Listen..Do You Smell Something?

"They're Scary With Ghostly Glow"

The success of Madballs in the 80's led to many a knock off as can be witnessed in this blog. However, not many licensed characters got rendered in ball form. The only ones I could think of were the Universal Monsters as Monster Balls. Then I found this on Ebay. Actually, I found it and tried to ignore it for months, because it's stupid. But then that same ungodly stupidity kept drawing me back to it and I became obsessed, cracked under the pressure and bought it. I present to you one of two Ghostbusters Ghost Balls.
Where, oh where, to begin with this piece of crap? Like the Sadballs discussed in my last post, this nameless dude (let's call him Sammy) is made of inflatable rubber and very sparsely painted. Actually there's four colors on there but they're barely applied. Maybe a ghost of a pissed off sweat shop worker painted them. "OOOOooooOOOooo screw you Colombia Pictures.....Herreeesssss a crappy paint job for your stupid rip off tooyyyyyyy" or something.

It's just a crotchety old man with demonic cat eyes, second-thought fangs and fancy ears. Seriously, those ears are cool, very Art Deco which fits with the movie. NO! I can't give those bastards that sort of credit. Even if the ear is cool, when the ear of a monster headed ball is the coolest part then you severely botched it. Yeah he's got gross warts on him and a pretty neat head ridge but those only slightly distract me from his Ernest Borgnine mug.
The packaging is slightly better than the item itself. It is pretty bare bones but it's got a "cool" explosion on the right of the ball and Egon looking shocked and appalled on the left. The Ghost Balls logo is my favorite part though. That Slimer rendition is pretty sweet. I'm not sure if that's reused artwork for something else or made specifically for this hunk of ass but its neat. In fact, I'm not too up to speed on Ghostbusters toys in general, so Sammy could be an actual charater. Like the ghost of a Ernest Borgnine. I doubt it though.
The back side reveals that there's actually two of these idiots. "Collect them all". There's only two. I don't even have the energy to italicize that because I'm so exasperated by this awful toy.

The bummer is that most Ghostbusters toys are pretty cool and unique. This degenerate seems like a sad attempt at sponging off a much smaller market even though Ghostbusters toys were raking in the money. The copyright on here says 1986, just about the time Madballs came out making me think that it was a rush job. End result crap. I still haven't been able to get it to glow in the dark! Granted it's over 20 years old at this point but I didn't thing glowing stopped. I should look that up.

In conclusion, avoid at all costs. I mean we're not talking Super Bouncing Weird Ball level garbage but not too far removed. Not worth the money they were charging for them in '86 and certainly not worth the Ebay price I paid in '10.