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

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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, as well as the childlike voice characterization provided by Dick Beals. Newly produced episodes were added in 1962 (by which time Dallas McKennon 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 dragon), and Goo (a blue thumb-type mermaid blob who could fly).

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 that included new characters such as Gumby's sister, Minga, and Denali the mastodon. 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.

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 (from the 1980s voice talent) and musical scores). This proved to be a controversial move; most Gumby purists consider the new audio to be blasphemous.

The new series, Gumby Adventures, also featured Chris Phillips.

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.

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 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.

Read more at Wikipedia.org