The rest of the Ghostbusters vintage magazine articles have been scanned, cleaned, and added to Spook Central. Here's a nice little list...

Ghostbusters Books page:
• Fangoria #36
• Fangoria #39
• Fangoria #40 (and poster image)
• Fangoria #41
• Fantastic Films #41
• Cinefex #17
• Cinefex #73 (Boss Films Closes)
• Premiere Magazine June 2004 (GB 20th Anniv)

Ghostbusters II Books page:
• Fangoria #84
• Rolling Stone
• Cinefex #40

Extreme Ghostbusters Books page:
• Ability Magazine

In addition to those magazine articles, liner notes booklet PDFs have been added for the Ghostbusters 1999 DVD and the Ghostbusters II 1999 DVD.

Plus, the Ghostbusters show (Real Ghostbusters, Slimer!, Extreme Ghostbusters) blurbs from the three editions of The Encyclopedia of Animated Cartoons have been added to The Real Ghostbusters Books page (and cross-linked on the Slimer! and EGB Book pages). Big thanks to Matthew Jordan of the Ghostbusters Wiki for cleaning up the scans (and assembling the poster for Fangoria #40).

Sadly, The Encyclopedia of Animated Cartoons is a very error-filled book, especially the 1st edition, in which I made MANY hand-written corrections (they have been left in the scans). This is why any information in this book can't be taken as 100% fact without being verified by another source. Some of the errors are SO incorrect that they're actually quite humorous. According to this book, the episode "Live! From Al Capone's Tomb" was a primetime special in which the Ghostbusters tried to prevent an anti-Halloween machine from destroying the holiday. I'm sure you already know that that episode was actually "The Halloween Door". Also, this book says that there was an episode entitled "Adventures in Slime And Peace" (it's "Space", not "Peace"), and that the Italian guy in the Slimer! shorts was named Linguini (his name is really Luigi). Bear in mind, these are just the errors in the Ghostbusters blurbs. There are thousands of other shows covered on the hundreds of pages, and I'm sure that there are a LOT of errors in all of that, too.

I also scanned in a few things that aren't really suitable for Spook Central. These have been uploaded to the Spook Central Patreon page:

• Toyfare Magazine #141 - May 2009 - A little history from when Mattel first released the Ghostbusters figures.

• Game Informer Magazine - December 2007 - This was the magazine that broke the news of a new Ghostbusters video game back in December 2007.

That's all for now. There will likely be more stuff added in a month. At this rate, I think it'll have everything I scanned in on the site *before* my deadline of December 31, 2015 :-)

It took six and a half years, but it has finally been completed. Spook Central is now home to scanned PDF eBooks of every Ghostbusters movie and television script that I have in my personal collection. Ghostbusters, Ghostbusters II, The Real Ghostbusters, Slimer!, and Extreme Ghostbusters... it's all here. The only scripts that have not been added are those from TimeLife's Real Ghostbusters Complete Collection DVD box set, but I have placeholders for them so they can be added at a later date. I want to see if I can clean them up a little and tighten up the files rather than just adding them "as is". There's no immediate rush to add them since, if you really want them, you can go out and buy the box set - if you don't have it already.

Before I get to the update list, I have a little request to make. If anyone reading this has a Scribd account, please download the Grundelsque PDF, upload it to 1fichier (or your favorite free file host), and e-mail the link to me. Thanks to MrMichaelT, I have the text copy and pasted and saved into a word processing document, but it would need to be formatted to match the original on the site. To save myself that work, I'm looking to get the original PDF off Scribd. Then it can be reuploaded here for all to access.

• Extreme Ghostbusters - Ghost in the Machine, Be Careful What You Wish For, and Glutton For Punishment.
• The Real Ghostbusters - Midnight on the Lady M (premise, unproduced) & The Haunting of Heck House (excerpt).
• Ghostbusters - September 30, 1983 draft and June 15, 1984 "Combined Continuity & Master Subtitle/Spotting List".
• Ghostbusters II - November 27, 1988 draft and February 27, 1989 draft.

The Ghostbusters II November 27, 1988 draft comes from a production-used copy I bought from creature shop supervisor Tim Lawrence, which has been a great source of financial stress and heartache for me.

I bought the Ghostbusters II February 27, 1989 draft from a "script store" back in the mid-1990s. A "script store", as I'm sure you could guess, is a retail store that sells photocopies of movie and television scripts, as well as other movie and television memorabilia. They're usually located physically in California, and have a webstore from which they can sell their wares online. I don't think that there are any script stores anymore as the internet put them out of business. My physical copy of this script includes six pages that were, obviously, photocopied from an original that had a colored background. As such, these six pages are horribly ink-blotted. I spent as much time, if not more, hand-cleaning the scans of these six pages than I did the other 135 pages combined! To illustrate the work that went into this, below is a before-and-after comparison of one of these pages. You can click it for an enlargement.

