The RMS Titanic, the world's largest and most luxurious ocean liner, left on its maiden voyage on April 10, 1912 from Southampton, England to New York City, carrying everyone from plutocrats to penniless emigrants. Titanic had an estimated 2,224 people on board when she struck an iceberg in the north Atlantic Ocean at 11:40 PM (ship's time; 9:40 PM EST) on Sunday, April 14, 1912. She sank two hours and forty minutes later at 2:20 AM (12:20 EST) on Monday, April 15th, resulting in the deaths of 1,514 people, making it one of the deadliest peacetime maritime disasters in history.

The wreck of Titanic remains on the seabed, gradually disintegrating at a depth of 12,415 feet (3,784 m). Since its rediscovery in 1985, thousands of artifacts have been recovered from the sea bed and put on display at museums around the world. Titanic has become one of the most famous ships in history, her memory kept alive by numerous books, films, exhibits and memorials.

She makes a brief appearance in Ghostbusters II (photo above), as the spectral ship finally arrives at its New York City destination, with its ghostly passengers disembarking to, presumably, finally be at peace. Meant to be a humorous sight gag in the film, its actually a rather solemn happening if you stop and think about it. Although Ghostbusters II was filmed after the discovery of the remains of the actual RMS Titanic in 1985, the specific nature of the ship's iceberg collision and overall appearance is inaccurate. The spectral ship appears to have a giant, gaping hole in its bow when docked, when in fact the actual vessel suffered several dozen small impacts along much of the starboard body and, by and large, broke off into two large pieces.

As I write this, it is 100 years ago to the minute that the ship sank and all of those lives were lost. We've all grown up with the legend of the Titanic, and it feels a little strange to realize that it's, just now, a full century since the tragic event took place. It always seemed so "long ago", but it really wasn't until now.

FURTHER READING
• NY Daily News - Photos: On Board The Titanic Before It Sank
• NY Daily News - Photos: Titanic Artifacts
• Miami Herald - Titanic: The Moral Of A 100-Year-Old Story by Leonard Pitts Jr.
• NY Daily News - Events Around The World To Mark The Shipwreck's 100-Year Anniversary
• BBC News - Titanic 100
• CBC News - Titanic's Sinking Commemorated in Halifax
• Titanic in Nova Scotia
• Encyclopaedia Britannica Presents Titanic: The Unsinkable Ship
• Encyclopedia Titanica
• Titanic Facts
• Titanic.com
• RMS Titanic, Inc. Offical Site
• Ghostbusters Wiki

This isn't a regular Shot On Site article, so I'm not going to tag it as such. This is really a look into the future of the Shot On Site feature here at Spook Central, as well as a few odds and ends that wouldn't fit as regular SOS articles.

Let's talk about sound stages. As you may know, both movies were filmed on a few sound stages at The Burbank Studios (now Warner Bros. Studios). I really was going to totally ignore the sound stages on my Filming Locations page, because I was just going to concentrate on locations that were shown in the film as they really exist (in a manner of speaking) in the real world, which people could actually visit. Yeah, you could tour the Warner lot, and you can (maybe) even see inside some of the stages, but all you'd see is an empty stage. You wouldn't see any of the Ghostbusters sets. However, after some careful consideration, I decided to create a Burbank Studios page here on Spook Central.

Let's get out the crystal ball and look into the future. Matthew Jordan from the Ghostbusters Wiki has been on a crusade to identify every single location on my Unidentified Filming Locations page. Incredibly enough, he's actually been getting some of the extremely hard to find locations identified. Okay, in all fairness, Matthew isn't the only source of some new IDs. Two of them I got all by myself, one was (in a really weird way) a joint effort by Matthew and myself, and two were ID'ed by other folks online. The rest were all Matthew. And what are these new locations you may ask? Well, here's what you have to look forward to over the coming months: GB1 Chinatown, GB1 Flipped Driving, GB1 Jogging, GB1 Ray With Trap, GB1 Reporter, GB1 Undead Cabbie, GB1 Wandering Louis, GB2 Gracie Mansion, and GB2 Orrefors.

