Gumby is a green clay humanoid figure who was the subject of a 233-episode series of American television which spanned over a 35-year period. He was animated using stop motion clay animation.
Gumby’s principal sidekick is Pokey, a talking pony, and his nemeses are the Blockheads. Other characters are Gumby’s dog Nopey (who responds to everything with a gloomy “nope”); Prickle, a yellow dinosaur or dragon; Goo, a flying blue mermaid who spits blue goo-balls; Gumby’s mother Gumba; Gumby’s father Gumbo; his sister Minga; Denali (a mastodon); Tilly (a hen); King Ott; and Professor Kapp.
Gumby was created by Art Clokey while a student of Slavko Vorkapich at the University of Southern California. Clokey’s first animated film was a 1953 3-minute short 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 Vorkapich taught 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 adding figures. Clokey and his wife Ruth (née Ruth Parkander) came up with the character Gumby, and Clokey made a 15-minute pilot later titled Gumby Goes to the Moon. NBC executive Thomas Warren Sarnoff liked the idea but rejected the pilot episode. The second Gumby episode, Robot Rumpus, made a successful debut on the Howdy Doody Show in August 1956, and in 1957 Gumby was given his own NBC series.
This Gumby tin sign would make a great gift for any child to put up in their room.
.