Write a quick introduction to introduce yourself.
By Alex Newborn
#345017
Hello all,

Ghostbusters was a hugely impacting film on my life. Was 14 when it first came out, got my first VCR right before the cartoon started coming out, made my first thrown-together uniform for Halloween of 86 or so. Corresponded with the writer of the RGB comic, James Van Hise, for a long time and even got my name on the title page a couple of times when he needed tapes of episodes or used my suggestions.

I remember Ghostbusters was big in England when I went to London the summer of '88. I loved the fact that their no-ghost symbols were mirror-image of ours. I bought several books including the UK novelisation by a totally different author, and three or four 'Ghosts in a Can', gotten at the Burger King in Piccadilly Circus.

Saw GB2 twice on opening day and came home to find a copy of the screenplay in my mailbox, a present from Jim, who had received an advance copy so he could adapt it for the comic. I have pretty much every toy Kenner made for the RGB line, and even into college I would occasionally upgrade my costume.

Eventually, I took the homemade patches off of my grey* Dickies jumpsuit and repurposed it as an Imperial Scanning Crew technician from Star Wars... ironically the Imperial Officer hat and patches were purchased from Katarra8 at the time!

[*You will forgive me the grey suit, I hope, as I was matching it to the movie poster since it was the largest photo reference I had... plus I am colorblind, so I took Casey Kasem's line 'boys in grey' as gospel.]

Got the Mattel PKE Meter back in January and have been seriously contemplating making a more accurate GB uniform for this Halloween. Have been debating the pros and cons of this idea... and then today I suddenly saw Donkey8012's Ectomobile driving around my hometown, and said "It's a sign!"

I just won an auction for volleyball kneepads, a patch, and a belt. The choice is made!

Alex Newborn
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By Alex Newborn
#345384
As I move forward with my new uniform, I think it's important to go back to the beginning and remember where I've come from...

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Here it is. My very first Ghostbusters costume. I'm the one on the right. That's my buddy Dave on the left. We were both about 16, so this is October of 1986. These were thrown together in a matter of hours on the spur of the moment, to be worn to a local 'Haunted House' since I would be out of town on Halloween. These were made from whatever items lying around my house we could scrounge, including a dark and a light blue short-sleeve Dickies worksuit.

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Alternate view. In my scrapbook is a caption that reads, "I look more like Heywood Floyd from 2010 than I do a Ghostbuster." Wildly inaccurate, I know, but we had fun. Not without its repercussions, though. We met a girl that night at the Haunted House who wound up being first my girlfriend and later Dave's ex-wife, LOL.

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For Halloween itself, I was in Arkansas visiting relatives, but I took the costume with me. Here's a shot of me and my cousin Sean just before we went trick-or-treating. The octagonal styrofoam backpack is one of the two Dave and I made, I guess it was just because we had two pieces that matched, but it would influence a later styro choice of pack in the future. Sean, by the way, very shortly outgrew me.

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The second iteration, Halloween 1987. I spent money on a grey jumpsuit but, uh, for some reason I still bought a short-sleeve one? Scratching my head over the logic there. Note the joke item attached to my belt... a mousetrap painted white and affixed to a switchplate painted black and yellow... a working 'ghost trap'. The no-ghost symbol on it was cut from a box of Ghostbusters cereal!

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I've got a long-sleeve jumpsuit now, still grey instead of khaki. Bear in mind this was all done with no internet, no resources other than a Pan-and-Scan VHS copy of the movie taped off HBO! I used the movie poster for most of the details. Not sure if Dave has procured his own short-sleeve one, or if he's inherited mine. And I can't for the life of me recall how we found out Stay-Puft was gonna be at the Toys R Us in Huntsville AL, but we loaded up just the coveralls and made the 70-mile drive for this photo op. Also there that day was someone dressed as the Noid from Domino's Pizza, but apparently I have no pics of him.

