BOO-GLEECH

Written by Jonathan Wojcik

THE REAL GHOSTBUSTERS
One Hundred Demon Parade:
Part Four!

Last time we met "GLORP!" and saw what happens when a bunch of imps merge together. Today, we meet the terrifying "SOON!"

Anemone-like Ghost

Episode: Partners in Slime

Seen inside the containment unit, this barrel-shaped monster seems to use its many toes to cling in place, waving its multiple tentacles. I like that some of these tentacles not only end in mouths, but seem to have their own tiny, vestigial arms, and that this ghost has more than just the two-eyed, human-like face on its front. It has either that single third eye or possibly more that we can't see. Maybe even a whole face on its opposite side?

Fish Ghost

Episode: Ghostworld

While we see a lot of ghosts taking on animal-like forms, I like how this minor haunt truly seems like the vengeful revenant of an actual fish, its hat collection implying a centuries-long grudge against humans who catch and eat its kind, which is why it now haunts a fish market and terrorizes people by smacking them with fish carcasses. Its spite for humans, I guess, just slightly beats its respect for the dead.

Possessed Graffiti

Episode: Knock, Knock

We've seen a giant, slobbering toothpaste tube emerge from a television, sure, but the weirdest case of object possession in this series has to be when a swarm of ghosts take an assortment of graffiti and advertising art as host bodies, particularly this giant floating "SOON" with eyeballs in its O's. What if this one had gotten away? Would it ever jump to some other body, or would there just be a "SOON" lurkin around New York indefinitely? I'd like to believe the latter.

Those of you as geeky for monsters as I am, of course, probably noticed the Medama Oyaji cameo first, one of only a couple background ghosts I've seen in this whole show that were lifted from some other supernatural animated series. We'll see the other one SOON enough.

"Do or Diner" Cook

Episode: Afterlife in the Fast Lane

This corny later episode has the Ghostbusters - and Slimer - compete against each other in a charity race, each with their own wacky-races style personalized vehicle. Why a racing episode? Why not? Naturally, ghosts get involved, and the Ghostbusters end up lost in the netherworld.

Somehow, they don't fully realize where they are until they stop and ask for directions at a lovely looking little restaurant, the DO OR DINER, which I hope is the name of at least one real, actual restaurant. As you may have guessed, they don't take too kindly to us alive-type folks 'round those parts, and we get to see some beautifully horrific bar patrons.

The cook is probably the most unpleasant-looking of the bunch, with his tumorous, veiny blue flesh, sloppy lips and mis-matched, jutting fangs.

The Green Diner

Episode: Afterlife in the Fast Lane

One of the Do or Diner's patrons is this hunch-backed, green skinned ghoul whose thick, pink hairs look a lot more like worms writhing out of his skin, and that's probably a pretty reasonable assumption. It's cute that it wears those blue suspenders, I guess so we know that even in another plane of reality, a greasy spoon is always going to contain at least one country bumpkin with no shirt and a bone to pick with foreigners.

The Multi-eyed Diner

Episode: Afterlife in the Fast Lane

Usually, when you've seen one big blob of eyeballs, you've seen them all...but this one's a real charmer, with its ecclectic collection of oculars - some of them even stalked! - and appendages (see above) sort of resembling plucked chicken wings, easily among my favorite kind of monster appendages.

This thing was sitting at a table with suspenders guy when the Ghostbusters barged in, and I know there are many possible reasons, but I'm going to default to it being a romantic outing because there's nothing stopping me. Suspenders ghoul is pretty sensitive about its upbringing in a small, simple demonic country town, but hecteyes here can easily see through suspender's violent exterior to the intelligent and sensitive soul screaming to get out. Literally. More than one, actually.

The Mummy Diner

Episode: Afterlife in the Fast Lane

This is one of the few mummies we ever see in this series, and you know by now that The Real Ghostbusters isn't satisfied to just wrap a corpse in bandages and call it a night. This otherwise human-looking cadaver has some very not-human green eyes, set low against an abnormally wide, toothy mouth.

