"Disappointment" is the word that best describes the
fourth season of The Real Ghostbusters. In an attempt to placate to concerns that show
about a team that captures ghost might be a little too scary for younger
audiences ABC renamed the show Slimer!
And the Real Ghostbusters and created Slimer shorts to air with the main
Ghostbusters episodes that would be targeted for the younger audience.
When
the show starts the audience is now treated with a new opening segment where
Janine barely appears but all of Slimer’s supporting cast from his 15-minute
shorts do. The Slimer series caused the
show to alienate the older section of its audience and helped bring down the show's reputation. When people discuss The Real
Ghostbusters series they almost always discuss this change as the downfall. You can see it here starting around 1:10 and here at around 17:70.
To add
insult to injury the fourth season also was significantly shorter than previous
two ABC controlled seasons. They did
this because instead of making new episodes they decided just to re-air some episodes
from Seasons 1 and 2 with voices from the new voice actors Dave Coulier and Kath
Soucie dubbed over for their respective characters.
The
real shame is the reputation of the show suffered because of this season but
of the eight episodes that were produced continued to be of high quality and some of
them such as Flip Side and Poultrygiest were some of my favorite episodes of
the series. I don’t feel that the main
portion of the Season 4 deserves the juvenile reputation that it gets.
In the
end we could say that Season 4 is a lesson that teaches you should always try
to keep studio executives away from content decisions.
The biggest kick in the teeth was Arsenio Hall abandoning ship to host his own talk show, hence Buster Jones comes in to voice Winston all the way to the bitter end.
ReplyDeleteI can't really blame him though that is a big career move.
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