Philadelphia Inquirer
Sunday, August 07, 1998
Exploring the subversive charm of Comedy Network's Space Ghost
By Christopher Cornell
If you're a celebrity -- an author, a TV star, a rock star -- and you head to Atlanta to promote whatever it is you're
promoting, a bizarre experience may await you. Since 1994, such folks, while visiting Turner Broadcasting's headquarters,
have been ushered into a small room with a camera, shown a picture of a cartoon character wearing a black hood and yellow
cape, and asked, via a speaker, a series of baffling questions."What are your super powers?" the booming voice often asks.
Or "Do you have enough oxygen?" And you'd better have an answer.
After a while, interviewees are let go, dazed and
disoriented, knowing that a few months later, or a few years later (or never), footage of them attempting to respond to
these questions, or of them just looking hopelessly baffled, will show up on -- of all places -- cable TV's Cartoon Network.
It's all part of the subversive charm of Space Ghost Coast to Coast. The series begins its fifth season of 15-minute episodes
tonight at 11:30, and with the departure of HBO's Larry Sanders Show, it's arguably cable TV's hottest talk show. It's
unquestionably the weirdest.
And that's the way the mad geniuses at Cartoon Network planned it.
The animated star of
the show is Space Ghost, whom baby boomers may remember as the cartoon character introduced in the 1966 Saturday-morning
cartoon show Space Ghost and Dino Boy. With "power bands" on his arms to fight bad guys, an "inviso-belt" to hide from them,
and the sleek Phantom Cruiser to ride around in, he was the epitome of crime-fighting coolness.
Almost three decades later,
executive producers Keith Crofford and Mike Lazzo had the idea that this character might be funny as the host of his own
animated talk show. So they selected about 50 cells from the original series, and spliced them together with new TV-talk-show
backgrounds to create a visual style that's a cross between a puppet show and a Clutch Cargo cartoon.
Space Ghost himself
took on a new characterization, too. Voiced by Atlanta-area announcer George Lowe, the 1990s version of Space Ghost is fussy,
self-absorbed, indifferent to his guests, slightly detached from reality -- in short, everything we've come to expect of a
big-time talk-show host.
Assisting Space Ghost is an assortment of marginally loyal sidekicks, including the cruel,
insectoid bandleader Zorak, and Moltar, the show's impassive and morose director.
The result caught on quickly and soon
became a pop-culture phenomenon, one that successfully draws an adult audience to a network whose viewers often can't cross
the street by themselves. It later sparked a spin-off series, the more child-oriented Cartoon Planet.
"We're quite proud
of the show," says Crofford, who has supervised every one of the show's 50-odd (or is it 50 odd?) episodes, and who in 1995
received a CableAce award for all that effort. But Crofford and the rest of the Space Ghost team are not resting on their
space laurels. This year, he says, the team hopes to take the series in new directions.
"We want to take it beyond the
talk show, move out of the confines of the set," Crofford explains. "We'll still be using those same 50 poses, but this year
we'd like to see Space Ghost exploring other realities."
In the season opener tonight, Space Ghost becomes convinced he's
terminally ill and consults the only doctor he can think of, "Dr. Drew" Pinsky, host of the syndicated radio show and MTV
series Loveline.
"And when Adam [ Carolla, Pinsky's Loveline cohost ] heard about it, he was pretty peeved," Crofford
reveals. "He actually tried to crash the interview. So we invited him to do his own spot, which will be in a show later in
the season."
In a later episode, TV lawyer Greta Van Susteren giddily consults with Space Ghost when he's threatened with
a lawsuit by the Space Twins, Jan and Jayce, his sidekicks from the 1966 Saturday-morning series.
"She was a great sport,"
Crofford says of Van Susteren. "We don't usually ask our guests such specific questions, but we had her on the show because
the show was going to be about Space Ghost's legal troubles, and she jumped right into the premise."
All that carefree fun
up on the screen and the show's oh-so-brief 15-minute length belie the hard work that goes into making Space Ghost Coast to
Coast.
"After we decide which interviews to use, it takes a couple of weeks to write a show," Crofford explains. "Then
there's two to three weeks of really rather tedious work on an editing machine. Trying to line up the lips with the dialog
is harder than you might think."
Meanwhile, the bank of celebrity interviews at Space Ghost headquarters keeps growing.
Crofford says there are "at least 30 interviews sitting in the files" with everyone from rockers They Might Be Giants to
author Merrill Markoe, Weinerville host Marc Weiner to veteran announcer Gary Owens, the original voice of Space Ghost in
the '60s.
And like any other self-respecting talk-show titan, Space Ghost has quickly become the superhero of all media.
He already has one CD under his inviso-belt, Space Ghost's Musical Bar-B-Que, which was a big hit on the children's music
charts. His second, Space Ghost's Surf and Turf, hits the stores Aug. 18. You can bet Space Ghost will mention it on the show.
After all, says Lazzo, "like most talk shows, Space Ghost Coast to Coast is all about the host and what his guests can
do for him."
ith no new episodes of "The Larry Sanders Show," it's up to Space Ghost to pick up the slack on late-night TV.
The concept of the half-hour show, which this week kicks off its fifth season, is that the star of an old mid-1960s Hanna-Barbera cartoon "Space Ghost," a black-hooded interplanetary crime-fighter, now has his own late-night talk show. Except that Space Ghost, who has a hilarious Jack Webb-style delivery, doesn't really get the concept and is still preoccupied by his previous existence as a superhero type.
