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.)

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!

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 :-)

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.

Renowned photographer Oliver Rath took a series of artistic photographs based on the theme of Ghostbusters, which were exhibited at the Windows Phone 7.5 Hotel Event on December 15, 2011 in Berlin, Germany.

Mr. Rath was kind enough to grant my request for copies of the photos and permission to publish them on Spook Central for all Ghostbusters fans to enjoy. For more of Mr. Rath's work, check out his website (some of the photographs on his site contain nudity, so consider this your NSFW warning). You can also find him on Facebook. (The photos and all information have also been added to the Fan Art page here on Spook Central, which is where you can find the additional photo credits.)

It all started innocently enough. Two and a half years ago I bought a vintage 1947 Tavern on the Green souvenir photo from a yard sale. I thought it was a nice, unique historical item with a connection to Ghostbusters. I didn't think I would ever have anything more to add to the "unique historical item with a connection to Ghostbusters" collection. Especially not something from another restaurant.

Two weeks ago I identified the Louis Wandering Past WienerWald location from Ghostbusters. The WienerWald Austrian Restaurant he passed was located at 1560 Broadway in New York City - the heart of Times Square. In doing research for that Shot on Site article I came across an eBay listing for a Vintage 1960s Wienerwald New York NY Restaurant Menu. For a mere $21.08 (with free shipping, no less) it could be mine. I figured, why not? So now it IS mine!

In spite of its name, WienerWald is primarily known for selling chicken, not sausage, as evident by their chicken silhouette logo. That said, if you wandered into either of their New York City locations (they only had two at the time this menu was made) and wanted to get some bratwurst, you could get it with sauerkraut and mashed potatoes for $1.95. Better than that, how about a whole sirloin steak with fried potatoes and a mixed salad for $4.95?!? Yes, a whole steak with sides for about the same price a combo meal will cost you at the McDonald's that now resides at WienerWald's old Times Square location. Speaking of hamburgers, you could get one for $1.25... and I'd bet you that it was a lot beefier than the paltry patties you get on McDonald's dollar menu today. You'll need something to wash down that food, so how about a cup of coffee for $0.20? You're lucky if you can get a cup of coffee-flavored coffee for a buck these days. There's also soda for $0.20 and, for the adults, liquors that range from $0.60 for beer or a goblet of wine to $7.00 for a bottle of Henkell Trocken sparkling wine. Finish your meal off with a nice slice of cheese cake for $0.75, or choose a Viennese pastry from their large selection for $0.65.

The most interesting thing about this menu, aside from how ridiculously cheap everything was 40+ years ago, is the list of WienerWald locations on the back cover. There were 215 in Germany, 2 in Belgium, 5 in Holland, 1 in Canada, 11 in Austria (Österreich), 3 in Switzerland (Schweiz), 2 in the United States (both in New York City [the numbers of the Broadway address are transposed as "1650" on the menu]), and 8 more under construction (im aufbau). By the time Wienerwald declared bankruptcy in 1982, they had 880 restaurants in the United States. That's quite a nationwide expansion. I wonder how many more they had in the other countries by that time. As of 2005 they only had 63 restaurants left, all in Germany and Austria.

Of course, you should know that I'm not going to just talk about this menu without letting you all get a copy for yourselves. I have taken the liberty of scanning it in, cleaning it up, and making a PDF out of it. Click on the cover image below to download it. The scans look infinitely better than the actual item. In fact, I dare say that the menu hasn't looked this good since it came off the printing press back in the 1960s!

A couple of brief updates to the site were done this week. If you follow Spook Central on Facebook, you will already know about the first one.

All of the deleted scene photos from the Making Ghostbusters book that have been on Spook Central for the past 13+ years have been re-scanned at higher resolutions. This is the first step in my plan to eventually re-scan all of the old images on the site. Here's a quick list of the pages containing the re-scanned photos.

