Gumba Gumba Gumba
June 20th, 2005This weekend we went up to the Museum of the Moving Image in Queens for the opening of the oddly-ubiquitiously-publicized Gumby Exhibit. Gumby turns 50 this year, see, and so they have a rather tiny collection of Gumby sets and scripts and two rooms of memorobilia and two film showings. And you could meet and take your picture with Gumby LIVE and in person!
Art Clokey the mild-mannered beatnik creator of Gumby… no, he’s not dead… was supposed to “open” the exhibit, but his son came instead. Art had fallen and broken his hip. Before the screening, his son did the intro and mentioned this fact and then added, heartbreakingly, “My father hates being 85.” This depressed me for the rest of the day. Also, Joe Clokey and I have the same fisherman’s cap. Luckily, I did not wear mine to the museum. That would have been embarassing.
While the museum was awesome… a mix of weird and easily-corruptable interactive activities related to the practice of making film and television, historical artifacts (cameras, broadcast equipment, tv sets) and pop culture crap. We particularly enjoyed the ADR booth where you can redub dialog from “Babe,” the editing room where you can add new soundtracks to “Vertigo” and “Twister,” and the green screen room where you can rip off bits from “Wayne’s World.”
The Gumby opening was kinda all over the place. There wasn’t an opening ceremony of any kind until the 2 PM screening. We came right at 12, so we watched a Museum intern and none-too-adept public speaker labor her way through a presentation on how to make Gumby (and later, animate Gumby). It was long, so I wandered around the floor while Kirk watched attentively and asked thoughtful questions about the process.
We finally found Gumby after walking up and down the stairs being told “he just left.” We finally found him and sadly, it was another Museum intern, probably nominated for the job for being the shortest girl on staff crammed into the too-small, shoddy costume. Still, this was the only thing at the show that held the interest of the little kids dragged along by their pop-culture-collector parents. Gumby even did some of the museum activities with the kids (like the “make a flip book” video booth… where your 3 seconds of video get printed out for your cut-and-pasting into flip book). It was throat-cloggingly adorable.
The biggest “event” was the screening of an hour and a half of Gumby episodes from the 50s, 60s, and 80s as well as a late 70s art film and some commercials. The curator or president of the museum did a particularly boring and creepy introduction, thanking all the people who helped set up the exhibit, giving a play-by-play of who talked to whom about how the exhibit came about, asking the hard core Gumby obsessive super-fans (obese people in homemade Gumby shirts) to put the museum in their will so when they die their 4000 happy meal toys and ebay finds will be “taken care of forever.”
As this speech was going on, the costumed Gumby make his/her way into the theatre, first lurking in the back unsurely, as the bored kids (including a toddler sitting near us who appeared like he might have been Joe Clokey’s son, or nephew or something) in the audience took notice and started screaming “Gumby! Gumby!” The costumed Gumby could tell she was drawing attention away from her boss, so she made her way to the front. Then the museum lady altered her speech to humiliate and indicate to the intern this was not cool. “We all know Gumby is very polite person who knows how important it is to say thank you. So he’s going to go away so I can finish saying thank you to all the people who made this show possible.” Uh oh Gumby, you’re fucked now. Gumby took a bow and clumbsily tottered out of the theatre. I wonder if Gumby got fired for that.
A lot of this exhibit was pretty unfriendly to kids—the displays were up really high, not at kid eye level. The boring speech. The too complicated demonstration. The overly long screening (kids can’t sit still for an hour and a half). Making Gumby go away.
Then as we watched the hour and a half of episodes which probably bored the pants off of any actual kids in the audience, I realized Gumby is probably designed more for stoned or autistic adults anyway. A lot of the stories just end. There may be a build up to some event, but as soon as the episode has filled up enough time it will just cut off.No character matches any other character design in the Gumbyverse. Gumby’s family and Prickle, Goo, The Blockheads and that weird “Professor” are all brightly colored abstract humanoids (and animaloids). But the other “people” look fairly realistic, like Davey and Goliath, or doll-like (with real hair) or animal-like. Toys are alternately huge or tiny, sometimes he’s in a Earth-like world, or in that creepy “playroom” with the giant books he walks into. I suppose each book is a planet and the “playroom” is empty space, so when he seems to be in his house or a town he’s in a book called “House” or “Town” or “Gumby’s Home.” Who publishes these books?
The late 80s Gumby cartoons are the ones I remember most, though they showed all the old ones along side them in the 80s show. Those seem the most odd to me because they had refined a lot of the “look” to be standard and slick (wheras you can imagine ol’ Art cooking up the 50s ones in his basement. Thumbprints in the clay), but they kept the weird stories that just end. Added a bunch of new but relatively personality-less characters (a chicken and a wooly mammoth—both realistic) as well as some poorly understood “cool things”—rock bands, skateboards and a weird reference to “protein shakes” in the example we saw.
We left after touring the 2nd floor of the museum and eating at a conveniently placed fancy diner. “The Cup.” It was ok.
We bought some props for our last day of shooting on “My Wife, The Ghost” episode 3 at a strange Queens party supply store that filled up the better part of a block. It seemed to be catering to people who were planning to make EVERYTHING for their own wedding. 1/3 of the store was fake flowers in sizes from gargantuan to lilliputian.