The Ghostbusters II February 27, 1989 draft isn't exactly new to the site. Long time visitors of Spook Central already know that a text transcript version has been here since the late 1990s. This text copy, which I transcribed by hand (no OCR program used), got passed around like a hot potato on "script sites", but with my transcriber's credit removed. Yeah, you can imagine how happy that made me to have my hard work typing up all 141 pages easily discredited like that. The script was not on the internet in any way, shape, or form before I transcribed it.

It was a year ago, today, that Harold Ramis died. We here at Spook Central have been remembering him this past week via a series of photos on the Spook Central Facebook page. To further the remembrance, I am pleased to make available an article Harold wrote for the August 2000 issue of Premiere magazine. Entitled "Sinning Isn't Everything", and meant to help promote Harold's then-new film Bedazzled (a remake starring Brendan Fraser and Elizabeth Hurley about a guy who made a deal with the devil), Harold gives advice to his fellow directors about Hollywood's Seven Deadly Sins.

Click on the cover image below to download the article PDF. Big thanks to Matthew Jordan for piecing together the cover image, which I had to scan in two parts.


To add to the celebration of his life, here is Harold's biography, as it was written for the Ghostbusters Press Kit in 1984. This is a scan from the re-print as it appeared in the Ghostbusters 1 & 2 Blu-ray Digibook.

More of the Ghostbusters stuff I scanned in over the past few months has been added to the site.

First up, the first draft of "The True Face of a Monster" script has been added to the Extreme Ghostbusters Scripts page. A big thanks to Matthew Jordan for darkening the text to make easier to read.

If you been following the Spook Central Facebook page, you would have already known a week ago that I...

* Re-scanned in the advertisements at the bottom of the Ghostbusters Home Video page.
* Re-scanned the Steve Perry and Ben Otto RGB model sheets in the first two sections of the Real Ghostbusters Production Artwork page.
* Added "The Real Gross Blisters" Wacky Packages parody to the Real Ghostbusters Merchandise page.

All of the 8x10 photographs in my collection have been scanned in, so you can find some nice high-resolution photos in the Official Photos section of the Ghostbusters Multimedia and Ghostbusters II Multimedia pages. Also, you'll find a Fox Family Channel promo photo in the Promotional Images section of The Real Ghostbusters Multimedia page.

A pretty big site update today. All but four scripts have been added to the Extreme Ghostbusters Scripts page. The last four require a lot of clean-up work, so they will be added at some future date. One of the scripts that was added was the first draft of Joseph Kuhr's "The Eyes Of A Dragon". This script required special clean-up work, which was graciously done by Matthew Jordan, as the original was black text on red paper. Above is a comparison between the original page and the converted and cleaned version. As you can see, Matthew should be commended for the exceptional job he did to make it readable...and printable!

As a bonus, a PDF of the Ghostbusters mentions/photos from the "Life: Year In Pictures 1984" magazine has been added to the Ghostbusters Books page. A high-res scan of the group photo of the guys on the stairs is also available as a separate download. Big thanks, again, to Matthew Jordan for taking my two-part scans and piecing them together into single images.

That is all for today, but before I go, please remember this safety tip: DON'T DRIVE ANGRY!

Back in July of last year, I created Ghostbusters Press Kit and Ghostbusters II Press Kit pages here on Spook Central. The high-resolution scans of the photos were added (if you have any of the missing GB2 photos, or can provide better scans of the low-resolution and watermarked images, please e-mail me), but I didn't have the documents scanned in at the time, so placeholders were used. Now, I finally have the documents scanned in.

They were scanned in as part of my efforts to scan in every single Ghostbusters script, book, magazine, and other flat piece of merchandise I have. I lost a lot of items due to Hurricane Sandy a few years ago, but I got *really* lucky that most of my Ghostbusters memorabilia/print materials collection was spared. It's a miracle that the scripts were unharmed as the water that flooded my old home caused the shelf they were on to fall off the bookcase. I can only assume the shelf fell after the water receded, otherwise I see no way they would have avoided the water. I took this as a sign that I should get everything scanned in ASAP, so I made a concerted effort to do that these past few months.

The plan, right now, is to get all of the scans cleaned-up and put onto Spook Central by the end of this year (December 31, 2015). There's no deadline for individual items; that's just my goal for when I would like to have everything done by. Matthew Jordan has been helping me out, but we're only two people, so things will be done "when they're done". So, stay tuned to Spook Central throughout the year for more updates and some very awesome stuff. Same ghost time, same ghost channel.

When I became a part of the Ghostbusters online community in 1995/1996, there were no Ghostbusters fan films online. Back then, you were lucky to have a 28.8k modem with dial-up internet, so you didn't have the capabilities to view large full-length movies - and there certainly wasn't a YouTube, or anything like it. It seems like as good a time as any to take a look back at the early fan films.

