| The Gumby Show | |
|---|---|
Gumby in the episode "Lost Treasure" |
|
| Genre | Comedy, Family, Animation |
| Created by | Art Clokey[1] |
| Directed by | Art Clokey |
| Voices of | Art Clokey Dallas McKennon[2] Norma MacMillan |
| Country of origin | United States |
| Language(s) | English |
| No. of episodes | 233 (List of episodes) |
| Production | |
| Producer(s) | Art Clokey |
| Running time | 30 minutes |
| Production company(s) | Clokey Productions |
| Broadcast | |
| Original channel | NBC (Original series)[3] Syndication (1988 series) |
| Picture format | Color |
| Audio format | Mono |
| Original run | November 12, 1955 – December 30, 1989 |
Gumby is a green clay humanoid character created and modeled by Art Clokey, who also created Davey and Goliath. Gumby has been the subject of a 233-episode series of American television as well as a feature-length film and other media.[4] Since the original series' run, he has become well known as an example of stop motion clay animation and an influential cultural icon, spawning many tributes and parodies, including a video game and toys.
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Gumby's principal sidekick is Pokey, a talking orange pony voiced by Art Clokey and Dallas McKennon at different times, and his nemeses are the Blockheads, a pair of humanoid, red-colored figures with block-shaped heads, who wreak mischief and havoc at all times. The Blockheads were inspired by the Katzenjammer Kids, who were always getting into scrapes and causing discomfort to others.[5][6] Other characters are Gumby's dog Nopey (whose entire vocabulary is the word "nope"); and Prickle, a yellow dinosaur who sometimes styles himself as a detective with pipe and deerstalker hat like Sherlock Holmes.[7] Also featured are Goo, a flying blue mermaid who spits blue goo balls and can change shape at will; Gumby's mother Gumba and father Gumbo. The later syndicated series in 1988 added Gumby's sister Minga and mastodon friend Denali.
Gumby was created by Art Clokey in the early 1950s after finishing film school at University of Southern California.[8] Clokey's first animated film was a 1953 three-minute short called Gumbasia, a surreal montage of moving and expanding lumps of clay set to music in a parody of Disney's Fantasia.[9] Gumbasia was created in a style Vorkapich taught called Kinesthetic Film Principles. Described as "massaging of the eye cells", this technique of camera movements and editing was responsible for much of the Gumby look and feel. Clokey and his wife, Ruth (née Parkander), invented Gumby in the early 1950s at their Covina home shortly after Art finished film school at USC. In 1955 Clokey showed Gumbasia to movie producer Sam Engel, who encouraged him to develop his technique by adding figures. Of the three pilot episodes of Gumby, the first was done by Clokey on his own, and the next two were done for NBC and shown on The Howdy Doody Show to test audience reaction.[4] The second 15-minute pilot, "Gumby Goes to the Moon", was initially rejected by NBC executive Thomas Warren Sarnoff. The third Gumby episode, "Robot Rumpus", made a successful debut on the Howdy Doody Show in August 1956.
Gumby was an NBC series (a Howdy Doody spin-off) during 1957.[10][11] Featuring lots of Clokey's puppet films, as well as variety, interviews and games, it was hosted by Robert "Nick" Nicholson from March to June, then by Pinky Lee until November.[12][13]
Gumby was inspired by a suggestion from Clokey's wife Ruth that he base his character on the Gingerbread man. Gumby was green because it was Clokey's favorite color. Gumby's legs and feet were made wide for pragmatic reasons: they ensured the clay character would stand up during stop-motion filming. The famous slanted shape of Gumby's head was based on the hair style of Clokey's father Charles Farrington in an old photograph.[14]
Female performers (among them Ginny Tyler and Nancy Wible) supplied Gumby's voice during the initial episodes. New episodes were added from 1961 to 1963, at which time Dallas McKennon became the voice of Gumby. Production continued through 1966–1968, by which time Norma MacMillan voiced Gumby.
By the 1980s, the original Gumby shorts had enjoyed a revival, both on television and home video.[15] 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 little sister Minga and a mastodon named Denali. Dallas McKennon returned as 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.
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, with the voices re-recorded and the original music replaced by Jerry Gerber's score from the 1988 series. (Clokey's rights to use the original Capitol Records production tracks could not be renewed at the time, due to legal issues.)
Art Clokey reportedly gave 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.
Beginning in 1982, Eddie Murphy began a parody of Gumby on Saturday Night Live. According to Murphy’s parody, when the television cameras were turned off, the sweet Gumby reverted to his true self: a cigar chomping, irascible celebrity who was highly demanding of the production executives. Whenever the executives refused to give into his demands, Gumby would assert his star status by saying “I’m Gumby, Dammit.”
In 1987, the character appeared in The Puppetoon Movie. In 1995, Clokey's production company produced an independently released theatrical film, Gumby: The Movie (aka Gumby 1), marking the clay character's first feature-length adventure.[16] In it, the villainous Blockheads replace Gumby and his band with robots and kidnap their dog, Lowbelly. The movie featured in-joke homages to such sci-fi classics as Star Wars, The Terminator, and 2001: A Space Odyssey. Starting in 1992, TV channels like Nickelodeon and Cartoon Network aired re-runs of Gumby episodes. The original cartoon, "Robot Rumpus", was featured on Mystery Science Theatre 3000.
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. By the end of the decade, Gumby and Pokey had appeared in commercials for Cheerios cereal, most notably Frosted Cheerios. Although no new animated Gumby material is planned for the foreseeable future, most of the episodes (with a few exceptions) 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.
Bob Burden wrote the Gumby comic series with art by Rick Geary, colors by Steve Oliff and Lance Borde, published by Mel Smith and Wildcard Ink/Gumby Comics. The first issue dated July 2006. It won an honor for Best Publication for a Younger Audience at the 2007 Eisner Awards.
The Gumby images and toys are registered trademarks of Prema Toy Company. Premavision owns the distribution rights to the Gumby cartoons (having been reverted from previous distributor Warner Bros. Television), and has licensed the rights to Classic Media.
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.[17] In March 2007, KQED-TV broadcast an hour-long documentary "Gumby Dharma" as part of their "Truly CA" series.[18]
On October 12, 2011, Google paid tribute to Art Clokey’s 90th birthday featuring clay balls transforming into characters from Gumby. The doodle was composed of five clay balls in the Google colors placed beside a toy block with a "G" on it. Clicking any of the balls revealed the Blockheads, Prickle, Goo, Gumby himself, and Pokey (all characters from Gumby).[19]
Various Gumby merchandise has been produced over the years, the most prominent item being bendable figures. Several single packs and multi-figure sets by Jesco (later Trendmasters), as well as a 50th anniversary collection, have been made of the Gumby characters. Also included in the Gumby merchandise catalog are plush dolls, keychains, mugs, a 1988 Colorforms set, a 1995 Trendmasters playset, and a Kubricks set by Medicom. A tribute album, Gumby, was released in 1989 by Buena Vista records.