Art Clokey | Gumby creator, 88

Art Clokey, 88, an animator whose bendable creation Gumby became a pop-culture phenomenon through decades of toys, revivals, and satires, died Friday in his sleep at his home in Los Osos on California's Central Coast.

Gumby grew out of a student project that Mr. Clokey produced at the University of Southern California in the early 1950s called "Gumbasia."

That led to his making shorts featuring Gumby and his horse friend Pokey for the Howdy Doody Show and several series through the years.

He said he based Gumby's swooping head on the cowlick hairdo of his father, who died in a car accident when Mr. Clokey was 9. And Mr. Clokey's wife suggested he give Gumby the body of a gingerbread man.

Mr. Clokey said that though Gumby eventually became one of the most familiar toys of all time, he was at first resistant to roll out the bendable doll.

"I didn't allow merchandising for seven years after it was on the air," Mr. Clokey told the San Luis Obispo Tribune in 2002, "because I was very idealistic, and I didn't want parents to think we were trying to exploit their children."

Mr. Clokey also created the moralizing and often-satirized animated clay duo Davey and Goliath.

The Lutheran Church hired Mr. Clokey to make the Davey and Goliath shorts, and Clokey used the money to help bring a Gumby series back to television in the 1960s.

Eddie Murphy brought a surge in Gumby's popularity in the 1980s with his send-up of the character on Saturday Night Live as a cigar-smoking show-business prima donna.

Mr. Clokey said he enjoyed Murphy's profane Gumby. "Gumby can laugh at himself," Mr. Clokey told the Tribune. Murphy's Gumby brought new toy sales and eventually led to a new syndicated series in 1988.

It was only then that Mr. Clokey started seeing serious financial returns on his creation. "It took 40 years," he said. - AP