Google on Wednesday celebrated the 90th birthday of Gumby creator Art Clokey with an interactive stop motion homepage doodle featuring well-known characters from the Gumby series.
The doodle, which went live on international Web sites yesterday, features a child's block with the letter "G" followed by five balls of colored clay for the remaining letters in the search giant's logo. Click on the balls of clay and Gumby characters will appear—The Blockheads, Prickle and Goo, Gumby himself, and Pokey. They pose for a moment before melting into a pile of clay and rolling back into a ball. See the slideshow below for more.
The doodle was created by Clokey Productions Premavision studios, led by animator Anthony Scott, who started his career in the 1980s on the Gumby series under Clokey. Nicole La Pointe-McKay, a Gumby lead puppet maker, modeled the characters for the doodle.
Wednesday also marks the official debut of the new Gumbyworld.com (above), which the studio said is "the most comprehensive look ever at the iconic green clay boy and all of the other characters in Art's limitless universe of imagination and artistic expression."
"The Google doodle is a perfect tribute to my father's work," Clokey's son Joe, creator of the new Gumby Web site, said in a statement. "Art's life and career were ahead of their time. My dad would have been thrilled to be connected with Google in this way."
The site includes clips of Clokey discussing his creative process and a look at some lesser-known projects.
Clokey was born in 1921 near Detroit and, after losing his father in a car accident at the age of nine, was adopted by music professor Joseph M. Clokey. The professor took Clokey and his friends on various trips to Canada, Alaska, Siberia, and the American West, which apparently influenced Clokey when he was created his characters, particularly "The Adventures of Gumby."
Clokey married Ruth Parkander and the duo moved to Hollywood in order to make religious films, but he got his start in commercials. On a shoot for a 1953 Budweiser commercial in particular, Clokey was asked to make it look as though a piece of cheese was disappearing. He did so using clay and stop-motion animation, which inspired him to perfect the practice during a break in between commercial shoots – an effort that eventually produced a film known as Gumbasia.
As luck would have it, Clokey was tutoring the son of a 20th Century Fox producer at the time, who invited Clokey to show off Gumbasia, which was basically a 3.5-minute music video that showed pieces of clay moving to jazz music. But the producer, Sam Engel, loved it and offered to fund a pilot featuring Clokey's characters. Ultimately, NBC signed Clokey to a seven-year contract to produce the Gumby series.
The Gumby Show premiered as an animated Saturday morning TV shows in 1956, but things really picked up in the 1960s, with Clokey and his wife producing 85 more Gumby Adventures, which were syndicated worldwide. Bendable Gumby toys were also introduced, breaking sales records.
In addition to Gumby, however, Clokey and his wife also produced the Davey and Goliath series for the Lutheran Church. According to Gumby.com, an episode called "Poka Dot Tie" was one of the first children's shows to address racism. Clokey also made some artistic films, like Mandala, but had a number of other childrens' shows and characters, including the Plucky Plumber, Space Ball and Professor Kapp, and Rodgie and Henry.
Clokey died on January 8, 2010 at the age of 88 at his home in California.
For more on Google's doodles, see the slideshow below. One of the company's more popular doodles was a playable image in honor of musician Les Paul, which eventually got its own standalone site. The search giant also celebrated the year's first total lunar eclipse with a doodle that included a live feed of the event.
Recently, it was revealed that Google obtained a patent for its popular homepage doodles, covering "systems and methods for enticing users to access a Web site."