Watching Space Ghost Coast to Coast always felt like I was getting away with something. I just wasn't sure what. Staying up past my bedtime, both my parents asleep, sitting in the dark and watching this bizarre cartoon on a cable channel ostensibly for children, not quite getting many of the jokes, or anti-jokes, but understanding on some level that it was all very funny. I assumed I wasn't old enough to understand it, which at that age is one of the most thrilling feelings in the world.
It was a talk show, featuring actual famous guests, and if I had more laughs at the obvious humor of Zorak (evil mantis; bandleader) and Moltar (somewhat less evil lava man; director), none of it would have worked without the straight man—dimwitted host/former superhero Space Ghost—grounding everything with his signature authoritative idiocy. And Space Ghost as a character owed everything to the commanding voice of George Lowe.
His voice was timeless, perfectly suited to a prior era of animation (indeed, the Space Ghost character was recycled from the 1960s) yet forced to say lines like "No one sleeps with my grandmother!" which he'd deliver with such commitment that they went from inane to genius. Lowe's Space Ghost could be bossy, petulant, naive, or whatever other tone demanded by the guest's prerecorded interview. Above all else, he was funny.
Lowe, after a long career in radio and voiceover work, died this week at the age of 67, after a series of health problems. His defining role will long outlive him, in a generation of viewers whose entire senses of humor were shaped, maybe even defined, by that first taste of surrealism that Space Ghost Coast to Coast tricked us into enjoying.
As an example, I understood the humor behind a failing liquor chain buying the show, and that its mascot was a shark, and that Lowe's Space Ghost was inflicting shark/liquor–based questions on his guest, Willie Nelson. I did not understand, exactly, whether Nelson was in on the joke, or if in the taping of his interview, was even informed what the joke would be. Above all, I was baffled whether his curt and confused-sounding answers were funnier to me if he was playing along, or if they were soundbites chopped and crammed into a post-production "narrative," to the extent that term even came close to applying. I definitely did not understand why the shark eventually exploded, but I liked it.
The people making Space Ghost felt like they were getting away with something, too. Surely the big fancy Cartoon Network executives (I did not understand how TV works) would not approve of getting real-deal celebrities only to turn them into punchlines or ignore them completely. Conan O'Brien got to sit there and watch as Space Ghost spent nearly half the show's runtime on his hands and knees, tracking an ant back to its home, in order to kill it and its family. Michael Stipe was a famous musician! His episode consisted of Space Ghost talking about food with Zorak (and Zorak's nephew, Raymond). Then Lassie was there for some reason.
You can easily trace Space Ghost's influence through the past 30 years, not just directly in spinoffs like Aqua Teen Hunger Force, but in the majority of Adult Swim's slate, and the rise of a popular surrealist strand of comedy: Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim, Eric Andre, the entirety of Weird Twitter, etc. Most of the successors, per Sturgeon's law, are crap—postmodernism entranced by the smell of its own butthole. Very few scions of Space Ghost nail the high-wire act of the original's barely contained chaos. Credit for that goes to the SGC2C writers, and especially to George Lowe, for being the steady and absurd center about which the madness could swirl. No one ever read dumber lines more seriously.
