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• Acceptable Targets: There is an ancient mystical tome in the ghost realm called "The Book of Annoying Beings." The Ghostbusters are on one page. As the Ghostmaster rips it out in frustration, we see that the very next page is devoted to mimes.
• Animation Age Ghetto: Interestingly, the show began life as an attempt to get out of this; given who ran the show early on, this shouldn't be surprising.
  • The essential idea was to create a show that was acceptable for Saturday mornings, but would still get the same Multiple Demographic Appeal that the movie had, which is why you have unusually solid (and complex) writing and humor (with examples like "The Thing in Mrs. Faversham's Attic" or "The Hole in the Wall Gang"), episodes with near-psychedelic visuals like "Knock, Knock" and, uh, a bit of occasional "focus" on Janine. Unfortunately, since The Merch sold like crazy, the executives saw only dollar signs, and demanded Re Tools to try and sell more merch. The writers revolted, many (including JMS) left and the show went right back into the ghetto. (Ironically this also drove away the wee kiddies to shows like, well, He-Man and the Masters of the Universe since the uniqueness of the early show is what drew people to it in the first place.)
• Author's Saving Throw: "Janine, You've Changed," considered by many fans the best use of this trope ever.
• Non Sequitur Scene: At one point in "Banshee Bake A Cherry Pie", we get a scene of a lovestruck Venkman dreaming he's in a music video with a singer (actually a banshee) he has a crush on. Egon appears, interrupting the performance and then breaks the fourth wall as the scene ends.

Egon: "Uh hello, I'm Dr. Egon Spengler and you're not watching this overblown spectacle. It's totally in the banshee-riddled mind of my colleague here. Um, thank you."

• Complete Monster: The Grundel, who targets children at night and derives great pleasure from terrorizing them.
  • There was also the being known as Piper, a one-shot villain from "The Pied Piper of Manhattan,". He's responsible for a sudden plague of ghosts in New York that he unleashes in order to play the hero when he repels them with his flute. When the Mayor attempts to pay him according to contract, Piper reveals he wants more. After his requests for a statue of himself down 5th Avenue and an office in city hall are denied, Piper uses his flute to hypnotize the children of the city and tries to force them to drown themselves, gloating the mayor will "rue the day he refused to pay the Piper." What seals the deal is that when the Ghostbusters intervene, Piper has no compunction using the kids as human shields in their fight.
  • Surt, from "Slimer's Sacrifice", is a godlike ghost who seeks to bring about the apocalypse. His minion Fenris prepares his coming by turning three humans into his vanguards. When Slimer ends up in the containment unit, Surt demands to know how Slimer got in there and hints that he is going to torture the information out of him. When Surt senses Eduardo's presence, he allows him to rescue Slimer and waits for him to open the exit to the containment unit so he can follow them. When Eduardo realizes Surt's plan and destroys the remote that will open the exit, Surt activates a spell he placed on Slimer to make him cut Eduardo's oxygen tank, before releasing Slimer from his control so he can realize that he just doomed his friend and be left to watch him suffocate and die, with Surt promising to return and torture Slimer after Eduardo dies.
• Creator's Pet - Slimer; he was The Scrappy to a lot of viewers, so what did the producers do? Rename the show Slimer and the Real Ghostbusters and have him show up even more. Then there were the Junior Ghostbusters. Yeah.
  • Slimer was at least a little more bearable when he genuinely helped the Ghostbusters save the day, like when they went up against Killerwatt.
  • A large part of the problem was that Executive Meddling changed Slimer's character. Originally, Slimer was an affable sidekick that didn't speak coherently. While there were episodes where he would play a major role, there were others in which he barely appeared if at all. However, with the third season, Slimer started to take more focus in plots and began speaking coherently.
• Funny Aneurysm Moment: The episode "Janine's Genie" has one scene in which the Ghostbusters, including Janine, tries to prevent a ghost-hijacked plane with the passengers inside from crashing in New York City. Janine and Peter, piloting the plane themselves, nearly avoided crashing against the WTC twin towers.
• Gannon Banned: This series and its concept is created by Columbia (which produced the original movies), not DiC, who only did the animation work.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: Peter gets possessed by a demon in an early episode. The symptoms? Spiky hair and a yellow complexion.
  • The story goes that Lorenzo Music was dropped because Bill Murray was concerned about Peter Venkman sounding like Garfield and executives sought to accomodate him. If indeed true, well, that makes a later Murray role very ironic.
• Retroactive Recognition: Before hosting his own talk show, Arsenio Hall was voicing Winston Zeddemore.
• The Scrappy: The Junior Ghostbusters, a trio of kids that came with all the Executive Meddling to make the show Lighter and Softer. None of the writers were thrilled with using them. JMS even once recalled saying he'd only use them if he could run them over with a truck. The kids only appeared twice here (though with expanded roles on Slimer's own cartoony spin-off), but fans were still irritated because these two appearances took up screentime from the Ghostbusters' re-matches with fan favorites the Boogieman and Samhain, respectively.
• Seasonal Rot: "Makeoveris Lotsabucks" is a particularly bad example, especially since it could've been passed off as a kind of proper fey. (Oddly enough, that example come from JMS himself, who may not have cared as much by that point.)
  • Arguably the fifth season more than any other. After the syndicated episodes, Seasons 3 and 4 suffered from Executive Meddling to be Lighter and Softer (as well as replacement voice actors for Peter, Winston and Janine), but still had some fan-favorites. Season 5, however, awkwardly shoehorned in elements of the second movie. (Louis was one thing, but the city's injunction against the team was seen as forced.) Slapstick humor became even more apparent and a number of episodes saw a Two Shorts format instead of one story.
• Some Anvils Need to Be Dropped: The show was very rarely ever Anvilicious in any sense; "Janine, You've Changed", however, has a rather blunt anvil about not needing to worry about your appearance and weight and whatnot and trust that people will like you just the way you appear. And if you're at all familiar with the history of "youth beauty" and anorexia in the 80s and early 90s, that anvil seriously needed some dropping on the show's largest age group.
• Ugly Cute (Slimer. The spud was actually pretty likable until he got overexposed in the later seasons.)
• The Woobie: Slimer in some of his focus episodes, especially in "Slimer, Come Home."