Extreme Ghostbusters Original First-Run TV Broadcast Recordings VHS Tapes

I recently found my set of eight VHS tapes containing my original first-run TV recordings of all 40 Extreme Ghostbusters episodes, taped from WWOR-TV in late 1997 when the series originally aired. Since this piece of Spook Central history should be documented, I have just written this lengthy article about it :-) Read on to find out more...

It's no secret that I have been running Spook Central for a long, long time. Thirty years, to be precise. (Spook Central 30th Anniversary Commemorative Coins are still available.) When Spook Central was first created in August of 1996, all of this fancy high definition and ultra high definition stuff didn't exist. Heck, even DVDs weren't available; at least not to the mainstream public yet. I remember going into Blockbuster Video back in 1997 or 1998 and asking them if they had DVDs, and them looking at me like I had three heads! What we had in 1996 were VHS videocassettes. That format started my love of physical media, and as a result, I had/have a meticulously curated collection of VHS videotapes. To better understand, let's set the Wayback Machine, Delorean, Tardis, phone booth, sled, stopwatch, or whatever to 1990.

Sometime in mid-1990 my family bought our first VCR. Before that, we recorded TV shows and movies (and ourselves) onto audio cassettes placed directly in front of the TV speakers, essentially turning them into "radio broadcasts", complete with family bickering in the background. Having a VCR was a DREAM! We could now tape shows and movies off the television complete with video! What a novel concept. We could also now buy movies on pre-recorded videocassettes. I recall the first two we bought were Who Framed Roger Rabbit and Beetlejuice; both from the now-long-gone Woolworth's in Oceanside, New York (in the corner next to the current Lia's Pizzeria).

Over the course of the 1990s and 2000s, we amassed THOUSANDS AND THOUSANDS of store-bought and home-recorded videotapes, because my father and I were avid collectors and recorders. I am not exaggerating when I state "thousands". Below are some photos taken of my former home in East Rockaway, where I lived from July 1989 to October 29, 2012 when Hurricane Sandy evicted us. These photos were taken on November 8, 2013 - long after we vacated the premises - during one of the many visits I took to recover as many pieces of our belongings as could be saved while the house was still standing and fairly safe to inhabit (while wearing a face mask, of course). They show quite a lot - but not all - of the videocassettes that were NOT recovered because they were either below 6-feet (the level the flood water rose to inside the house) or because there were simply too many videotapes to carry over to the new house. (All images can be enlarged to better see the sorrow.)






For the VHS tapes that weren't damaged, I grabbed them, did a quick bit of sorting, and shoved them into six "categorized" boxes in the corner of the attic back in 2013. Two boxes of "home-recorded non-commercial" tapes, two boxes of "home-recorded with-commercials" tapes, one box of "store-bought" tapes, and one box of "special" tapes. Aside from the "store-bought" tapes, which I made a list of in an effort to re-buy them on DVD (most still have not been officially-released on DVD), I never bothered to make any sort of "log" of what I still have on VHS. The other day, I was thinking about all of the movies I taped off of HBO and other channels back in the 1990s and 2000s, and I wanted to see which I still had. That led to spending some time photographing the labels of every tape in every one of those boxes. What I thought would take only an hour or two ended up taking me a WHOLE DAY! I concluded with a gallery of about 325 photos, not counting the "family home movie" tapes that are stored elsewhere. I had no idea that I still had that many tapes, yet none of them were the movies I thought I still had some of. (If I want to take it one step further, and make a searchable list, I will need to transcribe/OCR all text from the photos - but that's a project for a future date. Obviously, the long term "probably will never happen in my lifetime" project would be to transfer everything to digital and then to DVD for permanent keeping.)

I'm happy to report that ALL of my "special tapes" survived the hurricane. My "home movies" (separate from family home movies), various professionally-recorded school events (such as my graduation), all of my "Ghostbusters Stuff" tapes, The Real Ghostbusters Alternate Episodes tape (what I was able to copy off of the ruined tapes back in 2013), the 1989 ABC broadcast of Ghostbusters, plus tapes full of commercials, movie trailers, and music videos. All compilations were carefully-assembled and with everything noted on printed inserts with timecodes (so I can quickly fast forward to something on the tape).


