Plot
Atop the Eiffel Tower, three tired workmen finish their shift. One decides to nap in the Pavilion, despite a coworker's warning that the room was Monsieur Eiffel's workshop and is forbidden. He forces his way inside and finds machines still running, then clumsily knocks a clock onto a control box. The tower shudders with an eerie glow. He shrugs it off, promising to replace the control box lamps the next day. On a lower deck, tourists asking a costumed man for a photo realize he is a ghost. The three workmen take an elevator down and discover their napping coworker has been taken.
At the Firehouse, a Frenchman named Lucien begs the Ghostbusters to clear the Eiffel Tower of ghosts. Ray is reluctant, more interested in installing the firehouse's new satellite dish, but Peter and Egon are keen and Ray relents. Lucien promises to put them up in the best hotel in Paris. For two days the team takes in the city's sights and food, telling an annoyed Lucien it is all reconnaissance. At the tower, Lucien explains the power was cut as a precaution, leaving them to climb all 1,710 steps. After a band plays "La Marseillaise," the Ghostbusters get to work.
Egon is troubled when the P.K.E. Meter reads nothing, and the team is quickly surrounded by ghosts on both sides. He radios Lucien to restore power so they can reach the elevator, blasting through as they go. Ray and Egon notice the tower's girders strangely absorb their Proton streams. When ghosts attack the switchboard, Winston climbs onto the roof to stop them, noting he used to be a construction worker. Egon has the team reverse the polarity of their throwers and aim at the girders rather than the ghosts, which temporarily pulls the ghosts back into the structure.
Reaching the top, the Ghostbusters enter the Pavilion. Egon finds Eiffel's journal and the broken control box, and announces that the Eiffel Tower is the world's largest ghost containment unit, now about to explode. Eiffel had perfected ectoplasmic entrapment and built the tower to automatically attract and trap ghosts within its frame. The damaged control box, which molecularly bonded the captured ghosts, left the tower psionically porous so the most aggressive ghosts could escape. With about twelve hours before the molecular degeneration becomes irreversible and a few million ghosts are freed, Ray suggests strapping the control box to Egon's reverse-polarity pack to pull the ghosts back temporarily. It works.
The team meets with Lucien and government officials, and an elder official reveals two other sites where copies of Eiffel's papers were kept. Egon stays behind to study the control box while the others retrieve the papers, several ghosts trailing them. At the Louvre, Ray faces three ghosts that have possessed two Egyptian statues and a mummy; he destroys them, using his Ecto Goggles in the fight and lamenting he has no time to see the Mona Lisa. At Notre Dame Cathedral, two ghosts possess gargoyle statues and steal Eiffel's journal. Winston chases them across the roof, is nearly thrown off, and destroys the statue to recover the journal.
At sunrise, workmen connect auxiliary power from the tower's generator to a special console. As Egon prepares to connect the control box, a guillotine manifests and destroys it. Prompted by Peter, Ray seizes on the idea of using France's broadcast antennas to beam the ghosts across the planet into the Containment Unit. The packs are wired to the control box and tuned to 20,000 megahertz, and the plan works. The Ghostbusters are then sued by the cable company to compensate customers who endured five hours of angry French ghosts on their screens. Peter tries out the new cable looking for Humphrey Bogart or Spencer Tracy, but finds nothing on but sports.