Read more »

In 2004, Hank Braxtan made the Ghostbusters fan film Freddy Vs. Ghostbusters. It featured a battle between the "Denver Ghostbusters" and A Nightmare on Elm Street villain Freddy Krueger. Hank followed this up with Return Of The Ghostbusters in 2007, which was the first feature-length Ghostbusters fan film. To bridge the gap between the two films, Hank, and artist Bryan "The Sandman" Sanders, wrote a comic book entitled "Ghostbusters: The Denver Chronicles". The comic, which was released digitally on the Return of the Ghostbusters website one day prior to the film's release, also had a limited 50-copy print run. I own one of those copies. (I used to own two, but the autographed copy I had got destroyed by Hurricane Sandy back in 2012.)

The comic finds Neil Anderson alone in Denver busting ghosts, and dealing with a few vandals who damaged the original Ecto truck from Freddy vs. Ghostbusters. Ed Spengler & Eugene O'Fitzpatrick are in London at the British Museum to answer a call that the "New York Chapter" (the original four Ghostbusters from the feature films) was too busy to handle. There, Eugene discovers a map inside an artifact to the lost city of Cynopolis. Janosz Poha, a character from Ghostbusters II (who has since moved to England to "get away from you guys"), takes this map to the sole financier of the Ancient Egypt exhibit, Klaus Konstantin (and his assistant, Pavel Karnov). Twenty-eight days later, Ed and Eugene are invited to the archaeological site they helped Konstantin discover. They drive through the desert in an undecorated white automobile, presumably the future Ectomobile featured in Return of the Ghostbusters. Unfortunately, they arrive to discover a cave-in where several crew members are injured, and Konstantin is crippled, explaining his paralysis in the film. The two Ghostbusters run to the rescue, only to have Ed incapacitated by a group of resurrected mummies, leaving Eugene to fight against them by himself.

It took Bryan a whole month to make the comic, and he finished it and had the last page done a mere 10 hours before he flew out to Denver for the Return Of The Ghostbusters premiere. Keep in mind that it was released one day before the premiere, so he really got it done just under the wire! Bryan told me that it was supposed to be much longer, but was cut due to time. Had he stuck to Hank's original script, it would have been a 3-issue comic. So, it was severely downsized to just the overall summary of the script. A few years ago, Bryan sold Hank's original comic script and all artwork for $10 on eBay.

Thanks to the generosity of Hank and Bryan, I have been allowed to share this comic book with all of you. As a bonus, Bryan has also given me the Ghost Busted Ghostbusters/Sonic The Hedgehog crossover comic book he wrote years ago. (More info on this after the covers) So, without further ado, click on the covers to download the PDF eBooks.


Bryan filled me in on the originals of the Ghost Busted comic. Bryan was friends with several writers and creators of the 1993 Saturday morning Sonic cartoon and comic book, so he wrote a crossover featuring characters from both Sonic and Ghostbusters. It featured some Ghostbusters friends that he knew at the time, and Hank's Denver Ghostbusters. Bryan intended for it to be a 20 issue series, and you'll see if you read it, but he stopped after the first issue due to lack of interest and time. It was written way back in late 2004-2005 (before the Denver Chronicles comic). From working with Hank on this comic script, just using his characters, Bryan was able to become involved in the development of Return of the Ghostbusters. Outside of Hank and Tim Johnson, Bryan was one of the first people working on the film; working on props/art and script tweaks. A lot of his props were later featured in his short film Chucks New Job, which takes place after his Papercut 2 fan film, and features Kylie and Eduardo from Extreme Ghostbusters.

For the past few years, Spook Central presented a Halloween treat to the community in the form of a special eBook PDF. It was never intended to be a regular tradition, but it's turned out to be that way. Whether it stays that way...who knows.

This year, Spook Central continues the new tradition with TWO eBooks. The first one is something small, and not of any consequence, but it's here for you anyway. On the Ghostbusters Books page is the Ghostbusters Theatrical Program Book (it's the first item on the page). This 8.5x11 color program book/booklet, printed on hard card stock, was given out to audience members at premiere theatrical showings of "Ghostbusters" back in 1984. It features the title logo across the front cover; the full credits across the two inside pages; and the Columbia Pictures logo, title logo, and credits block on the back cover.

