Plot
On a dark and stormy night, a butler named Portifoy answers the door for Mr. Kingsford, Agatha Grisley's lawyer, who has come to read her will. Portifoy informs Kingsford that he is not getting anything, then throws the lawyer's coat back outside. Strange occurrences repeatedly prevent the reading of the will, so Kingsford calls in the Ghostbusters.
At the Firehouse, the team is eating pizza and watching a mystery, and Winston Zeddemore correctly names the killer as Larry the Plumber before the show reveals it. When the alarm sounds, Ecto-1 heads for the Agatha Grisley Mansion. Winston, a devoted fan of Grisley's work, explains that she was the greatest mystery writer and died a couple of weeks earlier, and that her stories were the hardest to solve.
As the team rings the doorbell, a knife flies out of nowhere into the front door. Winston recognizes it from chapter twelve of Grisley's "Murder on the Hoboken Express," and Egon Spengler confirms the P.K.E. Meter reads ectoplasmic activity off the knife. Inside, Kingsford demonstrates the problem: every time he removes a sword pinning the will, another falls in its place. Objects float, guns materialize, and bodies appear and vanish, all of which Winston identifies as motifs from Grisley's books.
Peter Venkman falls through a trapdoor into a hidden room where Grisley wrote her stories, and the team is flung onto torture devices scattered around it. Ray remarks it reminds him of the 1945 Chicago Slime Creeper Room Incident. Ray Stantz finds an unfinished, unpublished manuscript titled "Raoul's Revenge," 321 pages long, and concludes that Grisley will not move on until it is finished. The manifestations are her way of prompting the Ghostbusters to solve the story.
While Winston reads the manuscript, the others search for clues among flying weapons and smoking guns. Apparitions act out the book's scenes: a woman named Debbie is caught in a love triangle between her fiance and a Frenchman, then poisoned with cyanide. In the kitchen, the fiance blames the Frenchman and threatens him with a bazooka, while a burly cook reveals that he too loved Debbie and has set a time-bomb to kill everyone in the room. As time runs out, Winston finishes reading and reveals the real killer: the doctor, who poisoned Debbie's milk because she refused to pay her medical bill (incurred from indigestion caused by bad gourmet food) and laughed at his car. With the mystery solved, the apparitions vanish, and the ghost of Agatha Grisley appears to thank Winston, taking the time-bomb and Kingsford's coat with her and leaving behind a final page dedicated to the Ghostbusters. Back at the Firehouse, Winston sits tied up and gagged while the others try in vain to guess the killer in another mystery, with Peter at one point offering Winston Roquefort cheese.
Production and references
Agatha Grisley is a play on real-world mystery writer Agatha Christie, and the in-story title "Murder on the Hoboken Express" references Christie's "Murder on the Orient Express." Portifoy, the butler, is named after a butler of the same name in the first episode of Rod Serling's Night Gallery, a 1970s horror anthology series.
The episode is one of several in which fictional characters take on ghostly form, alongside Captain Steel Saves the Day and "Who're You Calling Two-Dimensional?" It also establishes Winston's interest in the mystery genre, a thread that returns in Elementary My Dear Winston. A running pizza gag from the episode, in which Ray eats a slimed slice without realizing it, pays off later in The Devil to Pay. The episode also establishes that Winston does not like basketball.
A frequently cited piece of production trivia concerns the pizza the team eats at the end. The script called for pizza, but the overseas animators were unfamiliar with it. As writer Dennys McCoy recalled, "In 'Boo-dunit,' we wrote that, at the very end, they would have pizza. None of the animators knew what a pizza was. When we got the animation back, they were eating what looked like a cake."3 McCoy described the result elsewhere as resembling a three-layer Boston cream pie.
One animation error occurs in the torture-device room: in a long shot, Winston is hung up and Ray is stretched, but in the preceding close shots the positions were reversed.
Release
"Boo-Dunit" was released on DVD in The Real Ghostbusters Complete Collection box set as DVD episode 030, appearing on Volume 1, Disc 5.1 In air-date order it follows "Drool, the Dog Faced Goblin" and precedes The Revenge of Murray the Mantis; in DVD order it sits between Beneath These Streets and Chicken, He Clucked.
