“Respectfully submitted for your perusal: a Keemokimoite. Height: a little over seven feet. Weight: in the neighborhood of three hundred and fifty pounds. Origin: Ozarks area U.S.A. Motives? Therein hangs the tale, for in just a moment we're going to ask you to shake hands, figuratively, with a Julia Childs from somewhere north of Toad Holler. This is … the Frying Pan Zone.”
A clan of odd looking people with large foreheads known as the Keemokimoites (key-mo-ki-mo-ites) arrived in Gumby’s town and promised to be nothing but helpful to the cause of small plastic toys. Initially wary of the intentions of such highly advanced technology, even the most skeptical toys were convinced when their code-breakers translated one of the Keemokimoite’s books with the seemingly innocuous title, "To Serve Toys”. In was written in a chicken-scratch hand writing that none of the toys could read or understand.
Sharing their advanced technology, this odd group quickly solved all of the toy’s greatest woes: wear spots, chewed arms/legs, and the need for periodic recovering. Soon, toys were volunteering for trips to the Keemokimoite’s hometown, which was supposedly a paradise.
Graciously accepting an invitation, Gumby went to their temporary camp for coffee and dinner before beginning the long trip to visit Keemokimoville in the Ozarks. Gumby ate a very filling meal of sow belly, taters, angel hair pasta, and fried sow’s ears. As he leaned back on his mountain man chair, Gumby pulled out on his flexible waistband to adjust his dinner and said “Ahhh that feels better – thank Jesus for elastic”. He was then snatched up and thrown in a frying pan to keep a large onion, some roach infested crackers, and a handful of goober peas company.
As the frying pan was being placed over the hot coals, Gumby said “Hey wait a minute. This no right. Gumby no like onions!” At that instant Gumby’s sister, Gumbelina, ran up to the edge of the camp, but was stopped by a mean looking Keemokimoite named KK.
Gumbelina screamed “Gumby… Gumby… Don’t get in that frying pan. I finally deciphered their handwriting. The book...the rest of the book — It's a cookbook!”
Well… Gumby sat up and jumped out of the frying pan into the fire. With one quick hop on a burning log (ouch!), Gumby jumped to the ground and skedaddled away from those Keemokimoites as fast as his little green legs would move. Apparently the book, "To Serve Toys", was a cookbook, and all the Keemokimoite’s gifts were simply to make toykind complacent, much like fattening pigs or cows before they are slaughtered.
“The recollections of one Gumby the toy, with appropriate flashbacks and soliloquy. Or more simply stated, the evolution of toys, the cycle of going from dust to dessert, the metamorphosis from being the ruler on TV to an ingredient in someone's soup. Gumby was lucky – this time. But who knows if Gumby – or YOU the reader – will ever end up on a Keemokimoite menu. It's tonight's "bill of fare", from the Frying Pan Zone.”
Happy 50th anniversary this week Twilight Zone.
References:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/To_Serve_Man_(The_Twilight_Zone) http://www.imdb.com/video/cbs/vi54853657/
