Ghostbusters II
After the discovery of the River of Slime beneath Manhattan and the team's return to active work, the Ghostbusters ran experiments on samples of the Psychomagnotheric Slime. Egon Spengler and Ray Stantz found a way to shift the slime from a negative charge to a positive one, then built the Slime Blowers to weaponize it.
On New Year's Eve, 1989, Ray and Winston used the Slime Blowers inside the Statue of Liberty to animate the monument, working in conjunction with a Walkman and a PA system playing a cover of Jackie Wilson's "(Your Love Keeps Lifting Me) Higher and Higher." Back at the Manhattan Museum of Art, the pair turned their blowers on Janosz Poha. Winston also hosed down Ray himself after Ray was possessed by Vigo. Once Vigo was driven out, Winston directed the slime at him and the painting while Peter Venkman and Egon Spengler hit him with proton streams.
In two of the screenplay drafts, the device's introduction plays out a bit differently. After the toaster is animated with mood slime and dances to "Higher and Higher," Peter wants to sell it, while Egon notes the team is investigating practical applications and thinks the slime could be a useful tool against certain types of manifestations. Ray reveals they have a prototype for a "pressure-forced, neutronically metered, fully portable delivery system" and sums it up as a "slime-blower," to which Peter sarcastically asks him to keep it under 150 pounds. A deleted scene shot just before the museum confrontation has Ray giving the device a working name: "basic prototype Slime-azooka BB-900."
Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire
In the summer of 2024, Ruth Myers, one of the Ghostbusters Engineer Corps, tested a Slime Blower on a person inside the Paranormal Research Center while Lars Pinfield and Lucky Domingo shared their findings on the Orb of Garraka with Ray, Podcast, and Trevor Spengler. The film also features the gun and a complete Slime Blower as set dressing, including a cameo in the firehouse basement.
Ghostbusters: The Video Game
During the Shandor Incident set at Thanksgiving 1991, a Mark II Slime Blower attachment was fitted to the experimental proton pack and thrower, also known as the Plasm Distribution System (PDS). The positively charged slime used here is green rather than the pinkish color of the original strain. The Mark II was used mainly to disperse positively charged slime to neutralize "Black Slime," which is negatively charged. The Mark II also added a Slime Tether mode built to capture entities without first weakening them or moving physical objects. In the 360/PS3 version, you can perform a "slime dunk" by slime tethering a ghost to a ghost trap. In an early draft of the game script, Egon points to photographs of the original Slime Blowers, taken from Ghostbusters II, while explaining the realistic version of the system to the player.1 In the realistic multiplayer modes, the pink slime can be picked up as a power-up and used to coat ghosts so they fight other ghosts. The stylized version of the game includes cameos of the pink slime alongside blue, red, and yellow slime in the Shandor Island level, and replaces the Slime Tether with a chargeable Slime Mine, where a longer charge produces a larger mine. The Wii/PS2 version also replaces the Slime Tether with Slime Mines that disperse a large amount of slime over a wider area. The fuller treatment of the in-game system lives on the Slime Tether page.
IDW comics
The Slime Blower recurs throughout the IDW comics, where the Ghostbusters lean on it any time positive energy, rather than containment, is the answer.
On a summer visit to New Orleans, the team was heckled by a mob that did not want them to trap their beloved Marie Laveau. Peter Venkman strapped on a Slime Blower and doused the crowd in positively charged pink slime, neutralizing them so the team could move on to their clients. Working alone soon after, Peter ran afoul of the Phantom Truck Driver. When his proton pack proved useless, he grabbed a Slime Blower and fired, only to find it set to the Slime Tether mode, which sent the phantom big rig crashing and wrecked.
A year later, Egon brought a Slime Blower to Roger's Apartment after Janine Melnitz began discharging Yellow Slime, but the positively charged pink slime had no effect on it. At Halloween, Ray used a Slime Blower on the ghost fire wall raised around Central Park at the Glen Span Arch, dissipating a section large enough for the team to get inside; he was then left behind to clear the rest of the wall after Stingy Jack trapped himself. The following spring, the blower was used to free the Hart Island Ghosts from Vigo's control.
