Welcome to Spook Central's special "Shot On Site Summer" event. All throughout the month of July, and possibly the rest of the Summer, I will be posting Shot On Site articles on Spook Central detailing newly-discovered Ghostbusters filming locations. Click here to view the current schedule.

Today's location was identified by Matthew Jordan, who has been on a hard-target search of every gas station, residence, warehouse, farmhouse, henhouse, outhouse and doghouse listed on my Ghostbusters 1 & 2 Unidentified Filming Locations page. His goal is to identify every single exterior location that appears on that page. A hard task? Sure. An impossible task? Not the way Matthew's been going at it. He's surprised me by identifying locations that I never would have thought could have been identified!

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The Parallax Corporation recently introduced a box of officially-licensed Stay Puft Quality Marshmallows into the marketplace. If you're getting a case of deja vu, there's a good reason for that. In 2010, Omni Consumer Products produced a box of Stay Puft Quality Marshmallows for $19.99, which contained 24 large square caffeinated marshmallows. Long story short: Omni lost the Ghostbusters marshmallow license (and the use of the StayPuftMarshmallows.com domain name - which Sony owns), Parallax now has it, and as a result we have new Stay Puft Quality Marshmallows.

In this review I'll make reference to Omni's marshmallows, but my opinions on that product are based solely on the photos and information about it that were presented online by the company itself and other reviewers. I never purchased Omni's marshmallows because the high price was a major turn off, and they never offered me a complimentary box either. Parallax was kind enough to provide me with a complimentary box of their marshmallows, though they are selling their marshmallows for less than half of what Omni was charging, so price wasn't an issue. Now that I have all of that out of the way to cover my butt legally, on to the review...

The first thing you notice about any product is the packaging. Parallax's Stay Puft Quality Marshmallows come in a box featuring dual Stay Puft imagery. On one side is the happy Mr. Puft, while on the other side is the angry Mr. Puft. Don't make him angry. You wouldn't like him when he's angry. This box design is a big improvement over Omni's nearly-plain white box. The small 5.0 oz (142g) box is approximately 4.25" x 6.25" x 2" in size.


On the left and right sides of the box is a little blurb about the big guy, the legal text, and the nutrition facts.


Now enough about the packaging. Let's open up the box.


Inside we find... A BRAND-NEW CAR!!!!! Well what did you think you'd find inside? A bag of marshmallows, of course.


Unlike Omni's product, which contains unnaturally large marshmallows, these are normal size, if not a tiny bit smaller. They're approximately 1" in diameter x 1" tall (a sugary cylinder). Here's one random marshmallow I pulled out of the bag and put up against a ruler just so you can see how they measure up (literally).


You'll find approximately 45 mini marshmallows in the box. I lucked out and got 46! Yes, I counted them. Hey, don't look at me like that. I did it for research purposes. That's the same reason I'm gonna give you as to why I decided to fashion them into a wall. Now if only I had some Angry Birds gummies to fling at it.


I pluck a sugary brick from the wall and pop it into my mouth. The marshmallows taste good, but I can't say that they taste any different from any other marshmallow I've ever had. If you've had marshmallows before, you'll know what these taste like. So if your intent is to just buy a package of marshmallows, you're better off picking up a bag of regular old marshmallows at your local supermarket. You'll get the same amount, maybe more, for half the price. Depending on what time of the year you go, you may even get marshmallows in unusual shapes.

Now if your intent is to buy Stay Puft Marshmallows, then Parallax's Stay Puft Quality Marshmallows, which you can buy for $7.99 at Think Geek, is a much better deal than the previous release from Omni. They're less than half the price, with more marshmallows inside, and feature a better looking box. And while you're on the Think Geek website, pick up a Stay Puft Marshmallow Man mug and some caffeinated hot cocoa mix to complete the trifecta.

Although these marshmallows are an improvement over the Omni product in terms of price, package design, and size and quantity of marshmallows, they're still not THE perfect Stay Puft Marshmallows. (I'd call them the next best thing so far.) For that, we'd need the generic-looking bag seen in the movie sitting on store shelves right next to the bags of Jet-Puffed Marshmallows. Because, when it comes right down to it, would you rather be Jet Puffed or would you rather Stay Puft?"