Another survivor is my complete collection of Extreme Ghostbusters tapes. Not just the three official Sony tapes in the extremely rare (pun intended) box set, but also - as the title of this article states - my original first-run TV broadcast recordings of all 40 episodes, taped from WWOR-TV in late 1997 when the series originally aired.


These are near-perfect recordings with no commercials and no edits. In fact, one episode has a "clapboard goof" that was later corrected. There is very little use of station logo/bugs on-screen, and the end credits are all shown full-screen (nothing shrunk down) and some don't even have an announcer speaking over the music. WWOR really left the show fairly untouched, which made it great for me to preserve. I recorded these in the highest quality SP speed and put only five episodes on each T-120 tape. I even included a printed episode list for each tape (with time codes as to when each episode starts), tucked inside each case. Yeah, I was a meticulous collector and archivist, even back then.


I have just tested the first tape and snapped a few pics off the TV from the opening of the first episode. Even though these tapes are 30 years old, because I keep my media in excellent condition, the tapes still play perfectly; at least the first one.





The way I put together all of my compilation tapes was to make them as professionally-looking as possible. To accomplish this, I would take a "two-step" approach. The first step would be to do a raw recording of the show, movie, music video, etc. off the TV with whatever commercials and "excess" there may be. Later, I would connect two VCRs, or a VCR and a camcorder, with the recording unit having a "flying erase head" to allow for seamless edits and even audio dubbing (that's how I made my music videos). In order to get "perfect seamless edits", I actually did tests with the recording unit to determine how many frames I needed to advance past the last frame I wanted to keep in order to know where to put it in record-pause mode. I also needed to test the recording unit to see how many seconds it would take from when I pushed the record button until when it actually started recording. Usually this would be one or two seconds, so I got really good at counting seconds and finding a spot in the playback - usually a cut or a word being said - which would be my cue to press the record button. I didn't always get it right the first time, but it didn't usually take me more than two or three tries.

Each compilation tape starts with twenty seconds of blackness as "leader" to give the VCR time to adjust tracking and for all on-screen text (like "PLAY") to disappear. In between each episode is ten seconds of blackness; though I think I only put five seconds in between each music video and commercial on those compilation tapes. To better explain this, I just did my first analog test recording using the StarTech analog & digital video capture device I bought last year. This will show (1) that these tapes really DO still play, (2) that WWOR-TV left the show pretty "clean" back in 1997 (the "UPN" part of the WWOR-TV logo is a dead giveaway as to when these were recorded), and (3) the care I took into removing commercials and making them as perfect as possible at the time.

What you see below is the entire first episode from the first tape (not including the twenty seconds of leader), the ten seconds of blackness in between episodes, and the recap from the beginning of the second episode. While the copy below is 640x480, I did compress it down a bit to keep the file size in check. A higher-quality less-compressed copy is playable on the Spook Central Patreon page.

NOTE: The faint horizontal scrolling lines in the video and hum in the audio is NOT in the original video tape. The occasional audio hiccup isn't, either, as far as I can tell. These artifacts were introduced in the transfer from analog tape to digital. I do not know why they are there, though I suspect it may be due to using a 12-foot composite audio/video cable to connect the VCR on one side of the room to the video capture device hooked up to the computer on the other side of the room. For the purposes of doing a quick video transfer for this article, it's fine for now. If/when I eventually transfer the content from all 350+ videotapes I have to digital, and then to DVD, THAT'S when I will need to get the issues resolved. (If you know how to resolve these issues, please post a comment below. Thanks).


Since I now have FOUR different copies of all 40 Extreme Ghostbusters episodes on disc - one bootleg SD Blu-ray, one bootleg HD Blu-ray, one bootleg SD DVD (that I made from the SD Blu-ray), and one official SD DVD - I really have no need to keep these tapes anymore. I don't believe that the episodes on any of the discs are edited, and aside from a "clapboard goof" in one or two episodes, there aren't any "alternate episodes" to speak of.

Since these tapes might be of interest to fellow Ghostheads or video archaeologists, I have added them to the Spook Central Shop at $80 for the whole set of eight tapes ($10 per tape). I don't want to throw out the tapes, and I would love for them to go to someone who would appreciate them, so if there is anyone that is still interested in VHS tapes in 2026, here is your chance to take home a part of Spook Central history. (These tapes were the source for all Extreme Ghostbusters multimedia that was on Spook Central from 1997 to 2019.)