(Credits: Far Out / Columbia Pictures)
Sun 26 October 2025 8:00, UK
There aren’t many comedies that have stood the test of time quite as well as the 1984 blockbuster Ghostbusters has managed to, and despite being over 40 years old, it feels relatively fresh to the point that they chose to reboot the franchise in 2016.
While the all-female Ghostbusters was given a mixed reception by audiences and critics alike, the two additions to the mainline franchise that arrived in 2021 and 2024 have been cited as solid additions to the brand, with them staying relatively faithful to the original identity laid out by director Ivan Reitman. However, as original as the idea may have seemed, 1984 wasn’t the first time the name had been used on screen.
The Ghost Busters was a 1975 sitcom for children produced in the US by Filmation, which told the story of two friends and a gorilla who, as the title suggests, were ghost hunters. Presented in a slapstick style, the show was moderately successful, which led the film’s producers, Reitman and writers Harold Ramis and Dan Aykroyd, to question whether the name they’d settled on would be possible to use without any legal ramifications.
Aykroyd insisted that the name shouldn’t be changed, and as an alternative solution, Columbia Pictures chose to pay Filmation half a million dollars for the rights to use the name, on the condition that they paid 1% of the film’s profits to the production company behind the 1970s TV show, and allowed them to produce an animated version for television if the film proved to be a success. The only issue is, they had a budget of approximately $30million, and ended up making over 12 times this amount through the box office, yet Filmation never received a penny from Columbia.
Understandably, Filmation weren’t happy about being double-crossed by the production giants, and while they did originally come good on the promise that they’d work together to make an animated version of the film, Columbia fleeced Filmation once again at the last minute, opting to work with the cheaper and faster option of producing it alongside DIC Entertainment.
This led to a battle between both parties, with Filmation racing to release their own animated series called Ghostbusters, which was based on their own original concept from the 1970s, and they managed to get it out just a week before the Columbia version. This, in turn, led to Columbia rushing to change the name of their own show to The Real Ghostbusters in an effort to reassure audiences that this was the famous version that they’d all seen in cinemas.
So, not everything about Ghostbusters, the 1984 film, was completely original, and similarly, The Real Ghostbusters, the TV series aired between 1986 and 1991, was not ‘real’ in the way that they claimed it to be. They had essentially created a knockoff television show in order to avoid paying any more than they needed to to a company they’d stolen the original name from in the first place, and fooled the entire world into believing it was all their doing.
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