Mal's Space Ghost Coast to Coast Corner

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We once roamed the vast forums of Corona Coming Attractions. Some of us had been around from The Before Times, in the Days of Excelsior, while others of us had only recently begun our trek. When our home became filled with much evil, including the villainous Cannot-Post-in-This-Browser and the dreaded Cannot-Log-In, we flounced away most huffily to this new home away from home. We follow the flag of Jubboiter and talk about movies, life, the universe, and everything, often in a most vulgar fashion. All are welcome here, so long as they do not take offense to our particular idiom.
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Mal Shot First
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Mal's Space Ghost Coast to Coast Corner

Post by Mal Shot First »

Introduction

I'd like to dedicate a space on Huffy Flounce to Space Ghost Coast to Coast because it's a TV show that still means a lot to me. I was 14 years old when my family immigrated to the US. In many ways, I remember that move as a much more traumatic experience than our flight from war-torn Yugoslavia to Germany. At the time of the war, I was 8 years old and had barely begun being aware of myself as a person and as part of a community. As a result, I became assimilated rather quickly after arriving in Germany. By the time the war was over and we could no longer stay in Germany as refugees, I actually felt more German than anything else. I was more comfortable speaking German than my actual native language, I had immersed myself in German culture, and I felt part of that society. Being forced out of that and transplanted into an utterly alien environment felt... well, alienating.

Even though my sister and I started attending American schools right away, assimilation didn't come as easily as it did in Germany. We continued to speak in German to each other for about two years before we gradually began shifting over to English. I believe that movies and television programs played a significant role in this transition. Particularly the quoting of movies and TV shows contributed to our eventual complete shift to English because when you quote something you have to do it in the language in which the quote was uttered. In order to engage in this activity, we were basically forced to speak English.

The shows we watched the most during this period were Daria, Friends, and Space Ghost Coast to Coast. Our attraction to Daria makes sense, thematically, since she's a teenager who finds everything about her surroundings to be alienating (and the show's above-average linguistic register taught us a number of useful words). Friends was a relatively benign show that we could watch with our parents in the evenings. Space Ghost drew us in because it was a really unique show at the time and had a bizarre sense of humor.

We started watching the show at some point in 1999, at which time there had already been something like 70 episodes and the show was becoming increasingly experimental compared with its more scripted early episodes that more closely parodied the late-night talk show setup. I'm pretty sure that the first episode we ever saw was a rerun of "Intense Patriotism" with Jeff Foxworthy as the guest. If it wasn't the first, it was at least one of the first - it was certainly the first that we had recorded on VHS. Since I was pretty obsessed with Star Craft at the time as well, I was working on recreating the entire episode as a Star Craft briefing using the mission editor (See here for an example of a briefing. I used the following unit animations for the various characters: Terran Ghost for Space Ghost, Zerg Hydralisk for Zorak, Terran Firebat for Moltar, and Arcturus Mengsk for Jeff Foxworthy.).

Space Ghost Coast to Coast served as the prototype for the type of absurd humor that would later become the bread and butter of the Adult Swim block on Cartoon Network (and that the kids would just call "random," as in "That was so random!"). I'm pretty confident in saying that Sealab 2021, Aqua Teen Hunger Force, Harvey Birdman: Attorney at Law, and The Brak Show wouldn't have seen the light of day had it not been for Space Ghost (the latter three were basically spin-off shows of Space Ghost Coast to Coast).

In this thread, I plan to post episodes of the show that I've collected over the years, and I hope to do it at least on a semi-regular basis. I could probably just post every single episode, since I'm pretty sure they've all been uploaded somewhere on the internet, but I want to stick to the ones I have on my computer for two reasons:
  1. Even though I'll be linking to videos that already exist online, I want to be able to replace those videos if they ever get taken down. I might not be able to do that unless I actually have the episode as a file on my computer.
  2. The episodes I collected are usually the ones I really liked, so those are the ones I'll want to post here anyway.
I'll post the episodes in chronological order because it will probably be the best way to observe the developing format of the show. I'll post a brief commentary alongside each episode to point out what I liked or mention a pop-cultural reference that I appreciated or didn't understand, etc. Everyone else is welcome add their own comments, of course. Maybe I'll learn something I never knew!
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Re: Mal's Space Ghost Coast to Coast Corner

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1994: Season 1, Episode 5 - Bobcat



When I first watched this episode, I was primarily familiar with Bobcat Goldthwait because of his role as Zed in the Police Academy movies. I later learned that he is a comedian and have also seen various clips of his comedy over the years. Something I just learned when I was looking for this video, though, was that he was apparently the voice of Moxy in The Moxy Show, the first original program specifically produced for Cartoon Network. I had never actually heard of that before, but I suppose it's fitting that Bobcat would appear as a guest on a show that was the first one that Cartoon Network actually produced themselves.

