In 1988, Topps released a 90 card, 11 sticker set entitled Fright Flicks. Each card featured a photograph from one of 14 horror movies of the previous 10 years, with a humorous caption beneath it. The card backs featured frightening "Did It Ever Happen?" urban legends, which told a Twilight Zone-like tale in 100 words or less. The stickers poked similar fun, with puzzle pieces on their backs. The set was a "modern" version of Topps' Creature Features set from 1973, which featured Universal movie monster film stills with funny and punny captions below them. The template for both of these sets goes back to 1959 with the Funny Monsters set, which featured drawings of monsters in various situations with a joke caption underneath.

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Next year is the 35th anniversary of Ghostbusters, and I suspect we'll get new Blu-ray releases of both original films in honor of the event (each including one new bonus feature to justify the re-purchase, like the recently-discovered Fort Detmerring scene footage). Hopefully, Sony will also see fit to finally release the entire series of Extreme Ghostbusters on DVD. Are you listening, Sony? Well, we may have gotten a look at the new master used for the Ghostbusters II Blu-ray.

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Insight Editions has been releasing high-quality collector's-worthy Ghostbusters books for the past few years, and last year we got two. Ghostbusters: Ectomobile Owner's Workshop Manual (reviewed here) was the obviously release, but Totally Awesome: The Greatest Cartoons of the Eighties was another, and it likely slipped under the radar for most. This 160-page hardcover tome was written by Andrew Farago (curator of San Francisco's Cartoon Art Museum), with a foreword by legendary voice artist Russi Taylor (Minnie Mouse, the kids in DuckTales, Baby Gonzo in Muppet Babies, etc.). Coming in at a nice size of 9.5" x 11.5" closed, in full color print on high-quality paper, the book comes factory-sealed, so you'll know that you're getting a new, clean, untouched copy.

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Since switching to a new server a few weeks ago, Spook Central and subsite The Corner Penthouse had been having severe issues with the blog software. The blog provides Spook Central with its main page, and runs the entirety of The Corner Penthouse. After a few days of having to disable the blog while we worked on the problem, we have managed to restore it, while at the same time upgrading it to the latest version. Unfortunately, that created a new set of problems because all of the skins and plugins from the old version were not compatible with the new version.

Right now, we have managed to get both sites back to 95% visual accuracy with (near) 100% functionality. Raffaele and I... well, mostly Raffaele, will continue to work on getting things back to 100% all around. Meanwhile, everything functions well enough that I will be able to write the reviews and articles that I have had to put off since all of this started.

We used this upgrade as an opportunity to make the site fully HTTPS-compliant, so you'll have a secure connection here. Not that we're providing any sort of sensitive information, but it seems like everyone loves secure this and secure that, so why not provide that as well.

Thanks to everyone for their patience.

-- Paul

Way back in August 2011, I had some special Spook Central 15th Anniversary patches made to honor the site's milestone. I thought they were all gone, so I never sent any to Ghost Corps when they started collecting patches from the various franchises a few years ago. Recently, I found that I still had a few in my secret stash. I sent it to the Ghost Corps crew along with a nice letter on my translucent slime green stationary. Thanks to Eric Reich for the photo of one of the last remaining Spook Central patches in their display case. I bet mine is one of the only patches they have from a website!