Trivia / Ghostwriter

• Keep Circulating the Tapes: The show hasn't aired in reruns since it last aired on Noggin in the early 2000s. It got a couple of VHS releases and a Season 1 DVD box set, but those are now out of print and go for high prices on eBay. The other two seasons remain in circulation limbo, not unlike with most of Sesame Workshop's other shows.
• The Other Darrin:
  • Melissa Gonzales replaced Mayteana Morales as Gaby for the final two episode arcs.
  • Calvin Ferguson was played by Wil Horneff in the first episode and Joey Shea for the rest of the series.
  • Jamal's father Reggie was played by Samuel L. Jackson in "Who Burned Down Mr. Brinker's Store?" and Dean Irby after that.
• Playing with Character Type: David Patrick Kelly is best known for playing creepy bad guys (notably in The Warriors). Here he plays Double T, a homeless man who many characters are afraid of until they learn that he is a nice guy (and a talented poet).
• Reclusive Artist: Sheldon Turnipseed's only other known acting credit was a small role in Mo' Better Blues, and he hasn't been heard from since Ghostwriter was cancelled.
• Screwed by the Network: Despite the show's popularity, it was abruptly cancelled after the third season due to inadequate funding after BBC pulled out of co-producing the show.
• Technology Marches On:
  • Almost everything that the characters do can be handled with cell phones and search engines in the New '20s.
  • Their version of the Internet is very basic. It is also funny how the children don't know what 'hackers' and 'viruses' are (from the perspective of a modern child, at least).
  • Manny Gites from "Into the Comics" is shown as an unemployed cartoonist living with his aunt and his comic book concept rejected. In the 21st century, someone like Gites might have some success becoming a professional or at least a semi-professional with social media and sites to promote his work like Kickstarter, DeviantArt and YouTube.
  • In the fourth episode of the "What's Up With Alex?" arc, Alex and Jamal find Kevin collapsed from a drug overdose and don't have a mobile to call for an ambulance. Also in that same episode, the video camera Hector and Tina use to film criminal suspects is very 90's.
• What Could Have Been: The original plan was to reveal Ghostwriter as a Civil War-era slave (possibly Jamal's great-grandfather Ezra per D. J. MacHale, who wrote the pilot). Unlike many slaves, he educated himself and learned the value of reading, so he would sneak off to the woods and teach other slaves to do the same. Eventually, slave catchers learned what he was doing and had their dogs tear him to shreds over it. Somehow, his soul ended up trapped inside his textbook^note with Fort Greene’s history (the Lafayette Avenue Presbyterian Church was a stop on the Underground Railroad, it was likely a place where he had stopped), it's likely his book was transported via the Railroad to serve as beacon of hope and had landed there for 125 years until he was released.
  • Per a 1991 article about the show from The New York Times, an early idea was for Ghostwriter to be "a famous 15th- to 16th-century writer, but not Shakespeare"; this was probably dropped quite early on.
  • there was a prototype episode produced in 1991 with Merlin Santana as Jamal. It was shown to focus groups who found it scary . It is around 13 minutes long . This prototype episode involves Jamal getting a message about a friend being in danger . He is told to go look where the ghost of music lives . He arrives at an abandoned music theater and heads inside . Jamal runs into Lenni who received the same message he did . Lenni discovers an abandoned book that contains song lyrics and guesses that whoever left their book in the theater had to leave in a hurry . Alex , Gaby and Tina didn’t exist in the prototype episode .

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