Wanted to share with you guys a recent acquisition for my collection.
Towards the end of the KennerReal Ghostbusters line, there was a planned vehicle named the “Fire Frighter”. This vehicle would have partially used the tooling for an unproduced Police Academy vehicle called the “Jail Jalopy”-
The “Fire Frighter” would have had additional tooling added on to the pre-existing front section- A containment section and a large crane piece for grabbing ghosts-
Due to the line’s declining sales at retail, this and many other Ghostbusters items never made it to production. A couple of prototypes for this vehicle have surfaced over the years… And while I don’t have the truck itself, I was lucky enough to buy these (sourced from a former Kenner employee) this past weekend:
Pictured here is a production-ready crane arm for the Fire Frighter, along with the original engineering pilot kitbash (one of a kind).
Needless to say, I am overjoyed to even own this little chunk of unproduced Ghostbusters toy history! I plan on having them cased together in an acrylic display soon. I will update this thread when I do!
Awesome! I hope that soon the mold for the truck itself surfaces online. Had The Real Ghostbusters toy line sold better, I know that I defiantly would have gotten this toy if Kenner produced it along with Egon’s lab.
This intriguing vehicle would have been so complimentary to the Ghostbusters firehouse. It could have had a whimsical back story like if this Ghost hunting vehicle was repurposed from an old Firetruck that came inside the Ghostbusters Firehouse. Nice little pieces Brother.
This makes me want to locate something I made myself when the RGB toys were still on shelves. I don’t guess I would’ve yet known about the planned “Fire Frighter” vehicle, but by pure coincidence I took an old Kenner Play-Doh “Pumper Number 9” fire truck and painted it white, even called it the Ecto-9 or something like that. I want to say I used the same red stick-on letters for the name that I’d bought to do the ‘no handle’ wording on my slime-blower, and I am pretty sure I even put caution stripes on it.
But see, it was red to begin with, so if I’d known about the Fire Frighter, I wouldn’t have painted that toy white.
I’ve got some boxes that were in my parents’ attic. I might need to sift through them and see if that custom item survived.
Best way to find something that you have no idea where it’s gotten shoved to over the decades? Go looking for something else entirely.
While looking for my home-made Ecto-goggles from the 80s-- which still elude me-- I instead found a box of old Kenner RGB stuff.
Lo and behold, there was Ecto-5. (Not 9 as I’d said earlier.)
Judging from the red vinyl letters for the name and the caution tape on the cherry picker-- both purchased to fashion a homemade slime-blower using little more than a poster image as reference-- this project must’ve occurred during or shortly after the summer of '89.
