Ghostbusters Collectibles

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When the first “Ghostbusters” film debuted in June 1984, horror/sci-fi comedy seemed ready-made for merchandising. After all, the Ghostbusters wore cool tan jumpsuits and carried mini nuclear reactors on their backs—later called “proton...
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When the first “Ghostbusters” film debuted in June 1984, horror/sci-fi comedy seemed ready-made for merchandising. After all, the Ghostbusters wore cool tan jumpsuits and carried mini nuclear reactors on their backs—later called “proton packs”—which were attached to guns that threw off laser-like red and blue particle streams. The special effects were not unlike the light-saber battles in the massively popular space-opera trilogy, “Star Wars,” which had just “ended” the summer before. The Ghostbusters lived and worked out of an old firehouse marked with a light-up sign showing a white Casper-like ghost trapped in a red circle-and-bar “no” symbol. They even rigged up a vintage hearse to look like a bizarre police cruiser, with “ECTO-1” on the license plate. Early on in the film, the Ghostbusters ensnare an ugly-adorable spud-shaped green blob “made of pure ectoplasm,” but not before he “slimes” Dr. Peter Venkman, played by Bill Murray. “Green slime” was already on every Gen-X kid’s wish list, thanks to the Nickelodeon show, “You Can’t Do That on Television.” Believe it or not, the first “Ghostbusters” toys didn’t hit the shelves until Christmas of 1986. While the PG-rated film was a blockbuster hit at the box office, some parents may have held off on taking their youngest, readily frightened children to see it at the cinema. By summer of 1985, the movie would be released on video tape and premiered on cable TV, and the first animated TV series based on the film, “The Real Ghostbusters” debuting in September 1986, arrived just at the point where families would have worn out their “Ghostbusters” VHS tapes. The film’s catchy theme song by Ray Parker, Jr.—with its famous line, “Who Ya Gonna Call?”—had been in regular rotation on MTV. In the film, two of the three paranormal investigators, Drs. Ray Stantz (Dan Aykroyd) and Egon Spengler (Harold Ramis), are presented as serious scientists, unsung geniuses who have encyclopedic knowledge of metallurgy, physics,...
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