Last time I did this, I wrote about Mega Man.  You wanna know what I love more than Mega Man?  Ghostbusters.  But here’s the thing.  I grew up on The Real Ghostbusters and Ghostbusters 2.  Ghostbusters came out the year before I was born and then the cartoon launched the year after.  My mom took me to see GB2 when it hit theaters in 89.  And man, the series has stuck in me like it’s a part of me.  Cause it is now.  And, in the context of me writing A Demon in the Desert, it is very important.  Why?  Because it gave me so many nightmares my mom tried to get it away from me.  But I loved it.  I would scream about demon bugs crawling all over everything but when she tried to tell me maybe I shouldn’t watch some good ol’ family ghost busting, I fought her.

And that is something I’m putting in the book.  Not the show watching but the nightmares.  I had a lot of nightmares growing up.  The Ghostbusters fought nightmares though.  A whole variety.  Slimer?  Slimer would be like a silly nightmare.  It’s scary, because it’s a ghost.  Slimer was smelly and gluttonous.  Even after the boys tamed him in the Real Ghoustbusters (I use “tamed” loosely), he could still be a nuisance.  And they fought bigger, worse things.  There is an episode where the boys actually stop Cthulhu rising.  And the best line in that episode, “The Collect Call of Cathulhu,” is when Egon explains that the Big Guy “makes Gozer look like Little Mary Sunshine.”

Egon, according to the show, partially got into the busting biz because of his run in with the actual Boogeyman.  That dude is basically Mr. Nightmare, right?  And they beat his ass too.  The show took what the first movie did and expanded on it hugely.  The writing, at least before the show got rebranded as “Slimer & The Real Ghostbusters,” was way better than you’d expect from a kid’s show.  It had a strange effect on the writing of GB2 (Janine going from Annie Potts’s strange little nerdy portrayal to the redhead of the cartoon) but not necessarily terrible.  And the change stuck around.  The IDW comic is an amazing blend of the movies and the cartoons.

So yeah, this was a little rambly, but if you never saw the cartoon (check out Extreme Ghostbusters too), give it a look see!