I like Aqua Teens, and a lot of other surreal and strange humor shows on Adult Swim.
But for the life of me I don’t get the love of Space Ghost Coast To Coast or the endless spinoffs(The Brak Show etc) when I first saw it I assumed it was cheap to produce and allowed CN to stretch the definition of cartoon and bring in more viewers(is an animated character “interviewing” celebs a cartoon?).
For what it is a talk show its ok, a lot of the skits get tiresome. The spinoffs are downright annoying sometimes.
I had no idea it was still on. Do they make new episodes or are they all old reruns?
I watched it damn near 20 years ago and, then, it was surreal and funny because we hadn’t seen a show like it before. The animation played into our “oh my God, I’m almost out of college and a real adult, ooohh… childhood nostalgia” needs and the awkward humor (long pauses, terrible interviews) was still something relatively new.
I imagine the style of humor it had has been used enough by now and you can find enough 70’s & 80’s retro stuff to choke a sloth these days that it doesn’t have much of a niche unless you were already a fan.
I never watched the spin-offs and can only imagine that they’d lose their novelty in a hurry. Brak and Zorak were best in small doses.
Have there been any Space Ghost spin-offs besides The Brak Show and Aqua Teens?
Space Ghost Coast to Coast started off as filler. Cartoon Network showed cartoons during the day to kids. Kids go to bed early. So they had a lot of late-night airtime to fill. They could show Tom & Jerry reruns that no one would watch, or they could fill the time with something cheap and weird that at least had a chance of attracting a cult following. Which Space Ghost did. It worked well enough that in 2001 they launched Adult Swim and started making more quirky original shows to appeal to the Space Ghost fan base.
The Brak Show was a misfire. It was painful to watch and horribly unfunny, but it didn’t last very long. But other shows like Aqua Teens and Harvey Birdman and Sealab 2021 and Venture Brothers were hilarious and brilliant. And Space Ghost paved the way for them.
Yes I was watching CN just now and there was a painfully unfunny segment with Brak, he and Zorak are the hosts of a new variety show(although at least it isn’t on Adult Swim).
I never saw the original show the characters were cribbed from.
I watched Space Ghost Coast to Coast when it first aired and thought it was hilarious. Curses was one of my favorite episodes, especially the cannibalistic rampage at the end – I still crack up at “Moltar, you’re looking rather… bellllchhh… plump today…”
I don’t know, it was the charm of the limitations of the animation plus the characters plus that particular brand of humor…I don’t know how to explain it, dude.
Hey, I watched the original Space Ghost in 1966. Pre Star Trek, it was the happening SF for a youngster like me back then. I followed it obsessively for the next 41 episodes until it was cancelled. I had a hell of a crush on Jan.
Space Ghost Coast to Coast was awesome! Reruns are still aired every once in awhile.
I’m not sure where Cartoon Planet falls in the spinoff line…it used the same characters and backgrounds, but featured much more child-friendly content.
I thought the first season of The Brak Show was bizarre and absurdly funny, but I have an off-beat sense of humor (to put it mildly.) I’m not especially interested in Adult Swim any longer, but as Jophiel said, back in the day it was definitely unique…
I mentioned 70’s/80’s nostalgia so this made me double-take a second but then I remembered that, yeah, even in the early 80’s we had old Underdog/Tennessee Tuxedo/Bullwinkle/Peabody & Sherman episodes playing weekdays at noon on the local UHF station. Never occurred to me at the time that the show was already nearly 20 years old or that I’d eventually be nostalgic for something from eight years before I was born.
I got a huge kick out of SGCtC 15 years ago. I’m not sure how to explain the appeal. It was just funny. Brak was the funniest supporting character, so he got his own show. I remember looking forward to the Brak show, but being disappointed with the product. I still think SGCtC is great, but I haven’t seen it in a long time.
I’ve always thought that the essence of comedy is subversion, and Space Goast: Leave this Place had subversion literally coming out of its ears. Literally. It subverted the original Space Ghost animation; it subverted our expectations of a cartoon; it subverted the chat show format, and interviews; it subverted the character-character of Space Ghost, and I can understand why some people might not like it, because it’s like The Irony Review, forever subverting everything to a point where you come to expect it, and nothing’s shocking any more. A bit like Monty Python in that respect. Not so much a show, more a kind of mental head-space and/or conditioning exercise that altered your perception of reality. What if they’re normal, and we’re the freaks? I picture Americans with their big chrome-finned cars and picket fences being driven into hysterical insanity by Space Ghost, because it undermined the foundation of the military-industrial hegemony. Hege-money, more like.
It’s one of a great number of US TV programmes that were never broadcast in Britain, so I only heard about it from a distance, and only got to see it years later via the internet. Along with MST3K, TalkRadio, pretty much the entire Adult Swim roster. As a consequence I had a chance to study it from the outside, like a bug, or a tampon. The whole Space Ghost parody didn’t work, admittedly, because I can’t remember ever seeing the original cartoon; I assumed he was a generic, invented 50s-style superhero character. I suppose the British equivalent would be a chat show using stock footage from Captain Pugwash. Also, is Judy Tenuta a real person? What does she do? Play the accordion whilst making trilling noises? Just that? I mean, if that’s all it takes to be a big star in America, why are people miserable there? Why are you miserable? You have Judy Tenuta!
You have to use moon clips in order for the cartridges to seat properly in the cylinders, otherwise there’s a risk that the hammer won’t hit the primer hard enough.
She’s a stand-up comedian, whose moment of popularity and relevance was about 20-25 years ago. So, even when SGCtC was originally on the air, she was well past her 15 minutes of fame.
I think Captain Pugwash was better known in the U.K. than the original Space Ghost show was in the U.S. Space Ghost was a *really *minor superhero. The original show was only on for two seasons. If it wasn’t for Coast to Coast, the character be almost entirely forgotten.
Part of the appeal was the pure randomness of reviving Space Ghost. It’s like a piece of strange flotsam thrown clear from the wreck of 1960’s children’s television. A talk show with Jonny Quest or Scooby Doo as the host would clearly have been a parody. But a talk show with Space Ghost as the host was just bizarre.
Space Ghost Coast to Coast is quite literally the grandfather to all the Adult Swim stuff. It existed for over five years as CN only adult night time show before launching AS in 2001. And The Brak Show started to falter a bit latter on, but I thought it was mostly hilarious.
George Lowe as a demented Ricky Ricardo chastising his son- "Brak, if you’re done driving you little baby car around St Babysburg…"
I had a crush on Jan as a child, as well. Plus, it was a very fun superhero cartoon for a demented little kid like me. What a small universe we live in! Ha!
