Williams Street Productions, LLC, simply known as Williams Street and formerly known as Ghost Planet Industries, is an American animation and live action television production studio division of Cartoon Network, which is owned by Warner Bros. Entertainment. The studio is the in-house production arm of Adult Swim. Keith Crofford oversees operations for the studio building, which also houses the Cartoon Network offices. Mike Lazzo oversaw operations for the studio alongside Crofford until 2019, when Lazzo retired from the company.
Name and logo
The current name of the company originates from the location of its headquarters building - which is also the home office for Adult Swim - at 1065 Williams Street NW in Atlanta, Georgia, near the current offices of TBS and TNT on Techwood Drive. The facility began as a carpet factory and was purchased by Turner as overflow offices for, among other things, set building and woodworking facilities, as well as CNN Field Engineering. Soon after CNN moved into the CNN Center in downtown Atlanta in the early 1980s, other Turner operations moved into the Techwood campus, an old country club which became the first headquarters for CNN. The street is named for early Atlanta settler Ammi Williams. The company's original name, Ghost Planet Industries, came from Space Ghost's fictional planet, where the animated talk showSpace GhostCoast to Coast was supposedly filmed. The studio's production logo features a wavy gray image of Space Ghost's fictional studio, with the words "Williams Street" beneath it. The soundtrack of Jack Webb's Mark VII Limited's production logo - a rumbling drum roll and two clinks of a hammer - is often used while the GPI/Williams Street production card is shown. In its early years, the Williams Street logo would often be followed by and the copyright byline against a black or white background. This was changed, in 2001, to a drawing of a skull with the CN checkerboard logo for its teeth, accompanied by Matt Maiellaro yelling "SKULL!!!". In 2012, the inclusion of the Cartoon Network logo was removed and the copyright byline moved to beneath the Williams Street logo.
Williams Street formed their own music label, Williams Street Records. The label was created after Jason Demarco, Adult Swim's vice president of strategic marketing and promotions, worked on Danger Doom, a project with Danger Mouse and MF Doom in 2005. Danger Mouse had previously worked on the music for Toonami and wanted to do an album that sampled that work. The group suggested the idea to Mike Lazzo; the project was successful. William Street Records now releases a majority of the music related to their shows. The label is managed by Demarco.
Homages
1065, the street number for Williams Street, is also the hull number for FishCenter Lives USS FishCenterprise.
