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It’s known as the infamous “Fire Ant” episode.

Just on the cusp of the new millennium, Conan O’Brien agreed to appear as a guest on Space Ghost: Coast to Coast, Cartoon Network’s satirical animation “talk show,” by then in its sixth season. The episode begins with O’Brien’s head, framed by a cartoon TV screen, being slowly lowered to the stage to trumpeted fanfare.

O’Brien looks around with a puzzled expression, waiting for the show to start. Finally, Space Ghost, the cartoon host, floats down to sit behind his desk.

Their conversation meanders into the existential topic of what exactly the name Space Ghost means. Is he literally a spaceman who died and became a space ghost? Space Ghost isn’t forthcoming, so the exchange becomes heated as O’Brien tries to pry out the facts: “Face it, Space Ghost, you’re a spaceman that choked on a muffin!”

But the absurdity doesn’t end there. Abruptly, Space Ghost leaves his chair in the middle of the interview. He notices a tiny ant that bites him, and so he tries to blast it with the laser beam that shoots from his space suit. He misses and begins crawling on the ground as the camera follows him, declaring things like, “For every 300 steps your little ant feet take, I take only one.”

For 11 long minutes, in the style of what the writer of the episode calls “David Lynch times 900,” Space Ghost completely abandons the O’Brien interview for a quest to find and “wreak vengeance” on the ant and its family. The episode ends with the Space Ghost finally encountering the tiny ant’s parents—giant monster ants that chase him away.

Photograph courtesy of Jay Wade Edwards

“If you tuned into Cartoon Network that Friday night and saw that, you’re like, What am I watching?” says Jay Wade Edwards, who helped edit the episode. “Is this real? Am I on drugs?”

The O’Brien segment was a quintessential example of the absurdist anarchy that Space Ghost: Coast to Coast brought to cable television when it debuted 30 years ago.

The show became a campy cult classic that has spawned an entire generation of adult cartoons. It also convinced Turner Broadcasting System to introduce Adult Swim to its Cartoon Network. That decision ushered in a new era of animated shows—proving that there was an appetite, and a lucrative market, for shows that seemed to know no bounds of programming rules and operated on shoestring budgets with small, guerrilla-style teams.

The start of it all was Space Ghost: Coast to Coast, the absurdist, minimalist animated talk show hosted by a long-forgotten 1960s Hanna-Barbera cartoon character, recast with a new actor and transposed to present day.

It set a precedent for other adult cartoons to follow. In other words, Space Ghost floated so that Rick and Morty could fly.

And it put Atlanta on the map as a quirky treasure trove of warped creative minds. “People discovered that there was a certain flavor and taste to all of this concentration of creative people in Atlanta,” says Khaki Jones, a former Cartoon Network and Adult Swim producer who now works at Disney. “That, to me, is the most magical element.”

IN 1991, LOOKING TO ADD TO HIS TELEVISION EMPIRE IN ATLANTA, which already included CNN, TBS, and Turner Classic Movies, Ted Turner bought the cartoon giant Hanna-Barbera. The haul included such iconic shows as Scooby-Doo, Where Are You!, The Jetsons, and The Flintstones and would form the core of Turner’s next big launch: Cartoon Network.

One obscure find from the Hanna-Barbera archives was Space Ghost, with its blink-and-you’ll-miss-it original run from 1966 to 1968, a show about a caped hero who fought bad guys in outer space.

Turner’s intention was to rerun cartoons 24/7. But Mike Lazzo, the first programmer at Cartoon Network, had bigger ambitions. Lazzo, a LaGrange native, had started in the shipping and receiving department of TBS and worked his way up the ladder. He wanted to create original content, which Turner okayed so long as it wouldn’t require additional budget.

Each week, Lazzo would get together to watch and talk about animation with Jones, who had grown up with the Saturday morning high jinks of Bugs and Daffy.

Lazzo first hired Jones as a coordinator in programming, and she would remain at Cartoon Network for two decades, until 2009, executive producing post–Space Ghost shows such as Harvey Birdman, Attorney at Law and The Venture Bros.

As the Space Ghost: Coast to Coast origin story goes, every afternoon, around 3 p.m., Lazzo, Jones, and voice actor and writer Andy Merrill would hold a programming meeting for Cartoon Network—which usually brainstorming ideas for themed cartoon marathons. One particular meeting happened to coincide with the network’s block of Space Ghost reruns.

