How tall is gumby

President Clinton was criticized for "being bent like Gumby" by the Senate Finance Committee on health care reform. Today's kids do know Gumby - a series produced by the Clokeys is aired daily on Nickelodeon. But Gumby has so far resisted the mass Disneylike exploitation that parents have learned to dread. The Clokeys' characters - the cheery, naive Gumby, the skeptical Pokey, his pony, and Prickle, a dinosaur, and Goo, a blue mermaid - grew out of an art film Art made in called "Gumbasia" - a takeoff of Disney's.

Gumby was inspired by a suggestion from Clokey's wife that he base his character on the Gingerbread man. Gumby was green because that was Clokey's favorite and it was a race neutral color. Gumby's legs and feet were made wide for pragmatic reasons: they ensured the clay character would stand up during picture-taking filming. The famous slanted shape of Gumby's head was based on the hair style of Clokey's father Charles Farrington in an old photograph.

Over the years, Gumby's look has changed. For a very brief start, he was not put together as well. He did not have hands. His mouth had a green gap in it and had red beads for eyes. He was a shade of Teal. Then for the 50's and some of the 60's he had a better mouth and nose, shinier eyes, better structure, and a taller head.

Then in the late 60's, Gumby had a bigger and smoother bump on his head, almost making it a straight line. I was not just being a baby. All animation is a kind of magic act, of course, but clay or puppet animation has a special power in that its subjects are real -- that is, three-dimensional objects that inhabit a world of substance and shadow, a place of actual, not computer-rendered depth.

Even on the flattened screen, we can tell the difference. When Gumby puts on a cowboy hat, or it is put on him, it really is on him. When you buy a Gumby doll, you are not buying some weird hypothetical extrusion of a flat figure into real space, like a Homer Simpson figurine, but a proportionate replica of the thing itself. There are two kinds of genius in this world, the imitable and the inimitable.

He is original and inarguable, and though he has gone in and out of fashion, been parodied and abused -- check out Youtube. Everything about the show is, appropriately, elastic. Gumby is officially 7 inches tall, but he is as big or small as he needs to be; his relative scale changes sometimes even within a scene.

He might be bigger than a lion or smaller than a rabbit. He sometimes seems to live in a toy store, although he also lives in a house with his parents, Gumbo -- who looks like a Pokey-colored Gumby wearing a clay toupee -- and Gumba. Later he gained a little sister, Minga.