Votebusters

July 5, 2006 8:34 PM

Doonesbury, November 1984. Does anyone remember the "Votebusters" running gag? I have only a foggy memory of it, perhaps being a mashup of Ghostbusters and the Presidential election. What was the joke exactly?
posted by rolypolyman to Media & Arts (4 answers total)

Way back when (I'm not sure if they're still available), I wrote a little script that saved the entire Doonesbury archive from its website. I just glanced through Oct/Nov of 1984 and didn't see anything. Wikipedia says (and the archive agrees) that the comic was on hiatus from 1/83 to 10/84, so it couldn't have appeared prior to October.

A Google Usenet search for "Votebusters" gives mention of it in a "long-defunct cartoon." I'm pretty sure it's not a Doonesbury comic. That's about all I got, sorry.
posted by Symeon at 9:22 PM on July 5, 2006

Any chance it might have been Bloom County? That's the only other cartoon I followed... but I don't remember them getting much into politics. It was definitely November 1984 though.
posted by rolypolyman at 9:36 PM on July 5, 2006

Bloom County definitely had a lot of political commentary--not just its own characters running for office, but satires of real political figures as well. I can't find any record of anything related to Votebusters, and I don't remember it myself, but that could have been it.
posted by leesh at 3:15 AM on July 6, 2006

Bloom County definitely had a lot of political commentary--not just its own characters running for office, but satires of real political figures as well. I can't find any record of anything related to Votebusters, and I don't remember it myself, but that could have been it.

As a former Bloom County obsessive, I can assure you that the gag in question never appeared in Bloom County. I can't tell you how sure I am of this without sounding like a huge nerd. But it's true.
posted by Mayor Curley at 4:26 AM on July 6, 2006