Plot
The Mean Green Teen Machine surf into New York City on a wave of green slime, drawn to the city as a dream vacation spot where they can eat their favorite food. Passing the somber Statue of Liberty, they slime her and briefly bring her to life, then move on.
At the Firehouse, Egon unveils his latest invention, the Alpha Wave Generator. Ray Stantz recognizes it as a way to control one's dreams, and Egon explains it lets the user rest and relax at the same time. They test the headset on the sleeping Peter Venkman and watch him dream he is Batman alongside actress Kim Basinger. Egon shuts off the monitor just as the alarm rings.
The team reaches a pizza parlor wrecked by the ghosts and opens fire, but the three prove too fast and agile to catch. Whenever the Ghostbusters manage to corner one ghost, the other two run interference and free their comrade. The ghosts phone every pizza joint in the book and begin stealing pizza all over the city. Ecto-1 gets stuck in traffic, and Slimer picks up the scent of pizza, but the Ghostbusters again fail to trap the spirits. They stage an undercover sting near the Washington Square Arch, with Peter and Ecto-1 disguised as a pizza stand, Ray as a mother, Slimer as an infant, and Egon and Winston Zeddemore as construction workers. The ghosts evade them once more and decide to follow Ecto-1.
Worn out, the Ghostbusters return to the Firehouse to sleep, and Egon suggests using the Alpha Wave Generator. Each of them dons a headset. The ghosts realize the men are dreaming, enter the generator, and turn the dreams into traps. Peter becomes a returning champion on a game show called "Wheel of Pizza" before the ghosts launch him onto the wheel. Ray, dressed as Tarzan in a dream called "Ray of the Rainforest," is shoved into a river of pizza by his gorilla sidekicks, who turn out to be the ghosts, and he goes over a waterfall clinging to a slice. Winston, a starship captain, is attacked by the Pizzanutions of Planet Pepperoni. Egon, hosting an educational show exploring the bloodstream, is chased by corpuscles before the ghosts appear.
Slimer fumbles with the generator's controls and inadvertently links the dreams, teleporting the team together. Egon deduces the three ghosts overloaded the machine, which was only programmed for five sleepers, and that the Ghostbusters will stay asleep as long as the ghosts run loose. Reunited inside the shared dream and back in their uniforms, the team confronts the Mean Green Teen Machine, who taunt that the Ghostbusters will be trapped forever. Rather than fight, Egon offers the ghosts a giant pizza concealing a Ghost Trap underneath it. The ghosts cannot resist and fly straight in, where all three are captured. Everyone wakes, and after some debate over lunch, Slimer holds out for pizza while the others toss pillows at him.
The Mean Green Teen Machine
The three ghosts are named Guggenheim (the apparent leader), Chicoloni, and Baravelli. They describe themselves through a rhyming chant: "We're mean, we're green, we're on the scene. We're the Mean Green Teen Machine." Their motivation is straightforward: pizza and fun. In battle they operate as a coordinated unit, with the free members running interference to rescue a cornered teammate.
Although they are caught in the Alpha Wave Generator's dream space, the Mean Green Teen Machine were somehow transferred into the Containment Unit when the Ghostbusters woke. They appear again in "Guess What's Coming to Dinner," the episode in which a ghost named Foul Grungie opens the Containment Unit to evict the spirits squatting in the Firehouse, and the Mean Green Teen Machine are among those who escape.2
Production
The episode carried production number 140-505 and was recorded on April 25, 1990. Its air-date episode number is 125; in DVD release order it is numbered 119, and it appears on Volume 4, Disc 4 of the boxed set.
The three ghosts are a parody of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, reflected in their reptilian surfer designs and their rhyming chant. Casting Cam Clarke, a voice from the contemporary Turtles cartoon, reinforced the homage.1 The parallels run deeper than appearance: both franchises debuted in 1984, both feature a team of four with an intellectual member (Egon and Donatello), a childlike member (Ray and Michelangelo), and a sarcastic wiseguy (Peter and Raphael). At the time of this episode's broadcast, the shows were even competing against each other in the same Saturday morning time slot: CBS aired Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles while ABC aired The Real Ghostbusters.2
References and homages
The episode is packed with media references. Peter's dream of being Batman with Kim Basinger nods to the 1989 Batman film. His "Wheel of Pizza" is a takeoff on Wheel of Fortune, Ray's jungle dream draws on Tarzan, and Winston's starship sequence parodies Star Trek, with Winston resembling Captain Jean-Luc Picard of Star Trek: The Next Generation. During the final battle Peter quotes Clint Eastwood's Dirty Harry line about feeling lucky. Earlier, Peter mentions that he and Kim Basinger are both Scorpios, which coincides with the name of the villain in Dirty Harry. The "Don Corleone Pizza" sign references The Godfather (and may also nod to the real-life Godfather's Pizza chain).
The episode also contains a quiet nod to Saturday Night Live: both Dan Aykroyd and Bill Murray (the actors behind Ray and Peter in the films) were cast members of that show, a connection the episode acknowledges in passing.2
The slimed Statue of Liberty coming briefly to life echoes a major sequence from Ghostbusters II, released the previous year. Winston and Egon also allude to that film's events, with Winston asking Egon to "remember what happened the last time we dug up the street," and Egon noting the subway system was pumped out within a few days. Notably, Winston was not involved in the street-digging incident in Ghostbusters II, which suggests the animated series treats the canon differently on that point. The Ghostbusters set up their sting near the Washington Square Arch, which briefly appeared in Ghostbusters II during the second montage. The ghosts place their pizza orders from a phone booth near Rockefeller Center, a location seen in the original Ghostbusters and in other series episodes such as "Janine Melnitz, Ghostbuster." Janine Melnitz does not appear in this episode.
Cast
Regular voices were provided by Dave Coulier (Peter Venkman), Frank Welker, Maurice LaMarche, Buster Jones, and Kath Soucie. Guest voices were Cam Clarke as Guggenheim and Anderson Wong as Chicoloni. Dave Coulier additionally voiced Baravelli, the third member of the Mean Green Teen Machine.12
Episode navigation
By air date, the previous episode was "The Haunting of Heck House" and the next was "Spacebusters." In DVD order, the previous episode was "Janine, You've Changed" and the next was again "Spacebusters."
Some content on this page was researched using the Ghostbusters Wiki on Fandom.
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Eatock, James & Mangels, Andy (2008). The Real Ghostbusters Complete Collection booklet, p. 37. CPT Holdings, Inc.
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Marsha Goodman (1990). Episode Call Sheet and SAG Report, "Mean Green Teen Machine" (1990).
