With its uncomfortable interactions and awkward pauses - made to feel all the more interminable by the tinnitus-like buzzing of Space Ghost’s moon-base-like Ghost Planet Industries headquarters - SGC2C was one of America’s first cringe comedies. Figuring out who was playing along and who was getting played was part of the fun. Some guests never actually got to speak those who did invariably spent much of their screen time staring at their two-dimensional host in baffled confusion. What did you think?”), or were ignored in favor of whatever the increasingly addlebrained Space Ghost was preoccupied with at the time (from growing a gigantic sea monkey named Banjo 1 to learning the flamenco intro to Yes’s “Roundabout” on his guitar). Other guests were roped into wholly unrelated misadventures, had their work insulted (“Wow, Denis Leary! I’ve seen all of your movies! I didn’t think they were very good.
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Visitors were incorporated into Space Ghost’s backstory: He’s married, for example, to Björk (who’s letting Tricky crash on the couch she uses as a toilet), and his grandfather Leonard Ghostal is a retired professional wrestler who sounds an awful lot like “Macho Man” Randy Savage. Yet the guests kept on coming - a who’s who of ’90s culture, from Thom Yorke to Jeff Foxworthy, Bob Costas to Judy Tenuta. Interviews with the celebrities involved were filmed separately, in largely improvisational fashion, then combined with the cartoon characters’ dialogue - often producing results diametrically opposed to the context of the original questions. Now retired from the business of fighting intergalactic evil, Space Ghost (real name: Tad Ghostal) and a support staff consisting of his imprisoned enemies Zorak (anthropomorphic mantis/bandleader) and Moltar (gravel-voiced lava man/director) flies face-first into show business, interviewing pop-culture luminaries through a monitor screen lowered into the chair where a guest would normally sit. Operated in tandem with Keith Crofford, a fellow Southerner with whom Lazzo shared an office as well as seemingly a brain, the show boasted a premise that was somehow both simple and endlessly, mutably ridiculous. Repurposing existing Space Ghost images from the original cartoons, Lazzo created the first animated late-night talk show in 1994.
But what he did with Space Ghost - the outer-space superhero wearing a striking white, black, and yellow costume was designed by comics and animation godhead Alex Toth for a perfectly average action cartoon from 1966 to 1968 and a brief revival in 1981 - was more radical.
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Lazzo was known for taking full advantage of the fly-by-night nature of the channel’s early days, during which it served primarily as a clearinghouse for Ted Turner’s massive library of old Hanna-Barbera cartoons: In 1997, he ran a single Screwy Squirrel episode back to back all day as an April Fools’ prank. SGC2C was the brainchild of Mike Lazzo, Cartoon Network’s original head programmer. But from its bargain-basement launch in 1994 to its place at the center of the wildly popular Adult Swim lineup in the 2000s, it helped introduce cringe comedy to the American viewing public, deconstructed the idea of the talk show beyond repair for a generation of comedians, and changed the look and feel of the entire animation art form. Few people afford Space Ghost Coast to Coast, Cartoon Network’s strange, seminal comedy, its rightful place in the pantheon. For this sea change, space was the place. Arrested Development, meanwhile, created a parallel track, establishing the single-camera sitcom as the “prestige comedy” format of choice, while The Daily Show made similarly Peabody-worthy waves in the talk-show format.īut all the while - long before, in fact - a shadow revolution was under way. The Wire and Deadwood cemented the prestige drama’s place on the small screen. Tony and Carmela’s own network already had a breakout hit in the form of Sex and the City, which proved that people would tune in for original programming on channels that mostly aired movies. The canon of shows that launched TV’s postmillennial renaissance begins before HBO’s mafia masterpiece, of course: Twin Peaks paved the way, and David Lynch has been cited by countless showrunners as the John the Baptist to David Chase’s Jesus Christ. The Sopranos started it all, or so the legends say. And this is just the latest of the seismic shifts that have made television - broadcast or broadband, cable or streaming - the medium of the post-millennium. This comes just after Stephen Colbert crawled out of character to occupy the throne vacated by David Letterman. Last week, Trevor Noah took over The Daily Show, the slaughterhouse in which Jon Stewart EVISCERATED liberal bugbears on a nightly basis.