3 min read
Kathryn M. Drennan is an American screenwriter and author whose work spans science fiction television, tie-in fiction, and magazine journalism. She wrote three episodes of The Real Ghostbusters and provided commentary for the series' complete DVD collection. Outside the Ghostbusters franchise she is best known for the Babylon 5 novel To Dream in the City of Sorrows (1997) and the first-season Babylon 5 teleplay "By Any Means Necessary."
Join the community
Free accounts post in the forum, upload to the gallery, edit the wiki, and follow your favorite franchises. No credit card. No catch.
Drennan attended San Diego State University, where she met J. Michael Straczynski, who would later create Babylon 5. The two relocated to Los Angeles together in April 1981.1 She began publishing magazine articles as early as 1977, well before her television career took shape.1
Drennan established herself first as a magazine journalist, contributing articles to Starlog and Twilight Zone Magazine throughout the late 1970s and 1980s.1 Among her most sustained magazine projects was an eleven-part series titled "A Show by Show Guide to Rod Serling's Night Gallery," published in Twilight Zone Magazine between 1985 and 1989.1 The series served as a detailed episode-by-episode guide to the cult anthology program.
In the early 1980s she worked with Carl Sagan on the Cosmos: A Personal Voyage miniseries.1 During the early 1990s she collaborated with producer Michael Piller on Star Trek: The Next Generation.1
Her animation writing credits include one episode each of She-Ra: Princess of Power (1985) and Defenders of the Earth (1986), both series that J. Michael Straczynski was also writing for at the time.2
Her most recognized individual teleplay is "By Any Means Necessary," a first-season Babylon 5 episode that aired in 1994.3 She also wrote the ninth Babylon 5 tie-in novel, To Dream in the City of Sorrows (Dell Publishing, 1997), which chronicles Ambassador Sinclair's life on Minbar and remains the only Babylon 5 prose novel co-developed under Straczynski's close supervision.4
Drennan wrote three episodes of The Real Ghostbusters, credited alongside Richard Mueller:5
She also served as a commentator on The Real Ghostbusters Complete Collection DVD box set, providing a visual commentary track for "Egon's Dragon." In that commentary she offered a number of production observations: she described the barnyard ghost only as "all legs and no arms" in her script, leaving the visual design entirely to the animators. The location name "Nass Burg" was a personal reference to one of her high school friends. The episode's central creature, the Genius Loci, was inspired by the Leeds Devil (a piece of American folklore that later appeared in Extreme Ghostbusters as the Jersey Devil), and Drennan noted that the Leeds Devil's origins in a period when folklore was yielding to scientific rationalism matched one of the episode's themes. Several animated moments in the finished episode differed from her script: she had not called for the dragon to understand English, had not written the scenes of Loci licking Zedikiah and Egon, and had intended Egon to be grabbed by two separate claws aimed at both him and Peter Venkman simultaneously.6
Drennan married J. Michael Straczynski in 1983.1 The two separated in 2002 and divorced in 2003.1
Some content on this page was researched using the Ghostbusters Wiki on Fandom.
"Kathryn M. Drennan," Wikipedia, accessed 2026-06-13, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kathryn_M._Drennan. ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4 ↩5 ↩6 ↩7 ↩8
"Kathryn M. Drennan," IMDb, accessed 2026-06-13, https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0237472/. ↩
"By Any Means Necessary (Babylon 5)," Wikipedia, accessed 2026-06-13, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/By_Any_Means_Necessary_(Babylon_5). Season 1, episode 12, original airdate May 11, 1994. ↩
Drennan, Kathryn M. (1997). To Dream in the City of Sorrows (Babylon 5 #9). Dell Publishing, New York. ISBN 0440223547. ↩
The Real Ghostbusters television series (1986-1991), DiC Entertainment. Episodes "Night Game," "The Man Who Never Reached Home," and "Egon's Dragon," written by Drennan and Richard Mueller. ↩
The Real Ghostbusters Complete Collection DVD box set (Time Life, November 2008), commentary track for "Egon's Dragon." ↩
