Christmas 2014

This won't be a terribly long post, as I have plenty of family things to get to, and I'm sure most of you are pretty wrapped up in your own Christmas / Holiday fun, but I wanted to take a few minutes to not only wish you all a Merry Christmas, but also to show off the neat Ghostbusters stuff I got this year!

Typically, I'm a pretty big Scrooge when it comes to the holidays. They just seem to be best left in the past when you had all the joy and wonder attached to it. As you get older, it seems to wear off, and you fill the role of gift giver and hand the role of gift getter to a younger generation.

The transition is quite hard. It's never fun knowing that your best Christmas memories are far away in the past.

However, there can still be some fun and excitement involved. Alcohol DOES help!

This year Mrs. Ghostbuster let me open one of my gifts early. And what an excellent gift it was:

Yes, FINALLY I am the proud owner of the Ghostbusters LEGO set!

This probably took me a good two hours to put together with minimal breaks. I'll admit, I'm not the best LEGO putter togetherer by any means, but the Ecto-1 was indeed a daunting task to assemble.

After spending a large amount of time putting it together, I can kind of see what the big deal is about LEGO sets. They are indeed pretty fun. 

Now I really have to stop myself from ever buying more, because I could really see myself getting highly addicted to LEGO products.

Christmas Eve was spent at my Mother In Law's. Most people dread their extended family, but I kind of like mine. They are fun people.

My Mother In Law, with a little bit of help from Mrs. Ghostbuster, nailed it this year with 3 AWESOME GB shirts. I may or may not be wearing the Stay Puft shirt as I write this.

For those who may wonder, I am pretty positive these came from the JC Penny website.

As we returned home, ready to unwind and not see or hear another child's scream for at least a century, Mrs. Ghostbuster gave me my last gift, and boy, was it AMAZING.

I am now the proud owner of a giant ass Ghostbusters logo.

My wife knew I wanted this one BAD. A friend of mine sent me a photo of it from a comic shop that is a little over an hour away from here, and Mrs. Ghostbuster had it sent to our door just in time for Christmas Eve!

It's made of thick foam, and measures close to two feet across. Looks spectacular on the wall as well. The perfect addition to the Mr. Ghostbuster HQ.

And the perfect end to Christmas of 2014.

Be sure to stop on over to the Mr. Ghostbuster Facebook page and share what you got this year!

Extreme Ghostbusters Kylie!

It must be a rare day, because I'm actually updating this blog. It doesn't happen often lately. 

I'll be the first to admit that I only have so many hours in the day, and most of them don't pertain to pondering  "how can I get a few more views on my blog today?"

But, as we all know, no matter how much time passes in between postings, eventually, I always find some kind of time to update this page and try to entertain and inform at least some of you.

To be honest, I haven't even been very active on Facebook either. At least not on a regular basis. 

Anyways, you didn't come here to see what I've been so busy with lately, you came to read about Ghostbusters!

Today we take a look at Kylie from Trendmasters' Exteme Ghostbusters toy line.

As I mentioned previously on this page, the Extreme Ghostbusters toy line was highly underrated and produced in far fewer amounts than the Rel Ghostbusters toy line that had come out ten years earlier.

While kids of the late 90's were all about Pokemon and WWF toys, the Extreme Ghostbusters failed to hit a home run.

It's not that they were bad toys by any means, but they weren't something that was highly advertised, and the cartoon itself would be on at weird hours of the morning, like 6am where I lived. Name me one child who is bright eyes and busy tailed at 6am that cares about Ghostbusters.

Basically, we can blame the failure of EGB on poor marketing. Really, that's kind of what it comes down to. Had advertisements been heavier, and the cartoon been in a prime Saturday morning time slot, Ghostbusters as we know it may be a whole different thing today.

Kylie was a pretty cool figure. Not since the days of the Real Ghostbusters had we seen a female GB figure. Yes, technically you can count Janine as a GB, since she always came with ghost-busting gear, and often times suited up in the cartoon.

Kylie Griffin is one of Egon Spengler's students, turned Ghostbuster. She embodies everything of the late 90's goth girl, and also has a deep interest in the paranormal.

One thing I love about  the EGB series is that the equipment is a giant upgrade from your average proton pack.

The Neutrona wand is replaced with an easier to manage Plasma Blaster. Smaller, and more powerful, the Plasma Blaster packs an added punch to busting class five full roaming vapors.

The ghost trap was also upgraded and given a new look as well.

Kylie also came with Slimer, who always seemed to find a way to depress me in this series. Naturally nearly ten years had passed since the original boys in grey protected the streets of New York from goblins, spooks, and demons.

Slimer seemed to have aged, and not gracefully, in that amount of time. I suppose it speaks to our own mortality. Egon had aged as well. When they ran the Back in the Saddle episodes, everybody came back looking much, much older than we remember them. 

Again, yes, time passes, we get it, but it's always hard to watch our heroes age.

While Extreme Ghostbusters may not have been what die hard GB fans of the late 90's would have liked it to be, it certainly fit the "slacker, skateboarding, extreme sports, edgy" lifestyle that was present at the time.

Kylie and her upgraded gear, and rather unconventional uniform embody a lot of the 90's culture, but at the end of the day, it wasn't what we were used to, and for many, change is a tough thing to deal with.