Late Night Time Machine: 1985-Era Johnny Carson Does Some Time Traveling of His Own

Johnny Carson loved the stars. No, not celebrities—he was fairly ambivalent about them.

Carson loved the stars in the sky, the suns of distant galaxies, the lights of the universe he often admired through telescopes at his home, and at the Palomar Observatory in California. It was on The Tonight Show that Carl Sagan, through conversations with his friend Johnny, became more than just an astronomer.

So, it’s only fitting that one of the legendary late-night host’s “Mighty Carson Art” characters seemed to come from outer space, representing the unmined potential of technological innovation and human imagination. Yes, it was at the intersections of Star Trek and the CBS Evening News that Carson and his team dreamed up Zontar Rather.

The name Zontar appears in a number of works of science fiction, including Zontar, the Thing from Venus, a low-budget remake of Roger Corman’s It Conquered the World (1956), which was released in 1967. Carson’s Zontar featured jet black air reminiscent of Mr. Spock, but with a bit more flow.

The last name Rather, meanwhile, was a nod to newscaster Dan Rather, who, in 1981, took over for Walter Cronkite as anchor of the CBS Evening News. Carson debuted the character on his New Year’s Eve 1982 broadcast, with Ed McMahon introducing the segment as the opposite of the “end of year” recaps typically broadcast at the end of the year. Instead, they wondered what a broadcast from the 20 years in the future would look like.

The Zontar character became a recurring one for Carson, not as iconic as say, Carnac, but one that delivered much of what endeared him so to viewers: the one-liners, the glances at the audience, and the wry smile that comes from the host knowing he is not playing a character so much as he’s playing Johnny Carson playing a character.

On January 17, 1985, Zontar Rather brought Carson’s audience exactly twenty years into the future, to January 17, 2005—a time that then seemed futuristic, but one that we now find ourselves exactly twenty years past, just as far away from that day as Johnny, Ed and the studio audience were back in 1985.

Looking back, the timing of this fake broadcast is a bit eerie—in reality, just six days later, on January 23, 2005, Carson himself would pass away at the age of seventy-nine.

The segment begins with the usual introduction by Ed, seated at Johnny’s desk, who tells us that they wondered what the news would be like in the future, “say, twenty years from today.” Johnny comes out, the playful look in his eye with an accompanying smirk, and takes a seat at a futuristic-looking desk, on which he casually places his papers.

Zontar Rather’s set looks a bit like the command center from a spaceship, with flashing lights and menacing machines fueling the broadcast. Zontar wears a frock worthy of a space king, gold on gold clashing with the intense black of his hair and the microphone to his right (attached to a not-so-subtly hidden cord).

Carson as Zontar gets right to the headlines, taking a bit of a meta turn as he, on this fake television broadcast within a broadcast, begins with jokes about television broadcasting in the future. He starts with low hanging fruit: on this day in 2005, he says, animal testing has been outlawed. “However, the court did rule,” Zontar says, “that it is permissible to use television game show hosts.”

Behind Carson is a futuristic monitor, placed not-so-neatly inside a crisp, white frame. The television jokes continue. The butt of his next joke is Joseph Wapner, the original judge of The People’s Court, which had launched just four years earlier in 1981.

According to Zontar, 2005 sees Wapner himself charged with manslaughter after “the head of [his] gavel flew out of the judge’s ailing hand and killed the judge’s longtime bailiff, Rusty Burrell.” Carson, to the audience’s delight, then cuts to a court sketch of Burrell, sprawled out on the floor with the gavel by his head.

After a quick jab at Phil Donahue, who Carson jokes was fired “when he was no longer able to keep his microphone up,” Zontar pivots to the world of science. He announces that “Dr. Clause Nike” has won the Nobel Prize in Medicine, “for his discovery that people who jog die ten years earlier than non-joggers.” The audience didn’t love that one. Carson lets out a little moan, turning towards the camera and trying to hold back a laugh.

The bit continues with a pivot to politics, including a joke about Jimmy Hoffa, who by 1985 had been missing for a decade. It turns out that on this day in 2005, he’s been found. “Ever since his disappearance, he’s been functioning as a William Morris agent,” Zontar Rather jokes, to mixed reactions from the audience.

This is a joke meant for folks in the know. In his early years, including while hosting The Tonight Show in New York, Carson was represented by William Morris, whom Carson believed had taken advantage of him. Their breakup ended with Carson threatening to no longer book guests represented by the agency on The Tonight Show. Carson, according to his attorney, Henry Bushkin, “never forgave” William Morris, and thus they became a semi-recurring punchline on the show.

Zontar, as newscasters often do, eventually pivots to tragedy. “Bob’s Big Boy, the longtime symbol of the national hamburger chain,” he says, “despondent over a career he thought was going nowhere, hung himself today with the Bermuda onion from the hamburger he’s been carrying for the past fifty-two years.” Cut to a darkly hilarious image of the tragedy. Carson is slowly winning the crowd back.

The sketch continues. Near the end, Zontar announces some new rules for the Catholic Church. “The Vatican today ordered all confessionals to be fitted with laugh tracks,” he says. The change came with the appointment of a new church leader, he says—one who had, in 1985, recently come off a killer four-year stint at Saturday Night Live—and was currently crushing at the box office.

“This action follows the conference of cardinals choosing a new Pontiff,” Carson says: “Pope Eddie the First.” The crowd cheers. Eddie Murphy as Pope? That’s something that even in 2025, we can probably all get behind.

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