This article appears in the new issue ofDEN OF GEEKmagazine.
The 1980s was a golden era for TV animation.
Yet arguably, the best of them all wasThe Real Ghostbusters.
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ButThe Real Ghostbusterswas different, running for 140 episodes across seven seasons.
It was a little different from the film.
They also sounded slightly different.
The series also turned Slimer into a sidekick character.
A lot of that had to do with executive producers Joe Medjuck and Michael C. Gross.
When you mess with that formula, you inevitably fail.
Ghostbusters has a very tight structure of four friends, or five if you count Janine.
You have to base everything out of their relationship, no matter what you do.
To me, thats what happened when they didExtreme Ghostbusters[the short-lived late 90s reboot of the series.
]The Real Ghostbustersstuck to the tenets of the movie, and continued to tell that story.
McCoys writing partner and wife, Pamela Hickey, also recalls how much importance was placed on authenticity.
That was the focus when we were working on it, she says.
The rule with Slimer was to imagine him as a seven-year-old boy.
That was how you wrote for him.
That faithfulness was crucial to its success.
That was the challenge, Hickey says.
But that was also how much we all loved these characters.
They got stuck in your head.
Hickey and McCoy have enjoyed a prolific writing partnership that includes over 50 different credits.
It was their agent who first floated the idea of them writing for animation.
McCoy recalls submitting a script that was sight gag after sight gag.
It went over well, and the pair quickly warmed to the idea of writing for animation.
It gave us so much control.
The additional episodes meant the show needed more writers.
He immediately called Straczynski up to ask if he and Hickey could pitch for the show.
That was until Straczynski read the resulting script, which was one of the first to focus on Winston.
Nobody was going to pitch a Winston story.
Winston cracks the case right there, Hickey says.
We saw that, and right away, there was more to him than meets the eye.
Hes a very literate guy.
We made Winston a big fan of murder mysteries.
Every time they wanted a weird story, theyd come to us, McCoy says.
McCoy describes working on the syndicated episodes as no holds barred.
You could get away with a lot more as long as you stayed faithful to the characters.
The sky was the limit.
This environment gave birth to one of the very best episodes ofThe Real Ghostbusters: The Devil to Pay.
It sees the gang sign up for a game show for win a trip to Tahiti.
And just went from there, Hickey says.
What kind of game would you play with the Devil?
Dennys would ask, and I would be likeWheel of Fortune.
McCoy ranks it as his personal favorite.
Not everyone was quite so enamored with them summoning Satan for a kids TV show, though.
Whats scary about it is that we got it broadcast, McCoy laughs.
Oh my God, we got so much shit.
We had every evangelical right-wing religious nut in the world complaining about it.
Even my own brother, who was born again, gave me shit about it.
Hickey and McCoy took inspiration from a variety of sources, both contemporary and otherwise, for their ideas.
Elsewhere, episodes like The Long, Long, Long etc.
Not that that quite went to plan.
We were supposed to avoid saying Aretha Franklin, Hickey recalls.
I dont know how they got away with it because it was the whole R-E-S-P-E-C-T.
The fact that the series was animated in South Korea to save money also led to similarly bizarre moments.
I remember this one scene where the Ghostbusters were supposed to be eating a pizza, McCoy says.
If you notice inGhostbusters II, they have all these little incidental scenes where Slimer appears, McCoy says.
Well, the thing is, they did the entire movie without Slimer.
The influence worked both ways, though, as McCoy explains.
We had a story we wanted to do, and we knew it was good, McCoy says.
We pitched it to Straczynski for the syndicated shows.
He loved it, but when we sent the script through, it was rejected.
So we went to Gross and Medjuck for the online grid.
Again, they loved it.
We sent the script in, and it was rejected.
It was only when they went to seeGhostbusters IIthat the truth emerged.
The crux of our story had been that the Statue of Liberty comes to life.
So when we saw the film, it suddenly made sense.
Hickey believesThe Real Ghostbustershad the potential to run much longerbut it didnt.
Instead, ABC made the cardinal sin of tinkering a little too much with the original formula.
But how do you explain watching Bugs Bunny?
He was obviously a 25-year-old guy.
Had the show continued, the writing duo would have loved to explore other areas of the Ghostbusters universe.
We always wanted to do a spin-off with Louis and Jeanine, McCoy says.
Theyre Ghostbusters, but theyre not Ghostbusters.
It would be interesting to have them as a team.
If they came to us and said, Can you do an animated series?
Sure, we would probably say yes, McCoy says.
We could do that.
