We’re down to the second to last day of 2009’s spooky event, the 31 Days of Monsters Countdown to Halloween. It’s the eve of All Hallow’s Eve I guess, and I have my second to last set of monster cels to share. In honor of the 25th anniversary of the Ghostbusters franchise, not to mention my love of 80s animation, I’m counting down 31 of my favorite monsters from the Real Ghostbusters cartoon. These animation cels are culled from my personal 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 Halloween day.
Today’s cel is a really fun one that falls into that category of a more finished image. The monster is from episode 53, "The Scaring of the Green." Typically, most background elements are separated out onto a layer of their own, be it a painting on paper behind all the stacked cels, or on a cel layer if there’s movement involved in the BG elements. This cel featuring a huge green saber-toothed cat-like bog hound monster (with super creepy spider-esque eyes) chasing Mr. Venkman is a bit of an anomaly in that the BG elements, as well as both main foreground characters are all painted on one layer…
I can see this presenting all sorts of problems in the process, most involving either syncing up the artwork in the various cels in the sequence to make sure the animation isn’t so bumpy and making sure the cels are painted in the proper sequences so that everything is colored correctly and overlaps properly. Maybe the animators were going for something more crude in a chase sequence like this and any jarring jumps between cels would work towards the tone of the sequence. Either way, when taken out of context like this it works very well as a stand alone piece of art.
I do think the hunter green which was chose as the color of the beast was a little unfortunate as it blends in to the black line-work enough to make the shape and features of the creature a little hard to distinguish. Luckily I have the pencil under-drawing for this piece, thought it was a little damaged by the cel (the paint on the back of the cels sometimes bonds with the paper drawing underneath, probably in the years that these were stored in warehouses.) You get the basic drift though…
Apparently, the notation NR-5 refers to leaving paint off the cel as it’s transparent on my copy of the finished cel.
I was also lucky enough to find a second cel from the same episode featuring this huge bog hound that shows it with a little more definition in the final cel…
I also dig this second one because of the little bits of light yellow green paint illustrating the creature being sucked into a ghost trap. It’s just a nice juxtaposition of a slight painterly style mixed with the clean cel art…
As weird as it might have turned out, I think maybe his spots should have been rendered in another color to help give him some more overall definition. Anyway…
Also, for any of you Real Ghostbusters fans out there that haven’t picked up any of the new DVDs, I’ve decided to give away a copy of the Volume 1 Steelbook edition of the show! There are only two days left to enter, so get to the typing…
This 5-disc set contains the first 25 episodes of the series (including the 1st thirteen episode Saturday Morning run) as well as some fun special features. So what do you have to do to win this beauty? All you have to do is send me an e-mail (or click on the Creature From the Black Lagoon monster in the sidebar) and make sure to include the following:
-Please put "The Real Ghostbusters Contest" in the subject line.
-List your favorite monster/ghost/creature from the series.
-Include your name.
The deadline for entries is October 31st at Midnight eastern standard time. I’ll be drawing a winner at random from the e-mails, and will respond to the winner via e-mail on November 1st. Also, if you feel inclined, I would love everyone to spread the word about the 31 Days of Monsters countdown and the contest, so hit up those social networks and tell a friend (my twitter handle is smurfwreck)!
Once again, if you’re enjoying these daily Real Ghostbusters monster posts, make sure to come back tomorrow for the last installment and tell a friend about the 31 Days of Monsters. 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…
