George Lowe, a veteran radio personality, voice-over artist for Turner Broadcasting System Inc. and the voice behind Cartoon Network’s character Space Ghost, died March 2. He was 67.
His family released a statement stating that he died of complications after elective heart surgery.
Lowe is best known for taking Space Ghost, an old Hanna-Barbara superhero character, and turning him into a sardonic parody of a talk show host on “Space Ghost: Coast to Coast.” The program debuted in 1994 and became part of the 2001 launch of Adult Swim — Cartoon Network’s nighttime, adult-oriented block of programming based out of a building on Williams Street in Midtown.
Space Ghost was “Deadpool before Deadpool,” said Ken Charles, program director at News 95.5 and AM 750 WSB radio. He knew Lowe from 1987, when both worked at a cable station near Tampa, Florida. “He was a superhero with an attitude. It was so crazy and unusual. That character was unlike anything on TV at that time.”
The show ran 10 seasons and aired more than 100 episodes. It featured Lowe as Space Ghost hosting real celebrities, who were interviewed and edited into the cartoon. The questions and answers were often wildly out of context. People such as Carrot Top, Bill Nye, Adam West, Mark Hamill, Jim Carrey and Zoe Saldaña participated.
“George has a huge booming movie-trailer voice, but he was also a big personality,” said Dave Willis, a producer of the show. “It was sort of impossible to imagine the show with anybody else. It was his personality merged into Space Ghost.”
They not only used his improvised thoughts on the show but “we’d sometimes take his disgruntled asides and put them in Space Ghost’s mouth,” Willis said. “I remember him talking about sending fruit baskets to execs and not getting any thanks for it. We used it.”
The Adult Swim producers liked him so much, they included a character “George Lowe the voice-over artist” into the popular animated show “Aqua Teen Hunger Force.”
Credit: DAVE WILLIS
Credit: DAVE WILLIS
Lowe was also an avid art collector, a passion he had going back to his early years.
“Mom caught me at graduation and said, ‘You want a car?’ I said ‘No! I want a Picasso,’” he told Fox 13 Tampa Bay in 2021. “So we went to the bank, and it was just a print, and she had to get a loan for the print.”
He was also a self-taught visual artist whose work was shown in many galleries around town starting with the Barbara Archer Gallery. Steve Slotin, who runs Slotin Folkart Auction in Buford, said Lowe was thrilled when the High Museum purchased one of his pieces.
Credit: HIGH MUS
Credit: HIGH MUS
“His work was obsessively abstract,” Slotin said. “He used paper and ink, maybe some mixed media. It was very detailed, intricate line drawings. It almost felt like you were looking at the universe and the cosmos when you looked at this art.”
Lowe was a regular at regional folk fests and loved talking about art.
“He was knowledgeable about Andy Warhol and modern artists,” Slotin said. “We would have these long discussions, and he would throw some art reference I didn’t even know about.”
Lowe’s home in Lakeland, Florida, was packed with more than 700 pieces of art, including many pieces by Georgia folk artist Howard Finster. “He was not a hoarder,” Willis said. “But imagine a hoarder if everything they kept had real value.”
Born in Florida on Nov. 10, 1957, Lowe came to Atlanta in the late 1980s and joined the Breakfast Club morning show on top 40 radio station Power 99. “George was hysterical,” said Rick Stacy, one of the hosts. “George was nuts. He’d do the voices of Andrew Young, Hosea Williams and Maynard Jackson. He also created original characters like Mr. Woodsy, a dirtbag pedophile.”
Lowe did voice-over work for 99X, the alternative rock station that succeeded Power 99. Steve Craig, midday host for 99X in the 1990s and 2000s who returned in 2023, still uses some of Lowe’s work on his current show.
“George would do these weird, ear-catching vignettes,” Craig recalled. “His humor was so non sequitur.”
Lowe’s radio station cubicle in the early 1990s was memorable. “It would be like walking into a circus,” Craig said. “It was a carnival sideshow of arts and graphics and collectibles and toys. It was crazy.”
In the 2000s, Lowe would do occasional bits for the Regular Guys morning show on 96rock, led by Larry Wachs and Eric Von Haessler, and crack jokes while judging events like bikini contests for the station.
“George would make hand farts to popular songs by request,” Wachs said. “He was just a great funny creative guy and I enjoyed being on the air with him immensely.”
Credit: JACK REGAN
Credit: JACK REGAN
Lowe also did hundreds of radio commercials and TV promos for clients ranging from ValuJet to Jack in the Box to NBC’s “The Voice.” He loved to copy voices.
“If I am somewhere like New York, and hear a great voice, I find myself later in the day trying to do that, especially in New York, because New York is such a pupu platter of sound,” Lowe told the Florida Fox station in 2021.
Lowe rarely tooted his own horn or gunned for the spotlight, said Charles: “George was amazing at hiding behind characters more than wanting to be the guy in front of the mic alone.”
In the mid-2000s, Lowe moved back to Lakeland to take care of his mother, Mabel, but kept an apartment in Atlanta. He was an only child.
“He doted on his mom,” said Willis. “It was real. It was sweet. When we had voice sessions in Florida, you’d hear his mom laugh. We’d hear her say something. We eventually wrote her into an episode of ‘Space Ghost.’”
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