Thanks to Ghostbusters Mania, you CAN have movie-accurate marshmallows AND the officially-licensed Stay Puft Marshmallows that Parallax makes. Buy a box of the Stay Puft Marshmallows, open up the box, take out the bag of marshmallows, and put the box on a shelf for display. Now print out Ghostbusters Mania's movie-accurate Stay Puft Marshmallows label onto an adhesive label, slap that label onto the clear bag of marshmallows, and voila!

As a side note - because I had no place to put this in the regular review - Richard Roy pointed out to me that Parallax's "Stay Puft Quality Marshmallows" logo bears a strong stylistic resemblance to the IHOP (formerly International House of Pancakes) logo. I didn't notice it before but, yeah, it does.

Stock footage, or archive footage as it is sometimes called, is basically video of a location that is not taken for a specific production, but is instead cataloged in a studio's stock footage library to be used on an as-needed basis. Footage that has actually been used in a specific production can also wind up in a stock footage library, as is the case with the Ghostbusters films. Using stock footage is much cheaper for a production than actually sending a crew out to shoot establishing shots of each different locale needed for a particular show or movie.

To give you a real example of the concept, take a look at this shot of a red brick house. Can you guess what television show this was filmed for?


If you guessed The King of Queens, you're dead wrong. Although this shot of this particular house may be well known from its use over nine seasons as the Heffernan's house, it was actually filmed in 1991 (seven years before The King of Queens premiered) for a little-known television series called Sibs starring Jami Gertz and Dan "Homer Simpson" Castellaneta. Not a single person on the The King of Queens production staff even knew where the house was until a fan did an exhausting amount of research. The King of Queens production staff just simply pulled footage of this house from the Sony Pictures stock footage library and that's how it came to be known as the Heffernan House. It even appears on many of the DVD boxes!

As expected, Sony has footage from both Ghostbusters movies in their stock footage library, and I have cataloged it to the best of my ability on the new Ghostbusters stock footage and Ghostbusters II stock footage pages here on Spook Central. What you'll find are different takes and camera angles of various shots and scenes, almost all in their original uncut form. What you won't find is footage of the actors or anything that couldn't be passed off as "generic" footage.

We've already had our first instance of Ghostbusters footage appearing in another production when I spotted this digitally-altered shot in the Monk episode "Mr. Monk and the Voodoo Curse" a few years ago:


There's a little bit of unused footage from a few scenes, and even some footage from deleted scenes, amongst all of the stock footage. All of the deleted scene footage is listed at the bottom of each page. Here are some unused Ectomobile shots from both films, and the exterior of the Parkview Hospital from the second film (where we would have met Sherman Tully), to whet your appetite. (In the third shot, you can see the top of the Ecto-1A at the bottom of the shot, and the front of the car reflected in the window.)

The RMS Titanic, the world's largest and most luxurious ocean liner, left on its maiden voyage on April 10, 1912 from Southampton, England to New York City, carrying everyone from plutocrats to penniless emigrants. Titanic had an estimated 2,224 people on board when she struck an iceberg in the north Atlantic Ocean at 11:40 PM (ship's time; 9:40 PM EST) on Sunday, April 14, 1912. She sank two hours and forty minutes later at 2:20 AM (12:20 EST) on Monday, April 15th, resulting in the deaths of 1,514 people, making it one of the deadliest peacetime maritime disasters in history.

The wreck of Titanic remains on the seabed, gradually disintegrating at a depth of 12,415 feet (3,784 m). Since its rediscovery in 1985, thousands of artifacts have been recovered from the sea bed and put on display at museums around the world. Titanic has become one of the most famous ships in history, her memory kept alive by numerous books, films, exhibits and memorials.

She makes a brief appearance in Ghostbusters II (photo above), as the spectral ship finally arrives at its New York City destination, with its ghostly passengers disembarking to, presumably, finally be at peace. Meant to be a humorous sight gag in the film, its actually a rather solemn happening if you stop and think about it. Although Ghostbusters II was filmed after the discovery of the remains of the actual RMS Titanic in 1985, the specific nature of the ship's iceberg collision and overall appearance is inaccurate. The spectral ship appears to have a giant, gaping hole in its bow when docked, when in fact the actual vessel suffered several dozen small impacts along much of the starboard body and, by and large, broke off into two large pieces.

