Slimer! and The Real Ghostbusters was the title given to The Real Ghostbusters when the animated series was retooled in 1988 and expanded into an hour-long block. The hour wrapped a new spin-off cartoon, Slimer!, around episodes of The Real Ghostbusters, and the combined program ran under the Slimer! and The Real Ghostbusters banner on ABC.1 The retool also brought a new opening sequence that was used for the remainder of the series.1
The Slimer! segment put the team's mascot ghost, Slimer, in the lead. Many of its installments had little to do with ghostbusting and instead followed Slimer through everyday misadventures, often back at the Sedgewick Hotel, the location where the Ghostbusters first encountered him.2 The cartoon leaned on a Warner Bros. and MGM theatrical-short style rather than the darker tone of the parent show.2
Development
The idea of a Slimer spin-off dates to around 1986, when Richard Raynis asked the production team of The Real Ghostbusters to start pitching concepts. Dan Riba proposed a "monster high" premise in which Slimer attended a school filled with baby versions of classic movie monsters.3 By December 1987 a different direction had been chosen: a series built around Slimer living on the thirteenth floor of the Sedgewick Hotel, structured as two eleven-minute segments to fill a twenty-two-minute ABC block and pitched in line with the tone of The Real Ghostbusters.3
That hotel concept was dropped before production. The show was simplified toward a newspaper Sunday-funnies feel, and the character designs were revised to look closer to Looney Tunes than to the rest of the Ghostbusters animated world.3 DIC produced the spin-off with the Great American Animation Company, and a number of the writers from the syndicated run of The Real Ghostbusters were turned down for the project because the work called for children's stories.4