Plot
At the firehouse, Janine Melnitz is interrupted at her desk when The Great Strazinski arrives and levitates his business card across the room to her, following it up with a bouquet of flowers. He explains that his vanishing-cabinet act has begun making his assistants disappear for good, and asks the team to examine the cabinet. Ray Stantz, who has seen Strazinski's show a dozen times and as a child dreamed of performing at the Magic Palace, is eager to take the case. Strazinski admits that despite being a magician, anything genuinely supernatural frightens him, and he bolts when he spots Slimer.
Ecto-1 pulls up to the Magic Palace, and Slimer sneaks inside through the exhaust pipe. The Ghostbusters find Strazinski on stage and begin analyzing the Magic Cabinet, while Slimer disrupts a nearby snake-charmer act. Egon Spengler concludes the cabinet is a dimensional gateway, its runes pre-Babylonian and possibly Crypto-Akkadian or, as Egon further speculates, Kabbalistic Lemurian, Pre-Deluge Period. While all four Ghostbusters are standing inside it, Strazinski remembers the secret word, "Goombah," and says it aloud, teleporting the team away.
They land in the Netherworld, sheltering in a castle from a literal rain of snakes. Inside they find a crowd of vanished assistants and a figure calling himself "The Amazing Gorgani." When Peter Venkman fumbles the card trick Gorgani demands, the figure reveals himself as the demon Gorgar: he breathes flame, transforms into a dragon, and pursues the team through corridors that loop endlessly in every direction because the castle is a pan-dimensional matrix. Once Gorgar loses them, Winston Zeddemore suggests a different approach: if Gorgar wants magic, give him magic. They all look at Ray.
Peter draws a mustache on Ray with soot and improvises a magician's costume, creating "Stantzo the Magnificent." Ray performs the card trick correctly, and Gorgar, overjoyed at finally meeting a true magician, begs to become his pupil. Peter negotiates a gateway home in exchange for Ray's promise to teach him.
Opening the gateway brings the team back to Times Square, but it also drags Gorgar through and creates a cross-dimensional conduit that begins converting the city into part of his realm. Gorgar, unconcerned by the chaos, practices his newly learned card trick on Slimer and succeeds. Ray takes Gorgar back to the Magic Palace, ushers him into the cabinet, and speaks "Goombah" once more. The cabinet surges with inward nether energy, reversing the outward flow, restoring the city, and apparently sending Gorgar back to his own dimension. The cabinet is destroyed in the process. Back at the firehouse, Egon explains the reversal using the "Selbert Theory," which holds that nether energy can flow in only one direction at a time.
Gorgar and the Magic Cabinet
Gorgar is a nether-entity of considerable power: proton streams have no effect on him, he can shift form into a dragon, and his realm operates as a self-contained pan-dimensional matrix. Despite the theatrical menace, his underlying desire is entirely benign: he simply wants to learn a card trick. He has spent an unspecified stretch of time collecting magicians' assistants and doves in his castle, waiting for a real magician to arrive. In practice he invokes magic using stage words, specifically "Abracadabra" and "David Copperfield." Gorgar is not permanently contained by the events of this episode. He reappears in "Guess What's Coming to Dinner," among the ghosts that escape when the Containment Unit is opened.
Strazinski's Magic Cabinet is the episode's central prop: a stage-magic vanishing cabinet that is also a functional dimensional gateway. Its carvings are pre-Babylonian; Egon identifies possible Crypto-Akkadian or Kabbalistic Lemurian origins. The gateway activates via the spoken word "Goombah" and, once the reverse nether-energy surge resolves the crisis, is destroyed.
The Great Strazinski, voiced by Maurice LaMarche, is a celebrated illusionist who named the episode's in-joke about the writer (see Production below). He is twice frightened away by Slimer, and a discarded script beat would have given him one more exit: Slimer was written to make him faint after the Ghostbusters are teleported.
Production
Larry DiTillio wrote the episode. He named The Great Strazinski as a tribute to former story editor J. Michael Straczynski; the gesture returned an earlier in-joke in which Straczynski had named a character after DiTillio in the episode "Ragnarok and Roll."
The voice cast recorded the episode on March 28 and April 4, 1990, with Dave Coulier recording alone in the second session.2 Coulier voiced Peter Venkman, with Frank Welker as Ray Stantz and Slimer, Maurice LaMarche as Egon Spengler, Buster Jones as Winston Zeddemore, and Kath Soucie as Janine Melnitz. LaMarche also voiced The Great Strazinski. Guest performers Greg Burson and Louise Vallance rounded out the cast, with Burson voicing Gorgar.2
Surviving storyboards document several scenes that were scripted but cut. Two of the trapped assistants were to be named Carmen and Miranda, and a discarded beat had Peter flirt with Miranda by asking whether they had met at a Grateful Dead concert. Egon and Ray were written to rattle off additional pseudo-scientific theories while examining the cabinet. A chase sequence involving a giant beetle emerging from a portal and being swatted by an enormous fly swatter was also dropped. An early version of the examination scene had Winston using the Specter Detector rather than standard gear. The Strazinski character had a final scripted appearance after the Ghostbusters are teleported, in which Slimer causes him to faint, but that scene was also cut.
Animation notes
Several animation errors appear in the broadcast version. As Egon opens the cabinet door after the demonstration, Winston is colored to look like Ray, who has just disappeared. When Ray is posing as the Great Stantzo, his fake mustache disappears and reappears between shots, and briefly his hair turns white while his jumpsuit shifts to resemble a green shirt with blue pants before reverting to normal. After Winston says "All right, New York City!", a visible body-outline glitch passes through his hands and Peter's.
Recurring elements
Gorgar reappears in "Guess What's Coming to Dinner," among the ghosts that escape after the Containment Unit is opened.
The premise echoes the earlier episode "The Cabinet of Calamari," in which the team likewise investigates a magic show and a cabinet that sends people to another dimension.
In broadcast order, the episode followed "Janine, You've Changed" and preceded "Ghostworld."
References
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Eatock, James and Mangels, Andy (2008). The Real Ghostbusters Complete Collection booklet, p. 37. CPT Holdings, Inc.
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Marsha Goodman (1990). Episode call sheet and SAG report, "You Can't Teach an Old Demon New Tricks."
