The Gumby Movie!

The Gumby Movie is exactly what you expect, a ninety minute-long Gumby adventure.  Inside the giant Gumby head you will find a movie which this Gumby fan found entertaining and also a little time capsule of the late 80's and early 90's when this movie was developed and finally released to almost no acclaim.

The movie came out in 1995 after several years of trying to find a distributor and its life on VHS and DVD has been rather grim with only shortened versions being available in a limited way until now. The whole shebang can be got for relatively small money and for a Gumby fan that's nifty as can be. The story is a weird one (of course) as we begin in outer space where aliens enjoy vintage Gumby transmissions. Then a strange monolith becomes both a green and red monolith and both of those come to Earth where they transform into Pokey and Gumby (though that's more than a bit uncertain). Then we follow Gumby and his band the "Clayboys" as they try to use their rock and roll talents to help farmers who are suffering from debt to the unscrupulous Blockheads who run the local bank. Then we learn that Lowbelly (Gumby's dog) can cry tears which become pearls when he hears the music. When the Blockheads learn of this they kidnap the dog then everyone else eventually. To the rescue is a new character named Tara who becomes a love interest of sorts for Gumby.

If all that sounds bizarre, then you have gotten the proper sense of it. This movie tries to be perhaps too many things, but in a movie which first and foremost is a visual feast of stop-motion antics, that's a forgivable sin. We have echoes of Terminator as a robot Gumby pursues our heroes into a gaggle of books which call back many a Gumby adventure from years gone by. We even get a light-saber battle at one point. If anything the movie has too many characters to manage as many seem to have little to do most of the time. Prickle and Goo in particular seem to get short shrift as Gumby's pals in the band (FatBuckle, ThinBuckle, and NoBuckle) take up space. The Blockheads do get a good show though, as their schemes are front and center most of the time.

This one is for Gumby purists for certain. Everyone else will have to tread with caution. I liked it.  The packaging is clever, but like a lot of stuff in this vein, it will be difficult to store. That's a nice problem to have when it's all said and done though.

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Coffee With Gumby!

Gumby has been on my mind a lot recently. Enjoyed the 50's and 60's adventures quite a lot. The animation is charming as it can be and the nostalgia for times gone by adds zest to the quaint storytelling. So I didn't surprise myself when I had to order Gumby Imagined, a coffee table book from Dynamite Entertainment.

Coffee-table books once were significant tomes which presented images which were fascinating and even at times rare. With the advent of the net the need for them has diminished mightily, but a lifelong denizen of the 20th century, I admit that sometimes I just need printed material in my lap to read. The screen is fine, but the page is often dandy.

Like Gumby himself, the idea of a book dedicated to his misadventures both before and behind the carefully arranged camera makes for fascinating entertainment. I never really get tired of hearing or reading about stop-motion techniques, the care and sheer force of will needed to make it work is by itself a saga. Modern movies and shows made by computers are wonderful to watch but any behind-the-scenes documentaries or such are often sheer boredom. The work is masterful, but watching it happen is not fun at all. Not so with Art Clokey's magnificent creation. Getting there is a lot of fun too.

Another trip to Gumbasia is scheduled for tomorrow.

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Gumby And Me!

Gumby has been a welcome nightly visitor in my home over the last several weeks. I've collected up the dvd collections of The Gumby Show which have hit the shelves in recent years and I've dabbled in them, especially the early 50's material. Now I've just completed a thorough run-through of the series, but in a quite different way than I'd normally consume cartoons. Every evening when I retire, I cue up a few episodes of the classic clay animated series and enjoy them.

They have proven to be delightful devices to get my mind off the troubles of the day and to let me slip off to sleep with ease. Gumby and Pokey, and later Prickle and Goo are sometimes too sweet, but generally are just what the doctored ordered. The early stuff is so inventive and bizarre, it's as much about the sheer joy of making them as much as anything.

Later in the 60's the misadventures become more humdrum as plot overcomes the wild creativity of the early exploratory shows and we get a Gumby who has to share the stage with more and more characters. The inclusion of more human-looking characters seemed to undermine the weirdness of Gumby's universe at times, but made a bit of sense given the historical nature of many of the stories. 

I especially enjoyed the mute Blockheads this time, as their menace was always present but their inept attacks were also always fun to watch. 

There is a general Gumby revival these days, with the little clay boy and his amigos getting another comic book, thanks to the folks at Papercutz. I'm pretty tempted by this one, which is pretty bright and takes full advantage of the large cast of Gumbyworld.

There is also a new book titled Gumby Imagined out that I'm pretty eager to read about the early days of Gumby and the work of his creator Art Clokey on that and other projects such as Davey and Goliath.