You ever find something that, if you had found it earlier, would have made your life a whole lot easier? That happened to me today. While watching the Ghostbusters II Electronic Press Kit looking for behind the scenes sound stage shots for the Burbank Studios page, I saw a shot that I must not have paid too much attention to when I first watched the EPK a few years ago:


Here we see the guys taking the santa hat promo photo in front of the clearly-marked Record Explosion store. You know, the Record Explosion store the guys run out of with smoking trap in hand in the film. The same Record Explosion store that I painstakingly identified using some fan-taken behind the scenes photos and Google Maps last year. Had I noticed this shot in the EPK years ago, it would have been a whole lot easier to identify the location :-)

Finally, I leave you with Entertainment Tonight's brief behind the scenes look at Ghostbusters II from 1989. I didn't record this or originally upload this. I think it came from the old Megadownload thread at the Ghostbusters Message Board on Ghostbusters.net, but I could be wrong about that. Anyway... ENJOY!

Comic artist Tristan Jones, who designed the rotating series of Spook Central banners you see atop this site, has let me in on a little secret. Dan Aykroyd's Ghostbusters 3: Hellbent script will be adapted into comic book form starting in Ghostbusters issue #13, and continuing to issue #16. The details are still being finalized, so there isn't much to report right now, but he did tell me that the first issue will have a whopping THIRTEEN variant covers. A rather unlucky number for those of us with small wallets. Expect a formal press release from IDW in the coming days, but in the meantime, if you don't tell anyone, you can view a preliminary rough of Tristan's variant cover by CLICKING HERE.

A nice vintage magazine has been preserved this time around. On the Ghostbusters Books page you can now find a PDF ebook containing all of the Ghostbusters articles from the December 1984 issue of Starburst magazine. All of the "Making of Ghostbusters" articles were written by Randy and Jean-Marc Lofficier. If those names sound familiar, that's because they would later write The Real Ghostbusters episodes "The Headless Motorcyclist" and "The Ghostbusters In Paris".

Mucho thanks to Lee Taylor for providing the scans from his magazine (it took me three years and four months, but I finally got it on the site) and, as always, Matthew Jordan for the clean-up and restoration of the scans. Oh, yeah, for those playing along at home... Richard Roy now has up to issue #11 (ELEVEN!) of NOW's The Real Ghostbusters comic books in the Ectocontainment's Comics section. So go check that out when you're done here.

Finally, there are four images from this issue of Starburst magazine that I thought were worth uploading separately from the magazine to the Spook Central Facebook page. Some of the old-timers will recognize some of these from when Bill Emkow had them on his site. Yes, that's adult film legend Ron Jeremy on the left in the second image. Yes, a pornstar appears in an official Ghostbusters production photo :-)

Well, how about that? Two Shot on Site articles in one year! It's about time I started picking up the pace. This was an easy one because the movie itself actual gives away half of the location!

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Back in 2003 I was working on a project that involved writing to the cast and crew of the various Ghostbusters projects. While on the Writers Guild of America website I saw a listing for Jina Bacarr with The Real Ghostbusters listed as one of her credits. Now, I knew that her name never appeared on any of the episodes that aired, and a Real Ghostbusters credit doesn't appear in her Internet Movie Database filmography, so I e-mailed her to find out more. As it turns out, she wrote an episode of The Real Ghostbusters that was never produced, but was used for a more important cause. Here are excerpts from the e-mails I exchanged with Jina to explain more.

WHAT THE EPISODE WAS TITLED

I looked through my list of credits and I did find the title: "Funny You Should Scream".

WHAT THE EPISODE WAS ABOUT

If I remember correctly it was about a weird dude, a Dr. Teufel (meaning devil) who runs a carnival and traps kids in his Fun House a la Pied Piper.

