Fred and Loathing on The Internet

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2025-Mar-19

Since the last blog post dedicated to one particular actor is a well established precedent now on the fredlambuth.com blog- lo and behold let’s talk about George Lowe!

Amazing announcer turned voice actor best known for being the spirit behind Space Ghost. The only one for me. I did watch a few of the originals, but they did not leave any lasting impression. Any more than Birdman or The Meteor Men. If anything, I thought Space Ghost was lame until his talk show host reincarnation on Cartoon Network in the 1990s.

Sadly, Mr. Lowe is the subject of a blog post because he recently passed. A young man of sixty seven. I regret that there are not more years to enjoy that buttery smooth voice of his.

Might as well make it seem intentional, so let’s state it now. This will be a two-parter. How do I know that? Because I made the editorial decision to publish the graphic material I have available now as two blog posts. I have enough to put together my visual memorial for George Lowe. However, I do not have the right inspiration to finish it just now. Instead I wanna just talk about him and his impact on my life with cheap text. Later I’ll talk about the Aqua Teens as their own semi-related blog post. George Lowe playing himself on the Aqua Teens is how this actor penetrated into my psyche as himself and not just a pretty voice.

Of that graphic material I mentioned, I painted the foreground and the background separately, so they’re going to be two different blog posts, and then later smushed together in layers to make one serious tribute to the late great George Lowe! George or anybody on the development team of the starting years of Adult Swim could appreciate me recycling my graphic work into several episodes.

Another theme set by precedent on the blog here is talking about the medium that is delivering the artist content being critiqued. Sadly- but not as sadly as George’s untimely demise- but sad nonetheless. I have no easy nor cheap access to watch the Space Ghost Coast to Coast series. A lot of the early (2001-2005) Adult Swim shows are available on MAX( you know, HBO Max). Space Ghost is not among them. There is no other streaming service, free or otherwise, that has the show in their catalog. DVDs are out of print.

I am able to find an abundance of clips on the general internet. I can find the Aqua Teen episodes where he played himself. Had I been younger I might have tried harder to trek the frontiers of the web to find full episodes of Space Ghost. As of the time of this blog posting, I am smack dab in the middle of my expected lifespan. My attempts to recapture the joy from media I enjoyed in my childhood have had underwhelming and diminishing effects, so I’ll let that hankering for SGC2C will have to wait until it's convenient for me. I bet Half-Priced Books has a DVD set.

Whole episodes are rare on the common public internet. What there is instead is an abundance of clips. Not just of the show, but anything recorded about George, Space Ghost, or early Adult Swim stuff. This tradeoff in media availability is something I have come to appreciate in my time-stretched busy adult life.

What brought me tons of joy recently was seeing a five to ten minute video of MC Chris interviewing George at his home in Florida. A short candid look that demonstrated a man who appeared to be as delightful as his voice presumed. Ever since I watched that brief interview I have taken the time to think about who was the man behind Space Ghost. Anybody who would put so much effort into being wacky with such sincerity would have to be delightful in real life. That video swept over me like a personal social media eulogy- from him to me. That’s how I’m thinking about it.

What is Space Ghost Coast to Coast? You can look that up on Wikipedia (and donate after you do). I’m here to tell you about how I know Space Ghost Coast to Coast. That’s what the fredlambuth.com blog is all about. This blog does not aspire to more than talking about me watching or reading or playing stuff. I would mention now that I didn’t learn about the ‘Coast to Coast’ part of the title until I heard Art Bell Coast To Coast. His midnight radio show was something I looked forward to when I drove to and from work on the night shift at the shipyard. At least I get the feeling that the Art Bell radio show is a reference the Space Ghost writers are trying to establish.

Fred Lambuth saw Space Ghost as a talk show host because Mexican Cartoon Network fortunately rebroadcast some episodes in English sometimes. They also put out Cartoon Planet sometimes! My brain has already calcified over so that I cannot verify for sure how much was in English and how much was in Spanish. I will say I’m confident there was both. And I will say I am rather confident I remember Brak in Spanish and it being a budding cornerstone in my understanding of speaking Castellano. Could all just be memory hallucinations? I’ll look up the Wikipedia page on those shows in Spanish to sniff that lead further.

