Have you accumulated a huge Ghostbusters Collection? Talk about what you have and show it off!
By Alex Newborn
#345578
Hi all,

My name is Alex, and I am an action figure junkie.

[everyone says: "Hi, Alex!"]

I'm still in the process of locating all of my old Kenner Real Ghostbusters toys among my parents' labyrinthine attic.. you know the warehouse at the end of Raiders? Imagine that but with the ceiling sloping in on you from both sides, oppressive heat, and itchy insulation everywhere. By the time you've shifted a few piles of boxes around, you're nearly dehydrated.

As far as I know, it should all still be up there somewhere, and to the best of my knowledge it was a complete collection, but for the most part I'm an opener so it's all loose except for the carded Ecto-Glow figures.

A while back, I rescued two or three large boxes and brought them home to take inventory. Everything seems to be in amazingly good condition despite the lengthy exposure to temperature extremes. I didn't locate the vehicles yet, though. No Ecto-1, Ecto-1A, or Ecto-2. Cross your fingers.

I also found my old Ghostbusters telephone, the one where the red slash of the circle-and-slash no-ghost logo was removable as the handset? But it had scrubbed up against some piece of my costume equipment that I'd spray-painted black, and the paint doesn't seem to want to wash off the phone. Awww. I loved that phone. Insult to injury, the VERY next storage box that I opened contained the original box for the telephone, sitting there empty. Doh!

I don't have photos of all the Kenner stuff (yet) but here are some pics already online of my Mattel/NECA toys and a few others.

Enjoy!

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~~~

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"Maybe now you'll never slime a guy with a positron collider, huh?"

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"The light's green, the trap is clean."

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"Well, now it is my turn, _______."

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"Are you a god?"

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"See ya on the other side, Ray."

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"Mother pus pucket!"

~~~

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cartoon homage