The Gigeresque Diner

Episode: Afterlife in the Fast Lane

This is one of those one-shot minor entities that instantly stayed with me when I first saw the episode, though I wasn't yet familiar with what it was probably homaging. It looks a little bit like the gunk-covered corpse of the "space jockey" from Alien, albeit with spines down its back, an exposed brain I mistook for a shock of blonde hair as a child - perhaps confusing it with its drinking buddy - and a fanged mouth on the end of its creepy, chitinous trunk! The perfectly normal, human clothes and perfectly normal, human hands do a lot to enhance this fiend's unreal, nightmarish qualities, though I like to think he holds down a really harmless, mundane ghost world job in that cheap suit, like assistant manager at a carpet decleaner or a hellphone disrepairman.

Arborak

Episode: Short Stuff

"Short Stuff" is an interesting episode in which the otherwise forgettable "Ghostmaster" villain hires himself three supernatural bounty hunters to destroy the Ghostbusters, and all three of them are pretty killer. Arborak is basically a spider creature, but follows a more mammaloid body shape than an arachnid, with lovely jaws that vaguely remind me of a mole rat, at least eleven eyes, and a silk gland in the tip of its tongue. It's more or less like a vertebrate evolving into an arachnid.

Ulyoth

Episode: Short Stuff

Another bounty hunter, Ulyoth is basically a long, slimy eel-like monster, with one huge, red eyeball, multiple tentacles, and a cloudy white vapor that seems to be a part of his being, since he's never seen without at least a little of the fog shrouding his body. Ulyoth is also capable of hurling fireball-like projectiles from his tentacle tips, generating barriers, and shape-shifting into objects such as a brick wall.

Nurgot

Episode: Short Stuff

The last and strongest of the bounty hunters, Nurgot looks like a giant, green slug with a head more like an insect - and just a single, long, whiplike antenna. Nurgot is also accompanied by a floating, silver orb, which has the ability to shrink and absorb his targets. The idea of these totally inhuman monsters working as bounty hunters is pretty awesome and not something I've seen often in other franchises, not even the one that most popularized bounty hunters as characters - and takes place in a galaxy crawling with alien species.

It's also interesting how the three hunters cover all the major bases of "creepy crawlies." You have a hairy scuttler that combines spider-like and rat-like attributes, a serpentine slitherer with octopus tentacles, and an oozing thing that's not quite a maggot, not quite a slug. All that's really missing is some sort of flapping, flying bat-mosquito-moth and you've pretty much hybridized all the most irrationally feared animal properties into four perfect elementals of creepiness.

The Grungy Family

Episode: Guess What's Coming to Dinner

Until I discovered this episode a few years back, I sincerely had no idea that this show was still running when The Simpsons had begun, though the overlap is only by about a year. It's not a terribly good episode, but it's interesting to see another weird "family" of ghosts. A spectral realtor actually sells them the Ghostbusters fire house while they're away, which is hilarious, and it's even more hilarious when Foul Grungy, the father, mistakes the containment unit for a washing machine - and mistakes the ghosts inside for "squatters."

Squatters! In HIS washing machine!

Foul also gets one of the most unintentionally(?) disturbing lines in the show, when he quips "I wasn't born yesterday! In fact, I wasn't born!"

This might imply that Foul either always existed as a ghost, but there's no rule that says you can't interpret him as the ghost of somebody who died in the womb. Why not even someone absorbed in the womb? He sure looks more like a parasitic cancer-twin than a person.

Leave it to a bad Homer Simpson caricature with Fred Flintstone's voice to inspire the darkest headcanon for almost anything in the show.

The Trio

Episode: Janine's Day Off

Among those special ghosts with the audacity to actually attack haunt the Ghostbuster's own headuarters, these three friends pose quite a threat when they get ahold of a proton blaster. It's too bad we only saw these ghosts once, because all three are full of personality and just really cool looking, even while retaining a sort of classical Halloween ghost look to them. The little spud-like one with the sad, glassy eyes deviates the most, and it's hard not to find him heart-tuggingly pathetic just to look at, while the fat, slightly warty one had another of those great "vestigial human" ghost designs, and the lanky one's hollow, tattered lower body gives an otherwise conventional design a wonderfully strange and grotesque twist.

As much as I love how outrageously odd some of the creatures get on this show, I wish we had also seen a few more like these guys, who play with the "classic" ghost image in their own weird ways.

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