Welcome to the second week of 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.
Opening up this 2nd week (as far as the count of days goes) is one of the Ghostbusters themselves, Egon Spengler. This cel is from episode 45, "Egon on the Rampage". Basically, Egon gets possessed by a demon from another dimension and hulks out going on a, a, well, rampage like the title suggests, scooping up damsels in distress and the like…
I thought this cel was kind of interesting because of the mixture of character homages mixed into the design. There’s a little bit of the Hulk in there, with the increased size and tattered jumpsuit still clinging to him (not to mention the unnatural coloring), but there’s also a little bit of the Wolfman to that design too with his hairy forearms and fangs. On top of this Egon’s already bouffant hair is taken to a drastic height that borders on a Bride of Frankenstein level.
Also, in some of the other cels from this same episode I noticed he sort of has a King Kong aspect to him, the unruly beast that really does have a heart of gold and just want to be left alone…
Again, there are what I’m pretty sure are Japanese Katakana kana notating where the artwork needs to remain clear. Not sure of the translation just yet, but the syllable translations of the kana to English are "chi" (the kana that looks like a fancy seven) and "ki" (the kana that looks like a "t" with a double cross.) This whole process is like the reverse of a typical illustrative shorthand when inking line art where the artist makes "x" tic marks in areas that need to be filling in with solid blacks.
Again, I hope everyone has been digging this countdown, and if so make sure to come back tomorrow for another installment of the 31 Days of Monsters here at Branded in the 80s. Also, you can head on over to the Countdown to Halloween and check out lists of a bunch of other sites participating in this year’s Halloween blogging event. I know I’ve been enjoying the heck out of what others are putting together this year…