WHY IT IS HISTORICALLY SIGNIFICANT

Unfortunately, my script was never produced. The story behind the story is that my edited script (my story editor was J. Michael (Joe) Straczynski) was donated to the "cause" when we (the Animation Writers) were fighting with the labor board for recognition to be admitted into the WGA. Joe had to prove to the board that story editing and writing co-existed in the world of animation as it does in episodic television writing (since the 1930s, animation writers were "required" to belong to the Cartoonists Guild). My Ghostbusters script helped to establish that precedent.

I am proud that I was able to contribute my Ghostbusters script to help our (Animation Writers) case, which resulted in animation writers finally being recognized by the WGA through the Animation Writers Caucus.

WHERE THE SCRIPT IS NOW

My original script with any editing done by Joe is sitting in a bank vault somewhere where all "legal evidence" spends eternity.

I probably have a copy somewhere, but truthfully, I'm working on a book right now and don't have the extra time to search for it through my own "vault." That script was written on an old computer and 5 inch floppy which "don't work no more."

BUT SHE *STILL* GOT PAID!

Yes, I did write one episode -- I rec'd a contract and the fee at that time for writing one episode ($3,000).

HER FEELINGS ON JMS!

Joe is one of my favorite people. One of the "good guys" in the biz.

When I started the Ghostbusters PDF eBook Preservation Project, one of the books I most wanted to preserve was Sholly Fisch's novel Ghostbusters: The Return. Even though it isn't a very old book (it came out in 2004), the publisher, iBooks, went out of business two years after it hit the market, thus ensuring that the very limited supply of books that were printed would become instant collectibles. Copies on eBay and Amazon Marketplace currently go for $100 or more. I bought my copy back in 2004 and have never read it or cracked the spine, It is as 100% Mint as 100% Mint can be. I bet that I could get a nice amount of money for it, but as hard up for cash as I am, that will be one of the last things I will ever sell. I might sell a kidney before I sell that book. Hey, I have two kidneys, but only one copy of the book :-)

It gives me great joy to announce that Ghostbusters: The Return can now be downloaded in PDF format on the Ghostbusters Books page. It was a true group effort in getting the book to be part of the preservation project, so be sure to check out the notes/credits link under the book cover for all of the gory details. The Ghostbusters 2005 DVD Movie Scrapbook has also be added to the Ghostbusters Books page.

I scanned in a bunch of the Kenner The Real Ghostbusters toy advertisements and "Action Toy Guide" booklets (just The Real Ghostbusters pages), which can all be found on The Real Ghostbusters Merchandise page. Almost all are PDFs, though the poster at the end is a singular image. This is actually the smaller of the two Kenner posters that I have. I didn't scan in the large poster/calendar because it is WAY too large to do without some careful planning first. It's the source for some of my holiday images that appear throughout the year on the top side of this blog.

Over on the Ghostbusters II Books page you can now find the junior novel by B.B. Hiller and a coloring book. With the coloring book, I made an exception to my rule about not adding children's books to the project. Not because it is exceptionally well done, but rather quite the opposite. It is the "Troll 2" of Ghostbusters merchandise. It is truly "so bad, it's good". Just take a look at the book's depiction of the four guys:


Yes, Ray has a mustache that would make Tom Selleck jealous, and Egon has lost his glasses (an essential element of the character) but gained poofy hair (for lack of a better description). I know that they can't draw the guys to look exactly like the actors, due to likeness rights, but they couldn't have drawn them to look more different if they tried. There's a way to make them somewhat resemble the actors without being exact likenesses. Just look at what the comics have done the past few years. Anyway, if there's one positive to the coloring book, it's that it was written up based on the script and not the final cut of the movie, so a lot of deleted scenes are represented in it. Also note that Kenner's The Real Ghostbusters toys are being used as the Ghostbusters' equipment (PDF page 50), and the Gigameter looks nothing like it does in the movie (PDF page 22). I can only guess that the artists were not shown a single photograph of the equipment from the movie set (and didn't think to look at photos or videos from the first movie), so they drew the equipment for the book based on what they could find from the animated series and their own ideas. And yet, the slime blower looks fairly accurate to its movie counterpart (PDF page 101).

