WATCHPARTY USA â–¶ Back to the broadcast
The Full Story · Told by the Makers

The Full Story of The Real Ghostbusters

Two cartoons called Ghostbusters premiered in September 1986, five days apart, and only one of them was allowed to use the name plainly. The other had to add a word to the front of its title to explain that it was the one you were thinking of. Then, one season in, a network hired a firm of psychologists to fix the show, and the writers went to a newspaper about it while it was happening.

The Real Ghostbusters ran on ABC from September 13, 1986 to October 5, 1991, produced by DIC Enterprises with Columbia Pictures Television. It carries the word "Real" because Filmation had made a live-action series called The Ghost Busters in 1975 and still held the television rights, then put its own rival Ghostbusters cartoon into syndication five days before ABC's. From season two, a consultancy called Q5 reshaped the characters, and story editor J. Michael Straczynski quit over it.

The name was lost years before anyone needed it

In 1975 Filmation made a live-action Saturday morning series called The Ghost Busters, starring Forrest Tucker, Larry Storch and a gorilla played by Bob Burns. It ran on CBS from September 6 to December 13 that year, fifteen episodes, and then it was over.

Nine years later, Filmation founder Lou Scheimer opened a trade paper.

"Well, I think they ripped us off," Scheimer told The Trades in 2007, describing his reaction to news of Columbia's Ghostbusters film. "Fact is, when I first heard of it, I read it in the trades, I can't remember which trade it was, I said, 'That's ridiculous. That's our show. That's our premise, that's our concept.'"

His lawyers called Columbia, and the meeting turned on a single word.

"We met with them, and they said, 'Well, this was an animated show on Saturday morning,' and I said, 'Huh-uh,'" Scheimer recalled. "He said, 'What do you mean, "huh-huh"?' And I said, 'Live!' And he said, 'Uh-oh. We've got a problem.'"

A deal followed, and Scheimer is candid that he got the terms wrong. Filmation took $500,000 for the use of the name plus one percent of the film's profits, and then learned what film profits are. "I think they spent something like $65 million, and they grossed something like $150 million, and they never had any profits," he said. "That's when I was exposed to the Hollywood accounting practices."

The larger error was one of imagination. "And I didn't make a deal with them that excluded the animation. I never thought of it."

So when Columbia moved to make a cartoon, Filmation still had a claim, and the two companies ended up in a race rather than a partnership. Scheimer says he tried to prevent exactly that. He proposed to Columbia's Herman Rush that they do it together: "Why not do something together. We've got rights, you've got rights." Filmation's parent company at the time, Westinghouse, refused.

"And our parent company then, Westinghouse, said, 'Oh, we don't need them,'" Scheimer said. "And I said, 'Bad idea. I think we need them. Because they'll have one, we'll have one, and nobody will know what's going on.'"

He was right on the timetable. Filmation's own animated Ghostbusters, built on its 1975 characters, went into first-run syndication on September 8, 1986. ABC's version premiered on September 13, 1986, five days later, with the word "Real" bolted onto the front to tell children which one came from the movie.

The confusion Scheimer predicted arrived in a form he did not. Because Filmation's 1975 team had included a gorilla, and the movie's team had included Winston Zeddemore, at least one viewer drew the wrong conclusion. "I got a phone call from a nice man, I can't remember where it was, and he was horrified that we had taken the Columbia picture and turned the African-American into an ape," Scheimer said. "And I tried to explain, 'No, you don't understand, that was in our original picture.' It was sad. I couldn't convince that guy that we hadn't somehow done something terrible."

A first season nobody was supervising

The show ABC got in that first year was considerably stranger than a licensed cartoon had any need to be, because the producers told their story editor to go as far as he wanted.

J. Michael Straczynski, who had come off DIC's Jason and the Wheeled Warriors, met the producers and heard something he was not used to hearing. The series was developed by Joe Medjuck and Michael C. Gross, who had both worked on the film.

"I loved the movie enormously, and I met with the producers... and they said, 'We want to do the movie. We don't want to cheapen it. We don't want to bring it down in quality. We want this to be as good as the movie was and as sophisticated in its storytelling,'" he told IGN in 2000. "Which was music to my ears, and I signed on to do that. I story edited 78 episodes, of which I wrote something like 15-20."

Asked whether the freedom surprised him, he was blunt: "Absolutely. Having always had to fight to get what I wanted to go through, it was the first time I'd had the producers saying, 'Just do what you do. We've got no problem with it. Go as far as you want.' I took that and went as far as I humanly could, because it was a great opportunity."

