For the benefit of those of you who haven't been playing along at home, a little history... Due to Hurricane Sandy destroying my old home and leaving my family homeless for over a month (we lived in a Red Cross emergency shelter for six weeks before we found a new permanent place to live), Spook Central went on hiatus for a year until I was a bit more back on my feet. I reopened the site for Halloween last year, and it remained open for three months until my father passed away in late January. For the past four months, Spook Central was back on hiatus, with the only posts being about the deaths of two prominent members of the Ghostbusters community: franchise co-creator Harold Ramis and Ghosthead extraordinaire Doreen Mulman.

Although I still have a lot of personal matters to take care of, I felt that with June being the 30th anniversary of the franchise, it was the perfect time to reopen Spook Central (again!). Thanks to the help of Spook Central staff member Matthew Jordan, I have a flurry of updates to post over the course of the month.

I would like to take this opportunity to thank everyone who made donations to my family in the wake of my father's death. I was totally blown away by the generosity of my fellow Ghostheads all over the world. I have been tossing it around in my head over the past few months whether to post a public list of all donations received from family, friends, and Ghostheads. I know that some people who make donations like to be anonymous, but I felt it would be a bit disrespectful of me not to publicly acknowledge each and every person who helped my family in our time of need. I'd like to give a special thanks to Chad Paulson for making a PayPal donation link and image to solicit donations for my family without me ever asking, suggesting, or hinting that it be done. The last thing on my mind after my father died was asking people for money.

1/23/2014 - XXXX - Citizens Inc. (works with my sister) sent a nice fruit basket.
1/23/2014 - $20 - Rabbi Anchelle Perl (cash)
1/23/2014 - $20 - Alim Gafar (cash)
1/26/2014 - $100 - Chad Paulson (PayPal)
1/26/2014 - $03 - Alfredo Buffone (PayPal)
1/27/2014 - $50 - Ed Mooney (check)
1/27/2014 - $50 - Jacqueline Kramer (check)
1/28/2014 - $59 - Toby Riesterer (PayPal)
1/28/2014 - $50 - Ryan Espin (PayPal)
1/28/2014 - $25 - Ron Daniels (PayPal)
1/29/2014 - $15 - Jeremy Marks (PayPal)
2/12/2014 - $25 - Marilyn "Chickie" Mandrino (check)
2/18/2014 - $25 - Ebony Brown (check)
2/25/2014 - $75 - Nina Fiorito (check)
2/25/2014 - $25 - Robert Vincent (PayPal)
2/28/2014 - $25 - Darold Crotzer (PayPal)
4/30/2014 - $50 - Giuseppe Ganelli (PayPal)
5/27/2014 - $3.89 - Frankie Smales (PayPal)
6/22/2014 - $50 - Raffaele Ruffaldi (PayPal)

If there's anyone listed above who would prefer NOT to be named, send me an e-mail and I'll remove your name from the list.

It is with great sadness that I report that Harold "Egon" Ramis passed away today at the young age of 69. Death must have a fondness for the number 69, but not in the same way that we humans do :-) My father died a little over a month ago at age 69, and his mother (my grandmother) and his uncle (my great uncle) also died at that age.

I knew the day would come when one of the "big stars" of the films would die, but I never thought that day would come so soon...and especially not on the cusp of the franchise's 30th anniversary. If anyone still had hopes for a Ghostbusters 3, this pretty much kills any chance of that happening. Even if they went with a new crew, and the original guys just showed up for cameos, there would always be the loss of Harold hanging over the project. Maybe now we can finally put Ghostbusters 3 to rest and not have it brought up every time one of the film stars is interviewed.

Just a thought: The Academy Awards event is being held this Sunday. I wonder if it's too late for Harold to be included in the In Memoriam segment.

Anyway, Ghostbusters News has an article up with some quotes from Harold's Ghostbusters co-stars and other celebrities paying their respects to the man.

After the jump are a few photos, videos, and interview links about Harold that I gathered from my archives.

