Gumby
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- This article is about the animated character. For the Monty Python character, see Gumbies.
Gumby is a green clay humanoid figure who was the subject of a series of television shows totaling 223 episodes over a 35 year period, animated using stop motion clay animation. The shows 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 featured similar claymation characters. Gumby himself first appeared on the Howdy Doody show in 1956 and was given his own NBC series in 1957. Female voice actors originally supplied the voice of the title character during the initial episodes, as well as the childlike voice characterization provided by Dick Beals. Newly produced episodes were added in 1962 (by which time Dallas McKinnon became the voice of Gumby), and 1966-67. Besides Pokey (voiced by creator Art Clokey) and his dog Nopey, Gumby's pals included Prickle (a yellow dinosaur), and Goo (a blue thumb-type mermaid blob who could fly).Gumby and Sai Baba
The series went dormant for years, but during all of this time Gumby had developed an audience interested in classic television animation. Art and Gloria Clokey journeyed to India in 1979 to see the holy man Swami Satya Sai Baba because he represented every ideal they believed in. They waited in the courtyard of the Swami's compound. When the Swami walked along the crowd he sprinkled ash on a Gumby doll that Art and Gloria had brought with them. At that time Gumby was not very popular at all. Shortly after meeting the Swami, Art and Gloria put together a two hour Gumby show that was very successful. Soon, the marketing of Gumby had exploded, as it became the most popular flexible toy on the market, and later appearing in many forms, from cups to ice cream bars.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. 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.
The modern Gumby adventures featured new characters such as Gumby's sister, Minga, and Denali the mastodon.
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 and musical scores).
The new series, Gumby Adventures, also featured a new opening title sequence, inspired by the original.
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 ', The Terminator, and '. 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 Gumby images and toys are registered trademarks of Prema Toy company. 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 Gumby material is planned for the foreseeable future, all 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 SpongeBob SquarePants writer Martin Olsen and Gumby's creative director Fred Thompson. It was produced by Missing Link Media Ventures and Clokey Productions.
Parodies
- 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 Mad TV.
- 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.
- 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.
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.
- 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".
External links
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