As I move forward with my new uniform, I think it’s important to go back to the beginning and remember where I’ve come from…
Here it is. My very first Ghostbusters costume. I’m the one on the right. That’s my buddy Dave on the left. We were both about 16, so this is October of 1986. These were thrown together in a matter of hours on the spur of the moment, to be worn to a local ‘Haunted House’ since I would be out of town on Halloween. These were made from whatever items lying around my house we could scrounge, including a dark and a light blue short-sleeve Dickies worksuit.
Alternate view. In my scrapbook is a caption that reads, “I look more like Heywood Floyd from 2010 than I do a Ghostbuster.” Wildly inaccurate, I know, but we had fun. Not without its repercussions, though. We met a girl that night at the Haunted House who wound up being first my girlfriend and later Dave’s ex-wife, LOL.
For Halloween itself, I was in Arkansas visiting relatives, but I took the costume with me. Here’s a shot of me and my cousin Sean just before we went trick-or-treating. The octagonal styrofoam backpack is one of the two Dave and I made, I guess it was just because we had two pieces that matched, but it would influence a later styro choice of pack in the future. Sean, by the way, very shortly outgrew me.
The second iteration, Halloween 1987. I spent money on a grey jumpsuit but, uh, for some reason I still bought a short-sleeve one? Scratching my head over the logic there. Note the joke item attached to my belt… a mousetrap painted white and affixed to a switchplate painted black and yellow… a working ‘ghost trap’. The no-ghost symbol on it was cut from a box of Ghostbusters cereal!
I’ve got a long-sleeve jumpsuit now, still grey instead of khaki. Bear in mind this was all done with no internet, no resources other than a Pan-and-Scan VHS copy of the movie taped off HBO! I used the movie poster for most of the details. Not sure if Dave has procured his own short-sleeve one, or if he’s inherited mine. And I can’t for the life of me recall how we found out Stay-Puft was gonna be at the Toys R Us in Huntsville AL, but we loaded up just the coveralls and made the 70-mile drive for this photo op. Also there that day was someone dressed as the Noid from Domino’s Pizza, but apparently I have no pics of him.
Back to Huntsville another time for a gaming convention. It says October '88 so this is my third straight year dressed as a Ghostbuster. I had only begun playing RPG’s a couple of weeks before, at the urging of all of my friends who had been playing since they were seven and eight years old, but I tagged along on their con trip so I could enter the costume contest. Somehow, I advanced to the D&D semi-finals, and none of them did, so after that I was pretty much ostracized from the RPG stuff unless I Ghostmastered a GB game.
A rare shot where we actually got our buddy Doug to dress up in one of the spare short-sleeve jumpsuits. Just yesterday Dave commented how he looks exactly like Egon with that hair. Speaking of hair, I miss mine. And being that skinny. Sigh. Minor upgrades to the equipment: handle to the ghost trap was previously a paint scraper, now replaced with a broken handle from my sister’s baby stroller; Dave is holding the heavy two-flashlights-joined-by-a-wooden-box thrower, while I am sporting a lightweight foam duplicate made since the heavy one can’t be holstered on the side of the pack; Doug sports a gun based on an episode of RGB, can’t for the life of me remember what it’s called but it looked cool. And on his belt is the PKE Meter… made from a hairbrush handle, an Atari paddle controller, and the clear tubes from a Push-Up.
This is Halloween of either 1988 or 1989, not sure. My nephew Dillon is a mini-Ghostbuster with a Kenner proton pack and Ecto-Goggles. Hard to remember he was ever that small… he is now taller than me. Good view of my hand-made no-ghost patch here. I still have it, I should scan it.
My other nephew, Tucker, in a tiny Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man costume that I made for him. I am pretty sure this was 1988, but it could have been '89. And yes… He too is now taller than me. Note the kneepads dyed grey; I didn’t know they wore kneepads for elbow pads in the movie, it was just all I could find. I was such a pioneer!
[By the way, I don’t know why I was wasting my time dressing as a Ghostbuster, when I could have just worn those glasses and gone as Bryce from Max Headroom!]
