So a reader asked which Ghost Buster is Daniel’s favorite, and the answer, of course, is Tracy. This time, Tracy is practicing to be a stage magician, which is awfully convenient, in that kids’ TV way, because the ghost of the Egyptian Queen Faroh is looking for an immortal magician called Simious, who looks like an ape. He’s supposed to have the secret of immortality.
I’ve described some of Tracy’s oddball stunts, which Spencer and Kong see with their own eyes but never seem to acknowledge, as “magic.” This gets paid off this time, as Tracy is practicing the “cut a rope in two and pull it back out as one” trick. He drops the two halves in his hat, and then levitates out a trumpet, to which several colored handkerchiefs are tied, and finally the two halves, tied together. Kong sneers that he can’t do magic despite what he’s just witnessed, because the halves are tied.
Even though he laughed through the entire episode, Daniel insisted that the best part of the episode by far was the final gag, in which Tracy’s stage magic goes awry and he makes himself and Spencer disappear completely, somewhat ruining their intended surprise entrance to Kong’s birthday party. For whatever reason, the sight of the office door opening and closing by itself was his favorite among more than a dozen gags, although the message from Zero self, and the subsequent self-destruction, got a mention as well. He loves it “when Tracy makes an explosion!”
Faroh is played by Barbara Rhoades, who spent decades doing dozens of these taped-in-a-day roles, appearing in very small parts in pretty much everything, including four separate characters in four separate episodes of McMillan and Wife. She seems to have retired after a run of twenty episodes of the soap opera One Life to Live in 2011.
Queen Faroh’s mummy – she has to have a mummy – has the most peculiar superpower. Apparently, anybody he touches turns into a mummy as well. I scratched my head, trying to remember whether I’d ever heard of such a thing in fiction, until Tracy hands the mummy a flower and it instantly dies. Kong calls that – that! – mummification. I think “turns into a mummy” was an awkward compromise offered when CBS’s Broadcast Standard department told them they couldn’t use words like “kills.”
Fire Breathing Dimetrodon Time 
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