SCHAPER'S TRACY: THE GHOST BUSTERS GORILLA ACTION FIGURE

Sometimes films and TV series get as mixed up as spaghetti.

So it is with Ghostbusters. Or should I say Ghost Busters. As such characters get lost, forgotten and misplaced like a gorilla in a haystack.

Tracy is such a gorilla, the resident ape in the CBS live-action Ghost Busters TV series which ran for 15 episodes in 1975.

Tracy was played by that classic man in a gorilla suit, Bob Burns, the famous monster and sci-fi film archivist. Bob's passion for props is very much on the vein of Forry J. Ackerman but that's another story.

Like any great convoluted story, it was the success of that other more famous Ghostbusters a decade later in 1984 - Yes, Who ya gonna Call! - which gave the original CBS show the bananas to swing back into view as a new animated TV series by Filmation, Ghostbusters and later Filmation's Ghostbusters after a rumble in the jungle with Stay Puft the Marshmallow Man.

As a toy collector its the toys that Filmation's show spawned that really interest me. It only lasted a single season in 1986 but Schaper released a whole troop of toys and sets, including yes, you've guessed it, Tracy! After ten years Bob Burns's aping around was immortalised in plastic!

The toy Tracy figure carries a purple Ghost Gummer, a gadget which, in the cartoon, blasted a pink fluid over evil nasties. It was really good at slowing ghosts down.

I've never ever seen a Tracy toy in the flesh, neither carded nor loose. I can't even recall seeing the Schaper line at premier UK toy fairs like Memorabilia. Did it sell outside of the home market in 1986? It cannot have been easy competing with that primordial slew of Real Ghostbusters' toys from Mattel, which were everywhere!

A couple of interesting points about Schaper's [of Cootie fame] 1986 Ghostbusters line. In the same year they were bought by toy giant Tyco, so whether this changed any of the branding on the cards I would be interested to know. Also each toy came with a mini-comic, again, something I have personally never seen.

Have you?

If you have a Tracy Gorilla figure then spare a thought for Bob Burns and his original ape suit back in 1975, as you can see here in this You Tube clip. Now that's proper monkey business!

What do you think?