Co-Creator Of Adult Swim Now Delivery Driver For Amazon

On April 15, X user @JaredWignall tweeted a happy anniversary message to Space Ghost Coast to Coast, prompting Andy Merrill to respond, “If you would’ve told me 30 years ago that today, I would be at the bottomest rockiest rung of the rock bottom ladder, I wouldn’t have believed you.”

Word quickly spread that Merrill was now an Amazon delivery driver—a job he was forced to take out of necessity after a rocky divorce left him without health insurance. A few days later, Merril tweeted a picture of himself in his Amazon outfit, putting to rest any doubts about his current employment.

And while Amazon driver is far from the worst job out there, it seems wrong that one of the people responsible for creating a show so influential it changed television forever is out getting bitten by a-hole dogs and dealing with angry Karens instead of sitting in an office somewhere writing the next big cartoon.

Chances are you know Merrill best as the voice of Brak, the weird cat-like alien that started on Coast to Coast before getting his own series on Adult Swim, The Brak Show.

While Merrill is an accomplished voice actor—he also plays the orange Plutonian Oglethorpe in Aqua Teen Hunger Force—his behind-the-scenes work needs to be acknowledged.

In 1993, Andy Merrill, then a programmer at Cartoon Network, and Mike Lazzo, the soon-to-be vice president of programming, started working on the first episode of what would eventually become Space Ghost Coast to Coast.

The two men decided to repurpose animation from a forgotten 1960s Hanna Barbara superhero cartoon and turn it into an absurdist version of the Tonight Show. The duo combined the old Space Ghost series with snippets of real celebrity interviews taken out of context to create what was arguably the single most important comedy series of the last 30 years.

The series’ overwhelming success led to the creation of the Cartoon Network’s late-night/early-morning Adult Swim programming block.

As millions of former college-age stoners can tell you, Adult Swim was the beginning of the absurd, stream-of-conscious direction comedy has been heading in since the turn of the century.

Andy Merrill and other Adult Swim alumni like Dave Willis and the late Martin C. Croaker regularly came up with bits based on improvisation and random non-sequiturs instead of the traditional set-up/punchline method of comedy.

Cartoon Network initially gave Space Ghost a shoestring budget, meaning that Andy and Co. weren’t just writing the show and voicing characters. They were also wrangling celebrities—many of whom didn’t “get” the show—conducting the interviews that made up the backbone of the show and occasionally appearing in live-action.

Andy Merrill was even one of the first people to do the iconic Adult Swim bumpers, something he claims was done off the cuff as he made it a habit to always throw out the ones he had gotten approved earlier in the day and improvise new ones live.

It’s come out in recent years that a lot of early Adult Swim stars weren’t paid very well and are now struggling. Carey Means, the voice of Frylock from Aqua Teen Hunger Force, was hospitalized in 2022 and had to set up a GoFundMe to help with his medical bills.

This is despite the fact that he voices a famous cartoon character whose likeness appears on T-shirts, hoodies, and tons of other merchandise that Means doesn’t see a cent from.

While it’s too soon to tell for sure, Andy Merrill’s prospects seem to be improving.

Ever since the initial tweet, his social media followings on X and TikTok have skyrocketed. He even signed up for Cameo based on all of the positive feedback he’s been getting from fans recently.

Hopefully, this good fortune will continue, and someone in the entertainment business will offer him a job, maybe even some kind of new Brak content.

Because if we’re being honest, Andy Merrill is too talented to be delivering packages for a living.