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The Good

That image up there is the new Spook Central Headquarters. Click on it for a look at the full-size image (if it's scaled down to fit your screen, click on it again). As you can see, I have a new 100% working fast computer - and I assembled it entirely myself! You can read the full specs here. That means, computer-wise, I've *FINALLY* recovered from Hurricane Sandy. Normally, I'd be ecstatic to get back to business as usual, and present all of the Ghostbusters updates that this site has lacked for the past 16 months. Sadly, all is not good.

[UPDATE - 4/2/2014]
I finally framed one of the three Dapper Dan Schoening signed art prints I've had for years (the other two have been sold on eBay) and put it up on the Spook Central Headquarters wall. Here's a look at the revised Spook Central Headquarters, and a close-up of the "This Chick Is TOAST" art print.




The Bad

After my father passed away three weeks ago - God, has it been that long already?!? - I knew that I had to stop dragging my feet, get over my worries about screwing it up, and finally buy a new computer bundle while I still had the money to buy it, and while I still had a place for it to be delivered to.

When we lost my father, we also lost his money, which was paying the rent on the place where I'm staying. His entire Social Security check and half of his retirement check was needed for the rent, and now we don't have either. I'm not sure at this moment what the combined household income is going to be starting in March, but I know that it's going to be a LOT less than it was in January. If we can get rental assistance, the landlord is willing to accept it and keep us here. I think he realizes how much we are good tenants, though compared to the noisy, crazy low-class undesirables living below us, cockroaches would be good tenants. In spite of the people downstairs, we like living here, we like the neighborhood, and we want to stay for more than just 14 or 15 months. Plus we don't want to have to pack everything back up, and go through the stress of finding a new place to live and moving everything there.

Losing my father and inheriting all of his DVDs has opened my eyes as to how I have WAY too much stuff that I don't need - thousands of DVDs, VHS tapes, CDs, comic books, trading cards, autographed/signed photos & memorabilia... I was quite a collector, and maybe a bit of a hoarder. Having all of this stuff doesn't make for an easy move. Since I don't need all of it, and quite honestly I've only watched probably 5% of the thousands of DVDs, I will have to start selling or giving away most of it. Ideally I'd like to sell as much of it as possible since I will need every bit of money I can get. To give you an idea as to just how much stuff we have, look at these photos of the boxes sitting up in the attic that I photographed four months ago.


The Future

Normally, having a new fast computer would mean that Spook Central would permanently be removed from hiatus status and operations would resume as they did before October 29, 2012. Spook Central will remain on hiatus for the time being. The next post, or bunch of posts, will be listings of items I've put up for sale to raise money for rent ($1,475), electric ($204), cable/tv/internet ($140), food, transportation, laundry, medicine/medical, and other assorted living expenses. (If you ever need proof that life enjoys crapping on me, the electric bill went up $50 this month, and the cable bill went up $20 last month.)

Some listings will be on eBay, and I may try to list a few directly here using PayPal (since eBay limits 50 free listings per month). There will be a bunch of Ghostbusters stuff for sale, such as full sets of comic books, some toys, some t-shirts, an original Ecto-1A model I assembled in the early 1990s in a GB-esque display case, a few copies of the Real Ghostbusters Complete Series DVD set in various conditions (some are disc only), and maybe a few other things as I find them. There will also be a huge lot of complete sets of Garbage Pail Kids cards from the original Series 1 to the All-New Series 5 (or maybe it was 4). Some autographed Wrestlemania plaques signed by Eddie Guerrero, Chris Benoit, and The Undertaker. The last issue of WWF Victory magazine and the first issue of WWF Magazine from 1983/1984 (Victory was a two-issue series that ran before it officially became "WWF Magazine"). Not to mention lots of DVDs, Blu-rays, CDs, and out-of-print VHS tapes. I have a LOT of stuff, and I know that some of it is quite valuable.

The first listings may go up sometime next week. That's the plan right now, though I've learned not to plan too much because shit happens that I couldn't possibly predict.

