For all of those joining me for the first time, welcome to the Return of the 31 Days of Monsters Halloween countdown here at Branded in the 80s! I had a blast last year, so again I’m counting down 31 of my favorite monsters from the Real Ghostbusters cartoon. All of these monsters come straight from my vintage animation cel collection, and my wife and I tried our best to put them in a not-so-scary to really-freaking-creepy kind of order with the creepiest falling on All Hallows Eve.
Today’s posse of vengeful do-gooding ghosts is none other than Wyatt Earp, Doc Holiday and Virgil Earp!
They hail from episode 60, Ghost Fight at the O.K. Corral. Wyatt and Virgil’s brother Morgan is also present, just not in the above cel. Basically, after a goofy financier turns the ghost town of Tombstone into an amusement park on the 100th anniversary of the O.K. Corral gunfight, the ghosts of Wyatt Earp, his brothers and Mr. “I’ll be your huckleberry” Holiday come back to clean out the town of undesirables. The Ghostbusters are called in and eventually they realize that they’ve taken the place of the McLaury’s, Clanton’s, and a Claiborne in a reenactment of the original gunfight.
Though in just looking at the one cel these gunfighters might not seem all that imposing (especially using their fingers at guns), they probably some of the more imposing and scary ghosts in the entire series. Just knowing that these men put a lot of guys into their graves, and the simple clean way they’re rendered onscreen with their glowing lifeless eyes, it totally gives me the willies. Actually, what’s kind of cool is that throughout most of the episode the Earp brothers and Holiday are walking around the town invisible with only their actual boots appearing in the scenes. Sounds silly, but it’s kind of creepy…
There’s also a lot of great imagery and animation in this episode, one of the better ones in the series in my opinion.
Come back tomorrow for another Real Ghostbusters monster animation cel as I count down towards one of my favorite on Halloween day!
Also, if you feel inclined, I would love everyone to spread the word about the Return of the 31 Days of Monsters countdown, so hit up those social networks and tell a friend (my twitter handle is smurfwreck, and I’m on the Facebook as well.) If you’d like to read more Halloween-y goodness, you can also click on the Halloween Archive link to the left (the banner with King Kong), as well as heading on over to the Countdown to Halloween to check out lists of a bunch of other sites participating in this year’s Halloween blogging event…
