Disney Did Ghostbusters 47 Years Earlier

The other day I had a flash back to an old toy I used to own. It was a Fisher Price Movie Viewer and it came with a cartridge with a Disney Cartoon short called "The Lonesome Ghosts". The movie viewer was awesome. You had control of the speed of the silent film. You could go fast, slow, and even backward using the dial to control the direction and speed. It was pretty nifty. I remember watching the film going forward and backward watching ghost materialize and dematerialize out of thin air. It was pretty cool.

Anyway, I remembered this toy and the film the other day. So, I looked up the film on Youtube and sure enough. It's there! Pretty stinkin' cool. So, I watched it again and realized pretty quickly that the movie Ghostbusters (1984) was a rip off of this cartoon made in 1937. In the short cartoon, some ghosts that live in an abandoned home get bored because they have no one to scare. So, in the yellow pages they find an advertisement for some "Ghost Exterminators" (Ghost Busters...see the resemblance yet?). The ghosts call them up mimicking a woman's voice and ask them to get rid of the ghosts in their house. Then they prepare to scare the filling out of them when they arrive. Mickey, Donald, and Goofy are the ghost exterminators (there were three main Ghostbusters, too). They are excited to finally have work, so they go over to the house and hilarity ensues. At one point, Goofy even says "I ain't scared of no ghosts"....almost using the famous line from the Ghostbusters Theme song by Ray Parker Jr "I ain't afraid of no ghosts". Interesting, huh? Watch the movie and tell me what you think. I think Disney has a clear case of copyright infringement on their hands. I wonder if they still have a case 26 years after the copy-cat movie premiered.