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Arthur Clokey (born Arthur Charles Farrington; October 12, 1921 – January 8, 2010) was an American animator, director, producer, screenwriter and voice actor, he was pioneer in the popularization of stop-motion clay animation, best known as the creator of the character Gumby and the original voice of Gumby's sidekick, Pokey. Clokey's career began in 1953 with a film experiment called Gumbasia, which was influenced by his professor, Slavko Vorkapich, at the University of Southern California. (2025). 9781578066964, University Press of Mississippi. ISBN 9781578066964 Clokey and his wife Ruth subsequently came up with the clay character Gumby and his horse Pokey, who first appeared in the Howdy Doody Show and later got their own series The Adventures of Gumby, from which they became a familiar presence on American television. The characters enjoyed a renewal of interest in the 1980s when American actor and comedian Eddie Murphy parodied Gumby in a skit on Saturday Night Live.
Clokey's second-most famous production is the duo of Davey and Goliath, funded by the Lutheran Church in America (now the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America).
Clokey founded the company Premavision (which has manufacturing subsidiary, Prema Toy Company) around his Gumby and Pokey franchise.
At The Webb Schools in Claremont, young Clokey came under the influence of teacher Ray Alf, who took students on expeditions digging for fossils and learning about the world around them. Clokey later studied geology at Pomona College, where his new father Joseph was an organist, before leaving in 1943 to join the Air Corps as a reconnaissance photographer during World War II. He graduated from his father's alma mater, Miami University, in 1948.
In 1987, Clokey provided the voice for the figure Pokey in Arnold Leibovit's film The Puppetoon Movie, and voiced him thereafter.
The Clokeys are credited with the clay-animation title sequences for the 1965 beach movies Dr. Goldfoot and the Bikini Machine and How to Stuff a Wild Bikini. His son, Joe Clokey, continued the Davey and Goliath cartoon in 2004. In March 2007, KQED-TV broadcast the hour-long documentary Gumby Dharma as part of their Truly CA series.
In 1995, Clokey directed and co-wrote (with his second wife, Gloria) , which ultimately served as his final work. The movie was not a success at the box office and was widely panned by critics, although it saw modest success on home media, going on to sell more than a million copies on home media, cementing itself as a cult classic.
On October 13, 2011, a day after what would have been Clokey's 90th birthday, Google paid homage to his life and works with an interactive logo doodle in the style of his clay animations, including Gumby, produced by Premavision Studios. Art Clokey: How Gumby got his name, The Christian Science Monitor, retrieved 2010-10-12.
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