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.