Gumby Creator Art Clokey Dies at 88

Art Clokey, the animator who created Gumby, the iconic character molded from green clay, died in his sleep on January 8, 2010, at his home in Los Osos, California. He was 88.

Gumby first appeared on television debut in 1956 on The Howdy Doody Show. The following year, he had his own series, The Gumby Show, in which he got into adventures accompanied by his red-colored sidekick, Pokey the pony. The series marked one of the first extended uses of stop-motion animation on television.

The 1950s did not last long, but Gumby resurfaced again in the 1960s and in the 1980s, and remained in syndication for years. He even became the protagonist of a 1995 feature film, Gumby: The Movie, directed by Clokey.

In the 1980s, Gumby acquired an unlikely hipness as a pop-culture touchstone when Edie Murphy, during his tenure on Saturday Night Live, portrayed a life-size Gumby as a cantankerous, cigar-chewing curmudgeon.

Also, with his first wife, Ruth, Clokey produced another claymation series, Davey and Goliath, about a young boy and his dog. The show, which was produced in conjunction with the Lutheran Church, imparted Christian messages. It aired in the 1960s and 1970s.

In 2006, Clokey was the subject of a documentary film, Gumby Dharma.

He was born Arthur Charles Farrington on October 12, 1921, in Detroit, Michigan. When his parents divorced when he was about eight, Arthur lived with his father. When young Arthur was nine, his father died in an automobile accident. The boy was reunited with his mother in California, only to be banished by her new husband and placed in a children’s home.

A few years later, Art was adopted by Joseph Waddell Clokey, a composer. Art Clokey credited his father with introducing him to culture and learning.

Art Clokey earned a bachelor’s degree from Miami University in Ohio and later attended Hartford Seminary in Connecticut, with the intention of becoming an Episcopal priest. He left before graduating and settled in California, where he and his wife, Ruth, planned to make religious films.

He enrolled at the University of Southern California, where he studied with the modernist filmmaker Slavko Vorkapich. In 1955, he made a student film, Gumbasia — a title that referenced the Disney film Fantasia — in which clay shapes dance and morph to a jazz soundtrack.

He created Gumby shortly afterward. He often said that the asymmetrical shape of Gumby’s head was a tribute to his biological father’s prominent cowlick.

Clokey’s first marriage ended in divorce. His second wife, Gloria, died in 1998. He is survived by a son from his first marriage, a stepdaughter, a sister, a half-sister, and three grandchildren.

Clokey had the distinction of being interviewed by the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences Foundation’s Archive of American Television. During the interview with Archive director Karen Herman, which took place in Los Altos, California, Clokey discussed his career for more than three-and-a-half hours.