Google Doodle Celebrates 90th Birth Anniversary of Gumby Creator Art Clokey

Google has celebrated the 90th birthday of the stop motion animation pioneer Arthur "Art" Clokey in its latest Google doodle. The doodle features some of Clokey's characters popping out from balls of clay.



Detroit-born Clokey was best known for Gumby, a clay figure and star of the Gumby Show, which ran for 35 years from November 1955. 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.

Film appearances, comic strips, merchandise and reruns in the 1990s on Nickelodeon and the Cartoon Network stand as testimony to Gumby's enduring popularity.