• Chinatown Ghost
• Couple Spends Honeymoon At Hotel Sedgewick
• Ectomobile Rejects A Parking Ticket
• Bums Stroll Through Central Park
• Pulling Up To Fort Detmerring
• The Fort Detmerring Ghost
• Louis Encounters Muggers In Central Park
• Getting Ready At City Hall, Janine's Lucky Coin
• Mr. Stay-Puft's Hat Falls To The Ground

Also, the 2006 Ghostbusters Official Score album, which has been out-of-print for almost six years now, has been preserved on the Ghostbusters Score page, along with its bootleg counterpart that was preserved a while back. Copies of the album have been going for well over $100 on eBay, and quite frankly, that makes me sad. Granted, that's what happens to something that was produced in a limited quantity of only 3,000 copies, but still, it's very sad that people who want to hear Mr. Bernstein's beautiful music have to pay such an exorbitantly high price for it - especially when it was originally sold for a mere $19.98. It's been officially out-of-print ("sold out") since May 24, 2006.

My first post of the new year is going to be one of my long-overdue Shot On Site articles. I have several locations identified and waiting to be written up, and hopefully I'll get to more than one a year.

Read more »

I've finally joined the 21st century and bought a PlayStation 3. My primary reason for the purchase wasn't the games, though I owned two before I even owned the console. I bought the PS3 primarily to replace a crappy Insignia Blu-ray player. (Insignia is Best Buy's brand, in case you don't know.) Every firmware update might fix one thing, or nothing perceivable at all, but break several other things. I won't go into details, but in short, DON'T BUY AN INSIGNIA BLU-RAY PLAYER FROM BEST BUY.

I knew that the Ghostbusters Blu-ray included a Ghostbusters PS3 menu theme, so that was the first disc I put in the system. That theme is now installed on my system and I have no plans to ever change it :-) If you've never seen what this theme looks like, I added some screen shots to the Ghostbusters Blu-ray page here on Spook Central. I also found out how to extract the wallpaper images from the PS3 theme file, so those 1920x1080 and 640x480 images are also available to download on that page. So if you've ever wanted to have that PS3 wallpaper on your computer, now you can have it.

The second disc I put into the console was Ghostbusters: The Video Game (GBVG), which was the first PS3 game I ever bought - six months before I bought the console. When you highlight the game on the PS3 menu it displays a nice group shot background image. I can't rip that image from the disc because my computer's Blu-ray drive can't read PS3 discs (only one model in the world reportedly can, and mine isn't it), but I did do an analog screen capture of it - which you'll find below, and also on the Ghostbusters: The Video Game page here on Spook Central.


The PS3 version of GBVG also includes 6 "exclusive" videos (as in "not on PC or [presumably] Xbox 360") that are already unlocked from the start. I added a list of them to the bottom of "Unlockables" tab here on Spook Central. One of these is the Ghostbusters' commercial seen on Dana's television in the film, only without the on-screen graphics and shown in it's complete form in full screen (4:3 pillarboxed into 16:9). This is an incredible bonus never seen elsewhere before, and it isn't even advertised on the back of the case! This is NOT on the Ghostbusters Blu-ray. Below is my 640x480 analog recording of this video. (I can only record video from my newly-purchased PS3 through the analog composite output captured at 640x480, so the quality isn't as great as if I did a direct digital rip from the disc, but I think it'll suffice. The only other copy known to exist online is missing the first second or two, so at least this one is complete.)

Thanks to the tireless efforts of Matthew Jordan, the "Ghostbusters" novel by Larry Milne has now been preserved as part of the Ghostbusters PDF eBook Preservation Project. You can download the PDF on the Ghostbusters Books page.

The Milne novel, which was published in Great Britain in 1984, is most interesting as it not only includes a novelization of the movie, but also a chapter on the making of the movie, information on the cast and crew, and the movie credits at the back (book page 169, PDF page 86). Presumably all of this came from the movie's press kit. I haven't checked my copy of the press kit to say for sure that's the source, but that would be the logical guess. (Yes, the press kits for both movies will eventually be preserved as part of the project, too.) The last four pages of the book are full-color photos from the movie.