Gumby

While visiting my brother this weekend, I had a chance to experience children's television. He has three kids; six, four, and two. The older kids mostly watch Nickelodeon and Disney, and these channels have inane situation comedies. I can't say that they are any more inane than the stuff I used to watch, but I tend to think they are.

But while channel surfing, I stumbled upon reruns of old Gumby cartoons, and while I was retreating into my past, my six-year-old niece seemed to be transfixed. Gumby was a big part of my childhood, and my younger sisters didn't remember him (my four-year-old niece insisted she did).

Gumby was a stop-motion animated show created by Art Clokey in the '50s. They were in production, I now learn, until the late '60s. The shows we watched were made around 1968. They are, in comparison with today's animation, primitive.

But strangely, they are absorbing. Gumby, of course, was a tall green bendable figure, and his main pal was Pokey, an orange pony. I had forgotten about other characters, like Prickle, a yellow dinosaur, and Goo, a blue mermaid. Mostly what I remember is that Gumby would jump into books, where he would be in the world of the book, or try to outwit the Blockheads, who were always into mischief.

As now, merchandising was a big part of Gumby. I had the Gumby figures, and I remember having a hobby horse with Pokey's head on it. My memory is fuzzy, but this toy may have been involved in getting caught in an antenna and pulling a TV set over. Even now I have pristine Gumby and Pokey figures, purchased at a flea market.

The Gumby cartoons are only a few minutes long, and have hardly any plot at all. One involved the Blockheads riding a Ferris wheel and using a fishing pole to steal carnival prizes. Pokey masquerades as a prize, and ends up clinging to the spokes of the wheel.

Clokey also invented Davy and Goliath, a stop-motion show that was created for a religious organization to teach good morals. I watched that show, too, even though it is far easier to mock. Gumby, though, is mock proof, despite Eddie Murphy's SNL sketches depicting him as a cigar-chomping curmudgeon. This was homage, not mocking.