Gumby
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Gumby4.jpg
Gumby circa 1957
Gumby is a green clay humanoid figure who was the subject of a series of television shows totaling 223 episodes over a three-and-a-half decade period, animated using stop motion photography, known as claymation. The shows also featured Pokey, an orange clay horse, and Gumby's nemeses, the Block-heads.
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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. 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 Clokey), Gumby's pals included Prickle (a yellow dinosaur), and Goo (a blue thumb-type mermaid blob who could fly).
The series went dormant for many decades, but during all of this time Gumby had developed an audience interested in classic television animation. 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 pals beyond their toyland-type setting and establishing themselves as a rock band.
The modern Gumby adventures featured new characters such as Gumby's sister, Minga and also Denali, the great Mastodon.
In addition to the new episodes, the classic 1950s and 1960s shorts were rerun as part of the series, but with newly recorded soundtracks (including new voices and musical scores).
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 lookalike robots. The movie featured in-joke homages to such sci-fi classics as Star Wars, The Terminator, and 2001: A Space Odyssey.
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 forseeable future, all episodes of the two series are available on home video and DVD
Parodies
A parody of Gumby also made appearances in the occasional sketch in the early years of Saturday Night Live, and was played by Eddie Murphy in a green foam costume. Murphy's Gumby smoked a cigar and talked like an arrogant celebrity indignant at his waning fame, frequently exclaiming, "I'm Gumby, damn it!"
Gumby was also the name of a character in several sketches on the BBC comedy series Monty Python's Flying Circus. This Gumby was a man who wore a knotted handkerchief on his head and shouted everything very slowly, including his catchphrase "My brain hurts!" He was played by various members of the Monty Python team over the course of the series, some sketches featuring several Gumbies shouting slowly at each other.
External links
- Gumbyworld.com (http://www.gumbyworld.com/)
- Premavision/Clokey Productions (http://www.premavision.com)