect other subjects for discussion will come to me as and when. Still, to start off with, we’ve got a real cracker to review!
I can’t believe it’s taken me almost two years to even mention Ghostbusters on this website. I mean, they are one of the most obvious things to discuss. They’re right up there with He-Man and Thundercats as deeply ridiculous ‘80’s cartoons, although they do score over the previous two programmes in that – if you accept the possibility of the existence of ghosts – Ghostbusters is vaguely possible. Not likely, but possible. He-Man, by contrast, is thoroughly impossible, and we won’t even discuss Thundercats (primarily because I can’t remember anything about them, as I conclusively proved in December 2001).
I can’t remember too much about Ghostbusters either, to be quite honest, but I do remember vaguely enough of the plot of a number of episodes to attempt to review one of them. Sadly, along with many of the other video tapes from my childhood, the video on which I recorded these episodes grew mould over the summer of 2001, and had to be consigned to the dustbin of history, as the great man Trotsky might have put it, were we talking about Menshevism and not Ghostbusters. But I shall try to cope as best I can with having last seen this episode about eight years ago, I would guess.
Accordingly, I can’t remember the episode’s title, if indeed it ever had one; I’m not sure whether Ghostbusters went in for giving their episodes titles. I know it was broadcast on a Saturday morning and was part of a Ghostbusters series entitled ‘Slimer and the Real Ghostbusters’. I’m not sure whether this was the original Ghostbusters programme or a kind of spin-off, but it still featured all our favourite Ghostbusters, who were, I believe, called Ray, Egon, Peter and Winston. Being unable to remember the episode’s name, I have decided to christen it ‘The Ghostbusters episode with the rather unpleasant witch in it’.
Obviously, I can’t remember too many of the plot’s details. I seem to recall the episode starting with a load of ghouls strutting their funky stuff somewhere in New York City in front of a statue. Being the types of fellows who quickly put a stop to any ghoulish shenanigans, the Ghostbusters show up pretty damn smartish and have a fight with the baddies. I suspect that the fight was, in fact, thoroughly gratuitous, and made little contribution to the episode’s plot.
However, something odd was going on with the statue. As I recall, it was a statue of somebody Spengler, a great-great-etc-grandmother of our hero Egon, who was burnt as a witch a long time ago. (I’m not sure of this – I’m just making it up as I go along – but it sounds vaguely like it might be right.) Anyway, the statue somehow wakes up and mutates into a real-life witch, who flies away shrieking inanities about how she’s going to make everyone pay for her unjust death. (Two points: firstly, it seems to have escaped her attention that those who burnt her are probably now long dead, given that – as far as I know – witch-burning has not been on the list of Publicly Acceptable Activities in the United States for some time now; and secondly, if she was burnt as a maleficent witch, it wasn’t exactly unjust, was it? I mean, she most patently is one, unlike pretty much all of those who were burnt in the witch craze.)
Anyway, it’s not long before the Ghostbusters learn that something very bad is going on, and to investigate, they go round to someone’s house. I can’t remember who this person is, or why she should know anything about the witch, but I do remember that she smacked Peter one and slammed the door shut. I would imagine that Peter made some form of unwelcome advances towards her. Either that or he just asked her whether she was a witch. Either of these approaches is likely to get you smacked by a woman. I can’t actually attest to this personally, but it’s just an assumption.
Anyway, having done this, the Ghostbusters go to a school. I’m sure they have some justification for doing so, but I can’t remember for the life of me what it is. (It’s becoming ever clearer to me as this article progresses that I can remember even less about this episode than I had initially thought.) The children have all been cleared out, and basically, we get the Ghostbusters and the witch chasing each other all round the school.
The deeply dramatic point of the episode comes when the witch sprays some sort of orange gas at Egon, and, because he’s her distant descendant, he actually mutates into a baddy! Oh no! What are the other three Ghostbusters going to do now? Well, I seem to recall that they run away, though what they do after that I’m rather less clear about. I remember a small segment of dialogue from this point:
SLIMER: [on seeing that Egon has mutated into the witch] Ray! Witch got Egon!
RAY: Winston! The witch has got Egon!
WINSTON: Correction: the witch is Egon!
Okaaaaaay. That sounds like a fairly unsolvable problem, then, doesn’t it? Well, not entirely unsolvable, of course: all they’ve got to do is kill Egon. For some reason, they seem to be unwilling to do this (and I don’t know why, because Egon was by far the most irritating of the Ghostbusters, what with his absolutely ridiculous hairstyle and his tendency to talk rubbish at the slightest provocation, though I suppose that last can apply to any cartoon character), so I seem to recall them formulating a splendid plan which involves trapping the witch back in the statue again. Then Egon’s cured and everyone’s happy.
I’ll admit that that review wasn’t quite as comprehensive as I’d been hoping. But never mind! If I ever acquire a video of the Ghostbusters, then I’ll review it in much more detail. In the meantime, let’s forget about them until such a time as I can think of another reason to write about them in an article.