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Back to Huntsville another time for a gaming convention. It says October '88 so this is my third straight year dressed as a Ghostbuster. I had only begun playing RPG's a couple of weeks before, at the urging of all of my friends who had been playing since they were seven and eight years old, but I tagged along on their con trip so I could enter the costume contest. Somehow, I advanced to the D&D semi-finals, and none of them did, so after that I was pretty much ostracized from the RPG stuff unless I Ghostmastered a GB game.

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A rare shot where we actually got our buddy Doug to dress up in one of the spare short-sleeve jumpsuits. Just yesterday Dave commented how he looks exactly like Egon with that hair. Speaking of hair, I miss mine. And being that skinny. Sigh. Minor upgrades to the equipment: handle to the ghost trap was previously a paint scraper, now replaced with a broken handle from my sister's baby stroller; Dave is holding the heavy two-flashlights-joined-by-a-wooden-box thrower, while I am sporting a lightweight foam duplicate made since the heavy one can't be holstered on the side of the pack; Doug sports a gun based on an episode of RGB, can't for the life of me remember what it's called but it looked cool. And on his belt is the PKE Meter... made from a hairbrush handle, an Atari paddle controller, and the clear tubes from a Push-Up.

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This is Halloween of either 1988 or 1989, not sure. My nephew Dillon is a mini-Ghostbuster with a Kenner proton pack and Ecto-Goggles. Hard to remember he was ever that small... he is now taller than me. Good view of my hand-made no-ghost patch here. I still have it, I should scan it.

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My other nephew, Tucker, in a tiny Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man costume that I made for him. I am pretty sure this was 1988, but it could have been '89. And yes... He too is now taller than me. Note the kneepads dyed grey; I didn't know they wore kneepads for elbow pads in the movie, it was just all I could find. I was such a pioneer!

[By the way, I don't know why I was wasting my time dressing as a Ghostbuster, when I could have just worn those glasses and gone as Bryce from Max Headroom!]

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Now this one is DEFINITELY 1989, as you can see by the found object that I painted yellow. I had no idea what a "Lifegard PASS alarm" was, I just knew they had something yellow on their belts, so when I found a little dead Walkman or whatever it was with a clip built onto the back, I slapped a coat of spraypaint and another cereal logo on it. Man, I wish I could find those boots! That's really bugging me. The holster slot on the pack is now occupied by a 'ghost bomb' as seen on the cartoon. It was some plastic juice bottle, with a detonator button made from parts removed from that same Atari paddle controller that became the PKE meter.

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Here I am channeling Ray. The stroller handle on the ghost trap has now been painted black. Wonder where those gloves are now? Note the small black maglite in the pocket on my left bicep-- was I channeling the future video game? Also in the belt pouch, I can just make out the silver top of my 'ghost repeller'; faux 'holy water' in a pump bottle.

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I'm actually pretty proud of the slimeblower that I built from junk. The main tank is two Pepsi bottles mated together. Back then, a Pepsi bottle had a separate black base that was just hotglued on. Once you removed it, you had a domed bottom to the bottle. The sideways tank below it is the domed section of a third bottle with the black base reattached at the opposite end. The working lights came from some headband-mounted headlights my electrician Dad had... similar to the thing Egon blinds Peter with when examining Dana in the firehall. You can see the wires going down to the large lantern battery in my pocket. The hose was from a vacuum cleaner, but it was brown with white spiral stripes, so I wrapped it entirely in electrical tape. The side tubes and the blower tube were all empty Pringle's canisters. The nozzle of the blower was some sort of plastic egg, maybe the old L'eggs pantyhose container? The blower was made with a caulking gun to give it some heft and a sturdy grip... probably one of the very same caulking guns Dave and I had used for neutrona wands back in 1986.

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Judging from the 'new' trap, a Kenner RGB trap painted black, this is sometime after Halloween '89. But it was the only decent pic I could find of my proton pack. The basic shape was a single piece of styrofoam, a packing case for a ceiling fan. The blades would be up at the rectangular end, and the circular area at bottom housed the motor. Too good of a resemblance to pass up, and it was sturdy and SO LIGHT. I covered it in black poster paper after learning the hard way that you can't spray-paint styrofoam. Luckily my Dad was installing ceiling fans as a side business during a layoff, so I replaced it quickly. More inspired by the movie and cartoon than any attempt at a replica.

