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"Slimer's Curse" is the 114th episode in broadcast order of the animated series The Real Ghostbusters. It first aired on December 2, 1989 as part of the show's fifth season, and was written by Richard Mueller.1 The premise is simple: Slimer wins a million dollars on the lottery, but everything he buys with the prize money turns out to be cursed.2
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On a stormy night, an armored van skids off the road and crashes through the gate of a cemetery, coming to rest against a tombstone marked "Tightly." A mist rises from the open grave, throws the guard from the van, and slips inside a strongbox. At the firehouse, Winston Zeddemore reads up on Jonathan Tightly, an eccentric millionaire whose fortune was seized by the New York state legislature upon his death on claims of unpaid back taxes, while Ray Stantz regrets having bought Slimer a lottery ticket. Slimer hovers anxiously by the phone waiting for results.
After a string of false alarms, armored-van workers arrive and confirm Slimer's Lucky Bucks card number 427699 holds the winning numbers. They hand him one million dollars in cash. News crews swarm the firehouse, and Slimer cheerfully starts spending and sharing the money: he stuffs some into Peter Venkman's pocket, the team plays a board game with the bills, and Slimer buys pizza, a new dress suit for Peter, a new stereo for Janine Melnitz, and a replacement vehicle called the Ecto-Limo.
Everything goes wrong. The pizza arrives full of worms, eyeballs, and bats. Janine's stereo shoots albums across the room and implodes. Peter's suit falls apart at a pulled thread. The new car explodes when Winston turns the key. Egon Spengler gets a reading off the money with his P.K.E. Meter and takes it to his lab, where he attempts to cleanse a bill using the Spectral Decontaminator, a pair of table-mounted blasters designed to wipe out spectral contamination. The curse proves too strong and the device has no effect. Ray translates Egon's conclusion: the cash is haunted and spreads bad luck to anyone who touches it, with the contamination contact-transferable to anything purchased with the money. Burning it is out, since Winston points out that destroying money is a federal offense, so the team decides to trace the curse to its source and return the cash.
The trail leads back to the cemetery and the grave of Jonathan Tightly. Tightly manifests from the bag of money and attacks, overloading Peter's pack and forcing him to ditch it. Winston realizes Tightly wants the money he owed the state back. Ray and Egon dump the cash out, and Tightly siphons it into his grave before pulling his tombstone upright again. Back home, Egon tells Slimer he can safely reclaim the buried money in 700 years, corresponding to the rate of ectoplasmic decay, and reasons that the curse on the already-spent cash lifted once Tightly reclaimed the rest. Slimer flies off to answer the door for more pizza, this time an ordinary one.
Jonathan Tightly, voiced by Frank Welker, is the episode's antagonist. He was an eccentric millionaire reportedly so greedy that he wanted his entire fortune buried with him at death. The New York state legislature had other plans, seizing the estate on the grounds of considerable arrears in back taxes. His ghost, still fixated on reclaiming the money, possessed the lottery winnings and spread bad luck to whoever came into contact with them. Once the Ghostbusters returned approximately ninety percent of the winnings, Tightly was satisfied and returned to his grave.
The episode used the show's regular fifth-season voice cast: Dave Coulier, Frank Welker, Maurice LaMarche, Buster Jones, and Kath Soucie.1
"Slimer's Curse" carries the production number 201013 and broadcast number 114. The voice cast recorded it on June 7, 1989, ahead of the December air date.3 Like other Slimer-led segments from this period, the episode runs about fifteen minutes rather than the full half hour. It is also one of the relatively few installments in which the Ghostbusters resolve a haunting without relying on their proton packs or traps, instead returning the cursed money to the ghost that owned it.
When the team returns to find reporters outside the firehouse, Winston asks Peter whether he has been bugging Geraldo Rivera again. It is the show's second nod to Rivera, after "The Ghostbusters Live! from Al Capone's Tomb!"
Janine tries to lighten the mood with a Debbie Gibson album on her new stereo. Gibson, an American pop singer who rose to fame in the late 1980s, had earlier appeared briefly in the first Ghostbusters film as a girl with a pink bow celebrating her birthday at Tavern on the Green.
After the Ghostbusters complain to the pizza parlor about their worm-and-eyeball order, the parlor tells them to go to the "rubber room hotel," a response that echoes a similar brush-off the team receives in Ghostbusters II.
Ray mentions that the firehouse has received eight calls related to Gremlins and Poltergeists appearing around the city, entities the team has encountered before.
Winston's reminder that burning money is illegal refers specifically to the crime of mutilation of national bank obligations, covered under Title 18 of the United States Code.
Peter nicknames the manifested Tightly "Smokey the Bear" during the cemetery confrontation.
The episode appears on home video as part of The Real Ghostbusters Volume 4 box set (Disc 3), where it is listed under the DVD code 110A.2
Eatock, James and Mangels, Andy (2008). The Real Ghostbusters Complete Collection booklet. CPT Holdings, Inc. ↩ ↩2
Eatock, James and Mangels, Andy (2008). The Real Ghostbusters Complete Collection booklet, p. 34. CPT Holdings, Inc. ↩ ↩2
Marsha Goodman (1989). Episode call sheet and SAG report, "Slimer's Curse." ↩
