YMMV / Space Ghost

• Adaptation Displacement: This often happens with fans of the later series who are surprised there was an older show before. This mostly crops up with the younger members of the fandom. As before the Adult Swim was a block the older Space Ghost found air time on Cartoon Network alongside the new even though the new dominated advertising. People raised around the shows that used characters from this are often surprised to find the original episode and see that Space Ghost, Zorak, Brak, and Moltar are not in any way like their Cartoon Network counterparts.
• Broken Base: Primarily a debate on where the series is after Space Ghost Coast to Coast. Some see the Adult Swim work has having repurposed a show into being a comedy Cult Classic. While others feel the later shows are embarrassments to the series that was a Cult Classic as it was.
  • The 2005 miniseries, a proper update of the character that makes him a character to be taken seriously again, or a series that goes too far into Darker and Edgier territory and just comes off as silly as Coast to Coast, except in a different way? It's notable the next time that Space Ghost was used as a serious character, in Future Quest, Space Ghost's origin was redone again to remove some of the darker parts of the 2005 series.
• Complete Monster: (2005 miniseries, by Joe Kelly & Ariel Olivetti):
  • Quartermaster Temple, the man responsible for ruining the life of Thaddeus Bach—aka Space Ghost—is a corrupt space cop with a streak of viciousness that matches the literal alien horrors. Temple introduces his corruption murdering an amiable weapons dealer and passing it off as justice, and when Bach tries to expose him, Temple has Bach's pregnant wife brutally murdered, recording the whole process of tearing the unborn baby from her womb and leaving Bach for dead after rubbing his face in this atrocity. When the Zorathians attack the colony planet Meridian, Temple first tries to escape while shooting innocent civilians who get in his way, then elects to sell out the entire planet to the Zorathians. To cover up his crimes, Temple is ultimately willing to plunge the Zorathians' mothership into Meridian to kill not only the Zorathians, but every innocent life on the planet.
  • Zorak is portrayed here as far worse than his other incarnations. A monstrous conqueror terrorizing the galaxy, Zorak sends his scouts out to prowl for populated planets and murder entire cities to test their defenses, after which Zorak sics his entire army onto his selected planet to enslave, torture, and devour the entire populace, with even children not exempt from these horrors. Keeping himself alive over the years by bodyjacking his own soldiers when his current vessel expires, Zorak uses the corpses of entire planets to breed new generations of Zorathians to repeat his slaughter campaign unendingly, hoping to leave nothing alive in the universe but himself and his race. A sadist who takes deep joy from his atrocities, Zorak goes so far as to betray and try to murder Temple after an alliance with him, then mock Space Ghost over the death of his family at Temple's hands.
• Designated Villain: The heat thing from the episode of the same name qualifies simply because it was attacking Jan, Jace, and Space Ghost. Nevermind that it possibly was just simply protecting its territory and itself from unintentional intruders.
• Memetic Mutation: There's a lot of unintentionally hilarious moments that have been used as punchlines at different times in the modern era.
• Narm: The 2005 comic mini-series attempts to distance itself from the comical tone of Coast to Coast and Cartoon Planet resulted in a take so dark and edgy that it likely ended up eliciting even more laughs than the comedy series as a result.
• Values Dissonance: The character Cyclo is clearly made to resemble an offensive Asian stereotype with his squinted eyes, accent, pointed facial protrusions somewhat resembling a Fu Manchu mustache, and literal yellow face. The fact that the main characters take particular fright at his robots, in contrast to some of the other legitimately frightening monsters in the show, don't really help.

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