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:
- 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.
- The episodes I collected are usually the ones I really liked, so those are the ones I'll want to post here anyway.