Finally, I scanned in and made into a PDF ebook the Biltmore Hotel brochure I got back in 2004. You can find it on the Sedgewick/Biltmore Hotel page at the top of the Fun Facts section.

A big round of thanks to the tireless efforts of Matthew Jordan for helping to make a lot of these ebooks possible. Without your help, a lot of these books would have been forgotten decades ago. Richard Roy is also helping to preserve vintage Ghostbusters books. He just uploaded high-resolution scans of NOW's The Real Ghostbusters #1 and #2 comic books to the Ectocontainment's Comics section, and moved The Real Ghostbusters in Ghostbusters II trilogy from his old site to that page, too. You'll definitely want to check all of that out, and keep an eye on the Ectocontainment's Comics section for future updates.

[UPDATE - 2/25/2012]
I want to give a quick bit of thanks to the guys at the Ghostbusters Wiki for mentioning the eBook Preservation Project (and this update, specifically) on their site. Those guys understand exactly what the project is trying to accomplish.

The reason behind all this is because in most cases, the materials that are being covered are becoming harder to find and costly to get. This project is to help fans that don't have the funds or came along late in the game so to speak. The Preservation Project is just for that, to keep the history of ghostbusters available for future generations.

Although I'm the one to give the project a name, it is not my project, per se. It belongs to all Ghostbusters fans. Richard Roy is doing his part to preserve the past by scanning in the NOW comics. Matthew from the Ghostbusters Wiki has been helping with scanning, cleaning-up images, and providing materials that I don't have. I still have a LOT more work to do with my collection of items directly related to the movies and animated series. I'm hoping that other webmasters will put some out-of-print books and materials in high-quality formats on their sites as well. Maybe one of my fellow webmasters will want to start archiving all of the old West End Games RPG books. I may not be interested in them, but I'm sure that a lot of folks are, and would love to have the opportunity to read some of them.

The realistic version of Ghostbusters: The Video Game contains art galleries which are unlocked as you progress through the game. Now on Spook Central you can view and/or download every single one of these 287 unlockable images. This also includes a few images that are NOT shown in the game, including the entire Thanksgiving Day Parade gallery from the deleted level.

For the first time anywhere, Spook Central is proud to present the lost (but not anymore) Thanksgiving Day Parade art gallery featuring that level's big boss: Blinkers, the Science Pup! You remember Blinkers, right? We saw him oh so briefly in the "Atari Live Trailer" from December 3, 2008 (stills below). Well, now you can see his concept art, as well as storyboards from his pre-fight cutscene (in the Miscellaneous gallery), and the rough cut video of that pre-fight cutscene! Also, it would seem that at one point in the parade level the player would have traversed through Ray's Occult Books, as there is concept art for it in that gallery, and a few concepts of jars that would have been on the shelves in the Miscellaneous section.


But that's not all! In addition to the parade gallery, there are a few hidden images in the other galleries, too. The images are there in the PC game's assets, but they're not shown in the galleries inside the game itself. One of these hidden images is the key to the Gozerian Alphabet in the Miscellaneous gallery. You can use it to decipher all of the hidden symbols seen here and there throughout the game (equip the PKE Meter in the Crypt Alley section of the cemetery to see some writing on the walls) and on some of the concept art. I tried it on some of the hidden Crypt Alley writing, but I couldn't get a clear enough shot to decipher more than a word and a few letters (which may be incorrect).


TECHNICAL GARGON NOW STARTS
Here's where I now go into detail as to how I got these art gallery images out of the PC game assets and put them into the form you see on the website. If you're not interested in this information, you can stop reading now and go check out the art galleries.