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James Van Hise liked my pun "Samhain Chanted Evening" enough to use it in the RGB comic from NOW, and he credited me on the title page, as seen in this photocopy he sent me of the original black and white proof art. So, for Halloween of 1990, I took a slight departure in my costuming...

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Unfortunately, the flash photo doesn't do it justice.

That's it for photos of the costumes, but I've got some shots here from the following year that might still interest you!

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It is now June 6, 1991, and here I am standing in front of the New York Public LIbrary. Or at least the facade of it at Universal Studios Florida!

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I wonder how many of you felt compelled to take this exact same angle?

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I wish I had owned a videocamera that summer. Alas, I would not own my first moving-picture camera until summer of 1992.

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I bet this thing looked better at night, when you couldn't see daylight through the windows.

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Gift shop of Ghostbusters merchandise... oh, for a time machine!

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Periodically the containment unit in the gift shop would start to fail, and they even had the cinderblocks coming out of the wall, only to retract when the crisis was over. Too cool.

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Beetlejuice 'Dead' in Concert was a pretty neat crossover idea. But the star of the show was that Ecto sitting there.

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I totally missed the moment when the Slimer puppet popped out of the window, so to this day I am not sure how the switch was achieved.

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After the show, Beetlejuice climbed on top of the Ecto and they drove off through the tourists. I got right behind the car and my Dad snapped this pic of me holding out my right hand and touching the car, but my body is blocking that from view. When I saw the developed photo, I captioned it "Let's run some red lights" in my scrapbook.

And that's all the pics of the old suit. But if you want to see what I look like now, here's some video of me from back in January...



Sorry for the pic-heavy introduction, everyone. I hope you enjoyed this retrospective.

I was 'busting when 'busting wasn't cool!

Alex
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User avatar
By Fritz
#345488
Alex Newborn wrote:James Van Hise liked my pun "Samhain Chanted Evening" enough to use it in the RGB comic from NOW, and he credited me on the title page, as seen in this photocopy he sent me of the original black and white proof art.
Gah...I had this nagging feeling the name "Alex Newborn" was familiar somehow. That's where I saw it before! Always nice to have someone with a connection to the old comic.

Welcome to GBFans.
:)

--Fritz Baugh, a guy who got a couple of fan letters printed
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By Alex Newborn
#345551
That's some memory you've got there, Fritz!

Yeah, I had written letters often to other comic books, had some printed in various issues of Marvel's GIJoe, some Dark Horse Star Wars comics, I even won a No-Prize once... but I had never gotten a personal reply back from a writer before. In my letter to RGB, I mentioned that I had every episode of the DiC cartoon on VHS, so James wrote back to see if I could make him copies of certain episodes that fans kept requesting characters from. I can't recall exactly, but we'll say it was like Sandman and Bogeyman, maybe Samhain. I was surprised that they didn't have some sort of deal arranged with Columbia to get him what he needed, but I was more than happy to dub copies and send them his way, and then we just kept up a pretty regular correspondence the next couple of years.

Some of my coolest Ghostbusters books are ones he sent me, including a making-of that I had never seen, and when I mentioned wanting to buy a copy of the script for Ghostsbusters, he said "don't buy it, I have it, I will make you a copy!" When he was later adapting GB2, he couldn't reveal any details but did admit he was already in possession of the script for it, but of course was not allowed to divulge any particulars. I was bold enough to ask if I could get a copy later, and he said he would not be able to do it until the movie opened, so I thought he was telling me to remind him.

My neighbor Craig and I went to the first AND second matinees of GB2 on opening day, and when I came home I was surprised to find a large envelope in my mailbox! I tore into it and grinned, and wrote him "You cut that pretty close. If it had arrived a day too early, you could have been in trouble!"