In the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles crossover, Michelangelo pulled a Slime Blower from Ecto-1 and doused Chi-You, though it was not enough on its own to exorcise him from Winston; Leonardo and Raphael completed the separation. Slime Blowers were also handed out to the 101 Cadets during the mission to neutralize Manhattan's network of ley lines long enough to capture the Bronx Spook. After the Dimensional Bleed, Ray doused a businesswoman with positively charged slime to stop a forced possession by the H2 Ghost; the ghost tried to flee but Peter and Winston trapped it, and Ray declined the woman's offer to buy some of the slime. He later used a blower to exorcise an Atlantean Priest Ghost possessing Egon inside Penn Station. Class notes from Ghostbusters 101 #4 describe these as "20-gallon slime blowers (sometimes a lot of slime is needed to sever the bonds of possession)."2
Ghostbusters: Spirits Unleashed
A Slime Blower appears in the testing area of the firehouse sub-basement in Ghostbusters: Spirits Unleashed.
Design and props
The prop's creator, Stephen Dane, drew the look from period military gear. He has said his inspiration came from a magazine showing soldiers with large flamethrower backpacks.3
The finished props were considerably larger than the proton packs. By Dan Aykroyd's account, the Slime Blowers were roughly three times as heavy and four times as bulky as the original packs, and it took several crew members to get him and Ernie Hudson strapped into them. The only working part was the gun, a practical device with an internal spinner that sent slime out under compressed air. The tanks on the backpacks themselves were empty; the slime and air were fed in from large external tanks, four to five feet tall, positioned off camera.4
Despite how they appear in the movie, the slime blowers were not functional without external power. In a number of shots, large cables can clearly be seen running from the backs of the slime blowers to presumably offscreen power sources and pumps. If the slime blower was an actual piece of equipment, it would be extremely heavy and could not hold the amount of liquid seen in the movie.
Slime Blower Components
The slime blower prop incorporated several commercial parts:
- AME Mountain Zone Grip
- VARIFLEX halogen headlight, Model B-043
- TAMIYA 1/35th Kampfpanzer Leopard Medium Tank Kit
Prop history and fate
It is believed that only two slime blowers were built for Ghostbusters II. The slime blower props used in the film have disappeared and have never been displayed at Planet Hollywood or Universal Studios as several proton packs and ghost traps have. No one is sure of where they're being stored, or if they even exist anymore. It's possible that the slime blowers are simply locked away in a forgotten storage building, or were disassembled so their parts could be used on other props in other movies. However, the slime blowers are still likely to exist as Sony provided Mattel with details of the slime blowers for their toy line.
A new picture of the slime blower was posted to Sony's official Ghostbusters website in conjunction with the promotion of the Blu-ray release. While not positively a "new" picture, it is believed to be fairly recent, which would mean at least one slime blower is still in existence in Sony's warehouse.
Successor concepts
A successor concept appears in tertiary material. Egon's Journal, a supplement included with the HasLab Plasma Series Spengler's Proton Pack, describes a device Egon toyed with called the Ecto-Extractor, which would charge negatively charged plasm to positive and douse a victim, with a secondary function to extract the negative energy or entity into a built-in canister that had to be emptied into a Trap or the Containment Unit within 24 hours. Egon theorized the subject would be unharmed and would simply experience higher-than-normal positivity in the days that followed.
Toys
Kenner released a toy similar to the Slime Blower, the ECTO-Charger Pack, as part of its Weapon Action Figure line. The device also lent its name to two figures in Mattel's six-inch line: Slime Blower Ray Stantz and Slime Blower Winston Zeddemore.
Build references
GBFans.com hosts community plans for building a screen-accurate Slime Blower prop, including the Collaborative Slime Blower Plans and Slimer7's Slime Blower Plans.
References
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Dille, Flint and Platten, John Z. (2009). Ghostbusters: The Video Game (Draft Revision February 11, 2008), script p. 109. The line reads: "He gestures at photos on the wall: still from Ghostbusters II."
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Ghostbusters 101 Class Notes (2017). IDW Comics, Ghostbusters 101 #4 (2017), comic p. 24: "20-gallon slime blowers (sometimes a lot of slime is needed to sever the bonds of possession)."
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Wallace, Daniel (2015). Ghostbusters: The Ultimate Visual History, p. 153. Insight Editions, San Rafael, CA, USA. ISBN 9781608875108. Stephen Dane: "One of my military magazines showed guys with big flamethrower backpacks, so I went with that idea."
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Eisenberg, Adam (November 1989). "Ghostbusters Revisited," Cinefex magazine #40, p. 37. Dan Aykroyd: "The slimeblowers were three times as heavy and four times as bulky as the original packs. I think it took three or four guys to get us into them every time... The only thing that worked on ours were the guns. The tanks were empty. The gun was actually a practical device with a spinner in it that sent the slime out, and it was driven by a lot of compressed air. Off camera were the real tanks that fed our lines. These tanks were huge, four or five feet high, and contained slime and air."