What that produced was a Saturday morning cartoon smuggling in horror and science fiction literature. "It was really an opportunity to cut loose and be very obscure, to bring all the classics of science fiction, fantasy, and horror to a genre for kids," he said. "I mean, when you can call a show 'The Collect Call of Cthulhu'..."

He describes writing an Alaska episode requiring a ceremony, for which the characters need to assemble a quorum of Inuit elders: "we referred to it as an 'Inuit Minyan'. And never explained it. Five people in the world got that, but that's okay, because we were free to be obscure." He also, he says, did stories about child abuse.

Then ABC hired the psychologists

By fall 1987 the show had been rebuilt, and the fight over it played out in the Los Angeles Times while it was happening.

Third-rated ABC had brought in a Glendale consultancy called the Q5 Corp, staffed with psychology PhDs alongside marketing and research professionals, to improve the kid appeal of its Saturday morning schedule. Q5's stated objective, per its own company manual as quoted by the paper, was to determine "product payoff", defined as "the degree to which a product and its attributes match the needs and wants of the consumer." In this case the product was cartoons and the consumer was children.

The Real Ghostbusters became the test case. Janine, the secretary, had been drawn as a sharp-edged, miniskirted wisecracker with pointed glasses, dangling bracelets and spiky hair. After Q5's input she got softer features, smoother hair, big round glasses, no jewelry, and from ABC a knee-length skirt. The notes on one DIC character drawing, as the Times reported them, described the goal as "generally less harsh & 'slutty,'".

Straczynski, who had read Q5's reports and sat through one of its seminars, did not hide his opinion from a national newspaper.

"They (Q5) wanted us to knock off all the corners," he said. "Janine was a strong, vibrant character. They wanted her to be more feminine, more maternal, more nurturing, like every other female on television."

He went considerably further. "It is a truly insidious organization, I make no bones about it at all. A lot of their research and theories are strictly from voodoo," he told the paper. "I think they reinforce stereotypes, sexist and racist. I think they are not helping television, they are diminishing it."

Fellow writer Michael Reaves put the creative cost more quietly: "I've written a few shows for this season, and they weren't as much fun as last season."

The suggestion that appalled both men was structural. Q5's report proposed that Ray, the character Dan Aykroyd had played, be "selected out" of the show because he "does not appear to serve to benefit the program."

"That's like 'terminate with extreme prejudice,'" Reaves said. "Ray is the dreamer, the idealist; he's very useful as a foil. They could not find any reason at all for this to be necessary."

Straczynski's account of that meeting is the sound of a writers' room breaking. "I sat there in dumbstruck shock at what they were saying," he said. "We (Straczynski and Reaves) just looked at each other and started laughing. We couldn't deal with it anymore; it had gone so far into the realm of the absurd."

The other side, in the same article

The reason this row is not a simple hero story is that the Times asked everybody, and the people who worked most closely with Q5 defended it.

Chuck Menville and Len Janson, the story editors on the new episodes, disagreed with Straczynski flatly. "When these people (Q5) started talking, 80% of what they had to say jibed with what we were already thinking," one of them said. "They never forced anything down our throats." On the proposal to delete Ray, Menville pointed out that it simply did not happen: "Once we said we didn't agree with that, nobody said another word about it."

Jennie Trias, ABC's vice president of children's programs, credited Q5 with bridging the gap between adult writers and an audience of "2- to 11-year-olds, with a core audience of 5 to 8 and a slight skew toward girls." On Janine she said: "The fact that she is now warmer I think is fine." She also argued that the loudest critics were writers who had attended a single seminar rather than worked with the firm, that Q5 advised rather than dictated, and that its reports often validated changes the network intended anyway. She noted the broader industry drift toward soft characters was as much a reaction to the success of Smurfs and Care Bears as to any consultancy.

Q5's own representative defended the Janine redesign as a reach problem, not a values one. "It (the change of Janine) was not done on anyone's gut feeling about what's creative and what's not creative, or what's sexist and what's not sexist. It's back to how we can involve more girls when we have primarily men characters. The female was not working for the female target, and we're sorry she's not the way she was originally designed, but she's not."

He said he would leave, and he left

Straczynski's 2000 account adds the part the 1987 article could not yet report: what the consultants wanted done to the team, and what he did about it.