~~~

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"It's SHOWTIME!"

~~~

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"Kinda makes you wonder, doesn't it?"

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"She's French. You know that."

Alex
YoZiggy, NSGhostbusters liked this
#345591
A few weeks ago, I got a batch of loose GB figures from a seller in Singapore, because I wanted to try some simple headswaps while waiting for Mattel to produce certain inevitable figures.

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The lab coat Egon at left was the one from Club Ecto, which actually arrived before the two 'early' versions from Singapore.

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I had thought at first that I would just swap the heads...

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...but then I realized the bodies were identical on the lab-coat and courtroom figures, so I went one step further and changed out their torsos too, so the shirts would be different as well.

This yielded me a lab-coat Peter:
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And a courtroom Egon, who was quickly joined by a head-swap-only courtroom Ray:
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I also wanted to make a Louis-as-Ghostbuster figure:
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The leftover Vinz body gave me a place to display the alternate Vinz head simultaneously with the other.

Of course, for a truly accurate Louis-as-Ghostbuster, you'd need the arms of slimeblower Winston for the black gloves and GB2 patch, and the pants-legs-over-boots legs of the unslimed Peter. I think he'd be about a $120 action figure by the time you assembled all the donor parts. And then you'd still have to customize the hair and earmuffs.

I was glad I'd bought the Louis to customize, though, because I hadn't realized that the glasses had broken off of my original figure. So I swapped out the fodder head for the original and took this pic before gluing the glasses back on:
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I didn't realize how good the likeness of Rick Moranis was until I saw him without the specs!

I also contemplated buying an 'early' Slimeblower Ray from Singapore, but decided to just use some photo fakery to make this shot:
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That's the same action figure on both sides, just with a different head popped in, and the two photos combined.

Alex
#346671
For Star Wars figures, I've used 'tunghori' several times without any major problems. I did once get a Ysanne Isard figure who had two left hands, but I contacted him and he sent me a replacement, told me just to keep the first one too.

For Ghostbusters, I've used 'viperskingdom' twice now. Some of the figures have messy paint apps, but as I was buying them for fodder, I wasn't too upset. I used some Goof Off to touch up oversprays and smears on the limbs and a lab coat, but as I posted last night in another thread, don't use it on the torso! It left white streaks in the plastic of a Spengler torso that I'd bought for Louis Tully. Luckily, both the jumpsuited Venkman and Stantz fodder figures seen in this photo had actually come on Spengler bodies.

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So I had a spare Spengler for Louis.

I had actually noticed that the heads were not always on the right bodies when I placed the order, which worked out because of the specific swaps I wanted to do. I managed to get parts from eight figures in only six auctions, all for less than Mattel price. Had I been buying them from Matty for those same parts, the price would have gone up by two additional figures.

The weird thing was, when they arrived, the two 'early' lab-coat Egons both had heads with slightly different paint apps from previous Egon releases... and neither one matched the real lab-coat Egon which had already arrived before them.

I took some Goof-Off to the face of the really swarthily complected one and took his skin tone back down to the plastic he was molded in, which matched the other two better.

I wish I could find accessories as easily as the figures. I'd love to find someone in Singapore selling the tripod trap that comes with Slimeblower Winston.

Alex
#347855
Well, it won't work for every figure, but for the ones who are dressed in a labcoat or a suit jacket, which will hide the damage, I just slice into the seam under their arm and work a small flat-headed screwdriver in there and use it to lever apart the torso halves.

If I can get a Walter Peck figure kinda cheap, I plan to give his vested torso to my courtroom Egon.

Alex
#347859
That is a really good idea. I was thinking if I used the Hector Hammond Figure from Green Lantern series for parts I could use his torso for a figure. Hectors over large head is perfect for a demon head to use on a Slime Blower Ray body. Just ad a little epoxy putty on the head for stub horns and paint and your done. The head snaps on a peg just like the GB figures.
#349587
Well, once upon a time, I thought it was a good idea to group a bunch of perishable Ghostbusters items together in some RGB lunchboxes. One of them survived okay, but the other one did not.

Here's the resultant mess of leaving a Nestle' Crunch bar and an unopened Hi-C Ecto Cooler in an attic for about twenty years...

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I guess it was the rice crisps inside the Crunch bar that were the problem. As they caved in on themselves, everything inside the lunchbox got coated in a fine patina of chocolate dust.

Now, wouldn't you know, there was an Ecto-Cooler in the other lunchbox too, but it didn't leak like this one did. Which makes it even more painful that my sole copy of the 'Ghost in a Can' certificate of ownership, obtained at the Burger King in Piccadilly Circus in London when I was eighteen, happened to be in the one lunchbox with TWO catastrophes.

So I washed the CoO off as best I could, ironed it to flatten it out better, and scanned it.

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And then began digitally cleaning it.

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Still a work in progress, but a big relief to see it this clean again.

Alex
#350888
When I was buying figures from that Singapore seller, I bought two of the lab coat Egon. One to keep as Egon, one to customize as Peter. This was before the Matty figure went on sale... ironically, I received the real one via Club Ecto several days BEFORE my 'early' ones arrived from the Orient.

So my son was watching Ghostbusters the other day while I was working on repainting a Kenner Ghost Trap for his Halloween costume. I glanced up, and there's Ramis in a WHITE lab coat in the scene where they're interviewing Dana Barrett for the first time. I ran and grabbed the 'one too many' lab coat figure and disassembled him for a coat of spray paint!

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"She's telling the truth. At least she thinks she is."

Alex
#358205
So, I bought a bunch of custom fodder figures from Matty when they had their sale, awaiting all of those to arrive before I begin swappin out parts.

But I need at least one, and preferably two, loose GB1 Winston Zeddemore figures. Anybody got any extras they'd be willing to part with. I can trade you some Walter Pecks!

Alex
#364514
Alex Newborn wrote:my sole copy of the 'Ghost in a Can' certificate of ownership, obtained at the Burger King in Piccadilly Circus in London when I was eighteen
That SUCKS that that happened, but the cleaned scan looks GORGEOUS!!...Yet another GB piece from years past I've never seen!! I have the can, but never had this :-(...
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