I was just watching the episode, “A Temporary Insanity” and saw when Janine is getting a proton pack from the Peter Venkman statue, his whole face s blurred. Why is this? I know I read this somewhere but i forgot the answer to it.

Copyright issues if I remember correctly. As I remember it DIC Entertainmen owned the rights to the looks and designs used in the RGB versions of the Ghostbusters.

JamesCGamora;136599
Copyright issues if I remember correctly. As I remember it DIC Entertainmen owned the rights to the looks and designs used in the RGB versions of the Ghostbusters.

Then it's kinda odd how Ray, Peter and Winston appear later in the series in the RGB designs completely unblurred.
As well as The Grundel who looks pretty much the same as he did in RGB.

Consider that, when Ray, Winston, and Venkman did appear, they didn't look exactly like the RGB designs. Ray was down to almost no hair. Winston had gone greyish. And all of them looked a lot older (too much older, in a lot of fans' opinions). And that's not even mentioning the absolutely inexplicable dressing of Ray in one of Egon's flight suits.

It is odd, though, that it only seems to apply to the five Ghostbuster characters (this includes Janine, but her looking different again actually makes some sense due to “Janine You've Changed”), but in “Darkness At Noon” and “Back In The Saddle” the RGB equipment is seen virtually unchanged. Slimer's design changed too, but some of that may have been to “de-cutify” him.

(sigh)…once more proving, as they put it in a book I read while creating the Timeline, “Intellectual Properties lawyers are a low species of life”

Proof right there that there was no officially given reason…cause it Fritz doesn't know then no one does.

I just remembered that Sam Hain appeared in the intro. Did the carrot nose make him different enough to avoid any legal problems with DIC?
I'm curious to see whether Peter's face will be blurred or not if this series ever makes it onto DVD.

It seems a case of the animation studio only paying for what they figured they'd really need.

They obviously went to effort to aquire the RGB equipment design sheets, as they're reproduced faithfully in the episodes they appear in… and even with the changes shown with the Firehouse set designs and Ecto-1, some of the Ecto-1 elevations and Firehouse interiors are based off of some of the design sheets that are on the Time Life DVDs.

And seeing as the XGB Ecto-1 toy looks more like a 59 Cadillac, it's front end being different in the cartoon may have been General Motors' doing.


But, as the major members of the RGB wouldn't be appearing in the show all that much, and when they did they'd be older, they probably figured it wasn't worth getting their character designs until they suddenly found the need to show Venkman's mannequin up-close… and then they got caught trying to get away with using it and not paying.

Doc Fritz;136603
(sigh)…once more proving, as they put it in a book I read while creating the Timeline, “Intellectual Properties lawyers are a low species of life”

As a law student I take offense to that statement. IP rights - heck, law in general - is not understood by the general public. Lay-persons rarely, if ever think about why a law prohibits certain conduct; they just get upset whenever they aren't allowed to do what they want.

Further, it was up to Columbia Pictures/DiC to grant a license to begin with. The blame really lies with them for not being more generous. The IP lawyers are just hired hands to give the studios what they want.

JonXCTrack;136616
Further, it was up to Columbia Pictures/DiC to grant a license to begin with. The blame really lies with them for not being more generous. The IP lawyers are just hired hands to give the studios what they want.

I think maybe you're taking the comment Fritz quoted too much to heart, and I have to say I really don't buy that argument that any licences that weren't given to the Extreme Ghostbusters production was down to Columbia/DiC not being “generous enough”, I find it much more believable that either the XGB production team didn't see the need to get all the designs, or the XGB legal team being sloppy to be much more likely.

I'm not passing judgement on the I.P. profession as a whole, but as we all know with all walks of life there are those who do their job well and then there are those who do the bare minimum.

I admit I'm amused by the vagarities of IP law and such, and how different companies handle it differently. I just think it's hilarious how one licencee can't use stuff from another when both things are owned by Sony. Contrast that to literally being able to go to the K-Mart I used to work at and buy Star Wars action figures packed with Dark Horse reprints of comics Marvel originally published in 1982.

Of course, I amuse easily.

The line I quote was intended as tongue-in-cheek, just as it was in the place I originally found it: Timothy and Kevin Burke's Saturday Morning Fever; the book made the statement when talking about the Columbia/Filmation dust-up over the Ghostbuster name.