It’s hard to put a finger on what exactly made many fans dislike Extreme Ghostbusters so much… here’s my understanding of it:
Equipment/Car/Charaters design: Something I champion as the poorest conceived part of the show, a lot of the design. The old RGB equipment was put into the cupboards because it was ‘under powered’. This seemed a rather poor justification for what I felt was a poorer system… I’ll never believe a cartridge based system is more powerful then the built in cyclotron system in the long run… but they could have easily retired the older equipment because ‘it’s out of date’ or ‘potentially dangerous to use after 6 years of being stored away’. It felt a little… snobbish, the way the new equipment was brought in and the old taken out of active service. In addition, while some might have called it silly, Ecto-2 could have been of use in some episodes.
The Ecto-1, one of the primary reasons I figure there were legal problems behind the show… it by far was changed the most and the only design feature that made it a Cadillac was the tail fins. It seemed obvious the car was redesigned in order to fly under the radar of legal licencing fees and if you’re not willing or able to pursue something as iconic as Ecto-1… what are you willing to pursue? It might have been better just to have retired the car fully and bring in a new one… even at the risk of alienating fans.
The character designs were a little unusual… some felt that the RGBs had been aged too much as it had aonly ben six years since the last RGB episode…
Laziness: Coupled with the Ecto-1 remarks, the show hardly hit all cylinders when it came to originality, firstly some could say several of the stories borrowed partly or fully from RGB episodes and that they weren’t able to create a whole series of original stories.
In addition, animation wise the logos would often be drawn as a empty prohibition symbol… the animators not bothering to draw in the ghost… and even further that a mannequin of Venkman had its face ditially blurred… adding more credence of possible legal problems.
Furthermore, you would actually see characters get reused in the backgrounds which just seemed incredibly lazy… like the animators only designed 15 or so characters for the show and would pick and choose which ones reappeared there… even if the design wasn’t playing the same character.
The Company: We hardly ever saw the Ghostbusters get paid or hassle customers for their fee… we saw them on the verge of bankruptys alot but hardly any time was shown to them getting their deserved payment.
The Characters: It is easy to see why some will call the XGBs politically correct… there were a wide selection of the New York demograph which seemed a little unrealistic… but you have to consider your personal views on that… Still, few of them in the cartoon seemed to have redeeming features that made you want them to survive every episode.
It’s a wide mix of things really, and there’s plenty more then the ones I’ve listed.
Another prime one, is the belief that the whole thing was designed simply to promote a toy line.
Since it was given an extension by the fanfic writers and artists, I’ve come to enjoy the series as a whole… but it needed more refining before it was released to the masses.
