Long live Gumby…

Gumby creator and animator Art Clokey has died at age 88:

LOS OSOS, Calif. —

Animator Art Clokey, whose bendable creation Gumby became a pop culture phenomenon through decades of toys, revivals and satires, died Friday. He was 88.

Clokey, who suffered from repeated bladder infections, died in his sleep at his home in Los Osos on California’s Central Coast, son Joseph told the Los Angeles Times.

Clokey’s creations included the claymation series Davey and Goliath which came to claymation life after the Lutheran Church commissioned Clokey to make Davey and Goliath “shorts”.

Clokey’s creations were often satirized such as Mad TV’s Davey and Goliath’s Pet Cemetery, a irreverent take on Stephen King’s book.

From Youtube:

Dreamed up by Art Clokey (from a small town called Millington, Michigan), Gumby had its genesis in a 1953 theatrical 3-minute short called Gumbasia[1], while studying at the University of Southern California under the direction of Slavko Vorkapich. It was a surreal short of moving and expanding lumps of clay set to music, in a parody of Fantasia. Gumbasia was created in a style called Kinesthetic Film Principles that Vorkapich taught. Described as “massaging of the eye cells” this technique based on camera movements and editing is responsible for much of the Gumby look and feel. In 1954, Gumby first appeared in “The Gumby Pilot”.[2] In 1955 Art showed Gumbasia to movie producer Sam Engel who immediately funded a 15 minute short film later titled Gumby Goes to the Moon. This was ultimately seen by Tom Sarnoff at NBC who loved it so much that he put the wheels in motion for a full audience test during the Howdy Doody Show. Gumby himself first appeared on the Howdy Doody show in 1956 and was given his own NBC series in 1957.

Gumby animator Art Clokey dies at 88 in California