Who you gonna call for nostalgic '80s cartoon fare that won't let you down? The Real Ghostbusters!
The Real Ghostbusters (dubbed "Real" to distinguish itself from another '80s cartoon, not based on the 1984 film, called simply The Ghostbusters) follows the adventures of Peter Venkman, Ray Stantz, Egon Spengler, Winston Zeddemore, Janine Melnitz, and their "pet" ghost, Slimer, as the troop of spectral eliminators repeatedly saves New York and the world from the evil machinations of the paranormal.
I've written before about cartoon shows from the '80s and '90s that don't hold up as well to my adult eyes as they did when I was a kid, but thankfully, The Real Ghostbusters isn't among their ranks.
What separates The Real Ghostbusters from these other shows is the quality of the stories. The writing, line-for-line, is about on par most other Saturday-morning cartoon fare of the time, and the animation is barely passable at best (characters go "off-model" so often you'd think it was intentional), but it's the stories as a whole that still manage to suck me in as an adult viewer.
One in particular included in this set involves the most clever twist on Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol that I can recall. The Ghostbusters, caught in a snowstorm in the mountains, accidentally pass through a time rift and end up in Dickensian London. It's there that they overhear an old man being tormented by ghosts and proceed to bust in and trap the apparitions. Upon returning to their own time, the foursome learn that the old man was Ebenezer Scrooge and that they trapped the ghosts of Christmas Past, Present, and Future, leaving the world a far worse place where everyone is uncaring and there's no Christmas. While Egon must hunt down and rescue the trio of spirits in the containment grid, Ray, Peter, and Winston go back through the time portal and attempt to pass themselves off as the ghosts to teach Scrooge the lessons he must learn to restore the world to the way it should be. In the process, Peter learns to see past his own Scroogeness" about the holiday.
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