Thanks as always for your comments, Fritz.


Fair point. For me, that's the kind of thing I'm happy to overlook in favour of the really big character episodes taking place some way into the timeline, when they've known each other for a while. And I do believe that Eduardo has superhuman powers of secret-keeping!

Well, it's a double release today. Here is my commentary on Grundelesque. Yes, I may well have to drop that point and come back to it...

Fritz, re. what we discussed recently, I was not equal to a full and detailed explanation and I really apologise if the little I do say is at all wrong and/or comes over as a bit blasé.

Why I don't believe any Extreme Ghostbuster is seventeen years old...

This was done primarily to get it out of my system, and I'm not sharing it on any larger forum because I simply don't want to get bogged down in anything, but it's there if anybody getting embroiled in a debate or something ever wants to cite it. It was inspired by the commentary, then thoroughly researched and made afterwards, which is why I am about 100X more informed about a certain primary source in the one than the other. But that's just FYI; there is no recommended watching order.

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'Extreme Ghostbusters was the best-written show, because it wasn't just about the ghostbusting, it was about the characters.' - Rino Romano

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Well, here I am, late again.

The original Grundel episode was written by JMS. It was the last script he did until the begged him to write the 1989 Halloween special ("The Halloween Door") and then in 1990 to fix some of the messes the "experts" made with the show.

I could see Venkman insisted on having the inside of the refrigerator coated with some sort of "ectoplasmically impermeable" substance to keep the grocery bills under control. Since Ray and Egon like to eat too, they went along with this one.

Like you said, some of the ages given on that old web site may have been holdovers from earlier drafts of the concept. It's not impossible for someone to have graduated high school before the age of 18, but it is highly unusual. Even ignoring the twelve years or ten issue, the fact that they're all in college means the Extreme team would be 18 at youngest. (I mean, I could see Kylie being smart enough to have graduated early, but the way we have things set up on the Timeline right now works better on the whole.)

Lol...I'd forgotten the hand in the water gag. I could see some bluenose TV type going "No, that's too easy to actually do so it'd cause kids to do it and we'll be accused of corrupting the youth."

Lack of Jack in fan fic: well, being fan fic writers, we know how many of our kind can be. The easiest idea they'd all have is to set up some kind of love triangle with him, Kylie, and Eduardo. Without that easy trope, all you're left with is his trauma, and I can understand a lot of writers (especially the young, immature horny ones) not wanting to deal with that. He only appears briefly in human form, and while he seems blandly pleasant, it's not much to go on. Even his character model seems generic in the mold of many minor characters in EGB. And he only appeared in one episode--it's the same reason that Ray's relationship with Elaine isn't all that popular. Compare that with Venkman and Dana (they were the most important character developments of the first two movies); Egon and Janine (which was slow but steadily burned in RGB, even though the movies completely trashed it); and of course Kylie and Eduardo (big play in EGB) and thus fandom's interests tend to lie with those three ships. (Though there seemed to be a spate of Hotzmann/Erin slashfics in the years immediately after ATC, which I didn't really understand as Erin was the most blatantly heterosexual character of the main cast.)

And again, it's weird how completely faithful to the RGB character design the Grundle is. Just like how the equipment seen in "Darkness At Noon" was pretty spot on to the RGB designs...compared to the designs of the five original Ghostbusters all being changed and even the notorious scene in "Temporary Insanity" where the face of a mannequin of RGB Venkman was digitized out. These licensing issues can be very weird.

Thanks for the shout-outs. My family name is that has confused teachers, classmates, and coworkers all through my life (It didn't help that my actual first name, and my middle name, are common enough...but with less common spellings. I've often joked that my parents didn't quite seem to realize what they had done ) Yeah, folks, if you've ever wondered how "Baugh" is pronounced, Rosey got it right.

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Thanks again, Fritz. I did actually consider the Kylie-could've-skipped(-but-what-about-Garrett?) point only after I made the short video with the long name, and then figured my almost seven minutes' worth of points was enough. I'm not clear on whether you got to that video, Fritz, but I hope you did/will because I think it's very interesting (not to mention I edited the bejesus out of that one!).

I now have another commentary: Fear Itself. Here is what I felt compelled to add to the usual, brief disclaimer in the description:
This is a very succinct version of the conclusion I came to after everything I felt and considered once I found that this particular episode did not pass the copyright checks! The way YouTube phrases its policies, and the results of its checks (even on the original attempt at this video) is quite reassuring, and made me very confident that I've been doing fair use (especially with every other episode so far being allowed). I feel less confident now, and it's been a bit discouraging, but I mean what I say in that description.

Anyway, I shall persevere... I sort of have to, because for once I name the specific episode I plan to do next time, and I aim to have that out in a couple of weeks. After that, I'm working hard at the computer for two months, after which time I'll probably feel completely cheerful about the whole thing again.

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'Extreme Ghostbusters was the best-written show, because it wasn't just about the ghostbusting, it was about the characters.' - Rino Romano

EGB Fan's EGB Fans
EGB Fan on FFN and AO3

One thing I've seen "Let's Watch" viewers do in Youtube videos is play the source material with a horizontal flip. But yeah, I really would have thought completely silencing the audio track and putting a great big "Fan Commentary" caption in the middle of the screen would have been enough. Sheesh.

..."Swank" is just "wank" with an extra letter after all.

Slimer's a class 5. The only "official" classification system came in the West End Games RPGs of 1986 and 1989, where the classification was more about the ghosts' manifestation and identifiable nature more than the simple power scale that both cartoons seemed to use. More on it here: http://www.ectozone.com/gbfl/terms.php

Duane Capizzi actually also co-wrote one RGB episode, "Poltrygeist", the episode where Egon gets turned into a werechicken. It was in the 1988 ABC episodes usually listed as Season 4.

Probably unintentional, but that "fear of being naked in public = fear of emotional exposure" parallels some observations I made above on "In Your Dreams"

Slimer throwing up is always a crowd pleaser

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Thanks for the reassurance. I've been feeling better about it the last day or so (all one really has to do is search YouTube for people who've had full episodes with no alterations up for a year or more ). I don't know if there's, like, a one in seven chance that any particular episode will be in this anti-copyright library of theirs, but anyway, I'm prepared for the possibility now.


I found that out when I did this little item for my website called Writers (comparing EGB episodes by the same people, and seeing if I think any RGB writing has influenced them... but I think only 'A Temporary Insanity' came to anything worth saying on that front). He co-wrote it with Steve(n) Roberts, if I remember correctly... well, let's look it up... yes, and Steve wrote some high quality EGB as well. I did think about mentioning it on the commentary, but when I actually sat down to record it, there didn't seem to be time.


Truthfully, your comment almost certainly made me think of that; as I'm not a Freudian, my mind doesn't go there. But whether one thinks Freud was onto something with that one or not (y'know, like a monkey with a typewriter ), I think the idea is probably more relevant to anyone's dream than Garrett simply being facetious.

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'Extreme Ghostbusters was the best-written show, because it wasn't just about the ghostbusting, it was about the characters.' - Rino Romano

EGB Fan's EGB Fans
EGB Fan on FFN and AO3

Something considerably shorter this week: Gaspar/Rivera: A Family Legacy?

This is how I spent my weekend, just for fun (because it was), and I guess to emphasise a point... anyone who follows my fanfiction will know what that is.

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'Extreme Ghostbusters was the best-written show, because it wasn't just about the ghostbusting, it was about the characters.' - Rino Romano

EGB Fan's EGB Fans
EGB Fan on FFN and AO3