Spook Central 28th Anniversary - A Look Back at The Real Ghostbusters Pilot Webpages

This month marks the 28th anniversary of Spook Central. It was way back in the ancient times of August 1996 that the site launched. Since I never kept track of the exact day the site went live, when I note the anniversary, I always do it on the first of the month. Although I've kept some archived copies of the site from the late 1990s on the Website Archives - Paul's Sites page, none of them are complete. Thanks to James Eatock, one of them is now a tiny bit more complete.

James found some late-1990s Spook Central images on an old CD-ROM he had. He sent them my way so I could make the 11/27/1999 archived copy of the site (zipped up) more complete. Thanks to these images, the "Real Ghostbusters Original" pages, as I called The Real Ghostbusters Pilot page at the time, are now complete. Here are screenshots of what those pages looked like in 1999/2000, filled with small framegrabs from the promo videos I received from Lanny White and the late, great Doreen Mulman (miss ya, Babe). I totally forgot about the combo header/navigational image I was using back then.


None of the 273x200 images on page 1, or 269x200 on page 2, were enlargable. What you see in the large screenshot here is "actual size". Yeah, in the days of dial-up internet, you didn't get high-resolution images, especially when grabbed from VHS sources!


Big thanks to James Eatock for saving the original images from these two pages. I wish he would have saved ALL of Spook Central's old images, so I could put together one complete archive, but I'll take what I can get. I was only ever able to save the html pages and just some of the images due to the space constraints I had at the time. You can only fit so much on 1.44MB diskettes.

Weirdly, this folder containing The Real Ghostbusters content was the ONLY folder on the three old CD-ROMs James found that he was able to salvage. The rest of the disc, and the other two discs, were completely unreadable. Perhaps we could get a guest spot on The Unbelievable with Dan Aykroyd!

[UPDATE 8/31/2024]
As a follow-up to this article, James Eatock just posted a nearly 18-minute long video detailing the history of The Real Ghostbusters Pilot. Spook Central is shown and mentioned from 3:34-4:34.


James also provided me with a copy of the first sketch Kevin Altieri ever did of the guys, which has been added to The Real Ghostbusters Production Artwork page.