As I write this, it is 100 years ago to the minute that the ship sank and all of those lives were lost. We've all grown up with the legend of the Titanic, and it feels a little strange to realize that it's, just now, a full century since the tragic event took place. It always seemed so "long ago", but it really wasn't until now.

FURTHER READING
• NY Daily News - Photos: On Board The Titanic Before It Sank
• NY Daily News - Photos: Titanic Artifacts
• Miami Herald - Titanic: The Moral Of A 100-Year-Old Story by Leonard Pitts Jr.
• NY Daily News - Events Around The World To Mark The Shipwreck's 100-Year Anniversary
• BBC News - Titanic 100
• CBC News - Titanic's Sinking Commemorated in Halifax
• Titanic in Nova Scotia
• Encyclopaedia Britannica Presents Titanic: The Unsinkable Ship
• Encyclopedia Titanica
• Titanic Facts
• Titanic.com
• RMS Titanic, Inc. Offical Site
• Ghostbusters Wiki

This isn't a regular Shot On Site article, so I'm not going to tag it as such. This is really a look into the future of the Shot On Site feature here at Spook Central, as well as a few odds and ends that wouldn't fit as regular SOS articles.

Let's talk about sound stages. As you may know, both movies were filmed on a few sound stages at The Burbank Studios (now Warner Bros. Studios). I really was going to totally ignore the sound stages on my Filming Locations page, because I was just going to concentrate on locations that were shown in the film as they really exist (in a manner of speaking) in the real world, which people could actually visit. Yeah, you could tour the Warner lot, and you can (maybe) even see inside some of the stages, but all you'd see is an empty stage. You wouldn't see any of the Ghostbusters sets. However, after some careful consideration, I decided to create a Burbank Studios page here on Spook Central.

Let's get out the crystal ball and look into the future. Matthew Jordan from the Ghostbusters Wiki has been on a crusade to identify every single location on my Unidentified Filming Locations page. Incredibly enough, he's actually been getting some of the extremely hard to find locations identified. Okay, in all fairness, Matthew isn't the only source of some new IDs. Two of them I got all by myself, one was (in a really weird way) a joint effort by Matthew and myself, and two were ID'ed by other folks online. The rest were all Matthew. And what are these new locations you may ask? Well, here's what you have to look forward to over the coming months: GB1 Chinatown, GB1 Flipped Driving, GB1 Jogging, GB1 Ray With Trap, GB1 Reporter, GB1 Undead Cabbie, GB1 Wandering Louis, GB2 Gracie Mansion, and GB2 Orrefors.

You ever find something that, if you had found it earlier, would have made your life a whole lot easier? That happened to me today. While watching the Ghostbusters II Electronic Press Kit looking for behind the scenes sound stage shots for the Burbank Studios page, I saw a shot that I must not have paid too much attention to when I first watched the EPK a few years ago:


Here we see the guys taking the santa hat promo photo in front of the clearly-marked Record Explosion store. You know, the Record Explosion store the guys run out of with smoking trap in hand in the film. The same Record Explosion store that I painstakingly identified using some fan-taken behind the scenes photos and Google Maps last year. Had I noticed this shot in the EPK years ago, it would have been a whole lot easier to identify the location :-)

Finally, I leave you with Entertainment Tonight's brief behind the scenes look at Ghostbusters II from 1989. I didn't record this or originally upload this. I think it came from the old Megadownload thread at the Ghostbusters Message Board on Ghostbusters.net, but I could be wrong about that. Anyway... ENJOY!

Comic artist Tristan Jones, who designed the rotating series of Spook Central banners you see atop this site, has let me in on a little secret. Dan Aykroyd's Ghostbusters 3: Hellbent script will be adapted into comic book form starting in Ghostbusters issue #13, and continuing to issue #16. The details are still being finalized, so there isn't much to report right now, but he did tell me that the first issue will have a whopping THIRTEEN variant covers. A rather unlucky number for those of us with small wallets. Expect a formal press release from IDW in the coming days, but in the meantime, if you don't tell anyone, you can view a preliminary rough of Tristan's variant cover by CLICKING HERE.

