Extreme ghostbusters7/14/2023 ![]() ![]() So, our first "series proper" ghost is this goddess of destruction, Achira, primary antagonist of the two-part series premiere. ![]() When we finally see it in the show? It is always, ALWAYS giggling. The ridiculousness of it is exactly what makes it surprisingly frightening, and you really have to check out that intro to appreciate the unpleasantly soft, rubbery way this entity moves. This is another new ghost most prominently - but memorably! - featured only in the series intro and a very brief cameo in a later episode, but what a superb design. It really looks like something that may, at one time, have been the soul of a dead human being, but its form has warped and deteriorated even worse than good old Slimer. Barlow really whipped up a wonderful mix of the comical and creepy for this bunch, and it isn't easy to pick a clear favorite, but as cool as tentacle and eyeball might be, it's actually spiney that draws me in the most. It's still too bad that this series never swamped us with hundreds of completely unique beasties like the good old days, but if it was going to have a set of "stock" specters, I'm glad they were these six. Interestingly, those little ghosts accompanying the "train" in the intro would reappear throughout this series whenever a storyline called for incidental swarms of weaker manifestations. I love the wheel of tongues borrowed from one of my favorite 80's ghosts, the eel-like head with its own wheels, the one-eyed engine with its smokestack mouth and even those goofy, gloomy eyes on the back, giving this being a total of three "faces" and none of them remotely human. It's hard to adequately express how much I love this design. This art comes courtesy Fil Barlow's own Deviantart, and you can appreciate the mix of the otherworldly and absurd on display here, Barlow's own homage to those zanier Real Ghostbusters specters by Everett Peck. We'll be looking at actual series screenshots for the majority of these, but one of the most incredible designs in the series can only be seen in the first few moments of the introduction sequence, obscured by an entourage of lesser phantasms. Incidentally, Fil is still at it today, and you can show your appreciation for his 30+ years of animation work by supporting his patreon, which will even grant you access to exclusive production artwork of the very ghosts we're about to review! What we're really here for, of course, are the ghosts, and while "Extreme's" ghosts are missing the free-spirited wackiness I loved so much in "The Real," character and creature designer Fil Barlow gave the monsters in this series a gorgeously menacing, biological look and feel he would also bring to such cartoons as Godzilla: The Series and Starship Troopers: Roughnecks. They had fights, they had flaws, they screwed up a lot and just felt a little more human than the picture-perfect friendship and competence we saw in Egon, Ray, Peter and Winston. Even having been a child at the time of the original four, the chemistry between the "Extreme" busters was just a little bit more interesting. I'd go so far as to say, however, that I actually like this team a little better than the first. At the time that this aired, The Real Ghostbusters had a small but hardcore internet fandom torn asunder by the addition of these new characters, both because they were new characters at all and because they differed from one another in ways that some people, for some reason, believe is too unlikely in a television series to be anything other than "liberal progressive pandering." We've sure come a long way from those days! For now, let's do a quick rundown of the main team:įrom left to right, we have Garret, the sarcastic jock of the four who uses a wheelchair to get around, Kylie, a goth (remember those?) with active interest in the paranormal, Eduardo, who just kinda showed up one day and got sucked into wrestling dead people, Roland, a tech geek who works on the team's gear, and of course good old Egon Spengler, the mentor figure who feels too old to keep busting on his own. The very fact that this was a kid's show did a lot to reign it in, keeping it from going too over the top into the laughably "edgy," even if network limitations did stifle it on a few points. Sure, at first glance, Extreme Ghostbusters might come across as aiming a little hard to go darker than its predecessor The Real Ghostbusters, but frankly, this is one of those rare cases in which an attempt at "grittiness" was truly pulled off in a kid's show. Hey guys, remember that time when a new Ghostbusters title with a new team was panned by established fans for being too different and "too politically correct?" Yeah, the good old late 90's! ![]()
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