Preface to
"THE COLLECT CALL
OF CTHULHU"
I've had a number of requests from people wanting to know how they could read a copy of this script. I figured the easiest way to deal with the requests was to post it, so here it is.
I wrote "The Collect Call Of Cthulhu" in 1986 for the animated TV series
The Real Ghostbusters. Those familiar with the works of
H.P. Lovecraft will recognize it as a parody of his story
"The Call Of Cthulhu", written in 1928 for
Weird Tales Magazine. The episode is a tongue-in-cheek collision between the Ghostbusters team and Lovecraft's famous "Cthulhu Mythos". What aired is pretty much what I wrote, save for some character beats that were cut for time. (Aficionados of the genre will recognize references to Lovecraft Circle members Clark Ashton Smith, August Derelith and Robert E. Howard, as well as more contemporary Mythos writers Karl Edward Wagner and T.E.D. Klein -- the latter sent me a note asking if I could guarantee him tenure at Miskatonic University.)
I'm reasonably pleased with the final product, except for two rather glaring inaccuracies -- the title card reads "The Collect Call Of
Cathulu" and the model design for the Big Guy himself isn't even remotely accurate -- he's red instead of green and has too many arms, legs and eyes, among other things. But hey, that's show biz. (Oddly enough, in the reviews I've seen of the episode done by Cthulhu-philes -- and there have been a fair number of them -- no one has ever complained about the latter gaffe. Possibly they were too stunned to notice by that point.) On the plus side, it's rather well animated, given the budget, and reasonably well acted. Whether you've seen the episode or not, I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I did writing it.
By the way, do any of you out there remember why the show was called
The Real Ghostbusters," when the title of the movie it was based on was just
Ghostbusters? Well, I'll tell you. Let's set the Wayback Machine for 1975, the year when Filmation Associates produced a live-action Saturday morning kids' show called
The Ghost Busters. It starred Larry Storch, Forrest Tucker, and Bob Burns in an ape suit. The only thing remotely clever about it was that the ape was named "Tracy" (Storch being "Eddie Spenser" and Tucker being "Jake Kong." If you're too young to know why that was funny, I can't help you.) It ran for one season on CBS. Now we flash forward to 1984, and the production of the first
Ghostbusters film. Columbia found out late in the shoot that Filmation still had the rights to the name "Ghost Busters" and paid for permission to use it on the feature. Filmation, however, hung onto the animation rights, and when the movie became a mega-hit, promptly tried to cash in by producing an animated sequel to their '75 series. (It was godawful; not even a decent cast that included Sue Blu and Alan Oppenheimer could help. Which isn't surprising, considering that this was the studio that gave the world
Gilligan's Planet and
Uncle Croc's Bloc). So Columbia had to title their animated series
The Real Ghostbusters (which it proved to be, racking up an eventual 140 episodes on ABC and in syndication, not to mention spawning the spin-off series,
Slimer).
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