I’m having an RGB marathon right now, which I tend to do when I’m feeling under the weather and call in sick to work. I guess it takes me back to my youth when being sick meant staying home from school and watching cartoons. Anyway, that cheesy 80’s music in the background of action sequences always amuses/annoys me, as an adult. I wonder if that was actually 80’s pop music back in the day or if it was recorded specifically for the cartoon.
Does anyone know? 
If we’re talking about the pieces like “Hometown Hero”, “The Boogieman”, “Charge me up”, then all that stuff was specially recorded for the show.
The 1980’s pop songs heard in the first season and the syndicated season episodes are performed by a group called Tahiti.
During the height of of The Real Ghostbusters popularity an album was released containing all of the songs by Tahiti. The instrumental music you hear in many of the episodes was composed by Haim Saban and Suki Leavy.
Ahhh…thanks for the info. I was always curious about those tunes. They’re just so…80’s.
If anyone is interested, I have the entire Tahiti RGB collection. That music rules. It’s drivin’ me crazy.
Ha! That’s awesome!
I always did like the dark, eerie instrumental music in the background.
If you’re talking about the Tahiti music, that soundtrack is still cool in my opinion. It really captures the energy, innocence (and yes, sometimes cornyness) of the 80’s, but its all in good fun. If you grew up with this show & just remember 1980’s in general, many of those songs exude that inexplicable larger-than-life magic & really brings moments like when the giant toy ghost from the episode “Ghost ‘R’ Us” is rampaging down the Brooklyn Bridge to life.
Another example is the “Boogieman” song in the episode “Knock, Knock”. There’s a version of that episode without that song in my Time Life RGB collection. Instead, it plays the instrumental version of the main theme & in my opinion, it doesn’t nearly have the same impact. The omission of that song for that moment alone makes the collection just a little less than perfect. The “Boogieman” song paired with everything that happens in that scene–flying subway car & all–is done in the way only the 80’s could do it which was extravagantly over-the-top. Because there are those moments in the series that often mirrored the “ghosts run amok in the city” moments from the GB movies and the music helps to encompass that (i.e. “Magic” and “Flip City”), the Tahiti tracks don’t seem so out of place. It’s really quite rare to have that amount of attention to detail put in an animated show–albeit only one season, but it makes The Real Ghostbusters all the more special.
The RGB soundtrack & its score pretty much defined NYC’s brand of cool for me as a kid. Its as big & tall as the skyscrapers themselves. The bridge parts to “Party On His Mind” & “Midnight Action”…yeeeah, that does it for me. 
See now I’ve heard this sentiment before but I always prefered the instrumental version.
That being said I do love the tahiti soundtrack. It gives the cartoon a nice time capsule and big budget feel that other cartoons from that era lack.
I always felt that the animation in that scene in “Knock Knock” was paced against the Boogieman song and it kind of threw things off with the GB theme song in there.
How do you guys make the icon-thingies with Ray an Winston?
Off-topic… but if they were anything like the ones I made (Boogieman, Peck, Vigo, Louis, Ecto-1) they were probably made in Microsoft Paint and then animated in a program that makes gif animations.
When I used to write GB stories, I would always project the instrumental music in my head for various scenes to give them the right tone. I’ve downloaded three of the Tahiti songs on my MP3: Midnight Action (my favorite), Party on His Mind, and the Sandman one (forget the name).
How can I make/use it?
Like that?
As I said, if you have a program like Microsoft Paint, that will let you make the basic graphic, and the different stages the animation would feature. To animate it, you’d then need a program like Animation Shop Pro which can make animated .gif files. And to use them in a post, just click on one of them and the forum will add the coding to your post.
I would like to suggest taking any further discussion of the animated smilies to a new topic, as this one is about the cartoon’s music.