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Art
worked with the Gumby shape for a while before he decided that
the optimum height for Gumby was seven inches. He cut several
Gumby shapes at a time from a large, half-inch slab of clay. The
arms were rolled separately and cut from long snake-like lengths
of clay, and soft wire was pressed into the arms to help maintain
their poses during the frame by frame animation process.
Regarding
color, Gumby looks kind of like a leaf of grass: "I am sure Walt
Whitman would have been pleased,"
Art chuckled. He chose the color green because it was allied to
nature, and reflected a love of the environment. It was not until
years later that Art learned that the color of the heart Chakra
is green. It makes sense to us.
In
Art's early experimental films of Gumby, you can see how he played
with the Gumby shape. One of the funniest is a film in which Gumby
is shot out of a cannon, blasting a "Gumby" shape through a barn
door.
Gumby's
head and body have had a number of distinctive styles over the
years. "We were refining the shape of Gumby as we went along.
At first, in the fifties, his head had a little bump. Then we
made the bump longer and taller in the late fifties and early
sixties. In the late sixties and seventies his head had kind of
a swoop to the side, and then in the eighties we went to a shape
that was inbetween all of them."
Where
it all started
The shape of Gumby's head and
body
Gumby's Name and Personality
The Pilot Episodes
The Second Pilot: Gumby's Trip
to the Moon
What Gumby Represents to Art
Clokey
Gumby's Eyes, from Red to Black
Gumby's Voice
Gumby Into and Out of the Books
Art Clokey on the Future of
Gumby
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