IDW's Ghostbusters #11 comic book, which comes out this Wednesday, July 25, 2012, features a scene in the Belda'r Cafe in Roswell, New Mexico with Peter Venkman and a female FBI agent. On page 19, there's a very special onlooker to the events...


Does that gentleman sitting at the counter look familiar? Well, I recognize that guy every time I look in the mirror! Yes, that guy watching Peter and the female FBI agent is ME! Paul Rudoff, the creator and webmaster of the Ghostbusters fansite Spook Central (where you are now), has his likeness in an official Ghostbusters publication. Not only that, but I'm wearing a "Spook Central" t-shirt - which are not available for sale, though maybe I should start selling some.


I'm absolutely touched that artist Dan Schoening would honor me like this. It truly makes me feel special to actually be part of the Ghostbusters universe, breathing the same air as Dr. Peter Venkman! And thanks, Dan, for also sending me the high-resolution scan of the unlettered panel for use on this site.

If you want to get a copy of this issue - and you can rest assured that I'm getting several copies - head down to your local comic shop this Wednesday or order a copy online at Graham Cracker Comics (Cover A, Cover B, Cover RI) and Ghostbusters Fans (Covers A & B only).

This isn't the first time I appeared in a Ghostbusters comic book, though it is the first time I literally appeared. I had a Letter to the Editor appear in The Real Ghostbusters 3-D Slimer Special (July 1993), which was the very last Ghostbusters comic book ever published by NOW Comics. Soon, I'll "appear" again - well, Spook Central will - as Tristan Jones is going to be drawing a one-of-a-kind Ghostbusters #9 Spook Central/Long Island sketch cover for me. When he gets around to doing that, it'll appear on his Tumbler site with all of the other sketch covers he's done so far.

(Bonus thanks to Ghostbusters News for mentioning my comic appearance.)

Welcome to Spook Central's special "Shot On Site Summer" event. All throughout the month of July, and possibly the rest of the Summer, I will be posting Shot On Site articles on Spook Central detailing newly-discovered Ghostbusters filming locations. Click here to view the current schedule.

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Welcome to Spook Central's special "Shot On Site Summer" event. All throughout the month of July, and possibly the rest of the Summer, I will be posting Shot On Site articles on Spook Central detailing newly-discovered Ghostbusters filming locations. Click here to view the current schedule.

This is a most unusual article. For the first time in my Shot On Site series, I'm going to start with the filming location, and try to figure out what in either Ghostbusters 1 or 2 was filmed there.

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Welcome to Spook Central's special "Shot On Site Summer" event. All throughout the month of July, and possibly the rest of the Summer, I will be posting Shot On Site articles on Spook Central detailing newly-discovered Ghostbusters filming locations. Click here to view the current schedule. As with most of the other newly-discovered Ghostbusters filming locations, this one was identified by Matthew Jordan.

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Welcome to Spook Central's special "Shot On Site Summer" event. All throughout the month of July, and possibly the rest of the Summer, I will be posting Shot On Site articles on Spook Central detailing newly-discovered Ghostbusters filming locations. Click here to view the current schedule. Today's location is another one that was found through the tireless efforts of Matthew Jordan, so let's get right to it...

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Welcome to Spook Central's special "Shot On Site Summer" event. All throughout the month of July, and possibly the rest of the Summer, I will be posting Shot On Site articles on Spook Central detailing newly-discovered Ghostbusters filming locations. Click here to view the current schedule.

Today's location was identified by Matthew Jordan, who has been on a hard-target search of every gas station, residence, warehouse, farmhouse, henhouse, outhouse and doghouse listed on my Ghostbusters 1 & 2 Unidentified Filming Locations page. His goal is to identify every single exterior location that appears on that page. A hard task? Sure. An impossible task? Not the way Matthew's been going at it. He's surprised me by identifying locations that I never would have thought could have been identified!

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The Parallax Corporation recently introduced a box of officially-licensed Stay Puft Quality Marshmallows into the marketplace. If you're getting a case of deja vu, there's a good reason for that. In 2010, Omni Consumer Products produced a box of Stay Puft Quality Marshmallows for $19.99, which contained 24 large square caffeinated marshmallows. Long story short: Omni lost the Ghostbusters marshmallow license (and the use of the StayPuftMarshmallows.com domain name - which Sony owns), Parallax now has it, and as a result we have new Stay Puft Quality Marshmallows.

In this review I'll make reference to Omni's marshmallows, but my opinions on that product are based solely on the photos and information about it that were presented online by the company itself and other reviewers. I never purchased Omni's marshmallows because the high price was a major turn off, and they never offered me a complimentary box either. Parallax was kind enough to provide me with a complimentary box of their marshmallows, though they are selling their marshmallows for less than half of what Omni was charging, so price wasn't an issue. Now that I have all of that out of the way to cover my butt legally, on to the review...

The first thing you notice about any product is the packaging. Parallax's Stay Puft Quality Marshmallows come in a box featuring dual Stay Puft imagery. On one side is the happy Mr. Puft, while on the other side is the angry Mr. Puft. Don't make him angry. You wouldn't like him when he's angry. This box design is a big improvement over Omni's nearly-plain white box. The small 5.0 oz (142g) box is approximately 4.25" x 6.25" x 2" in size.