All of these images are stored in the file w32art02.pod in the art\ui\tiles\ directory, with the thumbnails stored in the art\ui\thumbs directory. You can safely ignore the thumbnails, though a few thumbnails are also found in the tiles directory (they can be deleted). In each are the subdirectories: cemetery, hotel, hotelreturn, library, lostisland, misc, museum, parade, and timessquare. The images are stored as .tex files, with each image broken up into several parts ("tiles"). The game stores all of its textures and other image assets as .tex files, so the first three steps listed below can be used for any of the .tex files in the game. The programs mentioned in Steps 1-3 can be found on the PC Gaming page here on Spook Central.

   1. Use Dragon Unpacker to get the .tex files out of the .pod file.

   2. Convert from .tex to .dds using the Ghostbusters TEX Converter.

   3. Convert from .dds to lossless .bmp or .png using DDS Converter.

At this point we would have done everything necessary for the majority of the game's .tex files. You could then edit them in any image editor and then convert them to .jpg, .gif, or .png for the final file to be uploaded. With the unlockable art gallery images we have to do one more step because they are not stored as singular images.

You see, the art images are stored as 512x512 pixel pieces ("tiles"), which will need to be reassembled into single images. The file names give you a clue as to which part of the image it is. Anything with an "a" near the end is in the 1st row of the image, a "b" is the 2nd row, and so on. The numbers at the end tell you what column that part is in. A file with "b03" at the end of the filename is in the 2nd row, 3rd column.

For example "char_gravegollem001" contains 16 parts, in 4 rows and 4 columns.
Row 1: char_gravegollem001_a01.tex through char_gravegollem001_a04.tex
Row 2: char_gravegollem001_b01.tex through char_gravegollem001_b04.tex
Row 3: char_gravegollem001_c01.tex through char_gravegollem001_c04.tex
Row 4: char_gravegollem001_d01.tex through char_gravegollem001_d04.tex

Piece them together that way and you'll get the full-size image. Follow this methodology for the rest of the images, though not all of them are prefect squares like this example.

   4. Piece together the parts of each individual image one at a time using GlueIt v1.06 (requires .NET Framework v2.0).

When you run GlueIt, you will see a clean interface with four clearly defined steps. You need to run these steps on each set of image parts ONE AT A TIME! With 287 total complete images, this means you'll be doing this 287 times. Step 1 is simple: just open the image parts you want to glue together. Make sure they're listed in order. The easiest way to do that is to select them from the last one to the first in the file open dialog box; using Shift+Arrow Keys to highlight them all. Under Step 2 you'll need to put in the number of columns, which varies per image set, but is always easily determined by looking at the highest number at the end of the filenames. In the above example of "char_gravegollem001", you'll notice the numbering goes up to "04", so that means that there are 4 columns in that image. After typing in "4" in the Number of Columns field, press the big "GlueIt" button. A preview window will pop up, but since there are no scrollbars in it, you probably won't be able to see the entire glued image, rendering the preview rather useless. Ignore "Step 3 - Preview" as it doesn't really show you the glued image all that well. Move on to Step 4, where you select the output format (.bmp, .png, or .jpg) for the reassembled image, and save it where every you want. Now press the "Clear" button under Step 1 and start all over again on the next set of image pieces.

   5. (OPTIONAL) In your favorite image editor, crop the excess blackness from each image (you'll have to do it one-by-one as the amount of blackness differs per image) and when you're satisfied with the final image, save it to .jpg or .png (or .gif for some of the images with lesser colors, if you want).

