Extreme Halloween - Part 20 ("In Your Dreams")

Some fun facts about two versions of the script for this episode:

1) The mailman’s nightmare that kicks off the episode was supposed to have him wrestle with mail that turns into live fish, not being attacked by an envelope monster.

2) Garrett actually had two dreams: the basketball game one where everyone except for him is in a wheelchair and he gets run over and the one where Morpheus is a doctor that tells Garrett that he came up with a cure for his paraplegia: shocking him multiple times with a cattle prod. Worse, Garrett’s mom is there to “help” the doctor.

3) Eduardo was supposed to lose the hair on his head and his goatee hair in his infamous dream where Kylie confesses her love for him, then blows him off and calls him a bald freak. The TV show just has him go partially bald and his hair grows back in the end while the original script implies that it didn’t grow back.

4) There was supposed to be a subplot about Janine hiring a journalist to help The Ghostbusters get good publicity, but it all goes wrong when the homeless shelter collapses.

5) Roland’s dream where he spews water and drowns during a science symposium was also supposed to have him getting flushed down the toilet and an extended sequence where the dream leaves him with a full bladder and desperate to use the bathroom (which he does by peeing in a Thermos when he and Eduardo follow the dream worm creatures to the radio station)…at least the first script did. The second script had it the way the TV version was, where Roland just wakes up and spits out water.

6) Janine’s dream was supposed to be her locked in a cell as it fades into the darkness and she screams that she’s innocent and wants to be let out. The first draft had her as a Catholic schoolgirl while Mopheus was the nun punishing her while the second one just had Morpheus locking Janine in a cell. While I do think the TV version was scary (where Janine is the last person alive in New York and she desperately tries to find signs of human life), the two script versions are better (though I could see the Catholic schoolgirl one getting altered because of censors not wanting any complaints about religious references, even though they got away with showing Jewish culture – and anti-Semitism – on “The True Face of a Monster").

7) One of the scripts (not sure which) revealed that Barry Sherman actually was the traffic report announcer before Morpheus possessed him and turned him into a Howard Stern-esque shock jock who criticizes the news and spouts politically incorrect things.