Joe Clokey, Art’s son, is entrusted with the task of keeping Gumby alive in the 21st century.

JC: Stop-motion animation has a textural appeal. When you watch a 2D movie, it’s drawn; it’s flat. When 3D came along, all it tried to do was copy stop-motion because stop-motion is naturally 3D. Now computer animation has gotten better and everything’s gotten so smooth that it lacks texture. With clay animation like Gumby, there are real sets with real puppets. They all exist in real life. You can touch them. You’ve also got a real camera taking a picture of the action. It’s a magic trick: you take 24 still frames to get one second of action. So when a good animator puts it together, that life you see is amazing because it’s real. When I sat down and watched Corpse Bride with my five-year old, everyone loved it. [The audience was] captured by the textual quality of what they saw on the screen. It’s hard to put it in words, but it’s more real than other types of animation. Kids love it because the puppets come to life. It’s an imaginary world.

GR: Speaking of Tim Burton, do you feel that part of Corpse Bride’s success is attributable to the legacy created by Gumby?

JC: Well I know Tim is a Gumby fan. Some of his first movies had Gumby and Pokey in them, like the Pee-Wee Herman movie. So I know that his love of stop-motion animation comes from many sources, but one source of his inspiration is Gumby. And I’m excited that a well-known director like Tim is carrying on the great tradition of stop-motion. Corpse Bride is a wonderful film — wonderful to watch.

GR: Will Gumbasia appear on any of the forthcoming Gumby DVDs?

JC: It will be on the Rhino box set, fully restored. I’ve just spent the last four months remastering a selected group of episodes from the ‘50s and ‘60s. I went back to their original a/b camera rolls. There are no scratches. There’s no fading. It’s amazing how good they look! Gumby never looked this good, even when he originally aired. When Gumby aired in the ‘50s, he was shot in color but aired in black and white. In the ‘60s, they used prints off of negatives. I’m using the a/b rolls that actually created the negatives. They’ve never been used at all. It’s as if they were made yesterday. I’ve transferred everything to high definition and then put it down for regular DVDs. In the future, they’ll be ready for HD-DVDs. We have the highest quality possible. It looks more 3D than it ever has! I can see things I’ve never seen before, like the texture on the set and the grain on the wood. It’s amazing! They’ll be released in March [2006].

A production meeting for The Gumby Show takes place in the 1960s. The look of the show changed through the decades. The ‘50s episodes had a surrealist feel while the ‘60s featured a certain sophistication.

GR: As the Gumby shorts progressed from the ‘50s through the ‘60s and then the ‘80s, the storylines became more linear and borrowed more and more from Western literature and popular culture. Why is that?

JC: Well, they were different studios and different crews. My dad was in different phases of his life. The ‘50s episodes were more organic looking because Gumby was poured clay, made with rolling pins. Gumby was more in awe of Toyland and the various adventures he went on. There was more of a surrealist, stream-of-consciousness, trippy kind of feeling. There was more of the Vorkapich kinesthetic film movement in the ‘50s. My dad was fresh out of USC. He was fresh to explore the kinesthetic film principles and movement for the eye — how the camera moves and how the editing is done.

Gumby’s a different character in the ‘60s; you’re right. When my dad produced the ‘60s episodes, they were definitely more sophisticated. Gumby would have adventures relying more on clever stories and gags based on traditional storylines. It wasn’t as stream of consciousness or trippy. But it was still Gumby.

The ‘80s series had both aspects and was all over the map. They are definitely two separate eras between the ‘50s and the 60’s.

When you see the ‘50s and the ‘60s episodes with their original soundtracks and especially when you see them restored, which nobody’s seen ever, they look like completely different episodes. In about a month, we’re going to have them broadcast on the National Lampoon’s network across college campuses. College kids grew up on Gumby, and we’ve picked some cool episodes for them to check out.