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"Play Them Ragtime Boos" is an episode of The Real Ghostbusters. While on vacation in Louisiana, the team stops in a small town that has fallen under the spell of mean-spirited, jazz-playing ghosts who want to drag time back to the era when their music ruled.1 It is a Season 2 episode written by Michael Reaves and Steve Perry.
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Regular cast: Lorenzo Music (Peter Venkman), Frank Welker (Ray Stantz and Slimer), Maurice LaMarche (Egon Spengler), Arsenio Hall (Winston Zeddemore), and Laura Summer (Janine Melnitz). Guest voice: Sharon Noble.
A lone ghost plays a flute at a remote home, then vanishes. On their way to Mardi Gras and the International Para-Psychological Expo at Tulane University, the Ghostbusters stop to rest at the Hotel Boudreaux in the town of Muddy Flat. The place looks rundown and the brochure Ray is carrying turns out to have been printed in 1925. Peter brightens up when the hotel manager, Marie Cuttie, greets them. The same flute-playing ghost watches the team from a distance.
At midnight, the ghost is joined by other spirits, and they begin to play "When the Saints Go Marching In." Ray is drawn out by the music and joins the townsfolk gathering outside. The others follow, and Egon realizes the ghosts are causing a time slip. Marie scatters ritual powder and the ghosts vanish, restoring everything to normal.
Marie explains that the entity is the ghost of a jazz musician named Malachi, who wants to turn time back to the period when he was famous. He can place people in his thrall with his music, and the more people he controls, the more he can warp time. At a diner, Marie admits she is a Mambo, a priestess of Voodoo, but warns that she will soon be no match for Malachi, who keeps growing stronger. Egon calls Janine Melnitz and asks her to ship the team's gear, which she sends out for overnight delivery.
Egon and Ray work out the stakes: if Malachi succeeds, he will cause a "chrono-synclastic infundibulum," a world frozen without progression. The team is thrown through temporal distortions into the 1940s, the Civil War era, and a prehistoric period where they are menaced by a large marine creature that Egon calls a Megalodon. Studying the P.K.E. Meter, Egon theorizes that Malachi's sonic vibrations trigger a response in musically talented people, and that he could counter them with a correctly tuned counter-oscillation.
Ray and Winston return with bad news: the equipment was mistakenly shipped to Hawaii. Without their proton packs, Ray cobbles together makeshift gear from items at the Tulane expo, but it works poorly. Egon instead programs anti-distortion vibrations into musical notation and retunes several instruments to build a counter-oscillation against Malachi's siren song. Using progressively more primal and powerful music, the team finally disperses Malachi by playing 1980s contemporary rock. With the ghost gone, Peter stubbornly boards a bus for Mardi Gras, unaware that the holiday is already over, while the shipping company awards the team an all-expenses-paid trip to Hawaii to make up for losing the gear.
Malachi (also spelled Malachai) is the episode's central antagonist. In life, he was a famed trumpet player based in Muddy Flat, Louisiana, who died in 1942. His restless spirit became fixated on restoring the town to its glory days and began appearing at midnight each night, joined by ghostly band mates, to play "When the Saints Go Marching In." His music manipulates the local space-time continuum: architecture and clothing revert to earlier periods, and anyone with significant musical talent is compelled to dance without pause. The more people he ensnares, the more powerful his temporal distortions become, eventually projecting bystanders as far back as the Cenozoic Era. Ritual powder wielded by a Mambo can temporarily repel him, but his definitive defeat required a counter-oscillation delivered through rock and roll music. Malachi had no dialogue throughout the episode beyond a scream at the moment of his defeat.
Marie Cuttie serves as both the hotel manager of the Hotel Boudreaux and the local Mambo (a Voodoo priestess). She is the community's first line of defense against Malachi's recurring appearances and uses a traditional ritual powder to disperse him temporarily. She explains Malachi's history and nature to the Ghostbusters, though she acknowledges she is losing ground as Malachi grows stronger.
According to Steve Perry, there was internal resistance to the episode. J. Michael Straczynski never explained the reason but told Perry to write it anyway because he believed Perry could pull it off.3 The voice cast recorded the episode on June 27, 1986.1
The song Malachi plays through the episode is "When the Saints Go Marching In." Two versions of the episode exist with different background music for the parade scene: the television cut uses standard series music, while the VHS version plays "Party On His Mind," performed by Tahiti from the soundtrack album.
Egon's "chrono-synclastic infundibulum" line borrows a term from Kurt Vonnegut's novel "The Sirens of Titan," where it describes a wormhole-like phenomenon. During the prehistoric flashback, Egon identifies the marine predator as a Megalodon, a prehistoric shark, though the creature shown is clearly a reptile.
The Union and Confederate soldiers in the Civil War sequence carry historically incorrect flags: the thirteen-star "Betsy Ross" flag dates to the Revolutionary War, and the "Stars and Bars" was used by Virginia forces rather than in Louisiana. Peter also references the Battle of Gettysburg during the Civil War sequence.
Ray is the only Ghostbuster put under Malachi's control, which Egon labels "preternaturally induced hypnogogic ataraxia." His susceptibility to ghostly mental manipulation shows up in both films and in several other episodes. Peter's references to Philadelphia and Cleveland are throwaway lines; he also mentions the song "Good Evening Friends" and, at one point, characterizes the situation as "kismet."
Peter boards a bus to Mardi Gras at the episode's close without realizing the holiday is already over, which places the episode's ending roughly on the day before Ash Wednesday in mid-February.
Malachi later appeared in IDW Publishing's Ghostbusters comic series: a T-shirt referencing him and the episode appears on a character in Ghostbusters Issue #2 (page 12), and he makes non-canon cameo appearances on page 1 and Cover B of Ghostbusters Issue #10.
When Ray uses the makeshift proton pack, the proton stream is missing during an alarm cue, though the proton noise continues. In the makeshift-trap sequence, Egon touches the device and is shocked, but Winston, who is holding it, is not.
Some content on this page was researched using the Ghostbusters Wiki on Fandom.
Eatock, James and Mangels, Andy (2008). The Real Ghostbusters Complete Collection booklet, p. 6. CPT Holdings, Inc. ↩ ↩2 ↩3
Marsha Goodman (1986). Episode Call Sheet and SAG Report, "Play Them Ragtime Boos" (1986). ↩
Benjamin, Troy and Goldberg, Craig (2025). The Real Ghostbusters: A Visual History, p. 53. Dark Horse Books, Milwaukie, OR USA, ISBN 9781506749273. Steve Perry: "To this day I'm still not sure why they didn't want to do it. Straczynski never told us why. But he told me to do it anyway, because he thought I could pull it off." ↩