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Cereal:Geek TV #33: Ruining Janine Melnitz - Featuring Real Ghostbusters Redubbed Clips
It's no secret that drastic changes were made to The Real Ghostbusters after the show's successful first seasons on ABC and in syndication. In the latest episode of his cereal:geek TV series on YouTube, James Eatock went over one of these so-called "improvements": the ruination of the Janine Melnitz character. Read on to find out more...
James summarizes the de-evolution of the show quite nicely, so let's watch his 21-minute video.
The redubbed episode clips that appear from 15:21-16:32 were provided to James by me. Both clips are from "Ghosts 'R Us", with the Janine clip coming from the start of act two, and the Peter clip taken from the chocolate factory scene at the beginning. Here's an isolated look at the clips as used in the cereal:geek TV episode.
The video clips I gave to James are from a project I'm working on for the Spook Central VIPs.
About 11 years ago, shortly before that whole Hurricane Sandy ordeal, I had transferred the audio tracks of all of the redubbed episodes (and some other alternate audio) from my VHS recordings of the ABC broadcasts to my computer. The plan was to clean up the audio (remove hiss from the mono recordings or crackles/static from the stereo recordings) and then marry it to the video from the Time-Life DVD set. The project sat on the back burner for years because my audio editing skills are not good enough to do this.
Throughout all of 2022, I made the raw recordings available to the Spook Central VIPs, not just to finally get it "out there", but in the hopes that it will end up in the hands of someone who could actually get the project moving forward. That someone ended up being John Seitz (aka Johnny Splitz). He cleaned up the audio and then married it to the DVD video, and I made lower-resolution video files available to the VIPs as they were completed throughout the year. The reason the files were of lower-resolution and quality is because Patreon has a 200MB limit for file attachments. Even with John reducing the size and quality, I still had to split the files into two-part zips because they were just a tad above the limit.
The plan has always been to use higher-quality copies to author a series of "The Real Ghostbusters Supplemental Material" DVDs for the Spook Central VIPs to download (as ISO disc images) and burn to DVD-Rs, which can be stored with the Time-Life set. To provide fans with the content that should have been included with the Time-Life set... and yes, I offered them my tapes to use for the audio, but they declined. Recently, John gave me higher-quality 960x720 files that can be perfectly downsampled a bit to 720x480 DVD resolution to match the quality of the Time-Life set. As of right now, this is what John has completed and given me.
• Ghosts R Us (Redubbed Version)
• Mr. Sandman, Dream Me a Dream (Redubbed Version)
• Mrs. Roger's Neighborhood (Redubbed Version)
• Slimer, Come Home (Redubbed Version)
• Slimer, Is That You (Redubbed Version, ABC Broadcast Restoration)
• The Boogieman Cometh (Redubbed Version)
• Troll Bridge (Redubbed Version)
---------------
• A Fright at the Opera (Series Music Version)
• Knock, Knock (Tahiti Music Version)
• The Bird of Kildarby (Series Music Version)
• Venkman's Ghost Repellers (Tahiti Music Version)
---------------
• The Halloween Door (ABC Premiere Restoration, 1989.10.29)
• The Halloween Door (ABC Re-Run Restoration, 1990.10.27)
I will not start work on authoring the DVDs until I have the remaining items, which are just these two items:
• Short Stuff (Work-In-Progress Version)
• Play Them Ragtime Boos (Series Music Version)
"Play Them Ragtime Boos" might be tricky because the only source I have for the series music is from a foreign dub that was uploaded to YouTube. John and I will have to see if we can edit it into the English episode from the DVD.
What won't be initially included in the project are commercials, promos, the "Slimer Won't Do That" UK special, the anamorphic widescreen material from the Time-Life promo DVD, and the episodes with alternate video:
• Attack of the B-Movie Monsters (Bridge)
• Don't Forget the Motor City (Grey Gremlins)
• Lights! Camera! Haunting! (Victorian Skyscrapers)
I have some kinda poor 720x480 VHS transfers of the Bridge version from VHS. Maybe some video filters could be applied to them to make them look much better. The Victorian Skyscrapers version can be found on Sony's "Volume 4" DVD (with no title card), so I could rip that later and John or I could add the show opening and title card from the Time-Life copy (which has the Glass Skyscrapers). The Grey Gremlins version can be found on the UK "Volume 10" Magic Window VHS release, which I don't have. I think that James Eatock does (he gave me the framegrab on the Alternate Episodes page), so maybe sometime later he could can do a VHS transfer of the scene or the whole episode.
Since I'm going to author the DVDs with single-layer 4.7GB DVD-Rs as the target, I will only put 4-5 episodes on each disc. That means that there will be at least three or four volumes in the "The Real Ghostbusters Supplemental Material" DVD series. I don't have a target date for the release, as I am waiting on John to do the remaining episodes before I begin. Also, I am ashamed to admit that I am still on an old desktop computer that I was supposed to update in late 2016, but every time I get the desire to do it, life gets in the way. Patreon doesn't work in the older browsers I'm using on the desktop computer, which means that in order to post content for the VIPs, I have to transfer text, links, and files to my tablet and then post it there - and Patreon doesn't officially support mobile browsers. Suffice it to say, that's a major pain in the ass. That's why I haven't posted as much to Patreon as I did in 2021 and before. I apologize to all of the Spook Central VIPs for the lack of content. I do have stuff in the works, such as this project, so it's not for lack of materials. I want to be optimistic and say that by the end of the year I'll have those issues worked out, but we'll see...
1 comment
Thanks . I never knew you existed except for an article about the owner and one of the stars sharing a birthday..
May. 28, 2023 @ 00:36
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