I had a shot at simplifying the lamp's design by replacing all the springs and metal joints with a standard flexible neck. I thought this might make it a bit easier to animate him being knocked down by the ball as it has a much more straightforward range of motion than all of Luxo's moving joints.

I shot each frame quickly just to check that the animation was smooth and correct. I'm really not pleased with it at all, it seems too jumpy and it's not at all the effect I was going for. I'm trying to get his head to sort of snap downwards as the ball strikes him at quite a high velocity. I'm not sure how much of it just looks "wrong" because there's nothing else going on in the scene — I think it might look a bit better sped up and with the ball actually in place.

I might try playing around with the frame rate and adding a couple more inbetweens here and there to see if I can improve it at all.