Gumby: The Movie

Summarize Fact Check

While searching for Gumby, Pokey inadvertently irritates everyone at the fire station before becoming entangled with Goo, Prickle, and a giant slide, ultimately compressing them all into a single mass of clay. After a quick “deconfusion,” Gumby appears, interrupting ceremonial dances to spark ideas for his next concert. Fatbuckle and Thinbuckle round up the gang to head back to the farm-studio, but along the way, they discover farmers collapsed in the road—victims of the Blockheads’ E-Z Loan scam that’s threatening their farms. To help, Gumby and his band, The Clayboys, decide to put on a benefit concert. During practice, Pokey grows jealous of the time Gumby spends with the new band, while Goo comes across a pearl beside Lowbelly.

At Gumby’s first benefit concert, “Rockin’ Arc Park,” held at a park bandstand, the music scrambles Professor Kapp’s thoughts and makes Lowbelly cry a massive pile of pearls. While Goo, Prickle, and Kapp ignore the scene, the nearby Blockheads take notice, swipe the pearls, and discover the dog produces them whenever he hears music. Afterwards, Gumby and his friends celebrate their success at a small fast-food joint, where Prickle ends up drenched in dozens of spilt shakes, and Gumby strikes a deal with Lucky Claybert to appear on TV.

Meanwhile, the Blockheads replace Lowbelly with a robotic replica, hoping to use a concert recording to make him cry pearls—unaware he only does so when Gumby changes shapes. Two Gumby groupies, Tara and Ginger, follow the gang back to the farm/studio, lingering as Lucky arrives to finalise a contract with Gumby in his haystack office. Soon after, the Blockheads, posing as a TV crew, round up the Clayboys and their instruments (minus Gumby) and load them into a refrigerated truck. Tara and Ginger trail the truck to the Blockheads’ lair, where they find frozen Clayboy clones being made, including one programmed to capture Gumby once they realise they need him to extract the pearls.

At Gumby’s farm, robot Lowbelly happily rolls in manure, baffling everyone. While the others wash the dog, Gumby is quietly abducted. Moments later, the dog sparks, melts, and reveals a metal endoskeleton—he’d been replaced. Gumby is cloned and locked up with the others. With their collection complete, the Blockheads have the robot Clayboys perform, though Lowbelly still won’t cry pearls. Tara and Ginger escape just as the Blockheads program the Gumby clone to capture Pokey, Prickle, and Goo. The girls arrive just in time to save Gumby’s friends, disable the bot, and join Lucky in searching for the missing Clayboys. They defeat the Blockheads, rescue Lowbelly, and start thawing the Clayboys. However, the band soon melts and is taken to Professor Kapp, who uses sound waves to bring them back.

The Blockheads escape and send a Gumby clone after Goo. Prickle notices the threat and warns Gumby, who faces off with the impostor. A wild chase through video cassettes lands them in a hilariously inaccurate Knights of the Round Table movie. Gumby fails to pull Excalibur from the stone, but the clone succeeds, sparking a swordfight as the uninterested heroes look on. Gumby gets sliced in half but shrugs it off, fleeing into Battle of the Nebulae with the clone close behind. They duel with lightsabers; Gumby is chopped up again but still manages to escape. Finally, his firefighter dad blasts the robot with water, shorting it out and melting it. The rest of the Blockheads’ robots are destroyed, the Blockheads are captured, and Goo is rescued.

Gumby makes it to his videotaping with Claybert, then announces at a picnic that he’s starting a farm-focused loan company offering fair loans, with Claybert’s help. As punishment, the Blockheads were forced to weed Gumby’s garden. After a successful concert, Gumby and Pokey head back to outer space, feeling proud that their efforts saved the farms.^[7]

