Gumby
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Wikipedia-Article "Gumby"
This article is about the claymation figure. 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 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) and his dog Nopey, Gumby's pals included Prickle (a yellow dinosaur), and Goo (a blue thumb-type mermaid blob who could fly).
The opening of The Gumby Show featured a song with the following lyrics:
Gumby!
He was once a little green slab of clay. Gumby!
You should see what Gumby can do today. Gumby!
He can walk into any book, with his pony pal Pokey, too.
If you've got a heart then Gumby's a part of you.
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 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 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. In 1995, Nickelodeon aired reruns 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 forseeable 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.
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.
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 episode The Girl Who Slept Too Little.