Dominating children's TV stop motion programming for three decades in America was Art Clokey's Gumby series—which spawned a feature film, Gumby I in 1995—using both freeform and character clay animation. Clokey started his adventures in clay with a 1953 freeform clay short film called Gumbasia (1953) which shortly thereafter propelled him into his more structured Gumby TV series.

Rankin/Bass is a very famous stop motion company. Since the 1960s it has been making many stop motion Christmas specials such as Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, The Year Without a Santa Claus, Santa Claus is Coming to Town, and many others.

In November 1959 the first episode of Sandmännchen was shown on East German television, a children's show that had Cold War propaganda as its primary function. New episodes are still being produced in Germany, making it one of the longest running animated series in the world. However, the show's purpose today has changed to pure entertainment.

In the 1960s, the French animator Serge Danot created the well-known The Magic Roundabout (1965) which played for many years on the BBC. Another French/Polish stop motion animated series was Colargol(Barnaby the Bear in the UK, Jeremy in Canada), by Olga Pouchine and Tadeusz Wilkosz.

A British TV-series Clangers (1969) became popular on television. The British artists Brian Cosgrove and Mark Hall (Cosgrove Hall Films) produced a full length film The Wind in the Willows (1983) and later a multi-season TV series The Wind in the Willows based on Kenneth Grahame's classic children's book of the same title. They also produced a documentary of their production techniques, Making Frog and Toad.

Another example is "Pingu" (1986) about a penguin who lives with his family in an igloo.

In the 1990s Trey Parker and Matt Stone made two original shorts and the pilot of South Park almost entirely out of construction paper.

The animated series Robot Chicken continues to primarily utilize stop motion animation, using custom made action figures and other toys as principal characters. Other action figures, called Stikfas, are very popular stop motion figures and are not extremely expensive. Moral Orel is another stop motion based show, along with the upcoming Mary Shelley's Frankenhole, both created by Dino Stamatopoulos.