Production
Voice recording for the episode took place on September 10, 1986, and its production number was 76045. The episode appears on Vol. 2, Disc 4 of The Real Ghostbusters Complete Collection box set.2 According to the episode's call sheet and SAG report, Maurice LaMarche also filled in as the voice of Winston for this episode; some episodes had voice actors cover another performer's part when that actor was absent.2
Jean-Marc Lofficier co-wrote the episode with his wife Randy Lofficier but went uncredited. At the time only one member of the household could be a member of the Writers Guild, so the two agreed that only Randy's name would appear on the script.3
The episode drew praise after it aired. Jean-Marc Lofficier recalled that Harlan Ellison telephoned within minutes of the broadcast in Los Angeles to congratulate the writers on the premise and its resolution, and that producer Michael Gross named it one of his favorite shows, while noting that one of the overseas subcontracting studios had not animated it well.4
Several details from the script and drafts differ from the finished cartoon. A pair of young American tourists at the start are described in the script as the "1986 version of Lucy and Ricky," the first ghost wears Belle Epoque clothing, and a display case holds French Revolution garments.5 In an early draft, Egon described the tower's structure as acting like a Faraday cage.6 The draft also routed Ray to the Louvre's Grand Gallery before the ghost attack,7 and included a cut sequence in which the third copy of Eiffel's journal was hidden in Montmartre, where Peter battles a shapeshifting ghost woman and an animated garbage can while searching for Rue Gabrielle.8 Where the finished episode uses a guillotine to sabotage the control box, the first draft used a ghostly French coupe and a cannonball-like ghost.9 The original ending had Janine bring wine and brie to the team as Peter fumed over the new cable lineup.10
Continuity and references
The Eiffel Tower in this episode performs much the same function as the firehouse Containment Unit at 550 Central Park West, attracting and holding ghosts. Slimer does not appear. At one point Peter mentions Schenectady, a city in eastern New York.
The episode is referenced in the IDW comic Ghostbusters International #4. On its pages several Parisian bystanders are lifted from the cartoon, including tourists who were on the Eiffel Tower when the ghosts escaped, a painter who sketched Peter, a woman in a beret whom Peter spoke with near the Arc de Triomphe, and a restaurant owner who sat with the team. A poster in one panel reuses a dusk shot of the tower from late in the episode, and a television in another panel shows the trapped elevator operator from the opening.
Episode order
In air-date order, this episode follows Ghost Busted and precedes A Fright at the Opera. In DVD order, it follows Janine's Day Off and precedes The Devil in the Deep.
References
-
Eatock, James and Mangels, Andy (2008). The Real Ghostbusters Complete Collection booklet, p. 18. CPT Holdings, Inc.
-
Marsha Goodman (1986). Episode Call Sheet and SAG Report, "The Ghostbusters in Paris" (1986).
-
Spook Central, "The Ghostbusters in Paris" episode guide.
-
Proton Charging, "Interview: Jean-Marc Lofficier," October 9, 1998. Lofficier recalled: "I remember that after that one first aired, in the afternoon in Los Angeles, we immediately, like within five minutes of the credits rolling, got a call from Harlan Ellison to congratulate us on the premise and the way we resolved the situation. One of the producers, Michael Gross, told us it was one of his favorite shows and even apologized because the subcontracting studio that was assigned to it in the Orient sort of botched it up."
-
Lofficier, Randy (2009). The Real Ghostbusters Complete Collection Volume Two Disc Five, "The Ghostbusters in Paris" script, pp. 4-5. CPT Holdings, Inc.
-
Lofficier, Randy (2009). The Real Ghostbusters Complete Collection Volume Two Disc Five, "The Ghostbusters in Paris" script, p. 12. CPT Holdings, Inc.
-
Lofficier, Randy (2009). The Real Ghostbusters Complete Collection Volume Two Disc Five, "The Ghostbusters in Paris" script, p. 26. CPT Holdings, Inc.
-
Lofficier, Randy (2009). The Real Ghostbusters Complete Collection Volume Two Disc Five, "The Ghostbusters in Paris" script, pp. 32-35. CPT Holdings, Inc.
-
Lofficier, Randy (2009). The Real Ghostbusters Complete Collection Volume Two Disc Five, "The Ghostbusters in Paris" script, pp. 36-37. CPT Holdings, Inc.
-
Lofficier, Randy (2009). The Real Ghostbusters Complete Collection Volume Two Disc Five, "The Ghostbusters in Paris" script, p. 41. CPT Holdings, Inc.
