The Google doodle celebrating the search engine's 13th birthday
Now officially a teenager, Google has celebrated turning 13 in its customarily simple manner with a doodle showing the five letters of the company logo sitting around a cake.
With the search engine giant barely out of short trousers, the birthday celebrations come at a time when it is locked in an increasingly intense rivalry with an even younger pretender, Facebook.
Amid suggestions that Facebook could become the default form of online navigation, Google recently tried to overhaul its rival with Google+.
Research from Nielsen earlier this month showed that US internet users spend more time on Facebook than any other website.
At the same time, Google enjoys a 90% share of the global internet search market, according to the most recent figures from metrics firm StatsCounter, although its share varies considerably by country.
The doodle is in keeping with Google's low-key approach to celebrating its birthday. Unlike other doodles, it has no animated features and is based instead on a simple design.
Clokey was born Arthur Farrington in Detroit in October 1921 and grew up making mud figures on his grandparents' Michigan farm. "He always had this in him," his son, Joseph, recalled Friday.
At age 8, Clokey's life took a tragic turn when his father was killed in a car accident soon after his parents divorced. The unusual shape of Gumby's head would eventually be modeled after one of the few surviving photos of Clokey's father, which shows him with a large wave of hair protruding from the right side of his head.
After moving to California, Clokey was abandoned by his mother and her new husband and lived in a halfway house near Hollywood until age 11, when he was adopted by Joseph W. Clokey. The renowned music teacher and composer at Pomona College taught him to draw, paint and shoot film and took him on journeys to Mexico and Canada.
Art Clokey attended the Webb School in Claremont, whose annual fossil hunting expeditions also inspired a taste for adventure that stayed with him. "That's why 'The Adventures of Gumby' were so adventurous," his son said.
Clokey served in World War II, conducting photo reconnaissance over North Africa and France. Back in Hartford, Conn., after the war, he was studying to be an Episcopal minister when he met Ruth Parkander, the daughter of a minister. The two married and moved to California to pursue their true passion: filmmaking.
During the day, the Clokeys taught at the Harvard School for Boys in Studio City, now Harvard-Westlake. At night, Art Clokey studied film at USC under Slavko Vorkapich, a pioneer of modern montage techniques.
Clokey's 1953 experimental film, "Gumbasia," used stop-motion clay animation set to a lively jazz tempo. It became the inspiration for the subsequent Gumby TV show when Sam Engel, the president of 20th Century Fox and father of one of Clokey's students, saw the film and asked Clokey to produce a children's television show based on the idea.
In the 1960s, Clokey created and produced the Christian TV series "Davey and Goliath" and the credits for several feature films, including "How to Stuff a Wild Bikini."
Gumby's ability to enchant generations of children and adults had a mystical quality to it, said his son, and reflected his father's spiritual quest. In the 1970s, Clokey studied Zen Buddhism, traveled to India to study with gurus and experimented with LSD and other drugs, though all of that came long after the creation of Gumby, his son said.
Post time 24-9-2011 10:31 PM
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Post time 18-11-2011 02:48 PM
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