The proposal was to give each Ghostbuster a single fixed function. "Give each of them identifiable roles, so that Peter is the con-man, Egon is the brains, Ray is the builder, and they said, 'Make Winston the driver,'" Straczynski told IGN. "Winston being the black guy."

His response, as he tells it: "I said, 'You're out of your mind. I will not do that, and if you try and push that through, I will leave.' Given that this was ABC's number one rated animated series, they said, 'Well, Joe won't really go.'"

He went. "I always tell people that when I work for them, I have very few rules: I don't lie, I don't... and I never ever bluff. If I say I'm going to go, I'm going to go. And I went."

The show continued without him for years, softening further. At the start of the fourth season in 1988 it was retitled Slimer! and the Real Ghostbusters, expanded to an hour, and rebuilt around the ghost that had been comic relief. It ran until October 5, 1991, and by the archival count 147 episodes had aired, including the syndicated run and the Slimer! shorts.

How the telling has grown over the decades

The drift on this row is unusual, because the main conflict was documented as it happened rather than reconstructed afterward. Where it does appear, it is about interpretation rather than events. Nobody disputes that Janine was redesigned or that Q5 recommended cutting Ray; the participants disagree about whether that was guidance or intrusion, and the two sets of story editors working on the same show at the same time came to opposite conclusions about the same firm. On the naming, Scheimer's is the only detailed first-person account located, and it is worth noting that it comes from the party who lost, decades later, and has not been answered in the same detail from Columbia's side.

The honest bottom line

The Real Ghostbusters is a licensed spin-off of a movie, made to sell toys, named defensively around a rights problem its studio created by not reading far enough ahead. For most of its run it was exactly what its critics inside the building said it was: a softened, role-assigned, Slimer-forward version of a sharper show, tuned by consultants against psychological research into what five-to-eight year olds would sit still for.

But for one season it was something close to a smuggling operation, a Saturday morning cartoon with Lovecraft references and jokes five people were meant to get, made by writers who had been told to go as far as they wanted and took it literally. That season is why anyone still argues about this show. And the argument itself is preserved better here than for almost any cartoon of the era, because in 1987 the people making it were angry enough to say so on the record while it was still going on.

Sources

More show stories live at /full-story/. Related: the USA Cartoon Express in 1988 and the full story of Mighty Mouse: The New Adventures.

Frequently asked

Why is it called The Real Ghostbusters?

Because Filmation already owned Ghostbusters on television. It had made a live-action series called The Ghost Busters for CBS in 1975, and its rights deal with Columbia covered the film but not animation. When both companies made cartoons in 1986, ABC's had to distinguish itself, so it added "Real" to mean the one from the movie.

Was there another Ghostbusters cartoon at the same time?

Yes. Filmation's animated Ghostbusters, based on its own 1975 characters, entered first-run syndication on September 8, 1986. The Real Ghostbusters premiered on ABC on September 13, 1986, five days later. Filmation founder Lou Scheimer says he warned his parent company that two rival shows would confuse everyone and was overruled.

Why did The Real Ghostbusters change after the first season?

ABC hired a consulting firm called Q5, staffed with psychologists and marketing researchers, to raise the kid appeal of its Saturday morning lineup. Q5's recommendations redesigned Janine to be softer and more nurturing, pushed simpler dialogue and less satire, and assigned each Ghostbuster a single fixed role.

Why did J. Michael Straczynski leave The Real Ghostbusters?

Over the consultants' notes. He objected publicly in 1987, calling Q5 "a truly insidious organization", and later said he told the network he would quit if the character-role changes went through, including making Winston the driver. He says they did not believe he would leave, and he left.

Did everyone on the show hate the consultants?

No, and that is the interesting part. Story editors Chuck Menville and Len Janson told the Los Angeles Times that most of what Q5 said matched their own thinking and that nothing was forced on them, and ABC's Jennie Trias said the firm advised rather than dictated. The strongest critics were Straczynski and writer Michael Reaves.

What happened to Janine on The Real Ghostbusters?

She was redesigned. The original version had pointed glasses, jewelry, spiky hair and a miniskirt; the revised version had round glasses, smoother hair, no jewelry and a longer skirt, and a warmer, more maternal manner. The Los Angeles Times reported that notes on a DIC character drawing described the aim as making her generally less harsh.

When did The Real Ghostbusters end?

It ran on ABC until October 5, 1991. From the fourth season in 1988 it was retitled Slimer! and the Real Ghostbusters and expanded to an hour built around Slimer. Reruns moved to USA's Cartoon Express from September 1991.