Gumby

This article is about the animated character. For the Monty Python character, see Gumbies.

Gumby is a dark-green clay humanoid figure who was the subject of a series of American television shows totaling 223 episodes over a 35 year period, animated using stop motion clay animation. The show also featured Pokey, a red clay horse, and Gumby's nemeses, the Block-heads.

The Beginning Years

Created by Art Clokey, Gumby had its genesis in a 1955 theatrical short called Gumbasia, which was a surreal short of moving and expanding lumps of clay set to music. Gumby himself first appeared on the Howdy Doody show in 1956 and was given his own NBC series in 1957. Female performers (among them Norma MacMillan) originally supplied Gumby's voice during the initial episodes, as well as the child-like voice characterization provided by Dick Beals. Newly produced episodes were added in 1962, by which time Dallas McKennon became the voice of Gumby, and 1966-67. Besides Pokey (voiced by creator Art Clokey) and his dog Nopey (all that dog ever said was "Nope"), Gumby's friends included Prickle (a yellow dinosaur or dragon (there are stories that establish him as dragon, and some that establish him as dinosaur)), and Goo, (a blue thumb-type mermaid blob who could fly).

The Lorimar Years

By the 1980s, the original Gumby shorts had enjoyed a revival, both on television and home video. This led to a new incarnation of the series for television syndication by Lorimar-Telepictures in 1988 that included new characters such as Gumby's sister, Minga, Tilly the Chicken, and Denali the mastodon. Actor Charles Farrington assumed the voice of Gumby in new adventures that would take Gumby and his pals beyond their toyland-type setting and establish themselves as a rock band. Nopey had disappeared after the original series.

In addition to the new episodes, the classic 1950s and 1960s shorts were re-run as part of the series, but with newly recorded soundtracks (including new voices (from the 1980s voice talent) and synthesized musical scores).

Art Clokey is famed for giving many movie industry talents their first break in the business. A number of the clay animators who worked on the new series went on to work for Pixar, Disney and other studios.

The movie and beyond

In 1995, Clokey's production company produced an independently released theatrical film, Gumby I (aka Gumby: The Movie), marking the clay character's first feature-length adventure. In it, the villainous Blockheads attempt to replace the entire community of Clokeytown, Gumbasia with look-alike robots. The movie featured in-joke homages to such sci-fi classics as Star Wars, The Terminator, and 2001: A Space Odyssey. In 1995, Cartoon Network aired re-runs of Gumby episodes.

By the end of the decade, Gumby and Pokey had appeared in commercials for Cheerios cereal.

The Library of Congress had Gumby as a spokescharacter from 1994 to 1995, due to a common sequence in his shows where Gumby walks into a book, and then experiences the world inside the book as a tangible place.

Although no new animated Gumby material is planned for the foreseeable future, most (with a few exceptions) of the episodes of the two series are available on home video and DVD.

In August 2005, the first video game featuring Gumby, Gumby vs. the Astrobots, was released by Namco for the Game Boy Advance. In it, Gumby must rescue Pokey, Prickle and Goo after they are captured by the Blockheads and their cohorts, the Astrobots.

Also in the summer of 2005, New York's Museum of the Moving Image unveiled an exhibit entitled Gumby and the Art of Stop-Motion Animation, which ran until January 2006. The exhibit featured props, storyboards and script pages from various Gumby shorts over the past 50 years, as well as toys and other memorabilia that had appeared during Gumby's "career," including Eddie Murphy's Saturday Night Live Gumby costume. The centerpiece of the show was an actual complete set used in the production of a TV commercial for "Gumby vs. the Astrobots," on which members of the museum staff would conduct several demonstrations each day on how clay animation works, from molding a Gumby figure around a metal armature to making a short stop-motion video of the Gumby figure moving around the commercial set. Elsewhere in the museum, the long-standing do-it-yourself stop-motion animation exhibit, where visitors are encouraged to try to make their own stop-motion scenes using an easy-to-use camera setup and a set of provided paper cutouts, took on a Gumby theme, with Gumby, Pokey and friends added to the selection of paper characters and props. The exhibit opened June 18, 2005, with a series of Gumby screenings, with Art Clokey in attendance.

