"A ghost!"
—Various bystanders throughout the Casper cartoons
"(Casper) has to be the cheapest character design ever. It's just a construction model for a stock 40s baby character. It's such a funny concept to have a character without a design or any details at all. Even ears are too expensive to draw! There are a million characters based on this construction, but this is the only one that is nothing but construction."
—John Kricfalusi on Casper's Bedsheet Ghost design, "Naked Dead Baby With Dangling Parts Cut Off Construction"
"Out of all the classic cartoon characters of the mid-20th century, Casper the Friendly Ghost has to be the lamest one. The only toon that could possibly come close to Casper in terms of lameness would be maybe Andy Panda, but nobody remembers who that is anymore. Casper is kind and fluffy and G-rated as all get-out, and only wants to be your friend, gee whillikers. It'd be fine if Casper were your mom, but you watched cartoons to get away from your mom. He's not funny, he's not interesting, he's just not....anything.
Part of the fault for Casper turning out this way lies with the studio that created him. Their production process involved screening finished cartoons in front of a test audience. Whenever the people reacted positively to a scene, the studio boss would order EVERY SINGLE CARTOON from that point forward have that gag or story beat. As you might expect from this process, Casper cartoons became very repetitive, and there's a reason the only short to gain any kind of fame was the second one created, There's Good Boos Tonight. That was the one where Casper had the pet fox and it died. Audiences found it very touching, and so Casper was doomed to an eternity of trying to make friends and failing."
—Peter Paltridge, Platypus Comix
