“We just killed Christmas, Egon.”

Justin’s rating: I’d forgotten how creepy and good the spirits looked on this show. They really had fantastic creature designs.

Justin’s review: Can we sit back and acknowledge that Charles Dickens is one of us weirdos? The dude took one look at the Christmas season and thought, “Hey, you know what would make this better? GHOSTS. Kidnappy, freaky ghosts who play mind-games with their victims!” And then he somehow got his little creative writing project enshrined into Christmas forever to the point where we don’t even question it any more. Christmas has ghosts.

And if you have a problem with that, who you gonna call?

As we continue with Culty Christmas this year, who better to spend the holidays with than the boys in gray? I logged into my childhood by going back to a 1986 episode of The Real Ghostbusters called “X-Mas Marks the Spot.”

It’s Christmas Eve, and the Ghostbusters are grumpy because they have to answer a call in snowy, scenic upstate New York instead of drowning their sorrows in malt liquor. The ECTO-1 gets stuck in the snow, and when the guys get out, they are sucked into a vortex that spits them out into a Victorian village that’s hosting A Christmas Carol. Thank goodness they brought their proton packs!

Actually, that might’ve been a bad move. The crew takes down the Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present, and Future before Ebeneezer Scrooge can learn any lesson, leaving the old curmudgeon to wage an eternal war on the holiday. Returning to the future, the Ghostbusters find that everyone now hates Christmas. Of course, this being NYC, could you really tell if things had changed for the worse?

But setting things right again won’t be easy. For starters, they have no idea how to get to the past. And then there’s the unfortunate fact that Egon dumps the three ghosts in the containment unit, which means they can’t be retrieved without letting all the other ghosts out.

Egon volunteers to jump into the containment unit himself, which is a pretty cool idea for the show to explore, while the other three use the “time slip” to return to the past and stand in for the ghosts in the meantime. Cue a lot of slapstick comedy and Peter wearing golden curls and some pretty neat scifi stuff as Ego goes into this strange spectral world full of the Ghostbusters’ defeated foes. Apparently there’s a lot of callbacks to previous episodes if you’re in the know. I’m a bit rusty, though.

The Real Ghostbusters always had a bit more in the way of depth and production value than many of its contemporaries, and this episode is a good example of that. Sure, a lot of this is clearly aimed at kids, but there are some genuine laugh-out-loud quips, great ghost designs, and a nice little subplot about Venkman grappling with his own dislike of Christmas (due to his father never being around).

The climax is the highlight, with Egon charging through the containment unit in his bulky spectral suit and the other three hilariously attempting to be ghost understudies. Sure, the overall Christmas Carol is a very old hat by now, but it’s a classic for how easy it is to adapt in many ways.

Even as a time traveling ghostbusting episode of an ’80s kids cartoon. Scrooge and Dickens alike would be proud.

Intermission!

• This abbreviated theme song still slaps
• Ray apparently singed the fur off a cat with his proton pack
• If you have to abandon your car in the snow and hike to safety, better strap on your heavy work gear. Never know when you might get sucked through time!
• That is a laughably tiny duck for dinner
• Yeah you can just barge into someone’s house if you see a ghost
• I love that Venkman immediately tries to charge Scrooge
• Takes the Ghostbusters long enough to recognize the famous story
• This episode has ALL the “bah humbugs”
• “You want auras? You get auras.” activates magnesium flares
• Egon’s cool containment suit
• Haha a Viewfinder!
• Slimer is the worst in this show
• “Tonight you’ll be visited by three spirits!” “Three MORE?”