Imagine this opening dialogue employed on an episode of The Tonight Show:

Ed Mcmahon: From Hollywood, The Tonight Show starring Johnny Carson! This is Ed Mcmahon along with Doc Severinsen and the NBC Orchestra inviting you to join Johnny and his guests: Faye Dunaway and Tom Seaver. And now, ladies and gentlemen, heeeeeeeeeeere’s Johnny!

[Camera pans to curtains, nobody emerges. Studio sits silently for 15 seconds. Credits suddenly begin to roll uninterrupted and in their entirety. A pin drop can be heard as the camera suddenly pans to Ed Mcmahon looking around despondently, stone silent and scratching his rear.]

To follow this great episode up, Johnny Carson’s guest the following night will be a giant, mutated sea monkey. The NBC Orchestra also gets traded to a Japanese baseball team in exchange for a dog that walks over a keyboard.

These are the types of regular events that occurred on the (extremely) late night “talk show”, Space Ghost: Coast to Coast, for which the late Clay Martin Croker helped develop, wrote for, voiced two main characters and worked as the principal animator. C. Martin Croker passed away this weekend unexpectedly.

The most logical comparison to Clay’s work was early era Letterman, which was among the first to break ground on genre’d, on-air irreverence. But with far less at stake, this 15 minute episodic series was able to bring out the jackhammer.

Space Ghost: Coast to Coast was an unlikely, animated fusion of resurrected Hanna-Barbera animations placed naturally alongside (what seemingly were contractually obligated) media appearances by 90’s era celebrities. Space Ghost himself was the host and MC of these chopped up, real celebrity interviews, praying mantis Zorak served as the show’s uncooperative band leader and Moltar downstairs in the volcanic control room, the director.

Every episode was an all-you-can-eat helping of cringeworthy, snarky, irreverent silliness.

If these ingredients sound familiar — say, through a Michael Scott dialogue inadvisedly given to his direct superior, or Neil Patrick Harris literally winking to the audience — those easy laughs are now only easy largely because of the panache of that same man: C. Martin Croker.

Croker helped put a face to this generation’s most employed form of satire: an over the top, fingers pointing, deadpan merry-go-round. And he was able to do it without even poisoning the well of his source material: an old era of animation that crucially he held closer to his heart over anything else in his life.

And so, on and off from 1994 to 2008, midnight on Cartoon Network broke the rules and had an absolute blast doing it, as the joke was at the expense of the way things “should” be done. This extended from Space Ghost and onto his other projects he was heavily involved with, including the hit Aqua Teen Hunger Force. Croker’s passing over the weekend ought to be billed as the unfortunate loss of not just of a legend for a single TV network, but as the passing of a man who uncannily predicted the tone of current pop culture, “random” millennial musings, and the meme-filled internet at large.