Space Ghost Coast to Coast
A 1960s Hanna-Barbera superhero, recycled into a late-night talk-show host who interviews real celebrities on a monitor and rarely understands their answers. Space Ghost Coast to Coast was one of Cartoon Network's first original series, the precursor to Adult Swim, and the reason a generation of teenagers stayed up past 11 on Friday nights.
Cartoon Network programmer Mike Lazzo was asked to develop a cartoon that would appeal to adults. What he, Khaki Jones and Andy Merrill started as an attempt to revive Wacky Races drifted into a single idea: take Space Ghost, the 1960s Hanna-Barbera hero designed by Alex Toth, and make him a talk-show host. The show premiered on April 15, 1994, at 11 p.m. ET on Friday nights. It was one of the network's first original series and the earliest that wasn't an anthology of old cartoons. Each 11-minute episode was followed by the original Space Ghost cartoons, sometimes with a laugh track added.
Space Ghost sat at a desk, built from recycled Hanna-Barbera animation, and interviewed live-action guests who appeared on a monitor beside him. He usually assumed they were fellow superheroes; in early episodes he opened by asking about their superpowers, and their answers were re-cut in post-production to match whatever he had asked. His bandleader was Zorak, a mantis-like alien who was also his prisoner, and his director was Moltar, a man made of lava — C. Martin Croker voiced both. George Lowe was Space Ghost, and Merrill was Brak, the lion-like villain so unthreatening he only managed cameos. The first episode's guests were the Bee Gees, Kevin Meaney and Susan Powter. Later ones included Björk and Thom Yorke, Conan O'Brien, "Weird Al" Yankovic, Beck, William Shatner, Willie Nelson, Hulk Hogan with Slash, Bob Odenkirk with David Cross, and Charlton Heston.
The original run ended on December 17, 1999. Revived in May 2001, the show moved that September 2 to a new late-night block called Adult Swim — on the block's first night — and new episodes ran until April 12, 2004, when the TV run ended with "Live at the Fillmore." A final season went out exclusively on GameTap from 2006 to 2008, for 109 episodes across ten seasons in all.
Williams Street, the studio that made it, was founded around the third season as the show progressively split from Cartoon Network management. Space Ghost spun off Cartoon Planet, The Brak Show, Aqua Teen Hunger Force and Harvey Birdman, Attorney at Law, and helped launch the careers of Lazzo, Adam Reed, Dave Willis and Matt Maiellaro. And four boulders on Mars are named after Space Ghost, Zorak, Moltar and Brak.
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