Marvin Hamlisch, the composer, and ''Mean Joe'' Green, the football player, have made appearances. And Chris Gifford is the young white man. Emily Bindiger, a Carol Lawrence look-alike, plays the young woman. Supporting the puppets are three young performers, supposedly teen-agers but looking as if they may have already slipped into their 20's. Shades of Big Bird and the Cookie Monster can also be detected in the passing sketches. The pugnacious Goriddle Gorilla is a first cousin to Oscar the Grouch. The gentle, accommodating personality of Tubby Baxter contains strong echoes of Kermit the Frog. One liability is a perhaps-not-surprising tendency for the new puppets to remind viewers of the older puppets. The most obvious asset of this experienced talent pool is a combination of smooth professionalism and imaginative content. Most of the puppeteers, led by John Lovelady, have worked in productions of the Children's Television Workshop. The show's cast of puppets was designed by New York's Great Jones Studio under the supervision of Kermit Love, creator of Big Bird and other ''Sesame Street'' characters. In this instance, the executive producers - Joe Bacal, Tom Griffin and John Claster - went through the standard preparation hoops, including special seminars at which educators defined ''a broad range of both cognitive and personal development goals.'' More significantly, they recruited a staff that is laden with credits from the Children's Television Workshop and ''The Muppet Show.''
#Great space coaster speed reader series
Needless to say, the series has been ''designed to delight youngsters - primarily between 6 and 11 - while meeting the expectations of consumer groups, parents and educators for progressive new programming.'' But then, so has just about every new kiddie program since ''Sesame Street'' began collecting all those awards. The half-hours are being syndicated nationally and can be seen in New York at 7:30 A.M. This new commercial-television venture is not a network product.
LEAPING brazenly into the treacherous arena of children's programming, ''The Great Space Coaster'' gives every indication of being one of the few ''quality'' series that could manage to survive outside the awesome factories of the Children's Television Workshop's output on public television.
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