Perfect Hair Forever (series)


Premiere	November 7, 2004
Finale	April 1, 2014
Seasons	3
Episodes	9

Perfect Hair Forever was an animated series that ran on Adult Swim from 2004-2014.

Plot[]

Perfect Hair Forever is a parody of stereotypical anime clichés. The series revolves around Gerald Bald Z, a young boy with premature hair loss and his quest to find Perfect Hair Forever to remedy his premature baldness. He is joined on his wanderings by an array of strange companions. His quest is hindered by the evil Coiffio, though Coiffio's reasons for his interference are never explained in the show.

The series is a spin-off of Space Ghost Coast to Coast, due to a special featuring Space Ghost, Adult Swim Brain Trust (Also known as Anime Talk Show), coming on right after the premiere of the series to help tie it together.

Space Ghost appears in every episode, either as a character with an actual role or in the background.

Production[]

Perfect Hair Forever employs an ongoing serial format, a style that had been uncommon to previous Williams Street projects with their lack of emphasis on continuity. Each episode of the series featured different opening sequence music and visuals. The style and music of the end credits also varied from episode to episode.

Episode 7 aired April 1st, 2007, as part of Adult Swim's annual April Fool's Day joke, and was also available on Adult Swim's The Fix website.

In 2007, the Japanese noise rock band Melt-Banana recorded the song Hair-Cat (Cause the Wolf Is a Cat!) for Perfect Hair Forever.

Cancelation[]

Following the first six episodes, members of the Perfect Hair Forever creative team posted on the official Adult Swim message board that they weren't interested in continuing the show to a second season and at the Adult Swim panel at Comic-Con 2006, the cancellation of the series was announced.

In October 2006, Adult Swim announced that Perfect Hair Forever was back in production, with 16 webisodes to be aired online. However, after the first episode of the second season, no new episodes have been aired. This joke spanned the entire block, beginning with this episode and then airing all of season one in reverse order and in the style of old VHS fansubs, complete with English subtitles on most episodes. Occasionally, instead of the English subtitles, transcripts from other Adult Swim shows were presented instead. It replaced scheduled premieres of Bleach, Blood+ and Eureka Seven. The prank was hinted at though, as the schedule listed the same episodes that were to be shown that weekend for the next weekend ahead of time.

Broadcast History[]

The Perfect Hair Forever pilot first aired on November 7th, 2004, in the time slot that had been advertised as the premiere of the Squidbillies pilot. Unknown to the audience at the time, the existing Squidbillies pilot had fallen behind and wasn't ready to air.^[2] Williams Street continued advertising the Squidbillies premiere up to and including the bump directly preceding the show, which talked about wanting to make the show perfect for you and your hair forever, revealing the title "Perfect Hair Forever." The night's confusion continued when, instead of seeing the opening titles for Squidbillies, viewers were confronted with a title card for an episode of Space Ghost called Perfect Hair Forever, thus starting the pilot episode.

After the ending credits ran, a bumper card appeared, apologizing for the apparent scheduling mix-up only for it to fade out to a fake Technical Difficulties card featuring a selection of Perfect Hair Forever's characters. This was shown on screen for several seconds, accompanied by typical music before the card faded to static whilst the Action Hot Dog's "Do da la la la la!" echoed. The card returned and the music was replaced with a techno remix of Action Hot Dog's chant.^[2]

The first season of Perfect Hair Forever premiered on Sunday, November 27, 2004, at 12:30 AM Eastern Standard Time with the airing of the second episode. The pilot re-aired on November 20th, 2005, though without the Anime Talk Show discussion spoof.

Seven years after the series conclusion, an eighth episode was produced and aired unannounced on April 1st, 2014, as part of Adult Swim's 2014 April Fools' Stunt. Two versions of this episode, Muscular Distraction - A and Muscular Distraction - B, exist and were aired at 12:00 AM and 12:15 AM respectively.

Characters[]

Gerald Bald Z (voiced by Kim Manning) - The main protagonist of the story, Gerald is a young boy suffering from extremely premature hair loss. Because of this, he goes off on a journey to acquire Perfect Hair Forever.
Uncle Grandfather (voiced by Matt Maiellaro) - Uncle Grandfather is Gerald's father figure of sorts. He spends almost all of his time snacking, watching Brenda put on lewd displays, or reading pornography.
Action Hotdog (voiced by Will Armstrong) - The first character to join Gerald's journey. Action Hotdog is a hot dog which flies around and is only capable of uttering the words Doo da la-la-la-la-la-la la la-la-laaaaa-la-la!.
Coiffio (voiced by Dave Willis) - The main villain of the series, Coiffio is a self-centered old man with an enormous, multi-colored coif atop his head. He speaks in an odd, indeterminable accent and possesses a unique censor sound, wherein all his uses of the word "fuck" are censored by the sound of Coiffio yelling EFF!
Catman (voiced by Dennis Moloney) - A grumpy, fat man in a cat suit who is Coiffio's main henchman. Catman lives in a large, litterbox-shaped house, and is shown working at a convenience store in a few episodes.
Norman Douglas (voiced by Nick Ingkatanuwat) - A talking tree. Originally an agent of Coiffio, his task was to follow Gerald and watch him.
Terry/Twisty (voiced by Dave Hughes) - A sapient tornado that appears to suffer from dissociative identity disorder.
Young Man (voiced by C. Martin Croker) - A young, enthusiastic man in a bright purple suit that claims to be from the "Ministry of Planning" and calls himself the King of All Animals.
Model Robot (voiced by Matt Harrigan) - A small robot that serves as one of Coiffio's henchmen.
Rod, the Anime God (voiced by Matt Maiellaro) - An entity made of fire, who calls himself the god of anime. Rod is introduced early in the series, and pops in at seemingly random intervals. Rod is the focus of a secondary plot in the series involving Coffio attempting to sell him a house.
Space Ghost (voiced by George Lowe) - The title character from Space Ghost Coast to Coast, he in numerous episodes as either an essential character or as a background character.
Brenda - A silent girl and is the only character who never speaks. Her hair and eyes are based on Celeste from Aqua Teen Hunger Force, her outfit is based on Japanese Anime and her eye color is based on Sally Impossible from Venture Bros. Her only means of dialogue is a non English language and she is kept by Uncle Grandfather to bring him trays of hamburgers and satisfy his lewd needs.

Home Release[]

On October 27th, 2009, Adult Swim and distributor Warner Home Video released Adult Swim in a Box, a seven-disc DVD box set of various Adult Swim shows.

The pilot episode of Perfect Hair Forever appears in this set.^[5] In June 2010, the individual DVD was made briefly available for purchase at the Adult Swim website store.^[6]

The first season was released on iTunes.^[7] The entire series has been made available for free streaming on the Adult Swim website.