It’s beginning to feel a lot like…Day 20…here at my 31 Days of Monsters Halloween countdown! 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.
So, how do you follow up a really big purple and green spider monster? Why with something that would eat said spider monster as a snack, namely this freakishly creepy bat monster of course!
Whereas I have a huge phobia of spiders, I was never really all that bothered by bats. In my eyes they fall more into the cool section of the animal kingdom what with their natural use of sonar, their keen fashion sense (read, neat looking wings) and their hanging front one foot sleeping arrangements. I know a lot of folks get easily freaked out by bats, most likely because of the fear of rabies, but I think they get a bad rep most of the time. This guy here though, he might deserve it…
As far as bat monsters go, I’m really fond of the whole man-bat sort of creatures, particularly with examples like the Man-Bat on the Batman: the Animated Series and the scenes with Gary Oldman as the monster bat in Coppola’s version of Dracula. There’s also a great, though quick, shot of Dracula as a man-bat in the Monster Squad that I’ve always loved. There is a bit of an identification dilemma with this guy though. In this episode of the Real Ghostbusters (epi. 91, "Translyvanian Homesick Blues") there is a character, a vampire, named Count Volstock who morphs into a creature like this. But there are also holographic (but none the less scary) man-bats that are huge and take this form as well…
I couldn’t find either of these exact cels, so I’m not sure if this is Volstock or the man-bats. Also, I would have loved it of I’d managed to find a cel where the eyes of the bat were translucent red (for the neat backlit effect in the screencap above.) Maybe one day. Also, I really dug that the character designers worked a little bit of Christopher Lee into old Volstock. Just a nice touch…
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…
