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"Big Trouble with Little Slimer" is an episode of The Real Ghostbusters, the third-season entry that brings back Walter Peck, the Ghostbusters' nemesis from the Gozer incident. Peck sets out to discredit the team and, when he cannot expose them as frauds, hits them where it hurts by seizing Slimer for government testing.1 The episode was written by Len Janson and Chuck Menville and first aired on November 21, 1987.
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The episode carries production number 140005 and was recorded on June 1, 1987.2 In the DVD running order it sits at position 087, while it aired as the 089th broadcast. It appears on Disc 4 of The Real Ghostbusters Complete Collection box set, Volume 3.
Regular voice cast for the episode included Dave Coulier, Frank Welker, Maurice LaMarche, Arsenio Hall, and Kath Soucie. Guest voices were Lewis Arquette, Anna Mathias, Robert Towers, and Frank Renzulli.
One evening Ecto-1 leaves the Firehouse for a call, and Walter Peck and his partner Calahan follow it. A two-headed ghost named Double Bubble is wrecking a formal party. The ghost hurls a piano at the team, and Slimer is sent down the elevator shaft to scout ahead. Outside, Calahan sets up monitoring equipment while Peck declares he will expose the Ghostbusters as frauds. Slimer slimes Peck as he flies past, then leads Double Bubble back to the team, who confine the ghost. Ray Stantz captures it with a Ghost Trap held in his hand. The team finds Slimer has eaten all the party food.
Back at the Firehouse, Peck places a fake call claiming a ghost is haunting a government research facility in Queens, hoping to get the team arrested for spying. The Ghostbusters arrive at Testing Lab 5, where two scientists are puzzled over a centrifuge that has been running sluggishly. Egon Spengler unexpectedly gets a reading on his P.K.E. Meter, and Ray confirms a Class 5 with the Specter Detector, a device that resembles the ghost-sniffing meter from the first movie. A ghost emerges from the centrifuge, takes Slimer hostage, and flees down the hallway. The team traps the ghost and is congratulated by the facility's general. Watching Slimer, Peck gets another idea.
Peck and Calahan come to the Firehouse with a net and a strange box, announcing they are now with B.U.F.O. (the Bureau of Unidentifiable Flying Organisms). Armed with a warrant and the power to shut down the business, Peck takes Slimer, who goes willingly. Peter Venkman appeals to Mayor Lenny, but is told that because it is a scientific matter there is nothing the Mayor can do. The team decides to retrieve Slimer themselves.
At the B.U.F.O. facility, Slimer is subjected to tests. He cannot pass the lead-lined walls and grows woozy from bouncing around. The scientists lay out food groups to see what he prefers; Slimer eats everything, then empties a vending machine. A physician struggles to examine him without making him laugh, and Slimer slimes the room. The scientists deem him a possible danger to the world, which Peck uses as an excuse to destroy him in a cyclotron.
To get over the facility fence, Winston Zeddemore suggests Ecto-1's Jet Jumper, and after lightening the car the jump works almost too well. The team melts its way into the cyclotron lab. Egon cannot shut the device down with the master switch, and a scientist warns the cyclotron was not designed for sustained high-speed operation. Peck reveals he changed the stop code and wrote the new one down, but a draft pulls the paper onto the device and it disintegrates. With the facility about to explode and Peck unable to remember the code, Egon theorizes that if everyone fires their throwers together, the cyclotron's magnetic field can be bent like a lasso to halt it. The gamble works, but Slimer is nowhere to be seen until he reforms. The general thanks the team, fires Peck and Calahan, and awards Slimer a Good Conduct Medal. When Slimer breathes on the medal to polish it, the fumes knock out the general and his men.
Double Bubble is the two-headed ghost disrupting a formal party at the episode's opening. The creature hurls a piano at the Ghostbusters, chases Slimer into an elevator shaft, and is ultimately lured back to the team by Slimer and captured in a hand-held Ghost Trap. Double Bubble is the episode's only supernatural threat; the B.U.F.O. conflict that follows is entirely human in origin.
Calahan is Walter Peck's partner at the Bureau of Unidentifiable Flying Organisms. He follows Peck's lead throughout and never questions his methods. When the general fires both men at the end of the episode, Calahan's B.U.F.O. identification number is briefly visible: 62614. In a later non-canon cameo, Calahan appears in Ghostbusters Issue #11 (IDW Publishing), page 19, as a patron at the Roswell's Belda'r Cafe.
The B.U.F.O. General commands the Queens facility and is initially oblivious to Peck's agenda. Once the Ghostbusters save the complex from the runaway cyclotron, he fires Peck and Calahan and presents Slimer with a Good Conduct Medal.
Peck reveals that he lost his job after the events of the first film, telling the team how they made him look like a fool.1 In his animated design he wears a mustache but, unlike his live-action counterpart, no beard.
The episode shows that the Ghost Traps can be held in the hand, though the user has to look away as in both Ghostbusters films. The same hand-held capture had appeared as early as "Mrs. Roger's Neighborhood", when Ray trapped two lions. A scientist explains that ghosts cannot pass through lead, which is why the B.U.F.O. laboratory walls are lead-lined. Slimer's ticklishness during the physical exam had been noted earlier by Egon and Ray in "Victor the Happy Ghost."
Janine Melnitz appears with the team during the Queens search and rescue. Within the season's broadcast and DVD orderings the episode follows "The Grundel" (air-date order) or "Loathe Thy Neighbor" (DVD order), and precedes "The Copycat".
The episode received a pair of non-canon nods in IDW Publishing's Ghostbusters International #9. On page 1, panel 5, the B.U.F.O. Receptacle (the containment box Peck uses to transport Slimer) appears to the right of Jenny Moran's word balloon, and the monitoring device Calahan carried before Slimer slimed him appears to the left.
Some content on this page was researched using the Ghostbusters Wiki on Fandom.
