Tonight's featured avatar belongs to the member,
P806 - another long term member of the site since 2002!
If you're not familiar with the characters in his avatar, it's probably because you are too young. Those two figures are Gumby and Pokey, two characters created by Art Clokey back in the early 1950s.
After finishing film school, Art Clokey created his first film
Gumbasia where he first experimented with clay modeling in film. You can see it's influence in his later works.
Later, he was encouraged to create characters to fit with his style of filmmaking. So, he created Gumby and Pokey and made the first of three pilot episodes of which one was accepted for debut on The Howdy Doody show. A number of episodes were made and eventually in 1957, Art Clokey was given his own show. Gumby had a long run in which a grand total of 233 episodes were created including this one:
You probably have noticed that this isn't quite Spongebob Squarepants, but it was revolutionary for its time (no pun intended).
As a young lad, I once received a bendable Gumby and Pokey as a gift. I was amazed with it at the time and remember just staring at them. I was dumbfounded by the fact that Gumby was green and Pokey was orange. You see, at the time, the Reno household had a black & white television set - so I had no idea of their actual colors.
In later years, Eddie Murphy reintroduced the character of Gumby on Saturday Night Live into the public view. Of course, Eddie's version was a cigar smoking, profane and rude version - but it was fun to watch too.
....and now you know.
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Previously featured avatars:
Maccrage
Substandard
4v50
Vengarr
Wwace
Amos1909
BillythePoet
Bradders
StonerStudent
Skebe
Viator
Limaxray