Welcome back to my 31 Days of Monsters Halloween countdown!  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 All Hallows Eve.

For today I offer a portrait of a monster in transition, well sort of…

This ugly mug hails from episode 27, "Doctor, Doctor", and is one of the weirder in the series.  Basically, this is the more or less final form of a hybrid creature.  While fighting a specter in a chemical plant, the Ghostbusters inadvertently create a new creature though they don’t realize it at first.  The "thing" is actually covering all of the guys up to the neck like a huge glop of red goo (reminding me a lot of the imagery in GBII.)  The guys are admitted into the hospital and while there the goo on each of them starts morphing.  One gets an eye, one a nose, one an ear, and one a mouth.  Eventually the glop slides off of them and forms into a single creature, the disgusting monster you see above!

I find the idea of creatures like this that seem to be made from monster putty are kind of freaky because it would be really hard to dispatch them if the need arose.   I mean how do you stop a hulking brute of a creature when you can punch right through them and it doesn’t phase him in the least?  You have to resort to trapping them at that point, luring them into a place where they can get zapped by a downed power line or tricked into falling into a vat of battery acid or something.  When you can’t just stop them with a shovel to the face then the whole thing becomes a heck of a lot more daunting…

As for the cel itself, I really like the little details; the bits of leftover hair, the gross bubble of goo in the right ear, and those gnarly teeth.  Just plain ghoulish!

Once again, if you’re enjoying these daily Real Ghostbusters monster posts, make sure to come back tomorrow for another 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…