pace Ghost is an interstellar superhero marked by white tights, a yellow cape and a black cowl. Once upon a time known for his stiff, poorly animated adventures in space, he has retired to his home base, the Ghost Planet, where he now conducts a fiasco of a talk show with his erstwhile (and ongoing) enemies, Zorak the Mantis and Moltar the Lava Man. In this he is hindered by animation just as low-rent as that which marked his earlier adventures, and an interviewing style best described as the unfortunate intersection between a colossal self-absorption and a minimal attention span. Zorak and Moltar are not much help in this endeavor; Zorak calls him names, agitates for tributes to Jack Klugman, and flies off to spawn, while Moltar spends much of his time at the control panel watching shows other than the one he's allegedly producing.
Space Ghost shows his displeasure at guests and co-workers by firing explosive beams from his gauntlets. Zorak is reduced to a cinder more than once.
Celebrity guests, recorded in a remote studio, and visible to Space Ghost on a hanging monitor, come in for more than their share of disrespect. Many have their words taken out of context for comic effect. Ranging from the cast of Gilligan's Island to comedian Bobcat Goldthwait to wrestler Hulk Hogan and Broadway legend Carol Channing, they react with either giggles or bafflement. Some, like the rocker Slash, can't get into it at all. A few, like Glen Phillips and the Bee Gees, are cut off within seconds. In this group, dog superstar Lassie, barking at nothing and tilting her head in reaction to high-pitched sounds, isn't especially distinguished by her level of incomprehension; the famous canine tranvestite actually seems closer to "getting it" than one-time Batman Adam West, who comes off as just plain irritated.
The host isn't the only two-dimensional stiff
Space Ghost is an artifact from an era of television cartoons where the trick seemed to be posing your hero in a series of simplistic, stock movements and hoping it was enough to fool everybody into thinking it was animation. Employed here for the ironic effect, he displays no more persuasive illusion of movement: He has less than a dozen poses and moves, ranging from a wry aside to the camera to a threatening gesture with his wrist gauntlets. Repeated again and again in rapid succession, as he peppers his human and canine guests and similarly unanimated cohorts with a series of clueless non-sequiturs, the effect can be very funny indeed in small doses, which no doubt contributed to this show's cult success on the Cartoon Network's evening Adult Swim.
The celebrity guests can be amusing too, if sometimes unintentionally. Dawn Wells, telling an anecdote that has something to do with her teeth, puts poor Space Ghost to sleep. Dr. Timothy Leary, engaging in his perceptual profundity, amuses by seeming perfectly at home on the Ghost Satellite. Some genuinely funny people, like Judy Tenuta and Weird Al Yankovic, don't quite manage to take control of the proceedings; in too many cases, their clowning emerges as desperate. A very, very few, like Channing and Monty Python's Terry Jones, emerge unscathed.
The problem with the material as a DVD collection is that it throws the one-joke nature of the affair into sharp relief. A little of this goes a long, long way, and the cumulative effect is wearying to the point of total satiation. Watching more than one episode at a time is not recommended at all. It gets tiresome very quickly. This reviewer's saturation point was less than one episode, which made the other 15 an extreme chore.
The commentaries on six episodes are most interesting as demonstrations that even the show's creators are dumbfounded that they had anything to do with this thing. One, Evan Dorkin, has the most frightening moment when he suggests a drinking game that requires players to pick a stock image, any stock image, and indulge every time it appears onscreen. That game, as an inducement to alcohol abuse, could be even more dangerous than "Hi, Bob!"