I wonder how many kids watching this episode today would even get any of the Blossom references. This ridicule (and almost hatred) of Blossom was also something that was new to me when I came to the US. I'd seen the show Germany, but I never felt strongly about it one way or another. Why did people here react to it so seemingly negatively? Was it all because of Joey Lawrence?

I'm also not sure where Space Ghost sees the resemblance between Bobcat Goldthwait and Judy Collins, haha! Must be the voice.

It's pretty cool that they got the Ramones to be on the program. I wonder sometimes whether the characters' musical preferences reflect the creators' preferences or whether they're poking fun at certain bands or their fans.
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Re: Mal's Space Ghost Coast to Coast Corner

Post by Dalty »

So tell me about Space Ghost. Was it an old cartoon, recut and redubbed?
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Re: Mal's Space Ghost Coast to Coast Corner

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Space Ghost Coast to Coast had a very tenuous connection to the 1960s Hanna-Barbera Space Ghost cartoon. It used frames of animation from the 60s show to animate the characters, but that's about it. The new voice acting was actually always one of the highlights for me, and much of the show's appeal for me stems from the way the characters sound and interact with each other. What you describe (at least the way I read your question) is much closer to what Sealab 2021 did, namely take the setting and characters of the original show and repurpose them for a comedy show.

The Wikipedia entry for Space Ghost Coast to Coast describes its format pretty well, so rather than reinventing the wheel, I'll just post what's written there:
...Space Ghost Coast to Coast was a total reboot of the series intended for adults, now reinterpreted as a surreal spoof talk show and produced using the original artwork.

...

...The first two seasons were presented as a serious talk show with subdued jokes, while the later seasons relied more on surrealism, non-sequiturs, and parodies. In 2001, it moved to the network's late night television block Adult Swim.

Space Ghost Coast to Coast used the talk show format as its template but subverted it regularly. Various celebrities appeared on the show as guests. They were shown on a TV screen next to Space Ghost's desk, and unlike the characters, they were not animated. In early episodes of the show, Space Ghost apparently believed his guests were other superheroes and usually opened the interview by asking them about their superpowers. His interactions with guests were almost always painfully awkward and sometimes hostile. It was sometimes hard to tell if guests were aware of the nature of the program on which they were appearing. Their answers often did not match the questions coming from Space Ghost, because the questions were changed after the interview.

Space Ghost's relationship with his co-workers was even worse. His bandleader, an evil talking mantis named Zorak, and his director/producer, a red-helmeted lava man named Moltar, worked for Space Ghost as punishment for their crimes. They frequently disrupted the show and made no secret of the fact that they hated him.

Most episodes of Space Ghost Coast to Coast were about 15 minutes in length, although there were a few 30-minute episodes. Cartoon Network often aired two episodes back-to-back to make a 30-minute programming block. In the first few years of the show, Cartoon Network would show episodes of the original 1960s and 1980s Space Ghost cartoons (sometimes with an unusual added laugh track) after the 11-minute episode of Space Ghost Coast to Coast.
I'm not sure how often the guests' questions were taken out of context in the early episodes. Bobcat Goldthwait's responses in the video above, for example, seem to correspond pretty well to what Space Ghost is saying, and the context does not appear to have been changed.

There is at least one case where it looked like the guest's part was at least partially scripted, which could mean that there were more episodes like that. In an episode called "Table Read," you see the voice actors rehearsing the episode entitled "Fire Ant." The parts spoken by Conan O'Brien in the "Fire Ant" episode were spoken by one of the writers in "Table Read" and were only slightly changed in the eventual "Fire Ant" episode (possibly ad-libbed by Conan).

