I have been doing character design and 3D animation for years now, and with those years of experience came a new appreciation for the character designs used in Real Ghostbusters. Successful character designs from film to cartoon only work when the artist visually captures a character’s personality, not the actor’s likeness. The great thing about actors is they can change their personalities when acting. This is why we can accept the same face as different characters in different films. But in animation, if a character begins to look too much like the actor that played them, it gets to be too destracting because in most cases, they never look quite right.

Look at this art from the talented Dapper Dan.

While very skilled and well done, the characters are a bit distracting because they look like the actors…but at the same time don’t. And by focusing more on the actors likeness and less on the character traits, the spirit is gone. Venkman lost his charm and charisma and now looks weathered and unfriendly. Stantz lost his boyish nature and pure heart. Winston no longer has the down to Earth, everyman sensability. Egon is the most accurate, if only because he is the most stylized.

An actor gets an entire movie to define their character. But in TV animation, you get a limited amount of time. Not to mention you don’t get the subtle changes in personality that a real actor can provide. So in animation you have to cut to the chase and define the character instantly with their visual appearance. That is where animation is at it’s most powerful. Each characteristic from body shape, colors, hair styles, etc has to define their personality. Plus these various characteristics have to be instantly recognizable.

--snip--

Designing characters for animation isn’t easy. But the artists behind Real Ghostbusters got it right!

How many other fandoms have to go through this crap?

Beast Machines i.

Besides a way of pointing out "No, this story is NOT set in a Movie Purist universe"

...well, let me put it like this. There was a time my dream was to be a comic book writer. One of the things I'd read somewhere about comic book writing is a reminder that "Every issue could be someone's first issue". It's why I do other little things like using the character's full name, usually the first time they're referred to in the narrative, once per story. Trying to describe the characters once per story is probably a hold over of that impulse also--a comic writer just tells the artist to "draw Batman standing there". I guess I've wanted to do a little more than go "Egon Spengler is standing there". To "Draw" that picture of Egon standing there with words. Multiple times per story...yeah, that's obsessive. And I'll try to look out for it in the future, especially as this site is chock full of pictures.

I don't know if this is one of the scenes that inspired this, but Vincent's seen the first chapter of "Eye of Aretpo"...it's a scene with John and Eric, and they're looking at a poster of the original Ghostbusters. I do go into long descriptions, with an eye to accentuating Egon and Ray's resemblances to their children without just bluntly saying "This guy looked like John, the other one looked like Eric". And it just felt unfair to go "And two other guys" after being that descriptive.

John and Eric, on the other hand, are original characters. I do get to decide how they look. And as original characters it's far more likely that someone could stumble into that story when it's inevitably posted on FFN totally unaware of who they are. They may not have read "Future Shocks" or "Gemini Rising". Indeed, "Eye of Aretpo" is being intentionally written to not require massive familiarity with what has come before--what I think everybody needs to know is in the narrative.

So tell me then, in all seriousness...should describing John's rat tail and Eden's blonde hair be out of bounds now, too?

:sigh:...This shit's beginning to wear me down. How many other fandoms have to go through this crap? It's enough to me start wishing the cartoon producers did try to make the characters look more like the movie actors, just because it would have prevented arguments like this.

I seem to be the only person in the fandom who is completely neutral in respect to Ghostbusters. Everybody else seems to have the absolute need to "hunker down in one of the bunkers of the "Movie purist" faction, and the "RGB purist" faction.

I think I'm the only person who thinks the whole concept of "choosing sides" for this completely retarded.

My only concern is the fact that Egon is a brilliant physicist who loves Janine Melnitz and is one of the founding members of the ghostbusters.

Other than that, pretty much anything goes.



If the dividing line is a necessity, then it's a necessity. I can't stop it, and I probably shouldn't have even opened my mouth.

This may be MY fault.

I seem to be the only person in the fandom who is completely neutral in respect to Ghostbusters. Everybody else seems to have the absolute need to "hunker down in one of the bunkers of the "Movie purist" faction, and the "RGB purist" faction.

My only concern is the fact that Egon is a brilliant physicist who loves Janine Melnitz and is one of the founding members of the ghostbusters.

Describing characters of your own creation, whom the audience might not be familiar with, is absolutely fair game too. I also do that whole "introduce each character by their full name the first time they appear" thing, for instance.