Gumby Calling - Art Clokey, R.I.P.

It's A Small World

Although we did not attend church on Sundays, as a child I received spiritual direction of another sort....

In those days, cartoons primarily played on Saturdays... with Davey & Goliath and Gumby among the few oddball offerings that found their way onto the Sunday morning TV schedule.

These two powerhouse stop-motion hallucinations came from Clokey Productions, from the brain of Art Clokey.

Good moral values courtesy of the Lutherans - & Clokey

Later, following college, I was house-sharing with a couple of college classmates and learned that one's father had been a big wheel in the Lutheran church.  A reverend (among other things, including being a Naturist btw) he was also the commissioning executive for the Lutherans' TV entry - Davey & Goliath.  Somehow in 1982, through Jon I got motivated to look up the CA telephone number for Clokey Productions, and to place a call.

At work I had access to a small Phillips "Pocket Memo" micro-cassette dictation machine (and to long-distance calling!), and I surreptitiously taped our halting, bizarre conversation, later playing it for another friend who declared it the lamest thing he had ever heard.  Art sounded old and confused, and I was pathetic and needling.  But I'd gotten him to speak at length with me of his mentor Slavko Vorkapic', a Serbian master filmmaker (I thought the name was funny-sounding, and actually had Art repeat it over and over).  At sign-off, he encouraged me to visit him sometime in California, but sometime never came.

Clokey's: A Contemplative Life

Art Clokey lived an amazing life, which is amply documented in Tim Hittle's tender film Gumby Dharma.  He was orphaned following his father's death and his mother's abandonment at age 8, and raised by a Pomona College music professor who gave him his first film camera.

Art became a serious student of film animation under Vorkapic, dean of USC Film School.

The 60's were his heyday with hundreds of Gumby episodes springing from his rolling pin.

Clokey / Zappa tete-a-tete, "1967" [I think '70]

Gumby was the product of an inventive, seeking and expanding 1960's mind.  Though he ably presented the lessons of traditionalist spirituality that define Davey & Goliath, he personally needed more, and he made radical changes in the late sixties - becoming a self-professed "hippie," leaving his marriage, and pursuing eastern mysticism with Sathya Sai Baba.

A period of intellectual experimentation followed, with the 1970's bringing many years of intense personal loss and hardship before a revival of interest (film repertory shows, TV syndication, merchandising, and Eddie Murphey's "Gumby Dammit!" sketches) brought the clay boy and his creator rightly back to the fore.  And ultimately he reconciled with, and forgave, the estranged mother who had given him up for adoption.

Sic Transit Gumby

Art Clokey died on January 9, 2010 at age 88, and this nice obituary includes links to some of his work and the Gumby 1960's show intro.  Enjoy.

Later in life, Art looked more and more like Jacques Tati, I think, and every bit as sympathetic and appealing but a bit sad. He was a good soul.