Their first animated appearance was in Fright from Wrong, a cartoon of Paramount Pictures' Famous Studios theatrical series from the 1950s.

[1] The characters made numerous Harvey Comics appearances and were featured in the title Casper and the Ghostly Trio.

In Casper's earlier appearances in Harvey's animated cartoons and comic books, the Ghostly Trio were depicted differently, although they were brothers.

Similar to his later incarnation, Fatso was overweight and gluttonous (although, as ghosts were capable of eating in the early stories, this trait was not as odd as it later seemed).

[2] Fatso's brashness and quick temper often led him into mishaps, as well as an occasional role in one of Casper's adventures; Fusso and Lazo were sometimes called "the Ghostly Duo" in his absence.

Most of the time, the Ghostly Trio expresses a general feeling of superiority towards the living, sometimes degenerating into hatred, and, in the films from 1995 onwards, sometimes refers to humans as either "fleshies" or "bonebags".

The spin-off cartoon (in which they appeared as the main antagonists) depicted them in a similar light, where they often harass the doctor, although out of mischief rather than hatred.

Fatso is obese and assumed to be the least intelligent, even though he is adept at singing and has a surprisingly strong knowledge of pop culture.

Stinkie's special talent involves supernatural halitosis and body odor, which he prefers as his means of frightening "fleshies" who cross his path (sometimes announcing this by saying "Smell-o-gram!").

In 1987 Harvey Comics sued Columbia Pictures (the film's distributor) for $50 million, claiming that the iconic Ghostbusters logo was too reminiscent of Fatso.

The court ruled in Columbia's favor,[4] due to Harvey's failure to renew the copyrights on early Casper stories and the "limited ways to draw a figure of a cartoon ghost".

The Ghostly Trio are shown to be a very powerful and experienced group of ghosts, and the trio has vast supernatural powers, such as intangibility, invisibility, teleportation, flight, possession (which they supposedly hold the record for the longest possessions), matter transmutation, shapeshifting and other forms of reality warping.