It’s Gumby! Google Honors Stop-Motion Creator Art Clokey’s 90th Birthday on Homepage (video)
Posted By Vicki McClure Davidson on October 11, 2011
As a kid growing up in the 1960s, one of my favorite TV animations was that of the stop-motion Gumby, the bizarre, green wedge-headed boy made of clay who had an orange pony with popping eyes named Pokey. Google honors what would have been the 90th birthday of Gumby’s innovative creator, Art Clokey, with a special doodle of his clay characters on its homepage. Clokey died last year.
Clicking the colorful clay blobs in the Google logo transforms them into some of the characters that populated Gumby’s strange and wonderful world. Click them all quickly and they’re all activated at the same time.
Video capture of the Gumby Google doodle:
From The Guardian, Google doodle celebrates birthday of Gumby creator Arthur ‘Art’ Clokey:
Google has celebrated the 90th birthday of the stop motion animation pioneer Arthur “Art” Clokey in its latest Google doodle.
Detroit-born Clokey, who died in 2010, was best known for Gumby, a clay figure and star of the Gumby Show, which ran for 35 years from November 1955. Interest in the characters was given a boost in the 1980s when Eddie Murphy parodied Gumby in a Saturday Night Live skit.
One of Clokey’s first clay animation productions was Gumbasia (1955), a short, surreal homage to Walt Disney’s Fantasia that caught the eye of Samuel G Engel, then president of the Motion Pictures Producers Association. Engel was sufficiently impressed to finance the pilot film for what became the Gumby Show.
Film appearances, comic strips, merchandise and reruns in the 1990s on Nickelodeon and the Cartoon Network stand as testimony to Gumby’s enduring popularity.
The doodle features some of Clokey’s characters popping out from balls of clay.
From Wired, A Fun Google Doodle for Art Clokey’s Birthday!:
Celebrate Art Clokey’s 90th birthday today with a Google doodle honoring his pioneering work in stop-motion animation!
Clokey presented Gumbasia to the world in 1955 from University of Southern California. Then, from Gumby and Pokey in the 50s to Davey and Goliath in the 60s, his influence has been seen right up through this decade! Clokey died in early 2010.
The 1967 opening sequence of Gumby:
Brief Wikipedia bio on Clokey:
Arthur “Art” Clokey (October 12, 1921 – January 8, 2010) was a pioneer in the popularization of stop motion clay animation, beginning in 1955 with a film experiment called Gumbasia, influenced by his professor, Slavko Vorkapich, at the University of Southern California.
From the Gumbasia project, Art Clokey and his wife Ruth invented Gumby. Since then Gumby and his horse Pokey have been a familiar presence on television, appearing in several series beginning with the Howdy Doody Show and later The Adventures of Gumby. The characters enjoyed a renewal of interest in the 1980s when American actor and comedian Eddie Murphy parodied Gumby in a skit on Saturday Night Live. In the 1990s Gumby: The Movie was released, sparking even more interest.
Clokey’s second most famous production is the duo of Davey and Goliath, funded by the Lutheran Church in America.
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gumby rocks!