Yesterday my family and I went into the City to celebrate my parent's 38th wedding anniversary. We visited Times Square and Rockefeller Center, and I figured it would be a good opportunity to take some photos of the Ghostbusters spots at those locations - especially since most of them were unknown to me when I last visited on April 22, 2003. Sadly, between the overcrowding and the set-up for New Years Eve, I couldn't take the exact photos I wanted. I did manage to get a few shots, which have been added to the Times Square and Rockefeller Center pages.

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When Extreme Ghostbusters was first conceived by Richard Raynis and Jeff Kline, they needed a name for the show. It didn't have to be the final name, just something they could refer to it by while they were working out the details for the show. Apparently, the very temporary placeholder name they used during early pre-production was SUPER GHOSTBUSTERS. (No idea if gamma radiation or radioactive spiders was going to be involved.)

The full-page ad seen below appeared in The Hollywood Reporter: Animation Special Issue, dated January 23, 1996, for Columbia TriStar Television's current and upcoming children's programming and animation, which proclaimed that Super Ghostbusters was "coming soon". This was a full year and eight months before the show premiered on TV.


In an effort to research this previously unheard-of title, MrMichaelT from the Ghostbusters Wiki reached out to series conceptual artist Fil Barlow, and this is what he found out.

Interesting [advertisement], I've never seen it before. I was in Australia when Adelaide Productions was setting up. Obviously the new studio had to promote itself prior to any art being prepared (notice that absolutely NO art was done for the Ghostbusters and Jumanji spots so it was definitely before I was involved). I vaguely remember talking on the phone to Executive Producer Richard Raynis when he was throwing around some names for the new Ghostbusters show. By the time I was doing initial sketches it had the title "Extreme", which I considered a bit dated and corny (I seem to remember trying to talk him out of it, a lot of shows and toys were "extreme" back then), but I would have hated "Super" so I'm glad we didn't go that way. He seemed pretty set on [the "Extreme" title]. I doubt that he would have been interested in Super at all. Still it's a bit of interesting history to see that the "Super Ghostbusters" name was considered long enough to print [in an advertisement].

And here I thought "Extreme Ghostbusters" was a bad title. I agree with Fil; "Super Ghostbusters" would have been MUCH worse!

Thanks to Tim Kloske, frames from the Ghostbusters "Mastered In 4K" 2013 Blu-ray have been added to the Ghostbusters Home Video Comparison page. The original full-size Blu-ray frames have been added to the Ghostbusters on Home Video page.

This is what Tim had to say about the 4K 2013 Blu-ray: "For the most part, the 2013 Blu-ray release might now be the best. It's the most honest to the original film (similar to the 1999 DVD) while still being color timed to bring life into the film. The 1999 copy is really dingy and purple. Not only that, but the 1999 version is stretched a little bit. You got more picture in 1999, but everything was stretched. I think whomever did the color timing for the 2013 Blu-ray made some great choices, for the most part."

I don't own the 4K 2013 Blu-ray because I didn't feel that the double-dip so soon after the 2009 Blu-ray was worth it - and the lack of bonus features on the new Blu-ray also put me off (it allocates that space to providing the film with a higher bitrate) - but after seeing the improvements in most of the shots, I'm seriously reconsidering. Of course, with the 30th anniversary upon us in seven months, there's a chance Sony *may* release a Blu-ray set containing both films, so I'm gonna hold off on the double dip until I see if that happens or not :-)

If you don't want to hold off, you can buy the Ghostbusters "Mastered In 4K" 2013 Blu-ray from Amazon.

The following article was written by Matthew Jordan...

Over the course of the ongoing comic series Erik Burnham has written many characters into the series from previous canon and other interesting media. But somewhat new/original characters seem to be overlooked most of the time.

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IDW has over the last week started leaking out tidbits about the new Arc called "Mass Hysteria!". Among the details known is that it is a eight parter that starts up after (Volume 2) Issue #13. It will begin in February of 2014.


