SDCC ’25: What did the Hasbro GHOSTBUSTERS team bring to the show?

The Ghostbusters films were some of my favorite films growing up, like many others. That being said, I think I love the cartoon The Real Ghostbusters more than the films. I have some great memories of those toys. Today, I had the pleasure of speaking with graphics, packaging, and product designer Patrick Dennis of the Hasbro Ghostbusters team about the new stuff they are debuting here at SDCC, along with more coming out soon. From retro remakes, high-end movie figures, and high-end prop replicas, the Ghostbusters display was an impressive corner of the Hasbro booth.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

Julian Lytle: What’s new for Ghostbusters at San Diego Comic-Con 2025? 

Patrick Dennis: We’ve got our four-pack of Ecto Glow Ghostbusters. They’re Kenner re-releases, so they’re lovingly and painstakingly recreated to the best of my ability. We’re selling them in a four-pack for $79.99, featuring all-new artwork on the exterior box, created by Harry Moore, an incredible artist. He’s my go-to retro Ghostbusters guy. If I need anything done in a pinch, it’s Harry Moore. So that’s our exclusive product. Then we’ve got some reveals. We’ve got the Ecto Glow Ecto-1 that went up for pre-order this morning. It’s $49.99, and that will ship sometime in the spring. However, the Ecto Glow Ecto-1 will be color-matched to match the figures exactly. All the colors you see on the Ecto-1 will also be featured on the figures, and vice versa.

Lytle: Can all the figures fit inside the Ecto-1?

Dennis: Yep, it’s the standard Kenner Ecto-1. So you’ve got the bench seat in the front, and you’ve got the gunner seat up top. I think you can fit all four in if you try. However, I think that classic Kenner was two in the front and one on the seat.

Lytle: What about this Slimer and Stay Puft?

Dennis: Oh, let’s talk about that reveal. So, a while back on Ghostbusters Day, we had a little bit of a teaser. We were just letting people know that the Ecto Glow was getting a capsule collection. It was going to get a several-item line that would span about a year in releases. These are the first three offerings for that line. You’ve got the four pack, the Ecto One, and our classic Ghosts two pack. So it’s got the Green Ghost, a.k.a. Slimer, and Stay Puft. And again, you’re going to see them in those ecto-glow colors, glow-in-the-dark pigment. So it really just ties that whole ecto-glow line together. The thought process behind it was, what if Kenner kept going? In 1991, they released the last wave of real Ghostbusters figures, which consisted of four figures, five if you include Tully. But that was the final wave of Kenner Ghostbusters. But what would have happened in 1992? What would they have done if they kept going? So, I really got to explore that and design my own version of the Ecto-1 in Glow in the Dark, and then reimagined the classic ghosts in Ecto-Glow colors.

Lytle: Going by the sign that says Fall Commission Exclusive?

Dennis: Yeah, this coming fall, you’re going to be able to pre-order that set, I believe, at New York Comic Con.

Lytle: All right, so what’s the next row?

Dennis: We’ve got our Ghostbusters Plasma Series Ectomobile HasLab. So last fall, we ran a HasLab campaign for 45 days, where you could either get the base version of the Ectomobile, which was the Ecto-1 roof rack. It came with Slimer, the Library Ghost, and as a bonus, Little Louis Tully here. And it came with some accessories for Tully. He got a proton pack, a wand, a PK meter, and a trap. There’s a stack of books for the library ghost. She’s also got a Tobin spirit guide in her hand. It’s a nice little Easter egg. The gurney that comes with the car and that was the base offering. But for an extra $75, you got the deluxe offering, which was one car, two roof racks, all the figures that I just mentioned, plus all four of the Ghostbusters 2 figures with their slime packs, their accessories, their proton streams, their backpacks, and then more lights than we’ve ever put in a toy ever.

