Art Clokey, the animator who created Gumby and the stop motion animation series Davey and Goliath died yesterday. I had no idea who was responsible for those two contributions to my life, but the creations made for many happy moments, day after day.
Back in the early seventies my pocket size Gumby was one of my favorite companions. He was maybe two inches tall and whenever we were loaded into the green Dodge Dart to go from Queens to Brooklyn, or Manhattan to Queens, or across this part of the city into that part, some clone of Gumby was along for the ride. He was small, portable, and with a face always reflecting a good mood. Bendable, flexible, no drama.
We lost several of him between the cracks or under the the seats. It was a special euphoria-- gold, oil, space!-- to reach under the front seat and feel that rubber body and slide the hand back (don't cut yourself on the other junk under there) and pull an old yet newly discovered Gumby back into the light of our world. "It's mine," one or the other of us claimed. But he, it ?, was probably mine, not my sister's, since I am the one writing about him now, and the one who has a Gumby even today. (This recent clone of Gumby fell into the hands of a female coworker from a couple of years back, who went on to shun me Amish style for a period (verbal sins for insulting her future boyfriend, and calling her, inappropriately, "kiddie pool"). She found it in her heart to return him to me late last year, along with a swell Christmas gift of a scarf. I had forgotten this particular Gumby, that he was out there, hostaged, and for a while he had Stockholm syndrome and wanted to go back to her. (Or maybe I was projecting).
Clokey was also responsible for Davey and Goliath, a cartoon sponsored by Lutherans and which always featured a lesson to be learned by all. I loved the show, but hated Goliath and sometimes felt like beating him for his dopey temperament.
The cartoon was claymation like all the Christmas cartoons; we were always taught Santa was not real, but rather a happy artifice based on a historical man, and used by the godless to take the Christmas focus off of Jesus. As long as we got that clear, our father let us watch all the holiday cartoons, and without constant commentary, unlike nearly everything else.
Since Davey and Goliath was a religious program, though not from our strain of charismatic, conservative Christianity (prayer, praise music, faith healing, tongues), it was programming we could watch without fear of a "no" upon request. Other shows, like Zoom or The Electric Company or some of the later episodes of The Waltons were frowned upon. My father did not want us getting crazy teen ideas, and doing teen things, and getting all rebellious; he had done enough drugs during the 1960's to know when free thinking godless hippie shit was seeping into children's programming. The Public Broadcasting Service as mental crack, before crack existed.
Ark Clokey. Now dead and joined with the billions who have gone before. The afterlife just got more entertaining.
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