Among the first things one can notice from the second tease that includes a gang of Ghostbusters battle a octopus type monster is that both the original team and the "new" team are in it. However, it also includes the three nice ladies from the Ghost Smashers and the Rookie.

Other notes... Erik Burnham is teasing that 'there may be a return of an accountant' meaning perhaps Louis Tully is not restricted from the comic series anymore. He also notes that the shorts on the ladies is not planned for the story arc and maybe the artist was going by the cover art to (Vol 2) #1. (Thanks Mrmichaelt for passing this along!)

See, even Janine is thrilled - and she doesn't excite easily... unless Egon is around.

It was pretty much a year ago that Spook Central was put into a hiatus state due to Hurricane Sandy, and I feel that it's time it was brought back to life MWAHAHAHA! Even though I'm not where I should be in regards to having a new computer, all of the new Spook Central staff are capable of posting to the site, so there's no reason that the site needs to stay dormant (or be relegated to just hurricane-related posts) just because of me.

Yes, Spook Central now has a staff.


No, not that staff. THIS staff: Matthew Jordan, Raffaele Ruffaldi, and Doreen Mulman. All are long-time, respected members of the Ghostbusters online community whom I've been friends with for quite a while, and who have helped me and Spook Central over the years. You can read more about them on the Spook Central Staff page.

All three of these fine young eggs will post articles here as often or as little as they feel the need to. Pre-hurricane, I certainly wasn't making daily posts. Heck, I wasn't necessarily making weekly posts, either. Even if any of them posts once a month, or once every few months, it'll be a lot more often than I have this past year.

I can't promise you that you'll start seeing new Ghostbusters content starting tomorrow. Right now Matthew and Doreen have their own computer problems that they need to take care of before they can begin writing articles here. That said, I felt that it was about time I officially opened the door, so when we each have our issues resolved, we can walk right in and give you the Ghostbusters goodness you've come to know and love from Spook Central since August 1996.

As of right now, there shouldn't be any more Hurricane Sandy-related posts from me, though I will update the Salvaging Project, Computer Recovery, and East Rockaway House posts as needed until each of those matters are finished with. For the time being, you'll find links to all of the hurricane stuff in the small infobox near the top right corner of this blog.

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THE HALLOWEEN 2013 TREAT
When Spook Central was put into a hiatus state a year ago, the last Ghostbusters "thing" added to the site was the Making Ghostbusters eBook PDF. It was meant to go up on Halloween 2012 as a special treat, but the hurricane had other plans. It ended up being added to the site in my absence a week later. Thankfully, this year's Halloween treat eBook PDF *IS* being given out on Halloween...and here it is:


As part of the Ghostbusters PDF eBook Preservation Project, the Ghostbusters II novel by Ed Naha has been preserved and can be found on the Ghostbusters II Books page. Major thanks to Matthew Jordan for scanning in the book, cleaning it up, and making the digital preservation possible - especially in light of the computer problems he's been having lately.

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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.

For those of you who haven't been playing along at home... Hurricane Sandy flooded my home of 23 years in East Rockaway, Long Island, New York with five feet of water on October 29, 2012. As a result, my family had to spend six weeks in the Red Cross Emergency Shelter at Nassau Community College, before we found a new place to live in a neighboring town. We've now been living here over six months, and although we are settled in, we've not yet 100% recovered from the storm. I felt it was best to post a status update to let everyone know what's going on with my hurricane recovery and with Spook Central. Click on any of the bold "titles" to go to a blog page with more details; or feel free to check out all of the hurricane blog posts. I've also put up a quick link box in the upper right corner of the blog.

• Old East Rockaway House - Since I went back to check the place out on April 10th, I've been documenting what's going on there. The house is still there, but part of the ceiling in two rooms has collapsed. That's in addition to all of the buckled floors, mold, and so forth that's been there since the beginning of November. Our old landlord is trying to sell the property (he apparently has a bidder), and I assume that the new owner will knock the house down, raise the ground up, and build a new house there. I'll keep going back every two months to document the progress until a new house is built there. I may one day comb through the family photos (most of which survived) and the family home movie VHS tapes (most of which did NOT survive) and put together an article on the evolution and devolution of the house in the 23 years I lived there and the year or so that followed.

