I read the news today, oh boy. And it made me sad.

When I was in high school, we watched a movie called Fantastic Animation Film Festival. One of the installments in the film was a trippy 8-minute cartoon that featured a pristine mountain landscape full of happy animals and an acoustic band of musicians, who unfortunately plug in their instruments and crank up the electronics to such a level that the animals all run and hide, and the mountain responds by angrily blowing its top and spewing destructive lava all over the place. It was awesome, but what was truly striking is that the whole thing was rendered, using stop-motion animation, using nothing more than Play-Doh.

Mountain Music was only the second film created by an animator named Will Vinton. His first, called Closed on Mondays, had won an Oscar in the Short Animated Film category (it was the first Oscar awarded to a stop-motion animation) just a couple years earlier. He and his partner called this new medium they were developing “Claymation.”

Vinton next created a series of longer-form films, mostly for educational and non-theatrical mediums, as a well as a feature-length film, The Adventures of Mark Twain. In between these productions, he produced commercials for clients like Domino’s Pizza, Quaker Oats, and Rainier Beer. Which led to his most famous moment, when he created a commercial featuring a group of California Raisins singing “I Heard it Through the Grapevine.” The Raisins exploded into a cultural phenomenon, made “Claymation” a household word, and led Vinton to making music videos for Michael Jackson and a television show for Eddie Murphy.

In 1996, I had a brush with Claymation greatness when I was running the M&M’s account at BBDO advertising in New York. Our creative team was looking for a way to update the staid M&M’s characters, and they turned to Will Vinton to animate them in a new medium he was developing: computerized CGI Claymation. We headed out to Portland OR to develop the wireframes of the characters in Will’s shop, and then down to LA to shoot live-action film and record the character voices (Jon Lovitz as Red; John Goodman as Yellow). The resulting campaign – and the interest generated by the country’s “color-vote” for New Blue – broke all the marketing meters and re-energized M&M’s. (The campaign is still running today, some 22 years after it was first created.)

Amazingly, I had a second delightful experience with Will Vinton a few years later. This time the client was UPS, and the agency was Ammirati and Puris. We wanted to create a warm-hearted seasonal message, and our team came up with a stop-motion story in which a naughty elf (voiced by Gilbert Gottfried) takes Santa’s sleigh for a joyride and destroys it, but all is saved when the UPS guy shows up just in time to deliver all the presents and save the day. So I got to go back to Portland for another fun round in Will’s magical shop.

Sadly, I read the news today and there it was: the obituary of William Gale Vinton, dead at age 70 from multiple myeloma. It made me sad, and I admit I spent some time today internet-surfing through Mountain Music and M&M’s, as well as a few recaps of Will Vinton’s career. But nowhere could I find my old UPS commercial.

And then I remembered: as a parting gift back in 1998, Will had had the storyboard of the commercial laminated and had given us all a couple copies. I had brought mine home to my family, and they became my kid’s favorite place mats.

Today, I looked in the drawer and there they were, right where we had left them.

And I thought, what a gift: being a little kid, eating your oatmeal each morning while looking at the story of the elf, Santa’s wrecked sleigh, and the UPS guy. All rendered just for you by the King of Claymation.

Thanks Will. You were magic.