That's all there is to it. It may not seem like a lot of work - only five easy steps - but since Steps 4 and 5 have do be done on a per image basis, can't be automated, and there are almost 300 images, it gets to be quite the task. So with that in mind, if you want to use any of my converted and reassembled art gallery images on your site, you are free to use a few of them (no more than 20 across all galleries), but please give me credit and a link. The source material may be a PC video game that a lot of people own and could extract the images from themselves, but it took a helluva lot of work to get them looking as nice and neat as you see on this site, and I doubt that anyone else is going to bother to do all of that work themselves when I've already done it for everyone, so a little credit isn't too much to ask.

It all started innocently enough. Two and a half years ago I bought a vintage 1947 Tavern on the Green souvenir photo from a yard sale. I thought it was a nice, unique historical item with a connection to Ghostbusters. I didn't think I would ever have anything more to add to the "unique historical item with a connection to Ghostbusters" collection. Especially not something from another restaurant.

Two weeks ago I identified the Louis Wandering Past WienerWald location from Ghostbusters. The WienerWald Austrian Restaurant he passed was located at 1560 Broadway in New York City - the heart of Times Square. In doing research for that Shot on Site article I came across an eBay listing for a Vintage 1960s Wienerwald New York NY Restaurant Menu. For a mere $21.08 (with free shipping, no less) it could be mine. I figured, why not? So now it IS mine!

In spite of its name, WienerWald is primarily known for selling chicken, not sausage, as evident by their chicken silhouette logo. That said, if you wandered into either of their New York City locations (they only had two at the time this menu was made) and wanted to get some bratwurst, you could get it with sauerkraut and mashed potatoes for $1.95. Better than that, how about a whole sirloin steak with fried potatoes and a mixed salad for $4.95?!? Yes, a whole steak with sides for about the same price a combo meal will cost you at the McDonald's that now resides at WienerWald's old Times Square location. Speaking of hamburgers, you could get one for $1.25... and I'd bet you that it was a lot beefier than the paltry patties you get on McDonald's dollar menu today. You'll need something to wash down that food, so how about a cup of coffee for $0.20? You're lucky if you can get a cup of coffee-flavored coffee for a buck these days. There's also soda for $0.20 and, for the adults, liquors that range from $0.60 for beer or a goblet of wine to $7.00 for a bottle of Henkell Trocken sparkling wine. Finish your meal off with a nice slice of cheese cake for $0.75, or choose a Viennese pastry from their large selection for $0.65.

The most interesting thing about this menu, aside from how ridiculously cheap everything was 40+ years ago, is the list of WienerWald locations on the back cover. There were 215 in Germany, 2 in Belgium, 5 in Holland, 1 in Canada, 11 in Austria (Österreich), 3 in Switzerland (Schweiz), 2 in the United States (both in New York City [the numbers of the Broadway address are transposed as "1650" on the menu]), and 8 more under construction (im aufbau). By the time Wienerwald declared bankruptcy in 1982, they had 880 restaurants in the United States. That's quite a nationwide expansion. I wonder how many more they had in the other countries by that time. As of 2005 they only had 63 restaurants left, all in Germany and Austria.

Of course, you should know that I'm not going to just talk about this menu without letting you all get a copy for yourselves. I have taken the liberty of scanning it in, cleaning it up, and making a PDF out of it. Click on the cover image below to download it. The scans look infinitely better than the actual item. In fact, I dare say that the menu hasn't looked this good since it came off the printing press back in the 1960s!

Yes, I know, this article should have been written in June 2009 when the topic at hand was fresh and new. Unfortunately, I didn't get a PlayStation 3 until recently, so you'll have to make due with it being 2.5 years late. With that out of the way...

PlayStation Home is a virtual 3D social gaming platform for the PlayStation 3 on the PlayStation Network (PSN). Membership is free, and only requires a PSN account. Home allows users to create a custom avatar, and decorate their avatar's personal apartment with various items. In June 2009, to celebrate the 25th anniversary of Ghostbusters and the release of Atari's video game, many Ghostbusters items were made available for purchase, including a firehouse personal space. Below is a list of all items available for purchase with the current prices as of this writing.

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