In San Francisco, California, Studio Z held "Gumby's 50th Birthday Party" with Gumby creator Art Clokey. The band Smash Mouth played at the party, hosted by comedian Kevin Meaney. The party/comedy tribute was written by legendary comedy writer and stage director Martin Olson (Screen Actors Guild Awards, Penn & Teller's Sin City Spectacular etc.) and Gumby's creative director and composer Fred Thompson. It was produced by Missing Link Media Ventures and Clokey Productions.

Bob Burden is writing a new Gumby comic series with art by Rick Geary, colors by Steve Oliff and Lance Borde, edited by Mel Smith and published by Wildcard Ink. The first issue is dated July 2006.

The Gumby images and toys are registered trademarks of Prema Toy Company, although Warner Bros. Television now owns the distribution rights to the Gumby cartoons.

On March 16, 2007, Youtube announced that all Gumby episodes would appear in their full-length form on its site, digitally remastered and with their original soundtracks. This deal also extended to other video sites, including AOL.^[1]

In March 2007, KQED broadcast an hour-long documentary "Gumby Dharma" as part of their Truly CA series.

Parodies

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• Eddie Murphy played a parody of Gumby in occasional sketches on Saturday Night Live. The first appearance of Murphy's Gumby aired during the show's eighth season on December 11, 1982 in a sketch titled "Merry Christmas, Dammit!". Wearing a foam costume, Murphy's Gumby was played as an older borscht belt comedian who smoked a cigar and depicted an arrogant celebrity indignant at his waning fame. As a sign of his frustration, Murphy's character was frequently heard to exclaim "I'm Gumby, dammit!" when he felt disrespected by show business people.

• There is a version of the character in Pakistan referred to as Mohammed Al-Gumby, meant to make light of cultural tension but also seen as controversial.

• Gumby is also a frequent target of satire on MADtv.

• Gary Larson featured Gumby in a Far Side cartoon as a secret agent.

• A Gumby sketch ("Robot Rumpus") was featured on an episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000 (The Screaming Skull), and was parodied in one of that episode's host segments, with Crow T. Robot and Tom Servo creating their own version of Gumby, decrying Gumby and Pokey's "mistreatment" (in their eyes) of the robots in the sketch. When "Robot Rumpus" was aired on the show, it included the original soundtrack, complete with original voices and stock music.

• In 2005, a Simpsons couch gag was made featuring the Simpson family made out of clay and appearing on the couch next to Gumby, in the Season 17 episodes The Girl Who Slept Too Little and My Fair Laddy.

• Gumby and Pokey were seen in a Frosted Cheerios commercial. When they opened the box Gumby said, "Hey, they're frosted!" and Pokey said, "Hey, we're clay!"

• The comic strip Sherman's Lagoon has had several gags featuring Sherman the Shark chewing the heads off of Gumby toys. One such strip has him devouring a live giant Gumby, and is then prompted by his friends to eat Pokey.

• The theme song was briefly parodied by a female singer on the song Easy-Duz-It from the album of the same name by rapper Eazy-E. He sings "He was once a thug from around the way; Eazy. But you should..." before Easy shut her up.

Trivia

• In the 1990s, employees of The Met (the government run public transport corporation in Melbourne) were referred to as Gumbies due to the color of their uniforms and the "Gumby" television show being in the public's mind due to Australian re-runs.
• "Gumby" is a common nickname for someone who is very flexible in any sense of the word -- either double-jointed (someone with very limber joints), or very adaptable in different situations.
• A common saying in the United States Marine Corps is "Semper Gumby" which jokingly translates to "always flexible". The motto of the Marine Corps is Semper Fidelis, or "always faithful".
• The word "Gumby" is now used as slang to describe an act of stupidity or inexperience and is also used to refer to someone particularly uncoordinated (although this refers to Mr. Gumby, one of several characters in Monty Python's Flying Circus).
• UFC Ultimate Fighter Jeremy Horn's nickname is "Gumby" due to his flexibility during ground fighting.
• Prickle and Goo were named after Alan Watts' categorization of the two types of people in the world ("the prickly and the gooey -- the rigid, critical and the easygoing and mellow") after Art Clokey heard him lecture at San Jose State University. [1]

References

1. ^ Arrington, Michael (16 March 2007). YouTube Troubles Are Over: They Got Gumby. TechCrunch.

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