Then, moving from left to right, we also have our Rooftop Showdown 4-pack. So, reimagining that classic scene from the end of the movie when they’re going up against Gozer on the Manhattan rooftop, I wanted to take another stab at those face sculpts. When we created the Ecto-1A and the figures that came with the Deluxe set, we were extremely pleased with how these figures turned out. I wanted to take another crack at the original ’84 cast. I wanted to make sure those licenses looked good. We’ve had a lot of improvements in sculpting. It’s been five, six years since those original Plasma Series figures were developed, so I wanted to take another crack at them, see what we could do, and I think they look great. I think they’re some of the best-looking figures that I’ve seen come out of Ghostbusters. I’m very happy with how they turned out. And they’ve got that scowl, if you look at them. If you look at the picture from that scene, a screenshot from that scene in the movie, we tried to nail some of those facial expressions one-to-one.

Lytle: They look really good. So, the third and final row, I guess, we have the costume gear?

Dennis: Yeah, so all the premium role-play items. These have been a real labor of love as we do these. We work very closely with Sony, very closely with Ghost Corps, and they provide us measurements. They provide us with all the photo references. They sent us an actual trap to play with. And we go to great lengths to take all of the things you see on screen and kind of combine them into one product. Because, you know, in the world of movie making, there are 40 different traps. One’s made of rubber. One’s made of plywood. One’s made of metal. So, trying to figure out how to combine them all into one amalgamation has been really fun and an interesting challenge. So we’ve got our two in the box, which was our HasLab campaign from a couple of years ago. It was the trap in the PKE meter from Ghostbusters: Afterlife and Frozen Empire. Then we have our 1984 wand, which should be in stock at fan channel retailers, such as Entertainment Earth, Big Bad Toy Store, and Hasbro Pulse. You can find that information online. And then we’ve got the new 1984 Proton Pack. So it’s about 85% new tooling. It’s got a USB-C display mode power option. So there’s a little door here. When you open the door, there’s a switch and a power plug for a USB-C cable. You can snake the cable out the back and leave it turned on all the time like the Ecto-1s. So it’ll go into display mode. If you shut off the power to the room at a light switch, when you turn it back on, in theory, it should come on with the rest of your lights. We heard from fans that wanted to be able to leave this on as a display, as a nightlight, or as something they could leave on while it’s mounted to the wall.

Lytle: And this is the second one you guys made, the Proton Pack?

Dennis: Yep.

Lytle: But that was Ghostbusters 2 Proton Pack?

Dennis: So, a few years ago, they made a Ghostbusters: Afterlife Proton Pack. The Ghostbusters team, before I got on it, had made a one-to-one Spengler’s Proton Pack from the Afterlife movie. It has a lot of dense scratches, weathering, numerous additional wires and cables, several different play modes, extra switches, extra knobs, and extra LEDs. It’s got a whole bunch of stuff in that HasLab, the premium HasLab version. And then we wanted to take it back and kind of scale it back, go to 1984, and release that classic Proton Pack that you remember from the original movie, and really have a feature set that mirrors that original movie. We’ve removed the rumble motor, we’ve removed some of the switches that get you to the afterlife mode, but we’re working on electronics right now for it, baking in some stuff in the code, little Easter eggs here and there, some stuff that’s markedly different from the previous offering, and then looking at things that the fans have been talking about, including that USB-C always-on, and doing what we can there to make it a good experience for the consumer.

Lytle: When will this be released?

Dennis: This is available for pre-order now. When it sells out, it will be gone, but it’s expected to ship mid-next year. When it runs out, it runs out. My recommendation is to pre-order it as soon as you think about it, and then it will charge you when it ships. The main difference between a pre-order item and a HasLab is that you have to pay up front when the campaign ends. Pre-order, you pay when it ships. For $279.99, when that thing ships in let’s say end of next spring, like May-ish, June-ish, somewhere around there, it’ll charge you then for it instead of charging you now.

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Stay tuned to the Beat for more coverage from SDCC ’25