Photograph courtesy of Adult Swim

The official credit for who first pitched the idea of Space Ghost as a modern-day talk show depends on who’s telling the story. Jones says it was Merrill, and Merrill says it was Jones, who first uttered the catchy moniker “Space Ghost: Coast to Coast” in an announcer-type voice. But they both agree that it was Lazzo with whom the idea resonated.

“I remember it caught Mike perfectly off guard, and he laughed and said, ‘Oh my God, that’s hilarious. It sounds like a talk show,’” Jones says.

Merrill then threw together a pilot using two VHS players, a $25 microphone from RadioShack, taped reruns of Space Ghost, and an old CNN interview with Denzel Washington.

It was no easy task: He had to splice the video by hand, making fraction-of-a-second edits so Space Ghost’s mouth would look like it was moving.

That pilot has never seen the light of day, since they didn’t have the rights to the Washington interview, but it served as a proof of concept.

The show’s premise was simple: Space Ghost, stuck on “Ghost Planet” and bored to tears because he’s vanquished all his enemies, decides to create his own interview program after he learns about the “talk show wars” on Earth. (David Letterman, having lost out on The Tonight Show gig to Jay Leno after Johnny Carson retired, moved to CBS to directly compete for ratings and clout.)

It’s the classic Carson/Letterman/Colbert late-night setup with the host (in this case, Space Ghost) sitting behind a desk, a band leader (Zorak, a giant grasshopper who happens to hate Space Ghost’s guts), and a director running the show (Moltar, a molten-lava man who is held together by a space suit).

As a character, Space Ghost proved to be an ideal late-night host spoof because of his bloviating pomposity. “He was the principal of your high school who thinks he’s being cool but never is,” Edwards says.

If Space Ghost was the perfect host, voice actor George Lowe was a perfect conduit for the new iteration of the character. With a background in radio, Lowe was cast for both his ability to capture the classic announcer-like timbre of mid-20th-century superheroes and his irrepressible, no-holds-barred sense of humor.

Some of the funniest moments in the show were unscripted, when Lowe would just “rant and rant for 20 minutes between takes,” Edwards remembers. In the episode “Fire Drill,” for instance, they wound up keeping a whole chunk of dialogue from Lowe, as Space Ghost, complaining about how he had sent some fruit baskets to a couple of executives and had not gotten a thank-you back.

ONCE THE SHOW GOT THE GREEN LIGHT FROM CARTOON NETWORK, and an initial budget of $35,000 per episode, Lazzo began to put together a team. He and Merrill brought in Clay Martin Croker, who was charged with creating a library of stock animation that they could pull from over and over, rather than spending money on new frames each episode. “It was a couple hundred thousand dollars on animation once, and then you seldom animate anything again,” Edwards says.

A year after it was conceived, the show debuted at the graveyard time slot of 11 p.m. Fridays. With episodes that averaged 5 to 10 minutes, it wasn’t exactly a runaway hit at first—not a surprise to anyone involved. But the crew was undeterred because they were laughing so much. In fact, they often referred to it as “antitelevision.” As Edwards says, “It was more feral. We were feral television.”

Each writer, editor, and voice actor wore multiple hats over the course of the show’s 11 seasons. Croker, with inventive and smart comedy chops, took on the task of shaping Zorak’s cranky persona. Merrill created one of Space Ghost’s most beloved characters, the teenage alien, Brak, who got his own spin-off series, The Brak Show.

“Originally, he would just scream and talk in monotone, and that can only be funny for so long,” Merrill says. “Plus, my voice took a beating. Once Brak became more popular, we kind of dumbed him down a bit and made his voice a little more cartoony. Then the dumber he got, the more lovable he got. He just evolved into this happy idiot.”

Photograph courtesy of Jay Wade Edwards

A couple years in, along came writer and voice actor Dave Willis, who would go on to be a cocreator of the show’s spin-off Aqua Teen Hunger Force. Willis grew up in Conyers and got his start as a production assistant on whatever random shoots he could land in the Atlanta area—including a promo of the Viper ride at Six Flags Over Georgia, for which he worked a smoke machine on a precarious platform.

Through a chance connection with Matt Thompson, who would go on to be the executive producer of Cartoon Network/Adult Swim’s Sealab 2021 and FX’s Archer, Willis landed a job interview with Merrill.

Willis had his sister, who was an elementary-school teacher, ask one of her students to create a reference letter on his behalf, written on construction paper with crayon.

At first, the Space Ghost crew didn’t even rate office space at Turner. Matt Maiellaro, a writer who would also eventually be a cocreator of Aqua Teen, set up an office in a hallway. Editor Michael Cahill had his equipment in a broom closet. “His chair was half in and half out in the hallway,” Maiellaro says.

