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.
So initially when I was first scanning in the monster cels for this year’s countdown, I was pretty darn excited when I took a closer look at today’s gang of spooks. First of all, we have what can only be described as the ghost of Abe Lincoln (who ad the time of broadcast had been a specter for 6 score and 1 year.) If a spectral Lincoln wasn’t cool enough, I noticed that there were actually two cels stapled together! Ectoplasmic Abe was actually a correction on top of the original cel which featured a similar, yet wholly different ghost!
Before tracking down and watching the episode (#62, Deadcon 1), my hope was that I’d discovered a secret ghost that never made it to broadcast air. I was a little suspicious of this desire though, as the pencil under drawing for the cel actually featured Ecto-Abe. Since the correction only featured Abe alone on the cel, it didn’t make sense that he was a correction, but instead the originally intended ghost…
My question now is where are the original drawings with the secret ghost shown below (who is on the same layer as the rest of this gang in the cel and there would need to be a drawing to procel the cel.) I suppose that the drawing I do have is a copy/tracing of the original drawing with the non-Abe ghost, as it’s possible that repainting a series of cels is more time consuming than just painting one new character to supersede the original image. Either way, the dapper man in blue below is the main ghost at Deadcon 1 int he actual story, and the first to appear in the episode, so he’s not super secret at all.
This episode is a really fun one though, involving a spoof on Donald Trump, with the unveiling of the new Plump Towers convention center in New York. Hosting both a dentist’s convention as well as another more mysterious event, things start getting creepy and silly pretty fast. See Deadcon 1 is a gathering of monsters and ghosts bent on taking over the world. The guys are called in to take care of this posthumous party, but have to find a way to do so without relying on their proton packs (so they don’t zap any dentists or cause any damage to the new building.) The Stay Puft Marshmallow Man also makes an appearance as he’s invited to be the keynote speaker of the event…
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…
