Welcome to Spook Central's special "Summer of Spotlight" event. Throughout the Summer, I'll be posting Ghostbusters Cast Spotlight entries every Wednesday at Noon (Eastern). Click here to view the current schedule. Each entry in this series will showcase a cast member of the Ghostbusters franchise - Ghostbusters 1 & 2, The Real Ghostbusters, Slimer!, Extreme Ghostbusters, Ghostbusters: The Video Game, and maybe even Ghostbusters 2016 - in a role that you may not be familiar with. Maybe it will be from a long-forgotten movie, a television appearance before they were a Buster, or some really weird bit part that I'm sure they no longer include on their resume! There is a HUGE SPOILER WARNING if you read this article, as I am highly likely to go into plot details.

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Welcome to Spook Central's special "Summer of Spotlight" event. Throughout the Summer, I'll be posting Ghostbusters Cast Spotlight entries every Wednesday at Noon (Eastern). Click here to view the current schedule. Each entry in this series will showcase a cast member of the Ghostbusters franchise - Ghostbusters 1 & 2, The Real Ghostbusters, Slimer!, Extreme Ghostbusters, Ghostbusters: The Video Game, and maybe even Ghostbusters 2016 - in a role that you may not be familiar with. Maybe it will be from a long-forgotten movie, a television appearance before they were a Buster, or some really weird bit part that I'm sure they no longer include on their resume! There is a HUGE SPOILER WARNING if you read this article, as I am highly likely to go into plot details.

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When you've been doing this for as long as I have - last month marked Spook Central's 22nd anniversary - you tend to become intimately familiar with historical Ghostbusters photographs. I've seen the same images over and over again in various publications from 1984 to the present. So, I tend to notice when they've been altered. Starting sometime between 2009 and 2014, Sony's lawyers decided that historical Ghostbusters photographs now need to be altered to blur the faces of background extras and to remove any commercial branding on objects, no matter how slight or illegible they may be. The reasoning, we assume, is because they don't want to pay for likeness rights or licensing. Bear in mind, these same photos have appeared in print and online in their original unaltered form for 25 years (from 1984 to 2009). I'm sure that Columbia and Sony never paid anything to anyone for their use all that time.

I first became keenly aware of the issue in November 2015 when I reviewed the Ghostbusters: The Ultimate Visual History book. At the time I thought that Insight Editions blurred the photos. I would later come to realize that Sony blurred the photos before they gave them to the publisher. A few months later, in February 2016, the Ghostbusters.com website was updated with a new photo gallery. I actually posted a list here on Spook Central of which photos in the new gallery were altered.

A few years ago, I thought this whole issue was a small, limited affair that could be easily covered by a small section I added to the Ghostbusters Wiki's page for the official website. Unfortunately, that won't be enough to cover the matter anymore. Recently, I've had a discussion about the matter with several other members of the Ghostbusters Online Community (trademark pending), such as Alex Newborn and Matthew Jordan - and they, in turn, discussed it with several others. We've each discovered "new" altered photos that each other was not aware of. Alex covered a few in his latest Pet Peeves video (also embedded at the end of this post), and I'll cover a whole bunch here after the jump.

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Welcome to Spook Central's special "Summer of Spotlight" event. Throughout the Summer, I'll be posting Ghostbusters Cast Spotlight entries every Wednesday at Noon (Eastern). Click here to view the current schedule. Each entry in this series will showcase a cast member of the Ghostbusters franchise - Ghostbusters 1 & 2, The Real Ghostbusters, Slimer!, Extreme Ghostbusters, Ghostbusters: The Video Game, and maybe even Ghostbusters 2016 - in a role that you may not be familiar with. Maybe it will be from a long-forgotten movie, a television appearance before they were a Buster, or some really weird bit part that I'm sure they no longer include on their resume! There is a HUGE SPOILER WARNING if you read this article, as I am highly likely to go into plot details.

Full story »

Welcome to Spook Central's special "Summer of Spotlight" event. Throughout the Summer, I'll be posting Ghostbusters Cast Spotlight entries every Wednesday at Noon (Eastern). Click here to view the current schedule. Each entry in this series will showcase a cast member of the Ghostbusters franchise - Ghostbusters 1 & 2, The Real Ghostbusters, Slimer!, Extreme Ghostbusters, Ghostbusters: The Video Game, and maybe even Ghostbusters 2016 - in a role that you may not be familiar with. Maybe it will be from a long-forgotten movie, a television appearance before they were a Buster, or some really weird bit part that I'm sure they no longer include on their resume! There is a HUGE SPOILER WARNING if you read this article, as I am highly likely to go into plot details.

Full story »