Gumby/YMMV

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


  • Adaptation Displacement: Eddie Murphy's take on the character is much better known to modern audiences.
    • Well... maybe and maybe not. The Gumby Show was popular in syndication well after those sketches ended. Also, there was a new series soon after. To what do you think kids would have had more exposure back in the 1980s?
  • Cult Classic
  • Faux Symbolism: The official companion book, Gumby: the authorized biography of the world's favorite clayboy, written by Art Clokey and others. Basically, Gumby's mind is free.
  • Hate Dumb: Sadly, Gumby gained one on YouTube, when Ray William Johnson released a video about a black guy playing Madden '11 and yelling, "FUCK YOU, GUMBY!!!" (The black player is actually referring to another Madden player and not the clay character himself).
  • Ho Yay: This may be a bit of a stretch, but has anybody noticed that Blockheads G and J are never apart? And that J seems to take G's abuse a bit too submissively?
  • Nightmare Fuel: Oh, where to begin with the movie...
    • Not to mention some of the episodes themselves, including a piano-playing boy in "Small Planets" who goes feral when his arpeggio is interrupted.
    • Gumby melting in the episodes was pretty horrific.
    • That was turned Up to Eleven in an episode of Freddy's Nightmares when the melting is made to seem as if Gumby is being nuked.
    • The Glob.
  • Retroactive Recognition: Many key people of the animation industry got their start in the 1980s series, and went on to such things as Pixar and The Nightmare Before Christmas.
  • Special Effects Failure/Off-Model: In certain scenes in which Gumby and the other characters walk or drive into a book, the animators used different models for the characters and vehicles. And these models were either crudely made or 2D!
    • The same goes for the shrink/growth episodes. In the 1960s episode "Chicken Feed", the growing effects with Tilly the chicken are created with badly colored two-dimensional pictures of Tilly. Also, in the 1980s episode "Shrink-a-Dink", the growing/shrinking scenes (specifically with Gumby, Goo, Prickle and Professor Kapp) used crudely made models in each frame.