10 Films With Awesome Animated TV Shows You Forgot Existed

8. The Real Ghostbusters

By far the most recognisable of all the shows on this list, The Real Ghostbusters (no, I don't know what makes them real either) features everyone's favourite paranormal investigators as they take on the various ghosts, ghouls and goblins of New York City in a straight-up continuation of the 1984 original movie.

It also happens to be really, really good. Not only did it have J. Michael Straczynski (of Spider-Man and Babylon 5 fame) as a writer, it had the talents of Maurice LaMarche, Lorenzo Music, Frank Welker and Arsenio Hall behind the voice-work of Egon Spengler, Peter Venkman, Ray Stantz and Winston Zeddemore too. It also ran for six years, eventually being replaced by the tolerable though wholly incomparable Extreme Ghostbusters, which, having only featured a few of the former series' original cast, never really resonated with fans on quite the same scale.

You can also thank it for making Slimer - at the time a minor character from the first film - the franchise's most widely-recognised mascot next to Stay Puft. Everywhere the team went the big floating bogey seemed to follow, and he eventually even got his own animated short closer to the series' end.

I loved Ghostbusters growing up, but I doubt I'd have gotten into it as much as I did without watching re-runs of the show when they cropped up. Its contributive effects to the wider Ghostbusters canon - indeed its resonance - have long been undervalued. A reappraisal is overdue.

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Content Producer/Presenter

WhatCulture's very own resident movie guy, Ewan has been working in the content creation biz for over 10 years now, having started as a freelance contributor to WhatCulture Gaming all the way back in 2015. After graduating with a First-Class Honours in History from Northumbria University in 2017 (where he won a prize for a totally killer dissertation on the Watergate years), Ewan took on the role of Comics Editor at WhatCulture and quickly developed WhatCulture Comics into one of the biggest superhero-focused channels on YouTube. He followed this with a brief hiatus at Screen Rant in 2021, where he worked across the Gaming and Film sections as a writer and editor, before returning to WhatCulture as a Senior Content Producer / Presenter in 2023. He started his own podcast, We Love Dad Movies, in 2022, and has contributed several written pieces to the Eisner-nominated comics website Shelfdust as well. In his current role, Ewan incorporates his love of cinema, comic books, and history into written pieces and video essays for WhatCulture's Film & TV channel, as well as WhatCulture Gaming and WhatCulture Horror, with a particular focus on nineties-era Dad Movies, old school Westerns, and Golden Age Hollywood Noir. John Carpenter is his fave, and he thinks Batman Beyond should never have been cancelled. If that's your vibe, you'll probably like his stuff.