In Conversation: 's Andy Merrill

10.03.2013

Andy Merrill watched cartoons as a young lad, as most children do -- except that Merrill, unlike most children, also had the very grown-up instinct to be curious about the people who created his favorite animated programs. His practice of closely monitoring the credits at the end of cartoons hinted at an early interest in the industry side of that would eventually blossom into one of the most fun-sounding careers imaginable: senior writer/producer at Cartoon Network's Creative Group, the channel's in-house creative agency. Originally a writer and producer for " Coast to Coast," Merrill was a programming pioneer at Cartoon Network, helping it branch out into sister network before he came over to the promo side. Along the way, his vocal talents were called upon to create some of both networks' most memorable characters, including "Space Ghost's" dimwitted pirate , and "'s" Oglethorpe, a villainous space alien who also is apparently German.

Recently, Merrill was the driving force behind the promotion of Cartoon Network's latest wildly unpredictable effort, "," for which he created a treasure trove of spots, bumpers, interstitials and short films. Brief caught up with the jack of all trades to talk about making promo quirkier, writing a (fake) article for "Tiger Beat" magazine, and how doing puppet shows at his family's church set him up for voiceover success.

Let's begin at the beginning: How did you get into voiceover work at Cartoon Network?

I started at Cartoon Network about two months after it launched, in 1991. I worked in programming. In April of '93 we decided to launch "Space Ghost Coast to Coast" with the idea of putting him into a talk show. In 1994 we did a Christmas special where we had different "Space Ghost" villains on and we didn't have much of a budget. They didn't want to pay too much for voiceover, so I became Brak in '94. After a while Brak turned into a paid gig and I started doing various voices on "Space Ghost."

And along the way, Brak became one of "Space Ghost's"Â most iconic characters, even getting his own show or a while. You also voiced Oglethorpe of "Aqua Teen Hunger Force," another memorable villain. And yet, you are not a trained actor by trade, but a writer/producer. Are you just a natural performer?

When I was a kid, my family started a puppet ministry in our church, and my brother and I would play multiple characters. So I would do a number of different voices. [We'd be] working maybe two characters at once, so sometimes you'd have a dialog where you go back and forth, talking to yourself. I think a lot of it comes from that. And ad-libbing came from that too. A good amount of Brak and "Aqua Teen" is improvised.

Early on, how did you make the transition from programming to the promo side in Cartoon Network's Creative Group?

Friday nights there was a block that they wanted to spruce up. [The block was aptly called "Fridays." -- Ed.] Originally there were just two hosts standing around talking to kids and I came in and helped turn it into more sketch kind of comedy. I had a puppet named Long Haul… a puppet trucker. I wrote a lot of scripts for that show. And then I kind of moved over to doing promos.

Did you find promo writing as fulfilling as program writing?

It gets boring after a while just saying "coming up next…" so I was always trying to figure out quirky ways to do promotion. One of the first stunts I did was a July 4 marathon for "Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends." I took a bunch of toys out to a park and a bunch of store-bought fireworks and had Bloo, the main character, dancing around in baked beans and stuff like that. And then I launched "Loony Tunes" with a campaign that kind of mimicked the "Modern Family" campaign at the time, where the characters addressed the camera sitting on a couch in their living room. And then the most recent was "Uncle Grandpa."

It seems like doing promo for cartoons must be fun because the sky's the limit right? You could literally do almost anything for and with animation…

I like to say I reached the pinnacle of my career when I got to write a fake article for "Tiger Beat" magazine. There's a character in "Uncle Grandpa," Giant Realistic Flying Tiger, and they thought it made sense to do an article in "Tiger Beat": Everything you ever wanted to ask but were afraid to ask Flying Tiger. And then there are girly-girl-type questions and all her answers are just roaring. How has the promotion of animation changed since you started at Cartoon Network more than 20 years ago?

Everything's digital now so it happens very quickly. It's weird. If we had another episode of "Space Ghost" it would be done so much differently than we did before because everything is animated digitally. When we revived [the animated ""] we did a bunch of original ["Space Ghost" regular] and Brak and upscaled it to HD and gave them more contours, more details in their faces and stuff. And every file in there will have a different eye blink or something, so it's much more efficient to animate.

[Image courtesy of Double E Communications]