• Salvaging Project - I stopped worked on this at the end of February so I could take care of the computer. Thanks to the problems with that (detailed further down this page), I have not been able to go back to working on this. Thankfully, there's nothing soaking wet left to deal with, but there is still a lot of damaged stuff I have in bags. There are HUNDREDS of flood-damaged media (Blu-rays, DVDs, CDs, PS1/PS2/PS3 games, computer games) that I have to try to salvage. Cases and artwork (and game manuals) are trashed, for the most part, but the discs are fine (except for a small handful). They just need to be cleaned with some disc wipes. A time-consuming job, but not hard. A few family photo albums got damaged, and I'm not sure if the photos inside will be salvageable. I would bet that my grade school and high school yearbooks (signed by my classmates) and diplomas are even less likely to be salvageable. The same is undoubtedly true for birthday books and other paper personal mementos. I don't even know if there's any way to salvage the home movie (and Real Ghostbusters) VHS tapes. I'm hoping Nora & Doreen from the defunct Ghostbusters Fan Forum can help with the Real Ghostbusters VHS tapes (these contained the redubbed and other alternate episodes not in the TimeLife DVD set), but no one can replace the home movies. If those VHS tapes can't be salvaged, those memories are gone forever. (We also have to go through all of the boxes of undamaged stuff to see what can come out, what has to stay in storage, and what we may want to donate. We had a lot more room in the old house, so there's a lot of stuff we won't have room for anymore.)

• Computer (and Spook Central) Recovery - This is the area that's caused all of the problems over the past four months, and it's why I wish the hurricane didn't damage my old computer. From October 29, 2012 to January 31, 2013 my only "computer" was an iPod Touch I kept in my pocket while living at the emergency shelter. Thank goodness I had the foresight to take it when we evacuated. An iPod Touch is *NOT* an ideal computing device (having to rely on it for so long gives me a deeper hatred for Apple), and internet access on it is only as good as where ever I could get a free wifi signal (which was *VERY* limited at the shelter), but it was certainly better than nothing. Somehow I doubt "Apple: It's better than nothing" is gonna be the company's next tagline :-) Anyway, I digress...

On January 31st a charitable organization gave me a free computer. The computer works - I'm typing this message on it - but the hardware inside is too old for it to be anything more than an emergency computer. (I've been calling it a "temporary" computer on my computer recovery blog post.) I found a local mom & pop shop here in Valley Stream called Coast To Coast Computers, and on March 11th, I placed an order with them for a custom-built computer near-identical to the one the hurricane destroyed. It cost me $312 for the computer and $100 for the monitor. After FOUR WEEKS of giving me the runaround, and boldly lying to me (you can read all of the sordid details on the computer recovery blog post), the computer was ready for pickup on April 9th. I thought that would have been the end of the matter, but it was only a new beginning of problems.

For starters, I was under the impression that I was buying a custom-built computer assembled with 100% brand new parts that were going to be bought in bulk via OEM channels. What I received was a *USED* computer which is NOT a custom-build, but actually a nearly completely pre-assembled Hewlett-Packard (HP) computer originally designed for use in a business environment. All the computer shop did was swap out the hard drive for two larger ones, install Windows XP Pro on one of them (HP had Vista Business on it), and add in a 1GB PCI-E video card. None of that takes four weeks to do.

HP *PROPRIETARILY-DESIGNED* this system so that it's very user-UNfriendly. There's no reset button on the front, and there's no on/off switch on the power supply on the back. The case opens on the right, while normal cases open on the left. Metric screws are used throughout, instead of the common Phillips-head (or flathead) screws. HP designed the case to be "tool-less", but HP was rather clueless, and a bit foolish, since it actually makes things harder on the user. I had to make several trips back to the computer shop to pick up these "special" metric screws so I could install the Blu-ray drive, the floppy drive, and the video capture card's front panel.

