Cast and crew
The regular voice cast features Lorenzo Music as Peter Venkman, Frank Welker as Ray Stantz and Slimer, Maurice LaMarche as Egon Spengler, and Arsenio Hall as Winston Zeddemore. Guest voices include Matt Plendl, Jonny Solomon, and Janet Waldo. Matt Plendl voices Elwin Spalding, the leader of the ghost fraternity.
Plot
Dean Fitzroy interrogates three Tri Kuppa Bro brothers, Dudley, Specs, and Willis, about a string of pranks: 300 bats turned up in another dean's refrigerator and a slime pit opened in Fitzroy's driveway. The brothers insist they were framed. As Fitzroy storms off vowing to get them expelled, a ghost appears behind him, kicks him down the stairs, and vanishes. With the dean angrier than ever, Specs decides it is time to call the Ghostbusters.
At the firehouse, the West Side Women's Club arrives to present the Ghostbusters with a commemorative plaque for ridding the community of undead undesirables. The presentation falls apart when Slimer appears; the women are horrified that the team keeps a ghost as a houseguest, and Slimer chases them out after spotting the fruit on their hats. Dudley, Specs, and Willis nearly collide with the fleeing women on their way in. Peter Venkman assumes the haunting is just a fraternity initiation until one of the brothers recites the Tri Kuppa Bro motto. It turns out to be Peter's old fraternity, and the brothers honor him in the frat history book for the day he ran his underwear up the flagpole while still wearing it.
At the Tri Kuppa Bro house the team is mostly skeptical, but the ghosts prank them the moment they walk in. Egon Spengler admires the crude effectiveness of the methods while Peter splits the group up. Winston Zeddemore is lured away, drops through a trap door, and lands on a pile of attacking sheets. The other Ghostbusters open fire to drive the ghosts off Winston, and the phantoms flee to campus. At a fountain their leader, Elwin Spalding, fires a beam from his fingertip that swells a goldfish into a behemoth, then hurls Dudley, Specs, Willis, and a female student toward it. Peter quips a reference to the tale of Jonah and the Whale. The team blasts the fish and the students are unharmed.
The rampage continues into a cafeteria where the ghosts decide to initiate the Ghostbusters into their fraternity by killing them, then into the girls' dormitory. Consulting the college yearbooks with Dean Fitzroy, the Ghostbusters identify the ghosts' leader as Elwin Spalding. Fifty years earlier, Spalding led the most notorious fraternity in the state, a group that partied and pranked but never studied. They were caught stealing the answers to their final exams and expelled, and they swore they would get even some day. Peter reasons that Tri Kuppa Bro moving into the old frat house is what triggered the ghosts' return.
The Ghostbusters offer the spirits the one thing they never earned: a diploma. The ghosts agree to take a run of make-up courses. Ray Stantz and Egon lead Biology in Room 234, where an impatient Elwin uses his enlargement power on a fungus during class. Peter teaches a reluctant Economics lesson in Room 334, and Peter and Winston run Physics in Room 134. Elwin demands the seniors' traditional obstacle course before the graduation photograph, so the ghosts haul Ecto-1 around the parking lot and tear through the sprinklers, spooking the West Side Women's Club mid-ceremony. The team lures the spirits into the auditorium for the class photo, where Ray triggers a particle thrower hidden inside the camera and traps the entire fraternity at once. At Tri Kuppa Bro, Dean Fitzroy apologizes to Dudley, Specs, and Willis, after which Peter douses the dean with the classic bucket-of-water prank and strolls away.
Equipment and locations
The Ghostbusters use their standard gear, including the proton packs and particle throwers, a ghost trap, the P.K.E. meter, and Ecto-1. The action moves between the firehouse and the Tri Kuppa Bro fraternity house on a college campus.
Notes
Although the three students are central to the plot, the script never names them; they are identified as Dudley, Specs, and Willis in The Real Ghostbusters Complete Collection booklet.1
The episode also plays with the series' own rules about containment. The episode "Slimer, Come Home" establishes that a single ghost trap cannot hold a very large number of ghosts, yet here the team manages to contain Elwin and his whole fraternity in one trap. Janine Melnitz appears in the episode but has no dialogue.
The seniors' traditional obstacle course ends before its final trial, which appears in the animation to be a phone booth packing challenge.
Elwin Spalding has a brief legacy in subsequent Ghostbusters media. His yearbook portrait appears hanging on a wall in the IDW comic What in Samhain Just Happened?! (page 10). Separately, the Tri Kuppa Bro fraternity house sign appears as a background easter egg in Ghostbusters 101 #6.
By the show's original air-date order, the episode followed "Play Them Ragtime Boos" and preceded "Hard Knight's Day."
References
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Eatock, James & Mangels, Andy (2008). The Real Ghostbusters Complete Collection booklet, p. 8. CPT Holdings, Inc.
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Marsha Goodman (1986). Episode Call Sheet and SAG Report, "The Old College Spirit" (1986).