Somewhere I've also got a bunch more photocopies of uncolored proof art from various issues... hang on... a memory floats up... and I'm pretty sure among those are four pages for the last issue of the GB2 adaptation which were cut at the last second when the movie's last scene was changed. I think the real comic ran with extra ads at the back or something.

Great, another thing to search for that I have no idea where it might have gotten to in the last 22 years!

Alex
By Alex Newborn
#345849
I was just in the middle of a post over at AlabamaGB.com when the postman knocked on my front door.

I have two packages here, one from Kathy Pillsbury and one from AJ Quick.

I wonder what they could be?

~~~

EDIT: Watch this video to find out!



Alex
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By Alex Newborn
#346359
NEW VIDEO! Got my volleyball kneepads, belt, and a logo patch in today's mail... starts with a neat anecdote about being in the right place wearing the right shirt last night.



Alex
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By Alex Newborn
#346365
TheRealPonyboy wrote:PS... I am close friends with "Winston" in your photo there behind the car ;)
Cool! Is he on here? I may have some other pics from that day I can post.

I recently watched the souvenir video of USF from back in the day... wish all of those rides were still there. Was surprised to see Wayne Brady as a walk-around Winston, but apparently he's confirmed it in interviews.

A Ghostbuster from New Zealand... I suppose that means you're a Kiwi GeeBee, eh? I sometimes chat with a guy over at the forums at Rebelscum who works at Weta. I've even got a little action-figure-scaled piece he sculpted of a particular cantina alien. My wife is a huge LOTR fan, and after I pointed him out in one of the documentaries, she wouldn't let me paint the piece he'd done. I have to leave it matte black, LOL.

Alex
By Alex Newborn
#347480
I ventured up into my parents' attic again on Sunday afternoon. I unearthed my styrofoam proton pack for the first time in years. It might make a fun restoration project, but the styro has shrunk or warped or something from the heat, and it has lost a lot of spray-paint due to flaking.

I had forgotten that I covered the styrofoam ceiling fan container in plastic shelf-liner (a wood pattern) before spray-painting it. I recently wrote that I had sheeted it in black poster paper. I looked inside and did not see the battery-operated lights anymore, so this may have been a later incarnation. The version I wore to a costume contest in 1988 had a cardboard cover to the 'cyclotron' and red lenses for the lights, powered by a LEGO light system.

It was later refit with a plastic cyclo cover (the bottom of a laundry basket, I think?) with opaque red circles embedded that look a lot like the part of a Push-Up that the ice cream sits on.

Also found the thrower, which was a custom-made wooden box that linked two black flashlights. One's light shone inside the box, the other was the tip that lit.

Amazingly, their batteries still worked.

Still no sign of the Slime Blower, but I haven't gotten to every box yet.

Alex
By Madcap
#348561
Ha, belt gizmo indeed!

Thanks for documenting your costuming progress; I'm about to take the same plunge myself. Also love the pics; I forgot all about the containment unit 'meltdown' until you posted. I'm hoping we took some pictures when our family went down there one vacation ages ago.
By Alex Newborn
#348644
I'm momentarily stymied from shooting more video. Last Saturday morning I went to purchase digital hi8mm tapes before taking my son to see Donkey8012's Ecto-1 in the UNA homecoming parade (http://www.gbfans.com/community/viewtop ... &start=240), and every store I went to was sold out. I went back a few days ago and saw a sign saying that the 8mm production facilities in Japan were damaged months ago, and they're working to get back on track, so who knows WHEN I'll find the right tapes again?

But I can still put stills together for future update videos, and my still camera shoots video, I'm just not sure if it's in a format compatible with Windows Movie Maker. But if nothing else, I can record voiceover that way.

I just ordered some better volleyball kneepads from eBay, thanks to a recommendation from Donkey8012, so don't worry about duplicating my previous efforts. These don't have any name brand on the pads to have to remove, whew! And they were cheap.

My flightsuit is at the seamstress having the patches expertly sewn on.

Alex
By Alex Newborn
