Taken Away: Fabrications of Clay and Fiction

Recently, I selected Gumby: The Movie as my companion to a sinful stoned smorgasbord. It had been a frequent watch of my childhood, but I had not seen it for twenty years or more and it now remained barely a figment. The movie ends with a rock concert sequence, with an ’80s power ballad called “Take Me Away.” As the song and scene played, a rush of memory tickled my mind. I was giddy with fascination realizing that my present love for similar music must be threaded back to this song obfuscated at the end of a cult children's movie. To know this song was to know part of myself, and motivated by this, researching Take Me Away became my immediate priority.

I called upon our state-of-the-art AI overmind to investigate with me. It diligently scoured our collective digital records to tell me that Take Me Away from Gumby: The Movie was written by star songwriters and producers Max Martin, Rami Yacoub, and Andreas Carlsson and was performed by pop singer Simba Lorice. “Simba Lorice?” I silently asked myself before typing a natural followup, “Who is Simba Lorice?” Priscilla Samantha Lorice, otherwise known as “Simba” Lorice, is a Y2K teen pop sensation, who in addition to singing Take Me Away, which she recorded as the title song for her first album of the same name, also boasts multiple chart-topping hits, Grammys, and earned a four-year Las Vegas residency at Planet Hollywood Resort and Casino. Or so I was told. If from the whispering recesses of your thoughts comes the question, “Wait, who the actual fuck is Simba Lorice?” You're in good company, as that's what I thought too. To be blunt, I was too high for this shit, so I left further review for the next morning.

For my query about the song, the primary source listed was a page on a Gumby wiki at gumby.fandom.com that had precisely the slop of information that was served up to me the night before. For my followup of Simba Lorice, the primary source was another fandom.com page, disneyfanon.fandom.com. Enshrined there was a page of detailed fanfiction written about Simba Lorice’s life story and work; a dreadful amalgamation of pop star mystery meat mashed together from truths taken from stars the likes of Britney Spears, Lady Gaga, and Shakira. No detail left untainted, her pictures too are a lazy and inconsistent patchwork of women ranging from actress Elle Fanning, known for productions such as Disney's “Maleficent,” to pornstar Kiara Cole, known for productions such as Lethal Hardcore’s “Cum in My Cunt 3.” While the article was bizarre and wearying fiction, it was at least just that: fiction. Still, I was peeved that this phantom had leached into the Gumby wiki, and as a consequence, had bamboozled my zooted yesterself. I began to see Simba Lorice as a rot of sorts, and a morbid curiosity compelled me to explore how deep the contamination festered. Placing my hand on silicon soil, I tracked the oozing drip of Simba Lorice and soon found it seeping from the song lyrics website Genius.com.

On Simba Lorice's Genius page, she has been attributed to over one hundred songs, covering megahits such as “Material Girl” by Madonna, “Black and White” by Michael Jackson, and “Tiny Dancer” by Elton John. Imitation albums with mocked-up art featuring a menagerie of attractive young blonde women compiled these songs, which were accompanied by misattributed producers, writers, and featured collaborators. The page had twelve different accounts that had added to it, blighting the wells of knowledge, the most prominent being a user called GeniusRoberto. GeniusRoberto and Simba Lorice’s assemblage of apostles were further scrutinized, and a troubling malignancy in the corruption of reality soon began revealing itself; the same stained hands that brought forth the construct of Simba Lorice had made another: “The Hyper Girls.”

The Hyper Girls was yet another fictional band unburdened by constraints of reason and anachronism, matching the stench of Simba Lorice precisely. They had their own suite of two hundred and eighteen falsely credited songs on Genius with misinformation spread externally on various wikis and websites. Propping up both the false idols of Simba Lorice and The Hyper Girls was a dark lattice of no less than ten sockpuppets commanded by a single multi-armed form; each hand scribbling drivel to swaths of pages. Take the example of just one of the accounts, a user called Slipitup, that has bound multiple pages in a misshapen knot of fact and fantasy. The top page that they authored is that of imaginary guitarist Lily Jane of The Hyper Girls who is attributed to twenty-six songs. Lily Jane furthermore has six contributors, including five of our usual suspects and one new one which appears to be imitating the persona of a real Lorice-esque public figure. Slipitup's second largest contribution is to an artist named Johanna Wyatt, who Slipitup has credited to songs sung by ’70s R&B artist Keith Barrow. In reality, there is actually a person named Jo Wyatt (not Johanna) that is an album coordinator for Keith Barrow’s releases, but did not contribute to vocals. There is a second real person named Jo Wyatt (still not Johanna) who is an actual British singer and actress and who also has an artist page on Genius that is too masterminded by Slipitup. These “Johannas” are not to be confused with the artist Joanna Anthony, one of the other band members of The Hyper Girls, who is also known as JoJo Tickle, named after the character Johanna Tickle of the children’s show, JoJo’s Circus. These asinine threads are merely a few of the countless in this tangle; Slipitup alone is the top documentarian on twenty-six different pages, and has heavy fingerprints on another one hundred sixty-seven.