But in many ways, the lack of funding and stature lent itself to a kind of rebellious quirkiness that defined the show. “We were just born out of a necessity to create something, and there was no money,” Willis says. “Because there was no money, there was no limit to the creativity.”

THE TIMING FOR SPACE GHOST WAS ODDLY PERFECT. Television in the 1990s had seen a rise in scrappy, absurd, offbeat, and often wonderfully uncomfortable humor wrought from such live-action sketch shows as Kids in the Hall, Mr. Show with Bob and David, and The State. There was the bad-movie–skewering, spaceship-set Mystery Science Theater 3000.

But that kind of absurdist bent was only starting to touch animation, and the boundary-breaking cartoons of the 1990s were in their nascence. Mike Judge’s Beavis and Butt-Head on MTV debuted only a year before Space Ghost: Coast to Coast.

The familiar format, combined with cheap animation, whip-smart scriptwriting, and gloriously unhinged vocal performances—and often baffled or angry interviewees—made it unlike anything else on TV.

Space Ghost would chat with (or torture, depending on your perspective) celebrity guests (mostly from the B and C lists), peppering them with questions: “What are your superpowers?” “Are you getting enough oxygen?”

As momentum grew, the guest stars rose in stature, from early episodes with comedian Bobcat Goldthwait and cast members from Gilligan’s Island to, eventually, Björk (who gamely played Space Ghost’s wife), Thom Yorke, and Metallica.

The Space Ghost celebrity alumni list is long and varied: Weird Al Yankovic, William Shatner, the Ramones, David Byrne, Michael Stipe, “Macho Man” Randy Savage, Carol Channing, Willie Nelson—and even psychedelic-drug advocate Timothy Leary (“No one seems to know how or why he came on that show,” says Jones.)

Access to CNN’s satellite offices and equipment was a help with remote interviews from Los Angeles to Atlanta. “They’d come on like a deer in headlights, and we’re asking them if they ever fought this beast on this planet?” says Maiellaro. Staff members would conduct the interviews, then Maiellaro would manually transcribe the conversation, highlighting when a celebrity gave a funny look or reacted with surprise or befuddlement.

Infamously, Paul Westerberg of the Replacements stormed out when one of the silly questions got to be too much. Willis, who conducted that interview, says he was excited to talk to the singer of one of his favorite bands.

“He did not understand why he was doing this, did not get it, did not care for it,” Willis says. Finally, Westerberg “looked at me for a beat, then took his lapel mic off and threw it down,” Willis says, adding that as Westerberg stormed out, “you can faintly hear me in the background going, ‘Okay! I love your music!’”

By the time the show had been around for a few seasons, of course, many guests were in on the joke—which sometimes meant they “would try to bring their schtick to it,” which diminished the funniness, Willis says.

Consistently, the main criteria for whether something made it to the final cut was whether it made the team—especially Lazzo—laugh.

By all accounts, Lazzo had exacting standards, and if something wasn’t funny enough, he’d readily push the schedule back. “He was the type of person who was like, ‘I want to see something I haven’t seen before,’” Willis says. “At the end of the season, you would have five episodes instead of 24, but the five episodes would be really good.”

“It never came together until the very last minute,” Jones says. “You would always be convinced, ‘Well, we don’t have anything in this one, so we’re sorry. We’re going to pack it up and leave.’ But there would always be something in the last few hours—a thread that you could play with. And they did that beautifully.”

IN 1995, SPACE GHOST: COAST TO COAST LAUNCHED A SPIN-OFF called Cartoon Planet that was conceptualized as a variety show hosted by Space Ghost, Zorak, and Brak.

By the end of the decade, the cult following that Space Ghost had accrued, and the show’s credibility among comedy and animation nerds, would lead to the launch of not only spin-off shows, but also a spin-off network, Adult Swim, which debuted in 2001.

Adult Swim, named for the block of time at the pool when kids have to exit the water at a public pool, ladled up a late-night stew of cartoons, Claymation, and even live-action sketch shows. The writing centered around themes and jokes that were decidedly mature.

The year it launched, Adult Swim debuted Aqua Teen Hunger Force, a Space Ghost spin-off helmed by Willis and Maiellaro about three anthropomorphic fast-food items (a milkshake, a box of fries, and a ball of meat) that understandably went in even stranger directions.

Aqua Teen wound up going viral before there was even a term for that.

“When we made the Aqua Teen pilot, I sent it to a manager in Los Angeles, and he called me and said, ‘I don’t know how to make any money off of you,’” Maiellaro says. “A year later, he’s staring at a billboard for the show outside his window.”