#353612
Wow, I have so much going on that it's taking me forever to get these videos edited and uploaded!

Here are two shot last Tuesday!

[Youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e0APMXYQrbw#]Ghost(buster)s from the Attic, part 3[/Youtube]

[Youtube]url=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=deW-RFGSTyQ#]GB infomercial #4 Ecto-Goggle Parts[/Youtube]

And I'm still editing more.

Alex
User avatar
By Donkey8012
#353628
Those goggles are looking sharp already. I'm glad the pads worked for you. Have you heard anything from the seamstress since you made the videos?
By Alex Newborn
#353631
Yes, I've got the flightsuit back already (as will be seen in one of the still-being-edited videos) and dropped off the better elbow pads to be hemmed and have the black t-shirt material added, per your suggestion.

When I pick those up, I'll have one more little thing for her to do. Keep watching!

Alex
User avatar
By fifth_beatle
#353641
Hey Alex. Enjoyed looking at your pics. I'm about the same age as you, but only started making and wearing the gear 5 or 6 years ago. Your pics remind me of a few other gents around here, such as Bryan Fear and Sean Bishop, who also have GB photos spanning back 20+ years, and I'm always fascinated by them! :)

I know what you mean about the goggles / glasses. I like to wear specs too. I have two sets of the AN/PVS goggles, and I have one with a correct facepad, and the other with generic double-stick foam (as in the first movie). I can get my glasses in the foam version, not the facepad one.
By Alex Newborn
#353647
ProtonCharger wrote:alex, you dont need to type the full youtube link in the tags, you just need whatever is after the "=" sign.
Ah! Thanks for the tip. I couldn't figure out why putting in the same info at different forums was giving me such discrepancies in the results.

I think someone's been kindly editing my entries here.


fifth_beatle wrote: I have two sets of the AN/PVS goggles, and I have one with a correct facepad, and the other with generic double-stick foam (as in the first movie). I can get my glasses in the foam version, not the facepad one.
Ooh, that gives me an idea!

Not to buy another set of frames... but I did buy snaps to make a movie-accurate set of black elastic straps.

I don't see why I couldn't make a thinner pad to snap in and out with the real one.

Of course, then I may need a slightly shorter alternate strap, too, but that shouldn't be any problem.

Thanks for the inspiration!

Alex
User avatar
By Donkey8012
#353938
It's good to see you going the extra mile to make your gear look right. Also, I'm jealous that you got to meet up with the ALGB's. I bet trying those packs on has given you the itch like never before. Am I right? :)
By Alex Newborn
#353945
Yeah, I'm striking a compromise right now between having it 'ready' for this Halloween and getting things 'movie-accurate'. If I don't think a detail is doable by the end of the month, it's getting postponed, because I know this is not a one-time item for me.

I've already upgraded the goggle straps to a more Hollywood design. And last Saturday, Diane and I were comparing my flightsuit to the reference photos that I printed for her, and I said I was not going to do the leg hose this year, because I might eventually upgrade the entire suit, just to have one with the accurate storm flap.

Probably because she didn't want to do the patches over again, she had an out-of-the-box suggestion. She said if I found a matching khaki fabric, she could just add a storm flap to my existing suit.

As for the packs, it was very educational to see everything up close in three dimensions. It gave me a grasp of the details that photos and videos just don't afford... but on the other hand, I honestly don't know if I've got the stamina to wear one! The last comment I made to Jud in the video above, kinda hard to hear, was along the lines of "maybe I'll just get the yellow slicker and a hardhat, and that will be my costume" LOL!

Alex
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By Donkey8012
#353961
Yeah, the pack can cause some back issues if you wear it long enough and it is a heavier material. The mythos that I get hung up on is seeing The Real Ghostbusters jump in and out of that car with their packs on. I call BS on that. :) If we weren't nearly-dehydrated after the UNA parade, I would've let you try mine on. It's not too bad; it is a vac-formed shell. I hope to get a fiberglass pack one day.

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