Continued sleuthing unearthed more; more artists, more infected wikis, more fabrications. I even found the identity of the madman behind the curtain. But to what end was it all? With each discovery, I felt a deepening hollow in my chest knowing I would never find the borders of this wasteland, this abyss. Nor was I the first to try. A note of warning and tired resignation was left behind in a pending edit to The Hyper Girls’ biography by Genius user hmvfeetcausefearandanguish [hmv is an acronym for hentai music video]:

"The Hyper Girls is a completely fictional band created by a man… [who] has been integrating fake information about his fake band into real Wikipedia and Genius articles since at least 2014 and has went completely unnoticed up until now… [The] sheer amount of effort that [they have] put into making it all up, including making several lyric pages for this fake band’s fake albums… is genuinely baffling… [This] barely scratches the surface of the deep rabbithole [they have] been digging on this site… For the sake of my own sanity, I think I’ll leave it here for now."

This journey began with a song that I had dreamed of losing myself in driving on a warm summer’s sunset; my road open and my windows down, wistfully riding the ripples of a world lost to time. But in all my meddling, I had only managed to become ensnared in a godless bog of banality. No golden sky was on the horizon of the path I wandered, only a fetid mire reaching beyond sight. It was without a mote of regret lingering in my heart that I laid down my gumshoes next to those of my predecessor and turned away; it was time to return home.

“Take Me Away” was written by Ozzie Ahler, not Max Martin and the ilk, sung by Melissa Kary, not Simba Lorice, and had electric guitar contributed by Craig Chaquico. These are the facts, and I have since corrected the song's entry on gumby.fandom.com. However, in a grievous blow to my dream, there was no formal band, no album, and no release of the song. The cleanest version of the song accessible was the one embedded within the movie itself, which comes too with a distracting cacophony of sound effects that quashes the ambiance I chased. I found many other songseekers in the peanut gallery of low-quality YouTube uploads of the song gushing with gratitudes and lamenting the lack of release. One tenacious YouTube user named Wuzimu4444 commented:

“I sent an email to Joe Clokey about releasing the song a while ago. He told me this: 'Thanks for loving that song! That would be great to take the sound fx out and have ‘Take Me Away’ released as a song. It would take going back to the original multi track recording and using a sound studio. I will definitely put that on my list to do when I’m doing production work in the future. To do it right now would be very expensive. So glad you like the song! Don’t lose hope!”

Joe Clokey was the custodian of the Gumby intellectual property after Art Clokey, his father and the creator of Gumby, returned to the clay in 2010. Joe Clokey too passed in 2018, about four years after Wuzimu4444’s comment. A nail in the coffin, so to speak. But to the spectre of Joe Clokey, I pose this: What if there was another way? It could be a fool’s errand, but here I stand; your errant fool. For Art, for Joe, for Melissa Kary, for Ozzie Ahler and Craig Chaquico, for Wuzimu4444 and the songseekers, and even for GeniusRoberto, I share with you the fragment of my inner child’s undying soul that I used to imbue with life a fabrication of my own: a restoration and remastering of Take Me Away.

Nothing will ever top an official release of the kind that Joe Clokey mused and Art Clokey surely dreamed, and with Fox Entertainment now owning the rights to Gumby, the hamfist of exploitative nostalgia could someday tilt the balancing scales towards the hopeful few. Until then, I will not clutch onto hope, but onto my volume dial and steering wheel, driving toward wherever the shadows of the aged day stretch thin across a gilded road.

I invite you to ride with me. Below are links where this song can be downloaded.

If you are appreciative of my work, please consider contributing any amount below:

https://ko-fi.com/corvusobscurus

From the void, restless of order, came children of roiling chaos. Those who weave with both aspects mance reality itself with untold magick.