The Shape of Gumby's Head and Body
Art wanted to have a tall, slender shape, but he didn't want it to become a phallic symbol. "We put a little bump of wisdom on his head to give him the bump of wisdom that the Buddhists have. The only difference is that they have it over the center of their head and Gumby's is over to the side. Actually, the real inspiration for this bump came from my early childhood."
The size and location of the
Gumby bump match up with a picture of Art's father (taken when he was eighteen), who had a huge cowlick on the side of his head that he could not stick down. The picture hung in Art's grandfather's farmhouse in Michigan. "If you superimpose an outline of that portrait over Gumby, you will see that the heads coincide perfectly."
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."