“We were just born out of a necessity to create something, and there was no money. Because there was no money, there was no limit to the creativity.”

Aqua Teen ran for 11 seasons and was even adapted into a feature film.

The cascade of shows continued: Robot Chicken, a stop-motion variety show cocreated by Seth Green; The Venture Bros., a satire of 1960s space-adventure cartoons; Metalocalypse, a musical animated series about fictional death metal band Dethklok; and Squidbillies, about a family of anthropomorphic “Appalachian mud squids” living in the Georgia mountains. The series Rick and Morty won two Emmy Awards for Outstanding Animated Program.

Adult Swim also launched the careers of comedy duo Eric Wareheim and Tim Heidecker, who became popular with their Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job!, which debuted in 2007 and has been credited with helping to change the landscape of subversive television comedy. The New York Times said the show’s sketches were “like outtakes from a public-access channel that’s broadcast only in hell.”

Space Ghost’s influence is most resounding in Adult Swim’s The Eric Andre Show, a talk show hosted by cringe comic Eric Andre, who eagerly picked up the squeamish and wild interview mantle and carried it to even ickier pinnacles with his deranged approach to celebrity interviews.

Space Ghost certainly affected Atlanta-based artists’ career trajectories, even those who didn’t necessarily start at Adult Swim. That was the case for puppeteer, writer, and producer Raymond Carr, who says Space Ghost helped shape his early sense of humor and taste in pop culture when he was an avid teenage fan of the show.

In a full-circle moment, Carr worked on a Disney+ show with the Jim Henson Company called Earth to Ned. It was a short-lived alien-hosted talk show that debuted in 2020 and featured an animatronic puppet that asked its guests crazy questions—something that wouldn’t have been possible if not for Space Ghost: Coast to Coast.

Carr remembers how, as teenagers, he and his brother, Jon Carr, now executive producer at Dad’s Garage Theatre Company, would grab every chance they could to go over to their friend’s house to watch Space Ghost on VHS tapes.

Space Ghost instilled the “acceptance of being weird,” Carr says. But it was also a beguiling mystery. “I was just curious about the production aspect. I’m like, ‘Wait, is this a practical joke? How did they get someone to let them make this?’”

SPACE GHOST: COAST TO COAST AIRED 11 SEASONS; the final episode was in 2008. With the advent of social media, streaming, and mergers upon mergers, Cartoon Network and Adult Swim have changed drastically—as have the lives and careers of those who helped forge them.

Lazzo retired in 2019.

Several years ago, Lowe, now living in Florida, began to have serious heart problems, which have required multiple surgeries and follow-up visits to the hospital. “If they ever do a calendar of folks who’ve suffered heart ailments, I could be January,” Lowe jokes.

His most recent procedure in September prevented him from traveling back to Atlanta for Dragon Con—something Lowe has always looked forward to. It’s a place that has provided a nurturing home for Lowe, especially during tough times. In particular, he remembers the generous contribution that Dragon Con made toward his mother’s funeral in 2018, which left him sobbing. “It was incredible,” he says. “I’ll always have a warm spot for all of them.”

Lowe has carved out a successful second career as an artist, with exhibits at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta and the American Visionary Art Museum in Baltimore.

Merrill was laid off from Cartoon Network about a decade ago. Now living in his hometown of Newark, New Jersey, Merrill says life post–Adult Swim can be surreal sometimes, and he sees the animation side of television right now as really unstable, to the point where he had to take a part-time job doing Amazon deliveries for health insurance. “It’s just an uphill bloody scratching climb, and it’s frustrating,” he says.

Yet he still regularly gets requests to appear as Brak. He also remains active as Brak on social media. He quips that for one post, “I found myself at a local park here with my phone on a tripod shooting the Brak puppet wearing a hot dog T-shirt, singing a song about being a wiener. Halfway through, I think, I’m 57 years old.”

Croker died in 2016, four years after joining forces with Merrill again to do a 20-year reunion of Cartoon Planet as their signature characters, Brak and Zorak.

Merrill read about Croker’s passing on Facebook, but the enormity of the news of his friend and colleague’s death didn’t hit him until later: standing in line outside a Hello Kitty pop-up cafe in Los Angeles with his daughter.

“We were in line to get cupcakes and stuff, and I was just kind of doubled over on my knees, going, ‘Oh no, oh no,’” he says. “My daughter’s like, ‘Why is he crying?’” He stops and adds, “I think Clay would have thought that was funny.”

This article appears in our January 2025 issue.