Gumby with Guitar

Green Gumby character illustration holding a white guitar on white background. 

Gumby is a green clay character created by Art Clokey in the 1950s. Clokey decided to make Gumby green because he saw it as a racially neutral color and a symbol for life. The subject of two television series, a feature-length film and other media, along with trusty sidekick Pokey (a talking orange pony), Gumby is a well-known example of stop motion clay animation and a cultural icon. Gumby plays the guitar in a band with his pals called "The Clayboys". 

In a 1993 issue celebrating 40 years of television, TV Guide named Gumby as the best cartoon series of the 1950s. The Library of Congress used Gumby as a spokescharacter beginning in 1994, due to a regular sequence in the TV show where Gumby would walk into a book and experience the world within the book as a real place. Later, from 1997 to 2000, Gumby appeared in a traveling exhibit called Adventures into Books: Gumby's World, part of the Center for the Book's national reading campaign.