A nice vintage magazine has been preserved this time around. On the Ghostbusters Books page you can now find a PDF ebook containing all of the Ghostbusters articles from the December 1984 issue of Starburst magazine. All of the "Making of Ghostbusters" articles were written by Randy and Jean-Marc Lofficier. If those names sound familiar, that's because they would later write The Real Ghostbusters episodes "The Headless Motorcyclist" and "The Ghostbusters In Paris".

Mucho thanks to Lee Taylor for providing the scans from his magazine (it took me three years and four months, but I finally got it on the site) and, as always, Matthew Jordan for the clean-up and restoration of the scans. Oh, yeah, for those playing along at home... Richard Roy now has up to issue #11 (ELEVEN!) of NOW's The Real Ghostbusters comic books in the Ectocontainment's Comics section. So go check that out when you're done here.

Finally, there are four images from this issue of Starburst magazine that I thought were worth uploading separately from the magazine to the Spook Central Facebook page. Some of the old-timers will recognize some of these from when Bill Emkow had them on his site. Yes, that's adult film legend Ron Jeremy on the left in the second image. Yes, a pornstar appears in an official Ghostbusters production photo :-)

Well, how about that? Two Shot on Site articles in one year! It's about time I started picking up the pace. This was an easy one because the movie itself actual gives away half of the location!

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Back in 2003 I was working on a project that involved writing to the cast and crew of the various Ghostbusters projects. While on the Writers Guild of America website I saw a listing for Jina Bacarr with The Real Ghostbusters listed as one of her credits. Now, I knew that her name never appeared on any of the episodes that aired, and a Real Ghostbusters credit doesn't appear in her Internet Movie Database filmography, so I e-mailed her to find out more. As it turns out, she wrote an episode of The Real Ghostbusters that was never produced, but was used for a more important cause. Here are excerpts from the e-mails I exchanged with Jina to explain more.

WHAT THE EPISODE WAS TITLED

I looked through my list of credits and I did find the title: "Funny You Should Scream".

WHAT THE EPISODE WAS ABOUT

If I remember correctly it was about a weird dude, a Dr. Teufel (meaning devil) who runs a carnival and traps kids in his Fun House a la Pied Piper.

WHY IT IS HISTORICALLY SIGNIFICANT

Unfortunately, my script was never produced. The story behind the story is that my edited script (my story editor was J. Michael (Joe) Straczynski) was donated to the "cause" when we (the Animation Writers) were fighting with the labor board for recognition to be admitted into the WGA. Joe had to prove to the board that story editing and writing co-existed in the world of animation as it does in episodic television writing (since the 1930s, animation writers were "required" to belong to the Cartoonists Guild). My Ghostbusters script helped to establish that precedent.

I am proud that I was able to contribute my Ghostbusters script to help our (Animation Writers) case, which resulted in animation writers finally being recognized by the WGA through the Animation Writers Caucus.

WHERE THE SCRIPT IS NOW

My original script with any editing done by Joe is sitting in a bank vault somewhere where all "legal evidence" spends eternity.

I probably have a copy somewhere, but truthfully, I'm working on a book right now and don't have the extra time to search for it through my own "vault." That script was written on an old computer and 5 inch floppy which "don't work no more."

BUT SHE *STILL* GOT PAID!

Yes, I did write one episode -- I rec'd a contract and the fee at that time for writing one episode ($3,000).

HER FEELINGS ON JMS!

Joe is one of my favorite people. One of the "good guys" in the biz.

When I started the Ghostbusters PDF eBook Preservation Project, one of the books I most wanted to preserve was Sholly Fisch's novel Ghostbusters: The Return. Even though it isn't a very old book (it came out in 2004), the publisher, iBooks, went out of business two years after it hit the market, thus ensuring that the very limited supply of books that were printed would become instant collectibles. Copies on eBay and Amazon Marketplace currently go for $100 or more. I bought my copy back in 2004 and have never read it or cracked the spine, It is as 100% Mint as 100% Mint can be. I bet that I could get a nice amount of money for it, but as hard up for cash as I am, that will be one of the last things I will ever sell. I might sell a kidney before I sell that book. Hey, I have two kidneys, but only one copy of the book :-)

It gives me great joy to announce that Ghostbusters: The Return can now be downloaded in PDF format on the Ghostbusters Books page. It was a true group effort in getting the book to be part of the preservation project, so be sure to check out the notes/credits link under the book cover for all of the gory details. The Ghostbusters 2005 DVD Movie Scrapbook has also be added to the Ghostbusters Books page.

