Ghostbusters Presents of Birthdays Past

Although I've been running this website for 20 years, my love of Ghostbusters goes back much further than that. In honor of my birthday today, let's take a look back at a few of my past birthdays and the Ghostbusters presents I received for them.

Jumping into the DMC Wayback Tardis Phone Booth that I rented from Mr. Wells, let's set the time circuits to 1987 and see what little 10-year-old Paul got for his birthday. Yeah, little Paul rarely had his eyes opened when he took photos.


Hey, look, there are two Remco The Karate Kid action figures of Mr. Miyagi and Sato. From what I remember, they didn't have a kung-fu grip, but they did have karate chopping action. They both came with a plastic wooden board or something to "break". There's also a Copy Cat game that I don't remember at all, though it looks to be a Simon ripoff. A small Labyrinth ball maze game and some clothes are also present. The Ghostbusters item here is the Kenner H2 Ghost. I wonder how long that will stay mint on card?


Not very long, apparently. By the way, that's my sister Michelle in the above photo.

For that same birthday, I also got the Kenner Sludge Bucket Gooper Ghost, which came with a can of Ecto Plazm.


I was setting it up so that...


...ol' Sludgy could blow an impressive gooey bubble.

Let's jump ahead to June 1988 and see that the 11th birthday haul was.


The Ghostbusters item of note is issue #1 of NOW's The Real Ghostbusters comic book series. While I no longer have the birthday copy, I still have that issue...and signed by writer James Van Hise, no less. The rest of the presents tell you exactly what decade I grew up in. There's a WWF Magazine with Randy "Macho Man" Savage (OOOH YEAH!) on the cover (July 1988 issue), an ALF doll with a playable record which was a Burger King promo (there were four in the set each with its own record/song - Take Me ALF To The Ballgame [came with my ballplayer ALF], Melmac Rock, Cooking with Alf, Melmac Girls), a pack of Micro Machines miniature toy cars, a few packs of Garbage Pail Kids Series 13 cards (to the left of S'Math sitting in front of the Camelot game and above the "World" on the science kit box), a pack of Topps Baseball cards, an UNO Dice game (I forgot that ever existed! - though now it comes in a soda can), a Legend of Camelot board game, The Broadway Game (not sure why I got that), some edutainment stuff (S'Math, Rand McNally Destination: Vacation board game, and a science kit), a Toblerone chocolate bar, and some other stuff I can't identify.

The small group of preceding photos may not represent all of the Ghostbusters presents I ever received for my various birthdays. This article is the result of finding these photos in a family album while looking for something else. There may be more photos in albums I did not search, and I don't know what photos were lost forever thanks to Hurricane Sandy, so please don't think that I only received Ghostbusters presents for just these two birthdays. I do know that I received the Making Ghostbusters book for my birthday in 1997. I also dressed up as Peter Venkman for Halloween 1988.