• Dallas McKennon (credited as Charles Farrington) voices:
  • Gumby - The titular main protagonist
  • Professor Kapp: An exuberant scientist with a voice like Ed Wynn
  • Fatbuckle: a red man with a big belt (his name is a play on "Fatty" Arbuckle)^[8]
  • Lucky Claybert: A Groucho-like talent agent who makes a music video entitled "Gumbymania" (although it is officially known as "Take Me Away" in the credits)
  • Nobuckle: A yellow man with a New Jersey accent
  • Gumby Robot: A robotic doppelganger of Gumby created by The Blockheads and the secondary antagonist.
• Art Clokey voices
  • Pokey: A talking red horse and Gumby's best friend
  • Prickle: A yellow dinosaur with a Mel Blanc–like voice and a Midwestern accent
  • Gumbo: Gumby's firefighter father
• Gloria Clokey voices Goo: A blue flying mermaid
• Manny La Carruba voices Thinbuckle: A blue teenager with a thin belt
• Patti Morse (speaking voice)/Melisa Kary (singing voice) voices Tara: a light blue female, who initially starting out as Gumby's fan, before becoming his love interest at the climax of the film
• Alice Young voices Ginger: a yellow female and Tara's best friend
• Janet MacDuff voices Gumba: Gumby's mother
• Bonnie Rudolph voices Lowbelly: A skateboard-talented dog, who cries pearls every time he sees Gumby change shapes, and Lowbelly Robot: a robotic version created by The Blockheads to serve as a decoy while they try to exploit the Pearl crying abilities of the real one.
  • Bonnie also voices one of the Farm Ladies
• Ozzie Ahlers voices Radio Announcer
• Kirby Coleman is the lead singer for "This Way 'N That"
• Anthony McNulty voices Burnzy
• David Archer
• Lillian Nicol
• Rick Warren
• Stan Freberg (uncredited)
• Blockheads G and J: Two square-headed silent main antagonists, each with letters on both sides of their heads, who communicate using sign language
• Groobee: Gumby's pet bee
• Minga: Gumby's little sister. She makes a non-speaking cameo appearance at the end of the film

Production on the film was started in 1988 and was fully completed in 1992.^[9] Despite this, Premavision was unable to find a distributor for the film until three years later in 1995, when they finally found a small company named Arrow Releasing (not to be confused with Arrow Films) but the film was unable to reach an agreement for a wide release.

The musical score was composed by Jerry Gerber, who previously worked on the television series, and Marco D'Ambrosio. Additionally, Ozzie Ahlers produced the featured songs "Take Me Away", "Ark Park" and "This Way'n That". The lyrics for "Take Me Away" and "This Way'n That" were written by Gloria Clokey. Ahlers was also responsible for hiring frequent collaborator and Starship guitarist Craig Chaquico to play the electric guitar parts.^[10]

Summarize Timeline Fact Check

Box office

Gumby: The Movie was released on October 4, 1995, by Arrow Releasing, receiving a limited release in 21 theaters. Due to the film's limited release, the film was a significant box office failure that grossed just $57,100 against its $2.8 million budget.^[2]

Critical reception

On review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, the film has an approval rating of 20% based on reviews from 5 critics, with an average rating of 3.8/10.^[11]

David Kronke of The Los Angeles Times described the screenplay as "tired and listless", and criticized the dialogue as unsophisticated and hastily assembled.^[12]

Barry Walters of the San Francisco Examiner wrote that "although the action is slow by contemporary wham-bam standards, the drama eventually picks up as the kooky plot complications pile up. But the pacing is episodic, and the nonstop whimsy gets to be overwhelming: Every few minutes, you can feel yourself anticipating even hoping for a commercial break."^[13] Edward Guthmann of the San Francisco Chronicle wrote that "it should have been silly, kitschy, self-spoofing fun, but instead has a sad, enervated quality and frequently inept results."^[14]

Common Sense Media rated the movie a two out of five stars, stating, "The animation in this feature film edition might feel old-fashioned and clumsy; the story bland and simplistic. It's slow going, not terribly funny, and it's repetitive. Still it has a quirky charm that kids respond to, especially the grown-up "kids" who are long-time fans and enjoy the memories that repeat viewings provide."^[15]

Several critics focused on the animation, particularly how it incorporated less advanced technology than films like Toy Story, Pocahontas (both 1995), and stop-motion features like The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993).^[16][17][14]

A positive review came from Marylynn Uricchio of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, who wrote that it "is nothing more than an elongated version of the TV episodes that run on Nickelodeon, but that's not a criticism. With Gumby, anything is a pleasure."^[18]

Home media

The film was released on home video on VHS by KidVision^[19] and Astral Home Video on December 26, 1995; it would be the former company's final release before becoming defunct. The next year, Warner Home Video released the film on VHS, which became a top-10 seller, selling about one million copies overall on this format in total.^[20][21] It was released on DVD by Classic Media on April 22, 2008.^[22] NCircle Entertainment released the film on Blu-ray on September 5, 2017.^[23]

RiffTrax released their own commentary of the film on May 28, 2021.^[24][25]

Cult following

The film also achieved a cult status among its fan base^[21] to the point where it received a 2007 remastered showing at the Tribeca Film Festival.^[26]