The second Halloween treat is a MAJOR addition to the site and is an absolute rarity: the Ghostbusters II August 5, 1988 script draft!!! This draft is wildly different than the final film. There is no Slimer, Dana, Janosz, River of Slime, Vigo painting, or Ghost Jogger. New characters Lane Walker and Jalmar Litvinov would, in essence, become Dana and Janosz later on. Instead of the Vigo painting, the vessel of evil is a religious Icon triptych held by Jalmar. Vigo, who's Russian here, commandeers the Statue of Liberty and chases the Ghostbusters through the city streets at the film's climax. Oscar is possessed by Vigo and moves like an adult with an adult's gaze. The vehicle which we know as "Ecto-1A" is referred to as "Ecto-1". And that's just the tip of the iceberg of the differences in this draft. It truly feels like an alternate universe - but without the turtles. Major thanks to Matthew Jordan for helping me clean up the scanned pages. (Side note, the Ghostbusters II 11/27/1988 draft was not ready at press time and will be uploaded at a later date.)

A THIRD Halloween eBook treat is available if you visit my new second site/blog. The premiere post on that site will treat you to the Beetlejuice: Beginner's Guide To Seeing Ghosts theatrical promo booklet. This new site/blog will also be the home to a whole series of non-Ghostbusters Filming Locations/Shot On Site articles. If you enjoyed Spook Central Shot On Site articles, you might want to stay tuned to my other site for more of the same.

Finally, here are the winners of Spook Central's Halloween Ghostbusters 30th Anniversary Blu-Ray Raffle:

* Kevin H., Salem MA
* Sean B., Phoenix AZ
* Steven L., Los Angeles CA
* Laura S., New Orleans, LA
* Katie M., New York, NY

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For the complete list of Spook Central's Halloween Treat posts from years past, click here. Thanks to Miss Kate for the "Halloween Treat" title banner that appears at the top of this post.

In honor of the Ghostbusters 30th anniversary, Spook Central has five sets of Ghostbusters 1 & 2 individual Blu-rays to offer as prizes to five lucky winners. Each raffle ticket costs a mere $3.40 ($3.00 goes to the raffle pot, $0.40 goes to PayPal), and to be fair, I'm limiting it to ONE TICKET PER PERSON, WITH A U.S. PAYPAL MAILING ADDRESS ONLY. (If you live outside the U.S., please don't buy a raffle ticket as you won't be eligible for the raffle. Your money will be refunded, minus the PayPal portion.)


The raffle ends on October 26, 2014, and the winners will be announced on October 31, 2014 when Spook Central presents its annual Halloween Treat.

In the past, I've done several giveaways/contests, and I almost always had to pay out of my own pocket to ship items to the winners. I don't have records, but I wouldn't be surprised to learn that I paid over $100 out of pocket on postage for all of the contests combined. I can no longer afford to pay to ship out freebies to other people. I'm hoping that enough people will buy tickets so that the raffle pot will be large enough to pay for the postage on all of the prizes. That way I don't have to pay to ship out prizes, and winners will get TWO brand new Blu-rays for a mere $3.40. Each prize pack is valued at $39.98 (MSRP of $19.98 per Blu-ray).

OFFICIAL RULES
The "Spook Central Halloween Ghostbusters 30th Anniversary Blu-Ray Raffle" (hereafter referred to as "the raffle") starts on 10/12/2014 and ends on 10/26/2014. The contest is open only to legal residents of the United States, who have valid accounts on PayPal.com. Limit one ticket per person and/or PayPal account. Each ticket costs $3.40, payable only via PayPal, with $3.00 going to the raffle pot and $0.40 going to PayPal for their fee. Tickets are non-refundable. Any additional ticket purchases, and ticket purchases from non-U.S. residents, will be discarded (only these tickets will be refunded, minus the PayPal portion). If you don't win, you don't get your money back. Any money in the raffle pot left over after all postage is paid for will be considered donations to Spook Central and the Rudoff Family Relief Fund.

Winners will be chosen at random using The Hat random name-selection software. Winners will be notified via e-mail, and asked to confirm their mailing address in a timely manner. If a winner does not reply within three business days, they will forfeit the prize and it will be given to someone else via another random selection. Prizes will be mailed out once all winners confirm their mailing addresses. All information provided by entrants will not be sold, given away, or used for any other purpose than for this contest - though a winners list *may* be posted after the contest has ended.

No prize substitution or cash redemption allowed by a prize winner. If awarded, prizes will be awarded without any warranty of any kind. Odds of winning a prize depends on the total number of eligible entries received. All federal, state and local tax liabilities, if any, are the responsibility of the winners. Spook Central/Paul Rudoff shall not be responsible or liable for entries that are entered by other than human means (such as by an automated computer program or any non-human mechanism, entity, or device), in excess of the stated limit, or for entries that are late, forged, destroyed, lost, misplaced, stolen, misdirected, tampered with, incomplete, deleted, damaged, garbled, or otherwise not in compliance with the official rules, and all such entries will be disqualified.

By entering the contest, each entrant agrees: (i) to be bound by these official rules and by all applicable laws and decisions of Spook Central/Paul Rudoff which shall be binding and final; (ii) to waive all of his/her rights to bring any claim, action, or proceeding against Spook Central/Paul Rudoff in connection with the Giveaway.