From Proton Packs to Canon-Building: ‘Ghostbusters’ Eyes Its Own ‘Clone Wars’ Moment

Can Ghostbusters pull off a Lucas/Filoni?

In the early 2000s, in the wake of the commercially successful but critically divisive Star Wars prequels, George Lucas shifted the franchise’s center of gravity away from features and toward animation. Working with Dave Filoni, he helped build a slate of animated series — including The Clone Wars, Star Wars Rebels and The Bad Batch — that deepened the mythology and, over time, became central to the franchise’s canon. Those shows would later prove to be the connective tissue feeding into Disney’s live-action Star Wars universe.

The new animated series Ghostbusters: Night Shift is aiming to do the same for the world of proton packs and wise-cracking parapsychologists. Where Clone Wars bridged the gap between Lucas’ prequels and the original trilogy, Night Shift — which Netflix teased at the Annecy film festival last week — slots into the gap between Ivan Reitman’s 1980s originals and the 2020s sequels Ghostbusters: Afterlife (Jason Reitman) and Gil Kenan’s Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire.” (Paul Feig’s 2016 gender-swapped reboot — a film whose release was overshadowed by a torrent of misogynistic online abuse before disappointing commercially — has been exorcised from the Ghostbusters canon).

Set in New York in 1994, five years after the original Ghostbusters melted the Stay-Puff Marshmallow Man to save the city, the series fills in an unexplored era of the franchise while introducing a new generation of Ghostbusters, supernatural villains and paranormal mythology, figures that could eventually migrate into future live-action films.

“It’s only important if you’re concerned about space and time,” Jason Reitman jokes when asked how important it is the new series fits into the official Ghostbusters timeline. “Night Shift is very specifically set within the larger context of the Ghostbusters stories. You’ll be able to watch the movies, come into the show, watch more movies and never miss a beat. It all links up.”

The series, produced by Sony Pictures Animation, Netflix, and Ghostcorps, with animation production by Flying Bark Productions (Stranger Things: Tales from ’85), comes from the creative team behind Afterlife and Frozen Empire. Reitman and Kenan are executive producing, alongside the feature sequels’ producer Amie Karp and original Ghostbuster Dan Aykroyd. Ben Hibon and Elliott Kalan are showrunners.

The idea for the series first emerged while Reitman and Kenan were writing Afterlife. “We gave ourselves a mystery to solve,” Reitman says. “We thought of this young girl who found a proton pack in a barn, and we were trying to figure out who she was, how’d she wind up there, how did this proton pack get there.” That naturally led to another question: “Wait a second, what about that whole decade in between? What happened in the ’90s? That was the birth of this show.”

For Kenan, a trained animator whose first feature was 2006’s Monster House, the appeal of animation wasn’t simply that it allowed bigger ghosts or stranger worlds, but that the medium offered room to tell stories the films couldn’t. “We started to watch [1980s/90s cartoon] The Real Ghostbusters,” he says. “It actually became more than just inspiration for those films. It made us see the extraordinary possibility that Ghostbusters stories have when you stretch your elbows out a little bit. A series allows you to tell a character story, or character stories, with more space.”

The affection for The Real Ghostbusters remains. The Saturday morning series, which ran from 1986 to 1991, was gleefully surreal, sending Venkman, Egon and company into increasingly bizarre supernatural adventures unconstrained by live-action budgets. But in tone, the new show is more closely modeled on Ivan Reitman’s original films.

“Anyone who’s coming into this animated series thinking they’re about to watch the series from the ’80s, oh, are they in for a surprise,” says Reitman. “It is funnier, it is scarier. The visuals are incredibly dynamic, and it does the thing that that first film in ’84 did, which is you come in thinking, okay, maybe I’ll have a laugh, and then it spooks the shit out of you.”

That balance between comedy and horror became the guiding principle for the production. “The magic trick of the first film is that it was genuinely terrifying and laugh-out-loud funny,” Kenan says. “That is unique in the history of modern film. When you try to distill what the DNA of Ghostbusters is, it’s that tone.”

Hibon says the filmmakers deliberately resisted recreating the look of the old cartoon. “I think we all loved it in maybe different ways,” he says of The Real Ghostbusters. “It is so inventive, it’s so different, it has such a great identity. Maybe we are reining it in a little bit because this series is canon, and we’re trying to stay within the realm of maybe the movies. But at the same time it’s animation, so we’re still able to really expand and explore.”

Instead of looking to Saturday morning television, Hibon and Kalan say they drew inspiration from New York itself — specifically the New York of 1994.

“New York is both at the same time the greatest city on the face of the earth, and also disgusting,” says Kalan. “We want the show to feel like you’re there in the city in the 1990s, this very special time when New York hadn’t been cleaned up yet, when it was still a city where pretty much anything could happen.”

That period also defines the protagonists. “Our characters are in their early 20s,” Kalan says. “They’re at that stage in their life where they’re figuring out what is my life going to be? New York is the kind of city that it chews you up and spits you out, but sometimes it spits you out as a Ghostbuster.”

Although the series embraces the freedom of CG animation, Hibon says its visual language comes less from cartoons than from live-action cinema. “There’s definitely a film language,” he says, citing horror photography, lighting and camera work from the era. The goal, Kalan adds, is “a show set in the ’90s, but made now so while we want to reflect that time it will still feel very modern.”

Whether Night Shift ultimately becomes Ghostbusters’ answer to The Clone Wars will depend on whether audiences embrace its new characters as readily as Star Wars fans did figures like Ahsoka, Captain Rex or General Grievous, animated originals who made the jump to live-action fare.

But Reitman says the goal was never simply to extend the franchise’s timeline. It was to hand it to a new generation of storytellers capable of expanding the universe.

“I feel very protective of Ghostbusters, for all the obvious reasons,” says Reitman. “The really exciting part of this process for me has been to pass the torch and see two storytellers [take Ghostbusters] to places that I had never even imagined. Elliott’s understanding of the language of Ghostbusters — when he writes, he sounds like Aykroyd — and Ben’s ability to create a Ghostbusters universe that audiences have literally never seen before, ghosts they’ve never imagined before, equipment they’ve never seen before, and a version of New York that has never had Ghostbusters in it.”

For longtime fans, Reitman promises discoveries rather than nostalgia. “Audiences who already love Ghostbusters, they’re about to see a version of the story they’ve never seen before. And for anyone who’s never watched any of Ghostbusters, I can’t imagine a better entrance to the franchise.”

“The connective tissue is there,” says Kenan. “Whether you started with ’84, whether you started with Afterlife, or whether this is your first time watching something for Ghostbusters. You’re gonna have a great time watching the show.”