Even after 50 years, Gumby has no compare

Published 9:00 pm Tuesday, July 18, 2006

Gumby, the little green clay boy, is celebrating 50 years in show business – in 1956 he made his first appearance on television, on “The Howdy Doody Show” – and he’s looking as young as ever. There’s not a wrinkle on him, and if there were, you could smooth it out with your thumb.

It has been a long time since I’ve thought much about Gumby – and Pokey too, his pony pal. But he has never really left my head. He is parked there, in his sporty toy car, with other strange, disturbing things of childhood.

Not that Gumby was disturbing, in spite of being a naked slab of green clay with a lopsided head and bell-bottomed legs with indentations where his feet should be. But disturbing things happened to him – he was attacked and eaten by baked goods, for instance – that were the stuff of nightmares. Watching that episode again recently (“In the Dough”), I see that I was not mistaken. I was not being a baby. It’s scary stuff.

Well, it’s not all scary stuff. But even when it’s cute, it’s strange.

Animation is a kind of magic act, but clay or puppet animation has a special power in that its subjects are real – that is, three-dimensional objects that inhabit a world of substance and shadow, a place of actual not computer-rendered depth. When Gumby puts on a cowboy hat, it really is on him. When you buy a Gumby doll, you are not buying some extrusion of a flat figure into real space, like a Homer Simpson figurine, but a proportionate replica of the thing itself.

Art Clokey, the man who made Gumby, was far from the first to breathe life into inanimate objects frame by frame, but without a doubt, Clokey created the first clay TV star and one whose staying power and range of influence have exceeded that of contemporaries Howdy Doody, Huckleberry Hound or Cecil the Seasick Sea Serpent.

This summer, the creator and his creations are being honored at the Museum of Television &Radio in Beverly Hills, Calif., in “First of the International Clayboys: Gumby and the Animation Legacy of Art Clokey.”

Running through Sept. 10, it includes a selection of “Gumby” shorts from the museum’s collection with some of Clokey’s religious series “Davey and Goliath,” produced with the Lutheran Church from 1960 to 1975 and currently parodied on Cartoon Network’s “Moral Orel.”

There are two kinds of genius, the imitable and the inimitable. “Gumby” is a work of the second sort, the thing so completely, singularly itself, so far off down its own road, so unpredictable and odd, bizarrely constituted and eccentrically executed that there’s nowhere for anyone to take it, no variations to play on the theme.

He is original and inarguable, and though he has gone in and out of fashion, been parodied and abused – check out Youtube.com to view some not-for-children unsanctioned adventures – whatever insults have been done him are only further testament to his iconic power. Eddie Murphy’s “I’m Gumby, dammit” is funny only if you already know Gumby.

Gumby is officially 7 inches tall, but he is as big or small as he needs to be; his scale changes sometimes even within a scene. He might be bigger than a lion or smaller than a rabbit. He seems to live in a toy store, although he also lives in a house with his parents, Gumbo and Gumba. (Later he gained a little sister, Minga.)

He’s smaller than the books into whose covers he melts to visit the worlds inside them – the Old West, the Kingdom of Roo, the jungle – where he seems to inhabit a human world on human scale and interact with characters who, though they are made of clay, are not, like Gumby, supposed to be made of clay.

The scripts have the feeling of having been written at a gallop, scribbled down after a dream or improvised over a bowl of corn flakes without worrying about what does or doesn’t make sense. Gumby stories start fast, with minimal explanation – Gumby is selling watermelons to buy his mother a special birthday present; a man sells him a potion that turns them into gremlins. Gumby and Pokey are on vacation with $100. Gumby and Pokey run away from home into space, where they happen upon three small planets each run by an antisocial child.

Sometimes they wander around playing with toys. Once in a while an episode might teach a small lesson – ask permission before doing anything you should ask permission to do – but they aren’t really out to make any moral point.

Gumby’s lack of sophistication is reflected in the show’s production standards. Compared to the work of Will Vinton, Nick Park and Henry Selick, the sets and figures are rough-hewn and handmade.

The earliest episodes – the show was in production in the late 1950s, intermittently through the ’60s and again in the late ’80s, and an independently financed film was released in 1995 – are almost laughably crude, like a kid’s school project, though even the later, slicker episodes retain some of their handmade charm.