Gumby

Did You Know?

• Gumby's dog Nopey's entire vocabulary is the word 'nope'.
• The Blockheads' creation was inspired by the trouble-making Katzenjammer Kids.
• Gumby's sister Minga was voiced by Clokey's daughter Holly Harman in the 1988 series.

History

Art Clokey brought Gumby to life in the early 1950s, right after wrapping up his film studies at the University of Southern California. His very first animated project was a short student film from 1953 called Gumbasia, which ran just three minutes. It featured a strange, dreamlike sequence of clay blobs shifting and growing to music, poking fun at Disney’s Fantasia. Clokey made it using a “kinesthetic” approach he learned from his USC professor Slavko Vorkapić, a method Vorkapić described as “massaging of the eye cells.” This technique, focused on camera motion and editing, shaped much of Gumby’s overall look and feel. In 1955, Clokey screened Gumbasia for producer Sam Engel, who urged him to turn his clay experiments into actual children’s stories. That same year, on January 29, Clokey shot the first Gumby pilot, called Adventures of Gumby: A Sample, though it never made it to air. The name “Gumby” came from the sticky, muddy clay on his grandparents’ farm, which the family called “gumbo.” His wife Ruth suggested modeling the character after the Gingerbread Man, and Clokey chose green because he saw it as racially neutral and a symbol of life. Gumby’s wide legs and feet were a practical choice to keep the clay figure standing upright during stop-motion filming. His slanted head was based on the hairstyle of Clokey’s father, Charles Farrington, seen in an old photograph. NBC executive Thomas Warren Sarnoff saw the pilot and asked for another episode. That second one, Gumby on the Moon, became a hit after appearing on Howdy Doody, leading Sarnoff to order a series called The Gumby Show in 1955. Twenty-five episodes, each 11 minutes long, aired on NBC in 1955 and 1956. Early on, Gumby’s voice came from Ruth Eggleston, wife of art director Al Eggleston, until Dallas McKennon took over in 1957. Al Eggleston also created Pokey, the little orange pony who became Gumby’s best friend in those first episodes. The show mixed Clokey’s animations with interviews and games, and had two hosts over time: Robert Nicholson and Pinky Lee.

Reception and legacy

A pizza chain called Gumby's Pizza & Wings opened in 1985 near the University of Florida in Gainesville, Florida, and later spread to the Southern, Midwestern, and Northeastern United States. These restaurants are often found near college campuses and sell a signature item named Pokey Stix after Gumby's friend. In 1993, TV Guide named Gumby the best cartoon series of the 1950s in a special issue marking 40 years of television. Starting in 1994, the Library of Congress used Gumby as a spokescharacter for a traveling exhibition called Adventures into Books: Gumby's World, which promoted the Center for the Book's national reading campaign from 1997 to 2000. By the late 1990s, Gumby and Pokey appeared in Cheerios commercials, with Gumby voiced by Stephen A. Buckley. On August 4, 2006, the Center for Puppetry Arts in Atlanta opened Art Clokey's Gumby: The First Fifty Years, displaying original puppets and sets and screening Clokey's films. That same year, the children's book Gumby Goes to the Sun was published for the 50th anniversary of The Gumby Show. In 2007, the Gumby comic book series earned two Eisner Award nominations, for Best New Series and Best Publication for a Young Audience, winning the latter. A graphic novel called Gumby: 50 Shades of Clay came out in 2017. On October 12, 2011, a Google Doodle celebrated Art Clokey's 90th birthday, featuring a toy block with a "G" and five clay balls in Google colors that revealed the Blockheads, Prickle, Goo, Gumby, and Pokey. On December 21, 2019, Eddie Murphy reprised his role as Gumby while hosting Saturday Night Live during a Weekend Update sketch.

Merchandising

The most prominent Gumby merchandise is the bendable figure set by Lakeside Toys. Several single packs and multifigure sets were made by Jesco (later Trendmasters), and a 50th-anniversary collection. There are plush dolls, keychains, mugs, a 1988 Colorforms set, a 1995 Trendmasters playset, and a Kubricks set by Medicom. A tribute album, Gumby: The Green Album, produced by Shepard Stern, was released in 1989. Gumby images and toys are registered trademarks of Fox Entertainment. Premavision owned the distribution rights to the Gumby cartoons, having been reverted from previous distributor Warner Bros. Television in 2003, and had licensed the rights to Classic Media until September 30, 2012. As of April 2015, NCircle Entertainment owns home video and digital distribution rights to the cartoons. In August 2005, the only video game featuring Gumby, Gumby vs. the Astrobots, was released by Namco for the Game Boy Advance. The game is a sidescrolling platformer where Gumby must navigate stages to reach the end while avoiding enemies and pitfalls, and defeating bosses. Gumby vs. the Astrobots received generally average reviews according to review aggregator Metacritic, with an average score of 63 out of 100, based on four reviews.

In popular culture

Gumby was a recurring target of parody on Mad TV, appearing in several stop-motion claymation sketches during the show's early seasons. In the sketch Gumboy, a teenage Gumby and Pokey discover a Clayboy Mansion magazine and visit a clay Hugh Hefner. In the sketch CLOPS, a parody of the reality crime show COPS, Gumby is arrested alongside Santa Claus by Officer John Dough. In the sketch Gumby Old Men, elderly clay versions of Gumby and Pokey shout obscenities and inflict brutal comic violence on each other. In the mobile game Family Guy: The Quest for Stuff, an unlockable character skin called Gummy Peter features Peter Griffin as a green, flexible claymation figure. Robot Chicken has regularly targeted Gumby with mature parody sketches, including one where the Incredible Hulk works as Gumby's stunt double, and another where the Blockheads are put on trial for Gumby's murder. In the Muppet Babies episode The Great Muppet Cartoon Show, Miss Piggy flattens Gonzo into a one-dimensional green clay figure shaped like Gumby. In The Real Ghostbusters episode Station Identification, a parody character named Gumbo appears as a hyper-violent mashup of Gumby and Rambo. Mystery Science Theater 3000 featured and riffed on the classic Gumby short Robot Rumpus in a 1998 episode. In The Pee-wee Herman Show's 1981 HBO special, a naked vintage plastic Gumby toy sat on Pee-wee Herman's desk as a running background prop.