Gumby | |
---|---|
Gumby in the episode "Lost Treasure"
|
|
Created by | Art Clokey |
Films and television | |
Film(s) | Gumby: The Movie (1995) |
Television series |
|
* As a recurring segment in this series. |
Gumby is an American clay animation franchise, centered on a green clay humanoid character created and modeled by Art Clokey. The character has been the subject of two television series as well as a feature-length film and other media. 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, parodies, and merchandising.
Gumby follows the titular character and his adventures through different environments and times in history. Gumby's principal sidekick is Pokey, a talking orange pony. His nemeses are the Blockheads, a pair of humanoid, red-colored figures with cube-shaped heads, who wreak mischief and havoc. The Blockheads were inspired by The Katzenjammer Kids, who were always getting into scrapes and causing discomfort to others. Other characters are Prickle, a yellow dinosaur who sometimes styles himself as a detective with pipe and deerstalker hat like Sherlock Holmes, and Goo, a flying blue mermaid who spits blue goo balls and can change shape at will. Also featured are Gumby's dog Nopey, whose entire vocabulary is the word "nope," and Gumby's parents, Gumbo and Gumba. 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 he finished film school at the University of Southern California. Clokey's first animated film was a 1953 three-minute student film called Gumbasia, a surreal montage of moving and expanding lumps of clay set to music in a parody of Disney's Fantasia.Gumbasia was created in a style that Clokey's professor Slavko Vorkapić taught at USC 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. In 1955, Clokey showed Gumbasia to movie producer Sam Engel, who encouraged him to develop his technique by animating figures into children's stories.