On the left and right sides of the box is a little blurb about the big guy, the legal text, and the nutrition facts.


Now enough about the packaging. Let's open up the box.


Inside we find... A BRAND-NEW CAR!!!!! Well what did you think you'd find inside? A bag of marshmallows, of course.


Unlike Omni's product, which contains unnaturally large marshmallows, these are normal size, if not a tiny bit smaller. They're approximately 1" in diameter x 1" tall (a sugary cylinder). Here's one random marshmallow I pulled out of the bag and put up against a ruler just so you can see how they measure up (literally).


You'll find approximately 45 mini marshmallows in the box. I lucked out and got 46! Yes, I counted them. Hey, don't look at me like that. I did it for research purposes. That's the same reason I'm gonna give you as to why I decided to fashion them into a wall. Now if only I had some Angry Birds gummies to fling at it.


I pluck a sugary brick from the wall and pop it into my mouth. The marshmallows taste good, but I can't say that they taste any different from any other marshmallow I've ever had. If you've had marshmallows before, you'll know what these taste like. So if your intent is to just buy a package of marshmallows, you're better off picking up a bag of regular old marshmallows at your local supermarket. You'll get the same amount, maybe more, for half the price. Depending on what time of the year you go, you may even get marshmallows in unusual shapes.

Now if your intent is to buy Stay Puft Marshmallows, then Parallax's Stay Puft Quality Marshmallows, which you can buy for $7.99 at Think Geek, is a much better deal than the previous release from Omni. They're less than half the price, with more marshmallows inside, and feature a better looking box. And while you're on the Think Geek website, pick up a Stay Puft Marshmallow Man mug and some caffeinated hot cocoa mix to complete the trifecta.

Although these marshmallows are an improvement over the Omni product in terms of price, package design, and size and quantity of marshmallows, they're still not THE perfect Stay Puft Marshmallows. (I'd call them the next best thing so far.) For that, we'd need the generic-looking bag seen in the movie sitting on store shelves right next to the bags of Jet-Puffed Marshmallows. Because, when it comes right down to it, would you rather be Jet Puffed or would you rather Stay Puft?"


Thanks to Ghostbusters Mania, you CAN have movie-accurate marshmallows AND the officially-licensed Stay Puft Marshmallows that Parallax makes. Buy a box of the Stay Puft Marshmallows, open up the box, take out the bag of marshmallows, and put the box on a shelf for display. Now print out Ghostbusters Mania's movie-accurate Stay Puft Marshmallows label onto an adhesive label, slap that label onto the clear bag of marshmallows, and voila!

As a side note - because I had no place to put this in the regular review - Richard Roy pointed out to me that Parallax's "Stay Puft Quality Marshmallows" logo bears a strong stylistic resemblance to the IHOP (formerly International House of Pancakes) logo. I didn't notice it before but, yeah, it does.

Stock footage, or archive footage as it is sometimes called, is basically video of a location that is not taken for a specific production, but is instead cataloged in a studio's stock footage library to be used on an as-needed basis. Footage that has actually been used in a specific production can also wind up in a stock footage library, as is the case with the Ghostbusters films. Using stock footage is much cheaper for a production than actually sending a crew out to shoot establishing shots of each different locale needed for a particular show or movie.

To give you a real example of the concept, take a look at this shot of a red brick house. Can you guess what television show this was filmed for?


If you guessed The King of Queens, you're dead wrong. Although this shot of this particular house may be well known from its use over nine seasons as the Heffernan's house, it was actually filmed in 1991 (seven years before The King of Queens premiered) for a little-known television series called Sibs starring Jami Gertz and Dan "Homer Simpson" Castellaneta. Not a single person on the The King of Queens production staff even knew where the house was until a fan did an exhausting amount of research. The King of Queens production staff just simply pulled footage of this house from the Sony Pictures stock footage library and that's how it came to be known as the Heffernan House. It even appears on many of the DVD boxes!

As expected, Sony has footage from both Ghostbusters movies in their stock footage library, and I have cataloged it to the best of my ability on the new Ghostbusters stock footage and Ghostbusters II stock footage pages here on Spook Central. What you'll find are different takes and camera angles of various shots and scenes, almost all in their original uncut form. What you won't find is footage of the actors or anything that couldn't be passed off as "generic" footage.

We've already had our first instance of Ghostbusters footage appearing in another production when I spotted this digitally-altered shot in the Monk episode "Mr. Monk and the Voodoo Curse" a few years ago:


There's a little bit of unused footage from a few scenes, and even some footage from deleted scenes, amongst all of the stock footage. All of the deleted scene footage is listed at the bottom of each page. Here are some unused Ectomobile shots from both films, and the exterior of the Parkview Hospital from the second film (where we would have met Sherman Tully), to whet your appetite. (In the third shot, you can see the top of the Ecto-1A at the bottom of the shot, and the front of the car reflected in the window.)

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!