Gumby

Gumby is a 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 shows also featured Pokey, a red clay horse, and Gumby's nemeses, the Block-heads.

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).

Mr. Stuff gives Gumby all the goodies he can hold in "Grub Grabber Gumby. "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.

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 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 animated 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 cult 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.

Clokey also created Davey and Golitah for the Lutheran Church.

Filmography

• Animutations starring Gumby