I also remember reading somewhere that at times the cast would show up in full costumes to the interviews with the guest, which would sometimes elicit comments from the guest about their appearance. I'm not sure how frequently they did that, though.
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Re: Mal's Space Ghost Coast to Coast Corner

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I'm thinking of dusting off this thread, in which, I'm sad to say, I only got around to commenting on one episode. I think what I'll do is "release" the content in parallel here and on Facebook, just so I can tell myself that it's going to be seen by more than a handful of people.
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Re: Mal's Space Ghost Coast to Coast Corner

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1998: Season 5, Episode 12 - Intense Patriotism



My initial thought was to go through a series of SGC2C episodes in chronological order, and I think that's the order I will follow going forward, but since I mentioned "Intense Patriotism" in my introductory post as the one that drew me into the show, I figured I could write about that one first.

This episode is one of the last from the 1998 batch, at which point the output had started to slow down compared with the productive 1997 season. As I mentioned in my introductory post, I didn't watch it until it was re-run sometime in 1999, at which point I had already been in the US for a bit less than a year, so the ridicule of over-the-top American patriotism struck a chord with me. And it it seems like the writers went all out to include references to various bits of Americana, ranging from Arlo Guthrie ("Good morning, America, how are you?") to Cool Hand Luke ("You wanna go in the box?") to "When Johnny Comes Marching Home." Mind you, I didn't recognize most of these references at the time and they revealed themselves to me as references gradually over the years, as I learned more about American history, pop culture, and literature (and in some cases I'm still wondering whether the writers are referencing anything particular at all - e.g., when Space Ghost tells Moltar to "show Old Larry some respect and take off that helmet" [Who is Old Larry?]).

So while this episode is dense with little lines like this that you could spend all day unpacking (just upon my last viewing a few days ago, I noticed that Moltar is reading "Perfidy for Dummies," which only caught my eye because I recently learned that word in connection with questions of the legality of the Soleimani killing under the Geneva Convention - how timely...), they're not the main thing I picked up on during my early viewings of it. What stood out to me was how it highlighted all the contradictions between American ideals and American reality: Space Ghost telling Moltar that "United States Ghost does not believe in cruel and unusual punishment," only to threaten him in his next sentence with ripping off his arm and beating him with it; Space Ghost going on about how America is a free country, but insisting on keeping Zorak and Moltar pretty much as slave labor ("They. Work. For me."); or Space Ghost insisting that everyone recite the Pledge of Allegiance before the interview and then forgetting "indivisible" and having to look at his notes. It's bitingly satirical and my teenage self loved it!

Since the guest in this episode is Jeff Foxworthy, I suppose the jokes were aiming to poke fun at Americans in a similar way to his "you might be a redneck" shtick, which makes it all the more surprising that this is one of those episodes where the guest is clearly not in on the joke. At least to me, Foxworthy's reaction to the "stupid" questions seems pretty genuine, and I wouldn't have expected it from a comedian. I always did like that it's pretty obvious here the interview was conducted first and then the plot was written around it, taking some parts out of context for comedic effect. The writing credits for this episode went to Dave Willis, who would later go on to co-create Aqua Teen Hunger Force, and I think his sense for awkward situations and timing shines through here in several places. For instance, when Space Ghost starts telling Jeff, "No, I'll tell you what's insane" and the American flag graphic appears behind him, interrupting his response. The show generally gets some mileage out of this type of joke, where a character will try to say something and a graphic or sound effect keeps interrupting them (off the top of my head, I can think of a couple of times in the episode "Snatch" that this happens first to Zorak and then to Moltar).

All in all, I think this was a great introduction to the show. The episode had a bunch of small quirks that made it memorable and it came at a point in the show's run where the humor was slightly bizarre and different from anything else on television at the time, but it wasn't yet quite as unhinged as it would eventually become in a few years, so it was still pretty accessible. It kind of set the tone for all of the 1999 episodes, all of which were excellent and rank among my favorites. I'll get around to those eventually. :)

Oh, and just a tidbit that didn't fit anywhere else in the text: It took me a long time - I mean an embarrassingly long time - to realize that Zorak was taking a dump at his desk. I don't think I learned the meaning of "dropping the kids off at the pool" until I was in college or grad school. Still, there were plenty of hints to what's going on (including Zorak flushing the toilet) that I'm still shocked at my obliviousness. :oops:
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