Now this one is DEFINITELY 1989, as you can see by the found object that I painted yellow. I had no idea what a “Lifegard PASS alarm” was, I just knew they had something yellow on their belts, so when I found a little dead Walkman or whatever it was with a clip built onto the back, I slapped a coat of spraypaint and another cereal logo on it. Man, I wish I could find those boots! That’s really bugging me. The holster slot on the pack is now occupied by a ‘ghost bomb’ as seen on the cartoon. It was some plastic juice bottle, with a detonator button made from parts removed from that same Atari paddle controller that became the PKE meter.
Here I am channeling Ray. The stroller handle on the ghost trap has now been painted black. Wonder where those gloves are now? Note the small black maglite in the pocket on my left bicep-- was I channeling the future video game? Also in the belt pouch, I can just make out the silver top of my ‘ghost repeller’; faux ‘holy water’ in a pump bottle.
I’m actually pretty proud of the slimeblower that I built from junk. The main tank is two Pepsi bottles mated together. Back then, a Pepsi bottle had a separate black base that was just hotglued on. Once you removed it, you had a domed bottom to the bottle. The sideways tank below it is the domed section of a third bottle with the black base reattached at the opposite end. The working lights came from some headband-mounted headlights my electrician Dad had… similar to the thing Egon blinds Peter with when examining Dana in the firehall. You can see the wires going down to the large lantern battery in my pocket. The hose was from a vacuum cleaner, but it was brown with white spiral stripes, so I wrapped it entirely in electrical tape. The side tubes and the blower tube were all empty Pringle’s canisters. The nozzle of the blower was some sort of plastic egg, maybe the old L’eggs pantyhose container? The blower was made with a caulking gun to give it some heft and a sturdy grip… probably one of the very same caulking guns Dave and I had used for neutrona wands back in 1986.
Judging from the ‘new’ trap, a Kenner RGB trap painted black, this is sometime after Halloween '89. But it was the only decent pic I could find of my proton pack. The basic shape was a single piece of styrofoam, a packing case for a ceiling fan. The blades would be up at the rectangular end, and the circular area at bottom housed the motor. Too good of a resemblance to pass up, and it was sturdy and SO LIGHT. I covered it in black poster paper after learning the hard way that you can’t spray-paint styrofoam. Luckily my Dad was installing ceiling fans as a side business during a layoff, so I replaced it quickly. More inspired by the movie and cartoon than any attempt at a replica.
James Van Hise liked my pun “Samhain Chanted Evening” enough to use it in the RGB comic from NOW, and he credited me on the title page, as seen in this photocopy he sent me of the original black and white proof art. So, for Halloween of 1990, I took a slight departure in my costuming…
Unfortunately, the flash photo doesn’t do it justice.
That’s it for photos of the costumes, but I’ve got some shots here from the following year that might still interest you!
It is now June 6, 1991, and here I am standing in front of the New York Public LIbrary. Or at least the facade of it at Universal Studios Florida!
I wonder how many of you felt compelled to take this exact same angle?
I wish I had owned a videocamera that summer. Alas, I would not own my first moving-picture camera until summer of 1992.
I bet this thing looked better at night, when you couldn’t see daylight through the windows.
Gift shop of Ghostbusters merchandise… oh, for a time machine!
Periodically the containment unit in the gift shop would start to fail, and they even had the cinderblocks coming out of the wall, only to retract when the crisis was over. Too cool.
Beetlejuice ‘Dead’ in Concert was a pretty neat crossover idea. But the star of the show was that Ecto sitting there.
I totally missed the moment when the Slimer puppet popped out of the window, so to this day I am not sure how the switch was achieved.
After the show, Beetlejuice climbed on top of the Ecto and they drove off through the tourists. I got right behind the car and my Dad snapped this pic of me holding out my right hand and touching the car, but my body is blocking that from view. When I saw the developed photo, I captioned it “Let’s run some red lights” in my scrapbook.
And that’s all the pics of the old suit. But if you want to see what I look like now, here’s some video of me from back in January…
Sorry for the pic-heavy introduction, everyone. I hope you enjoyed this retrospective.
I was 'busting when 'busting wasn’t cool!
Alex
That’s great stuff you have there. Way to make me feel like a total newb 
