By Glenn Erickson

Celebrating a 50th anniversary, Rhino has released two volumes of Gumby short subjects from 1987 and 1988. As kid-oriented entertainments go, Gumby was always sort of an acquired taste, yet Savant always found the earlier shows fascinating. They were slow but the characters were completely sincere. The supposedly rudimentary dimensional animation could do some expressive tricks now and then. To me the Gumby shows were a television extension of George Pal's old Puppetoons, but meant for small children and lacking the fancy music tracks and art design. You either liked Gumby or you didn't. As watching stop-motion animation was as close as I could get to seeing the infrequently-shown Ray Harryhausen movies, I was always hooked. The first thing Savant did when he got an 8mm camera to play with is to animate (well, crudely pixillate) whatever toys could be put into service.

The Gumby shorts on these two volumes are from the late 80s, well beyond the era of 'classic' Gumby. The stories are more complicated but often not as interesting. As in the Archies cartoon show, Gumby is now an aspring rock guitarist with a group composed of his various claymation friends. There's Pokey of course, now just another pal instead of Gumby's constant companion; Prickle and Goo, a blue clay girl. They live in a storybook land (to facilitate frequent into-the-book fantasy sequences) and often practice in a barn. A wooly mammoth (or hairy elephant?) pal plays a french horn in the band.

The setup is updated with inconsistent details. Gumby has a skateboard and does tricks while playing his electric guitar. The animators have fun giving Gumby Pete Townshend-style guitar licks, but it doesn't fit his character very well. Also, many shows have 'educational' content built in, especially suggestions about American history and reading.

The best shows tend to be the simplest. Goo imagines a big dough monster in one episode and Gumby shrinks himself to bug-size to help a bee doctor find out why the whole hive is getting sick. The culprit turns out to be insecticide spraying. Some episodes try for more sophisticated humor, with Gumby at one point having a western showdown with a Clint Eastwood type.

Gumby's troublemakers the blockheads appear from time to time just to do extraneous antisocial acts, like stealing Gumby's skateboard. The shows are tame and not particularly clever, but might be a good alternative to children's programming geared to agitate little minds with overdoses of jeopardy and aggression.

Rhino's DVDs (sold separatedly) of The Very Best New Adventures of Gumby Vols 1 and 2 are reasonable but not terrific transfers of brightly-colored originals. I'd guess that the shows were taken from older transfers without the best encoding one would hope for. They'll look fine on a normal monitor but tend to fuzz out on a big screen. The audio is okay, even though the original tracks are so simple they could be called 'refreshingly primitive.'

Each disc proudly proclaims that the contents are 'All original everything, music, voices, FX." That's good to know but each short subject is missing any credits it might have had. A compilation of credits appears behind the last show on each disc. There's also a trailer for a video game called Gumby vs. the Astrobots that appears to break the Gumby mold by introducing constant action and (for tiny kids) scary monsters.