I scanned in a bunch of the Kenner The Real Ghostbusters toy advertisements and "Action Toy Guide" booklets (just The Real Ghostbusters pages), which can all be found on The Real Ghostbusters Merchandise page. Almost all are PDFs, though the poster at the end is a singular image. This is actually the smaller of the two Kenner posters that I have. I didn't scan in the large poster/calendar because it is WAY too large to do without some careful planning first. It's the source for some of my holiday images that appear throughout the year on the top side of this blog.

Over on the Ghostbusters II Books page you can now find the junior novel by B.B. Hiller and a coloring book. With the coloring book, I made an exception to my rule about not adding children's books to the project. Not because it is exceptionally well done, but rather quite the opposite. It is the "Troll 2" of Ghostbusters merchandise. It is truly "so bad, it's good". Just take a look at the book's depiction of the four guys:


Yes, Ray has a mustache that would make Tom Selleck jealous, and Egon has lost his glasses (an essential element of the character) but gained poofy hair (for lack of a better description). I know that they can't draw the guys to look exactly like the actors, due to likeness rights, but they couldn't have drawn them to look more different if they tried. There's a way to make them somewhat resemble the actors without being exact likenesses. Just look at what the comics have done the past few years. Anyway, if there's one positive to the coloring book, it's that it was written up based on the script and not the final cut of the movie, so a lot of deleted scenes are represented in it. Also note that Kenner's The Real Ghostbusters toys are being used as the Ghostbusters' equipment (PDF page 50), and the Gigameter looks nothing like it does in the movie (PDF page 22). I can only guess that the artists were not shown a single photograph of the equipment from the movie set (and didn't think to look at photos or videos from the first movie), so they drew the equipment for the book based on what they could find from the animated series and their own ideas. And yet, the slime blower looks fairly accurate to its movie counterpart (PDF page 101).

Finally, I scanned in and made into a PDF ebook the Biltmore Hotel brochure I got back in 2004. You can find it on the Sedgewick/Biltmore Hotel page at the top of the Fun Facts section.

A big round of thanks to the tireless efforts of Matthew Jordan for helping to make a lot of these ebooks possible. Without your help, a lot of these books would have been forgotten decades ago. Richard Roy is also helping to preserve vintage Ghostbusters books. He just uploaded high-resolution scans of NOW's The Real Ghostbusters #1 and #2 comic books to the Ectocontainment's Comics section, and moved The Real Ghostbusters in Ghostbusters II trilogy from his old site to that page, too. You'll definitely want to check all of that out, and keep an eye on the Ectocontainment's Comics section for future updates.

[UPDATE - 2/25/2012]
I want to give a quick bit of thanks to the guys at the Ghostbusters Wiki for mentioning the eBook Preservation Project (and this update, specifically) on their site. Those guys understand exactly what the project is trying to accomplish.

The reason behind all this is because in most cases, the materials that are being covered are becoming harder to find and costly to get. This project is to help fans that don't have the funds or came along late in the game so to speak. The Preservation Project is just for that, to keep the history of ghostbusters available for future generations.

Although I'm the one to give the project a name, it is not my project, per se. It belongs to all Ghostbusters fans. Richard Roy is doing his part to preserve the past by scanning in the NOW comics. Matthew from the Ghostbusters Wiki has been helping with scanning, cleaning-up images, and providing materials that I don't have. I still have a LOT more work to do with my collection of items directly related to the movies and animated series. I'm hoping that other webmasters will put some out-of-print books and materials in high-quality formats on their sites as well. Maybe one of my fellow webmasters will want to start archiving all of the old West End Games RPG books. I may not be interested in them, but I'm sure that a lot of folks are, and would love to have the opportunity to read some of them.