Today officially begins "Space Ghost October", a month long celebration of the original Hanna-Barbera superhero series in honor of its 60th anniversary. Yes, that anniversary technically happened last month, but since I had so much planned for the blog in September, it seemed like the right call to push it back a little.
Today, I'm starting things off by going to a time before Space Ghost. We'll be looking at a few pieces of concept art from early on in the series production. Ladies and gentlemen, I introduce you to The Space Ghosts. These two pieces were done by legendary comic artist and Space Ghost character designer Alex Toth. The piece retains the main three characters, but with much different designs. I don't know if it was still intended to be a superhero cartoon at this stage, but this art kind of gives off a Lost in Space vibe. Fitting, as that show had just begun at this point, and it would only be a few years before Hanna-Barbera took their own stab at an animated version of it.
After that, the show was heavily reworked, growing closer and closer to the Space Ghost we're more familiar with. This design is pretty close to how he looks in the final show, but with a few noticeable differences. He's got red gloves instead of gauntlets, a slightly altered belt, black boots, and a different logo. Not a bad design, but I'm glad we ended up with the final version.
I've covered this before, but I also thought this would be a good time to feature this preliminary design for one of Space Ghost's most notable foes, Zorak. His design was much different initially, and, according to this storyboard, his name was also originally "Korak." Though he doesn't look like this in the series, the design was used in several pieces of merchandise, most notably the Gold Key comic, which can also be found below. Honestly, I kind of prefer this version over how he looks in the actual show. I love that design, but this version definitely feels both more alien and villainous, at least in my opinion.
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