The Gumby Movie has also been released. I'm sure I'll get hold of it eventually. I'm not student of the later Gumby material at all, but I'm curious about it for sure. These creations by Art Clokey have proven to have a durable life, longer than many others from the era. There is an adult sensibility about the shows which entertains children while not generally talking down to others. The 60's cartoons have bumpy moments for certain, but overall are still part of a great green saga which weirdly is greater than the sum of its parts.

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Out Damn Gumby!

Just added this second volume of vintage The Adventures of Gumby to my burgeoning DVD collection. Glad to have the second half of this two-part collection of the green guy's show from this era. Picked up the first half early last year and now have added the second. For the record I got the bonus box with the Blockheads inside...love this kind of marketing! One of the extras this time is a film called "The Clay Peacock"; check this out for more on that. Many reviewers bemoan that some of the Gumby animated material has been discarded from this collection due to the stereotypical nature of the some of the stuff concerning Native Americans. Having never seen these I cannot judge, but feel it's a mistake to not include material of this kind in these collections which purport to offer a glimpse into the full range of what was happening. Because they are not included I will not be able to see for myself what the problem was.

This sort of thing has happened before of course with Warner Brothers and I remember concerns with some of the Popeye cartoons a few years back. But it's enough I feel to add cautions to the packaging or perhaps even inside for those who are concerned. Purging material which is now deemed offensive runs the risk of masking a problem which has plagued mankind for all its history and to alter that history retroactively, even in this small instance creates a false impression of what attitudes were and how they might need to shift going forward. Racist material should be objected to and sneered at but it should not be purged from the historical record, because as we know from the old adage, those who don't learn from history are doomed to repeat it.

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Gumby Strikes Back!

While doing the grocery shopping the other day, I always take a moment to check out what new flicks might have tumbled onto the market, and I was delighted to find first of what is proposed to be two volumes gathering together the 1960's rendition of the classic Gumby television show. Created by Art Clokey in the 50's, Gumby was revived in the happenin' decade of my youth, and I'm glad to have these episodes to watch. They put me in the same mind as watching the vintage Fleisher Popeye cartoons, of entering into a completely other world of creativity and whimsy with just a dash of danger to make it all seem urgent. The creativity of the animation is remarkable and while Gumby and his pal Pokey have become cliches of sorts and the objects of satire, they remain durable fantasy heroes for the common man.

Here's what you get with this set. It matches up well with the 50's box set which landed on the shelves last fall and which I looked at here.

And now because it's just neat to do, here is a Gumby comic book gallery.

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It's Gumby Dammit!

I stumbled across this collection of minor classics the other day at my local retail store, just sitting there among a gaggle of boring modern movies featuring real people (more or less). My attention was instantly on the little green clay boy and his his reddish clay horse.  I had to have The Gumby Show.

Art Clokey works on the first Gumby adventure.

Gumby and Pokey are a thoroughly infused part of the American culture, a classic TV show produced by the dedicated talent of Art Clokey, a classic toy, and thanks to Eddie Murphy's sardonic presentation so many years ago on Saturday Night Live, the character was reinstalled in the popular imagination.

Eddie Murphy reintroduces everyone to Gumby.

The story of how Gumby came to be a TV show is fascinating and points back to a time when TV was a territory occupied by pioneers before it became dominated by play-it-safe-executives. The Gumby TV show, presented on this dvd in its original uncut glory is weird and fascinating, an American Alice in Wonderland-style mini-epic which plays with visual imagery and our expectations of same much the same way Lewis Carroll did with words in his classic children's tomes. Later Gumby shows (produced in the 60's and afterwards) were captured (necessarily I'd argue) by narrative as story became primary and visual splendor came second, a nod to variety. But these first ones are all about the visual, with story (such as it is) taking a decided back seat to tricks of the eye the animators can pull off.

The original visual spectacle - "massaging the eyeballs".

Clokey began with Gumbasia, a wild animated short which rips its name from Disney's Fantasia and its hallucinatory rhythm from jazz.  Check it out. This little bit of oddness caught the fascination of TV types and a kid's show was ordered. Gumby really has more in common with Jack Cole's wild and wacky Plastic Man than anything else, a tendency to allow his form to follow his feelings, and he's often all too subject to the environments he's in. For more on the history and lore of Gumby, Pokey, the Blockheads, and his other multi-colored associates see the website called appropriately enough Gumbyworld.

The adventures here are reassembled as they were originally. The first episode, in later years divided into three parts runs its original eleven minutes here, as do the other 50's episodes included. There's not much in the ways of extras, but Gumbasia is included as well a glimpse of a modern Gumby cartoon being shot.

What I got - two dvds and a little doll...ahem...action figure...too.

Recommended if you're in a whimsical mood. And if you're not, it might make you that way.

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