Much like how it is now, how I got my best glimpse into Space Ghost during my childhood was in clips. There was no YouTube in the mid-nineties. There was Talk Soup, a program on the E! Entertainment channel on Mexican cable. With a day or two of delay to allow for subtitles, the show was shown on Cablevision, a cable provider who had a Latin American version of the E! Channel. By the time I started watching Talk Soup, John Henson was the host. Greg Kinnear was a movie actor by then. I kept watching until Hal Sparks took the job. He didn’t do it for me. Was Aisha Taylor after or before that? Damn my memory is leaking. And leaking such important stuff, like cable talk show show host chronology.

Space Ghost was a frequent clip to be shown on the Talk Soup daily shows and the weekly wrap up that sometimes had more in-studio skits thrown in. In-studio skits for Talk Soup were cheap and daring bits of comedy that gave me the same taste of the bizarre I got from the Space Ghost clips hosted on there.

During my childhood, I was starving for what I remember of my American homeland. Talk Soup was a thick pipeline of American media flowing into my American mind, which was self-insulated from the abundance of Spanish-dubbed content. Had I had easier access to more child oriented, yet slightly adult-themed cartoons, I might not have found so much succour in the bizarre clips I saw of Space Ghost.

There was a lot of semi-adult stuff at the time among the new Cartoon Network shows in the 90s, or on Nickelodeon. Where I was living, Mexico City, they were dubbed in Spanish. So I mostly ignored it. If I could not find something in English, I’d just turn off the TV. Even though this was motivated for chauvinistic reasons I now regret, I can appreciate that this prejudice shunted my childhood mind into something other than TV. Even if I was playing video games or hitting my action figures against each other. Sometimes it would lead me to books.

Space Ghost conducting non-sequitur interviews with his former villains working on the show’s backstage crew did tickle my funny bone as a kid. It was only a tickle though.I felt I was missing out on the bulk of the humor. I did know it was there and had a curiosity about it. Just like I did for any ‘adult’ humor I did not understand at the time.

It was not until my late teens that I found the full rhythm of this show’s comedy. Referential humor is cheap. As cheap as cutting up 60s cartoons into a few dozen generic animated movements. Cheap as that maybe, it hits right on the money for me. Early Adult Swim was right on target for my teenage taste for weirdness, even if it carried an embarrassing amount of edge. The fact that they were using recycled material from the old ugly action cartoons I had seen on Cartoon Network added to the weirdness. It was fun to think of a timeline where a space faring super hero is now reduced to chatting with vapid C-list celebrities.

To be frank, Zorak is what lured me in. He was the lewd, crude, mantis alien that served as Space Ghost’s band leader. C. Martin Crocker voiced the character. He passed away almost ten years ago.He might get his own blog post! I’ll mention his name and then explore more about what his efforts had on little ol’ me. Calling these blog posts as memorials might be misleading. Oh well. Who is gonna complain?

George Lowe had his second introduction to me when he played an animated version of himself, as a wedding DJ on Aqua Teen Hunger Force. I do not know if he has actually ever been a wedding DJ. I do think he has a voice perfectly suited for the job. Just about any announcer job would suit him well. That voice… Incredible voicework is a talent I gravitate towards. George had oodles of voice talent.

Not just the richness of his voice were what made him a great performer. He could do a great obviously-not authentic Hispanic accent. Dad on The Brak Show sounded Cuban to me. From that brief interview I mentioned earlier, I had learned George hails from Florida, so Cuban vocal affectations would be the first one that comes to mind for a white Floridian. And George Lowe was one hell of a white Floridian! Maybe one of the best! Have you seen him in the Space Ghost costume? His voice is not the only thing that was robust.

I wish I could give George Lowe even more praise. To me, he had one job: to be the secret identity of Space Ghost, and he did it superbly. I hope where he may be, he’s having a laugh. Also he was great as the CEO of Bebop Cola on Sealab!