A Little Green Ball of Clay
For being faithful satellite service customers, we found out here at chez Scrubbles that we’re getting three free months of Showtime (including ancillary channels Sundance and Flix). Blockbuster movie overload! Amongst the new offerings was Gumby Dharma, an hour-long documentary on the life of Gumby creator Art Clokey. This was totally fascinating, of course. One of my favorite parts came when they showed snippets of Gumbasia, a short film that Clokey created in his own garage in 1953. According to the doc, Clokey showed this to a 20th Century Fox studio exec in the hopes that they’d pick up the film for theatrical distribution. The exec was duly impressed, but instead of taking on this film he commissioned Clokey to created a new set of shorts geared towards children. Voilá, the creation of Gumby!
Joy of joys, I actually found the full-length version of Gumbasia on YouTube. Dig the jazzy score and the eye popping colors:
I thought Dharma Gumby was FASCINATING. I stumbled upon it at the gym one day, and it confirmed a deeply held suspicion from childhood that Gumby was both Christian and psychedelic.