I was willing to put up with this "new" computer being used, and all of HP's proprietarily-designed bull, but what would happen next made this computer unusable. I copied all of my files over to the new computer, installed all of my programs, everything was going smoothly. One day, out of the clear blue, on every boot it started giving me an "512 - Rear Chassis Fan Not Detected" error message, requiring me to press F1 to continue booting, even though the chassis fan runs at full speed nearly *ALL* the time. I think it's even louder than my new air conditioner! I would bet that the only way to fix the computer would be to send it in to HP, and they already told me that the warranty expired on February 15, 2012 - over a year *before* I bought the computer.

As if all of that crap wasn't enough, around the end of May, Windows decided to no longer provide the internet. I was using my SeaMonkey browser to surf the web, closed the browser, and less than a minute later, I decided to run it again to look something up. Imagine my surprise when SeaMonkey couldn't go online anymore. Internet Explorer was able to go to Google *once*, but upon a re-run, even IE lost access. The "Network Diagnostics for Windows XP" program claimed it "detected a problem with the Winsock provider catalog" which "allows programs to communicate with this computer across the network", but its "fix" (resetting the catalog to the default configuration and then rebooting) didn't fix the problem. I suppose, worst case, I could get internet access back by re-installing Windows, but that still wouldn't solve the fan issue.

All of those problems have forced me to switch BACK from using the "new" computer I bought from Coast To Coast to the "temporary" computer that the charitable organization gave me. I recently noticed that NewEgg and/or Tiger Direct (two online computer parts stores) have bundles where you can buy all (or some) of the parts and assemble the computer yourself. Although I've never put a computer together, and am a little scared to try it, I'm starting to think I may have to go that route and hope for the best. I think that's my best option right now for getting a computer that 100% suits my needs...and hopefully won't give me any problems.

Right now I can't even deal with that, as I'm halfway in to a 30-day free trial of PlayStation Plus, which gives me a dozen free games to play as long as I'm a member. Since I have no interest in paying for the service past the 30 days, I need to *attempt* to play and complete 11 more full games before July 12th. Once that is done with, then I'll try to motivate myself to get my computer issues resolved completely, finish the salvaging project, and finish going through the boxes in storage in the attic. Then I can focus my attention back on my usual online activities - you know, like scanning in those scripts and books :-)

I actually thought I would be able to make my official return at the beginning of April when I got the "new" computer. I didn't know at the time that the computer shop boss would lie to me about a few things, and that the computer I'd be getting from them isn't what I thought I'd be getting, and that it would cause me all of these problems. I even managed to pull of an April Fool's Day prank (on the "temporary" computer) and uploaded the new Spook Central Staff page. I was planning on mentioning the new staff when I made my official return, and then have them start making regular non-hurricane posts after that. Right now we'll hold off on any non-hurricane posts here for the time being. I'll keep Spook Central in suspended animation, sort of speak, though I'll definitely post an unusual holiday song in December. Although I hope to make my official return before then, I'm gonna err on the safe side and plan to be at that stage (aka "back to normal") by the beginning of next year. My family should be on a new lease by then (our one-year lease expires in December), so that'll definitely ease my mind that I won't be moving again any time soon.

Just because the Spook Central website isn't being updated much, doesn't mean there isn't anything going on. The SPOOK CENTRAL FACEBOOK PAGE is CONSTANTLY UPDATED by staff member Matthew Jordan (DevilManOzzy from the Ghostbusters Wiki) with all of the latest news and previews of the IDW Ghostbusters comic book series, and other little bits and bobs. I even pop in there from time to time to post something. The Spook Central Facebook Page is definitely the place to be!

As for me, tomorrow's my birthday, so I'm taking some time off. I'll resume tackling everything in July (hopefully), and all future detailed updates regarding the computer, the salvaging project, and the old East Rockaway house will be posted on the respective blog pages.

(Banner Image Source: BethelBulletin.com)