The
Spook Central VIP Exclusives Area is the home to content that has been made exclusively available for supporters who pledge a monthly donation through the
Spook Central Patreon page. Said content is either downloadable through the VIP Exclusives Area here or on the Patreon page, though I link to some exclusive content throughout Spook Central where appropriate. You can learn more about the Spook Central VIP Area
in this blog post. The VIP articles that are posted on Spook Central, which are easily distinguishable by the "[VIP]" at the start of the article title, are readable by all visitors, but contain
download links that will only work for VIP members. If you wish to download this content, become a supporter through the
Spook Central Patreon page. With that out of the way, let's continue...
For many years, Spook Central has spearheaded the
Ghostbusters PDF eBook Preservation Project, an effort among fans to preserve out-of-print Ghostbusters books so that pieces of the franchise's history are available to all, and are not lost to time, or held hostage by price-gouging aftermarket sellers. Thanks to the gracious amount of webspace provided by Raffaele, Spook Central is able to do the same with selected fan-made and promotional digital disc content. I have a few discs that are suitable for the
Disc Preservation Project, though if the primary content from them ends up on an official, commercially-available, easy-to-obtain Blu-ray/DVD/whatever, then I won't include it in the project (or will remove it if it's already been included). This is about preservation, not piracy.
Originally, the plan was to make .ISO images files available, which could be downloaded and burned onto DVD-R discs, which would give you an exact copy of the original DVD. However, even with the gracious amount of webspace provided to Spook Central, I find that that may not be completely feasible in the long-term. Most of the disc images are 4GB each, and that adds up pretty quickly. Also, some people may not be able to to download files that large. There's also the concern that there may not be many dinosaurs like me left, who would prefer a "physical disc"-suitable file. With all of that in mind, I felt that the best thing for the project is to proceed with DVD-ripped .MKV video files of selected content from each disc. These files would have the same quality as the video on the disc (I won't recompress them), but they could be immediately played without the need to burn a disc or mount an image file. Anyone who
does want the .ISO image files for all of the discs in the project, can buy the
limited-edition physical flash drive release, which is a copy of my master flash drive for the small amount of people who may want those files.
On June 16, 2009, Sony released
Ghostbusters on Blu-ray for the very first time. Generally, the disc was not very well received among Ghostheads due to the very grainy film transfer and
horrible color balance, and the lack of substantial new extras that fans were waiting
years for - like the music video and Fort Detmerring deleted scene (which we wouldn't get for another 10 years). The new extras we did get included a "Slimer Mode" picture-in-picture interview and trivia track, and two fluff pieces on the restoration of the Ecto-1 - all of which have been ported over to future Blu-ray releases.
There are three extras from the 2009 Blu-ray that have never been seen again on home video because they are tied to "of the moment" things. One is the hidden PlayStation 3 Ghostbusters Theme. It was never mentioned on the case or in the menus, but if you put the disc in the video game console, you'd be able to install a theme to give your system a few different Ghostbusters background images. I've archived that on the
Ghostbusters 2009 Blu-ray page, for those dinosaurs, like me, who still use a PS3.
The other two extras are videos that were added to promote the then-new
Ghostbusters: The Video Game: An eleven-minute featurette and the "Atari Live/When Disaster Strikes" Trailer that was originally re-released on January 29, 2009 with the Peter clip at the end. When the movie was re-released on Blu-ray in 2014 and 2019, these two videos were not included because the game, and the systems it plays on, were no longer new. Also, I don't think Atari has the Ghostbusters license anymore, so Sony may not have been able to include them due to the Atari name appearing in them.
Whatever the case may be, I felt that it was worth ripping these two videos from the Blu-ray and preserving them in their original 1920x1080 29.97fps MPEG4 H264 video with Dolby AC3 48000Hz stereo 192kbps audio. Yes, I realize that this disc doesn't fit within the usual parameters of the Disc Preservation Project, since it was officially-released and used copies can still be purchased from the second-hand aftermarket. However, I believe that with the releases of the 2014 and 2019 Blu-rays, Sony has put this disc out-of-print, and clearly the two game videos are no longer being sold on product released by Sony, so in that regard, I believe that it falls under the purview of the project.
The featurette runs 11:19 and is 1.8 GB, while the trailer runs 1:43 and is 276 MB.
Disclaimer: No copyright infringement is intended with the content on this page. The presentation of disc content is done solely to preserve materials that are no longer being published, or in the case of fan-made discs, may have never been made available for public purchase in the first place. These materials will be lost and gone forever if the fans don't properly preserve them. Please note that the money paid to me as a Spook Central supporter is for my hard work in bringing this material to you since August 1996. You are not paying for the content itself. The money I receive is used to fund Spook Central and to pay for my living expenses.