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Author Topic: Gumby animator Art Clokey dies at 88 in California  (Read 3418 times)
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« on: January 09, 2010, 01:26:55 PM »

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100109/ap_on_en_ot/us_obit_gumby_creator
Gumby animator Art Clokey dies at 88 in California

January 9, 2010


AP – FILE - Art Clokey, the creator of 'Gumby,' poses with a stuffed version of his creation to mark its 50th …
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.

Gumby grew out of a student project Clokey produced at the University of Southern California in the early 1950s called "Gumbasia."

That led to his making shorts featuring Gumby and his horse friend Pokey for the "Howdy Doody Show" and several series through the years.

He said he based Gumby's swooping head on the cowlick hairdo of his father, who died in a car accident when Clokey was nine. And Clokey's wife suggested he give Gumby the body of a gingerbread man.

Clokey said that though Gumby eventually became one of the most familiar toys of all time, he was at first resistant to roll out the bendable doll.

"I didn't allow merchandising for seven years after it was on the air," Clokey told San Luis Obispo Tribune in 2002, "because I was very idealistic, and I didn't want parents to think we were trying to exploit their children."

Clokey also created the moralizing and often satirized claymation duo "Davey and Goliath."

The Lutheran Church hired Clokey to make the "Davey and Goliath" shorts, and Clokey used the money to help bring a Gumby series back to television in the 1960s.

Eddie Murphy brought a surge in Gumby's popularity in the 1980s with his send-up of the character on "Saturday Night Live" as a cigar-smoking show business primadonna.

Clokey said he enjoyed Murphy's profane Gumby.

"Gumby can laugh at himself," Clokey told the Tribune.

Murphy's Gumby brought new toy sales and eventually led to a new syndicated series starting in 1988.

It was only then that Clokey started seeing serious financial returns on his creation.

"It took 40 years," he said.
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« Reply #1 on: January 11, 2010, 02:25:27 PM »

http://www.nationalenquirer.com/art_clokey_dead_gumby_davy_and_goliath_eddie_murphy/celebrity/67945


The creator of kid vid classic Gumby, stop-motion animator Art Clokey, dead at 88.


(video of Gumby on the above link)

The bendable green character was first created by Clokey after supervised medical usage of LSD in the 1950s, his son told the NY Times.

The green, spikey cow-licked phenom along with his horse pal Pokey, first appeared on pioneer puppet kid show The Howdy Doody Show in 1956.

Gumby was so popular he spawned his own TV show in 1957 and his own manipulative figure toy line.  Though the 1950s show run was brief, Gumby reappeared in new shows during the 1960s that were constant syndication.

In the 1960s and 1970s Clokey and his wife also produced Davey & Goliath another claymation series for the burgeoning early morning religious market. 

The show, the bane of many a boomer early riser, was a money maker and Clokey said he only did it so he'd have the funds to  produce more Gumby shows.

Sadly, Clokey's early years were no picnic.  After his parents were divorced, he was rejected by his mother's new husband and placed in a children's home. 

After years of struggling financially, a series of spoofs on Saturday Night Live in the 1980s featuring Eddie Murphy as a cigar chomping green reprobate, cussing "I'm Gumby - dammit!" and suddenly Gumby was EVERYWHERE.

Reportedly, Clokey loved Murphy's reinvention of his gentle green creation - but was grateful SNL aired late at night when no child was awake to see it.
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RIP Grumpy Cat :( I will miss you.


« Reply #2 on: January 12, 2010, 05:30:58 PM »

OH WAAAAAAAAA!!!!!!!!! 

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RIP Grumpy Cat :( I will miss you.


« Reply #3 on: January 12, 2010, 05:33:51 PM »


Gumby's distinctive look was inspired by the gingerbread man and the hairdo of Art Clokey's dad.
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RIP Grumpy Cat :( I will miss you.


« Reply #4 on: January 12, 2010, 05:38:18 PM »

March 25, 2002 -- Art Clokey never had clay actors like Gumby, Pokey, Prickle and Goo in mind when he went to film school. Clokey, who created Gumby 45 years ago, says he can't believe that a clay boy with googly eyes, mitten hands and a lump on his head ended up with his own TV show and top-selling poseable doll.

"I was studying to be a producer and director of films with live people in them -- not clay," Clokey tells Harriet Baskas. She reports on Gumby's roots for Morning Edition as part of the Present at the Creation series on American icons.

But with money tight, Clokey decided to make a short film in 1953 starring clay balls, clay cones and other geometric clay shapes that seemed to dance, grow, divide and dart around, Baskas reports. Clokey shot the film in stop-motion animation: he would barely move a piece of clay, shoot a frame of film, stop the camera, then move the clay a tiny bit more. Then he'd repeat the process over and over again -- about 4,000 times.

Clokey added music and called the film Gumbasia -- a reference to Disney's Fantasia and to the clay soil in Michigan that Clokey's father called "gumbo" whenever it rained.

The dancing clay shapes became the clay boy Gumby once Clokey showed his film to Sam Engel, whose son Clokey was tutoring. Engel was a Hollywood producer and thought Clokey's clay figures would look great on television.

"He said, 'Art, if you can make little figures out of that clay and animate them... I'll finance a pilot film,'" Clokey says.

Gumby soon began to take shape: Clokey's wife suggested the gingerbread man as inspiration; Clokey's favorite color was green, so Gumby was too; the bell-bottom-shaped legs allowed the character to stay upright; and a lump on one side of Gumby's head was styled like the hairdo of Clokey's dad in an old photo.

Clokey's short films of Gumby first appeared on Howdy Doody in 1956, but Gumby was spun off into his own weekly network show the following year.

Film historian Michael Frierson says Gumby became hugely popular because "he's a good character, you like him, he's a nice guy" and because, at the time, Clokey's simple low-tech production methods appealed to the audience.


Gumby went into retirement in the late 1960s but made a comeback in the 1980s, when Eddie Murphy played a cranky version of the character on Saturday Night Live. Murphy's famous "I'm Gumby dammit" line represented the antithesis of the sweet, loveable animated character he was mocking. And that's what made Murphy's Gumby so funny, according to David Sheffield and Barry Blaustein, who wrote the skits for SNL.

"Yeah, Gumby was really sweet, but a lot of performers who are really sweet off stage aren't really that sweet, so we thought Gumby was just one of those guys," Blaustein says.

Gumby remains popular nearly five decades after his creation. Next month, Rhino Home Video plans to release a seven-DVD set of all the Gumby episodes.
http://www.npr.org/programs/morning/features/patc/gumby/index.html

http://www.gumbyworld.com/
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RIP Grumpy Cat :( I will miss you.


« Reply #5 on: January 12, 2010, 05:46:09 PM »

 

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« Reply #6 on: January 13, 2010, 07:40:33 PM »





 
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« Reply #7 on: January 14, 2010, 12:17:39 PM »


Gumby's distinctive look was inspired by the gingerbread man and the hairdo of Art Clokey's dad.


Thank-You.
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