Hah, thanks! I really appreciate it
How f****g rad does it feel to have created a manual and set of information that is LITERALLY canon to the franchise now?
It feels weird in two ways. First it feels like I'm kind of a real life GB Ray+Egon (but I'm just a BSc, not a PhD).
Second, it doesn't feel like I created this manual. It's weird to explain, but the decals and switches (especially for the neutrona wand but also for the trap) are so self evident that it feels like I simply "discovered" their intended operation, rather than "created" it. "Discovered" what was intended by Stephen Dane in '83 rest his soul, boy what I wouldn't give to be able to talk to him.
So I've had moments where in discussions I felt like screaming: "but isn't it obvious!?!?". Lol. I tried not to. Ghostbusters means very different things to different people. Respect others interpretations of everything and they'll respect yours is what I've learned.
The proton wand operation, for example why the SD concept only has 4 pie chart decal circles and the final screen used wand has 5 decals, is clear cut from SD's concepts, and a topic I video called with Eric Reich and Ben Eadie at length about. To me it was self evident. So self evident that both Mattel and Hasbro came to the -exact- same conclusion as to how it operates in 2014 and 2021.
I learned through my video calls with GC that they too were trying to work things out as they were moving along. The 40 year old, detailed prop concept info had understandably been lost to the ages. The rushed shooting script of GB1 also never really fleshing out the meaning or sequence of any of the switches for posterity or future generations.
I can just imagine Ivan shouting: "Come on! Just make sure the prop lights are nice and bright and lets go! Don't worry about technicalities". Heck we never even see ANY of the 6 dials of the trap being used in any movie (apart from the metal on off switch on the top).
When I post the prop manual +time stamps you will see. You'll see how two scenes were filmed with Phoebe, one with the intended wand operation sequence and one with a deviating start up sequence because they needed a scene where first the pack Red switch is turned on and THEN she also turns on the wand and the deep startup sound should (creatively) not be heard twice in the same scene (it wouldn't have, the red pack switch would only have started the cyclotron IF the wand switches were already on. If not, it would have simply illuminated a red light and then the cyclotron would have been able to be switched on by the wand as in the Egon elevator exit scene in GB1).
That's for the wand.
The trap is much less clear cut. The trap front switches specifically. This has been a secret that (to my knowledge) no one in the GB community has found/shared until now. I found it many years ago but never told anyone.
Basically, of the trap front switch decals (seen in red at the top of this thread), the only decals created by the GB production in 1983 (I assume Stephen Dane) are "NRADS" and "Sync". All the other verbiage is from a pre-existing device.
What device?
It's from a military jet avionics UHF radio.
TR: Transmit-Receive
TR+G: Transmit-Receive + Guard Frequency
ADF: Automatic Directional Finder
GD: Emergency Guard Frequency
PRE: Preset
Man: Manual
Makes perfect sense as A LOT of GB1 stuff was salvaged from military jet junk yards, including the cyclotron (based on a doppler radar). So they probably looked at various old boxes with many buttons and picked a box with verbiage that included decals like Tr(ap), Guard, etc.
Interesting sidenote, on the Matty traps Mattel got it slightly wrong and thought the screen used Planet Hollywood trap washed out decals read GL as opposed to GD and ATF as opposed to ADF which I incorporated into the manual.
So the only decals / switches added by the Ghostbusters 1983 production team were "Sync" (which can only mean sync cartridge to trap base, and "NRADS" which is actually a known thing in science (net radiation dosage absorbed per second). So they were thinking of having the radiation absorption be a user adjustable element from the start. It made sense to me to have that the confinement power of the trap, directly influencing the charge level.
The rest I made into things that made sense:
Off: (switches off the pedal link to the cartridge for safety)
TR: became Trap
TR+G: became Trap + Guard (at set GD NRADS setting, usually max NRADS)
ADF: became Auto Detect Field (or Auto Trap Function on Matty traps)
GD: became Set NRADS level for TR+ G mode (usually just max NRADS)
PRE: became Preset; select from a bunch of presets of NRADS/Cone sizes using the side dials
Man: became Manual; the switch to adjust the overall NRADS level (confinement power vs storage time) using the NRADS dial
Even though the trap decals and switches are far less "clear cut" than the wand, you can kind of see how things can simply be inferred/imagined with a little bit of scientific knowledge.
But all in all it feels weird that how I understood or inferred the operation of these things has now become canon in the franchise. To me it's simply what made most logical sense based on the decals and switches.
Statistics: Posted by One time — April 10th, 2024, 5:03 pm