I think I can reasonably say that one of the most important films in my life is Ghostbusters, I’ve literally seen it well over a hundred times, I’ve actually watched it more than once in a day several times (not so much these days as I struggle to find the time to watch anything) and I have quite a working knowledge of the movie and lore surrounding it.
So you can imagine my excitement as a child to hear that there would be a Ghostbusters cartoon series and a toy line. I was more excited about the toy line actually and promptly informed my Mother that it was to be Ghostbuster toys for Christmas and that Santa had better comply or not show his fat head around here (I wasn’t quite as spoilt as that, but made it known that GB would be greatly appreciated).
The Ghostbusters toys were featured quite prominently under the Christmas tree that year and Santa and I had no problems.
The problem however did start when I opened the Spengler toy and had to check the name on the packaging twice whilst still not understanding how such a monumental screw up could occur (toy companies were perfect in my mind at this stage). The head on the toy was completely wrong, he had red glasses and atrocious blonde hair. It didn’t look anything like Harold Ramis (Spengler).
I felt, in no small way, really cheated.
I opened the Stanz figurine and whilst far from perfect I could live with the new look, Zeddemore’s figurine looked generally like him, kind of, and then Venkman’s figurine bore only the most remote hint at the film character. I then realised that the cartoon series was not going make me happy.
It did not.
The Stay Puft Marshmellow man toy was quite good though, I still consider it the best of the Stay Puft toys but there was no Gozer or Terror Dogs.
The other problem was up until that point all figurines that I played with were GI Joe size and thus able to interact in my mind. The Ghostbusters figurines were a funny size, too big to co-exist with my Leatherneck GI Joe. The articulation on the toys was quite poor as well, no way to pose the characters and the particle throwers came with a particle stream already coming out of it that you could twist but then made it impossible to do anything else (I actually cut the streams off of mine).
There were also a bunch of gimmick ghosts available, all characters from the cartoon series that at this stage I hadn’t seen and was growing more and more wary of.
To this day I still feel cheated and robbed of excellent Ghostbusters figurines, even the A-Team had passable figurines that whilst they didn’t really look that much like the actors you could at least use your imagination (there were larger much closer to the actor’s likeness figurines available for the A-Team too).
So to answer the question (which Matt put to me some time ago now) what were in my opinion the most disappointing toys?
The Ghostbusters toyline.
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