With the dwindling budget The Real Ghostbusters weathered by the sixth season, you'd assume it'd drop off from there, but no, as if by some weird twist of faith, the show rose from its death bead, drank a glass of water, shit itself then died for real. The seventh season is the weirdest of them all in terms of its length and arrival.
The seventh season came out in 1991, and you wanna know how long it lasted with the budget cuts and low ratings in mind?
Four episodes
That's right, ABC could only bleed the show out for four more episodes before it finally died. In terms of complete seasons, the seventh season of The Real Ghostbusters has to be the shortest season I've ever encountered, so allow me to really tear into this before our next review, this is the last in the show proper.
Three of four episodes were written by Jules Dennis and Richard Mueller. Dennis worked on various later-era Real Ghostbusters episodes and would go on to help on Batman The Animated Series and Sonic SatAM. Mueller had a little more experience under his belt, being on the show as early as the syndication run and even writing a novelized take on the first Ghostbusters movie.
He would also write for some episodes of Extreme Ghostbusters and also wrote for Batman: The Animated Series, and was apparently good enough to appear as a commentator on the DVD release, Dennis was a no-show.
The only episode to not be written by Dennis and Mueller was the second, which was helmed by Len Janson and Chuck Menville.
As I already covered a Janson/Menville episode with It's About Time, and because each episode didn't catch my interest with a plot synopsis and since every episode at this point can be considered self-contained, I picked this one because... I dunno... B-movies? And I really wanna see what these two can bring to the table.
Also interesting fact, if the production code is anything to go by, this is technically the last episode ever produced. For perspective on the order based on the production code, 4, 2, 1, 3, so yeah, I'm covering what's basically the finale to the entire show.
Kai-Joo!
It's monsters in Tokyo, with ghosts resembling popular monsters related to Tokyo.
Wanna know what the cause of the situation here is? Right at the start, some film canisters fall into toxic waste. What's the correlation between toxic waste and film canisters? Throw me a bone please. Anyhow, this is a toxic-waste set-up, where do you think it winds up?
At this point, the show turned away from ghosts being the enemy and focused more on actual monsters. Sheesh on a biscuit.
Also to show how low the animation budget sank, the first beast to emerge knocks over the boat, but it cuts away as it's knocked over.
A little over three minutes in and the Ghostbusters arrive in Japan, and Slimer is met with the amount of praise the network has for him. And I gotta concede, at this point Peter was getting a lot dumber, if I hadn't seen Russian About and just any other episode from season six I would've come to that same conclusion.
So far the biggest stand-outs are the clear animation goofs. I managed to pick up on looped footage when a boy witness tries to get their attention. All else is shenanigans with a teched-out Japanese vehicle. I'm half expecting the vehicle to be able to turn into a mech,
After driving the point home that actual ghosts are no longer the forefront for the series, as well as the network showing their mass apathy for Winston, they decide to fire their proton beams again. They say insanity is doing the same thing more than once and expecting a different result, but this time... it works. A higher power setting was all that needed to be done. Well color me a dinosaur.
A discussion goes on about the monster they encountered, and I gotta say, they really wussed out on the Godzilla reference. You know, you could get away with saying the actual name, especially if your only alternative is Lizardo. They get their insight from Kenji, who would surely go on to produce Mega Man, claim all the credit and helm a Kickstarter game that'd become the butt of many jokes for years to come.
Speaking of insanity, same thing as before, fire a basic round, then just turn it up afterwards. So we get the gist behind this episode, repetition. I can quit now, I only have eight minutes left, but I made it this far, I just hope I can say a lot more. All I got now is that they never give a good explanation to how film reels on toxic waste can create kaiju creatures, and a question. Did Peter just quote Eminem nine years in advance?
Only hope I have for this episode is that this turns out to just be a crazy dream one of the Ghostbusters had during their trip to Japan, probably after watching all these movies. At this point, if you're not into Japanese movie monsters, this will start to feel very dull, and get pretty stupid too. Times like this I'm glad I'm a few minutes away.
So all ends happily, but hold up, the spill situation was never fully resolved, do we get a cliffhanger ending? Nope, as if they threw their hands up, this is where the producers gave up, well, until I'm proven wrong on the production codes.
Final Thoughts
It's fitting we leave off on a disappointment, because the series had got to this point. I can see how far it had fallen piece by piece and I can agree on many of the complaints lobbied against it. If I saw every single episode it would've been absolutely miserable.
And yeah, I have more to say on the marathon overall than I do this entire episode. It really feels as though the seventh season was them getting rid of whatever episodes were left on the chopping block for the sixth season. I mean hell, the Ghostbusters getting sent back to the 50s just because they got hit by an active trap makes more sense than movie monsters coming to life through a film reel's exposure to toxic waste.
Stay tuned for the ranking.
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