Google Pays Homage to Jim Henson
Last Saturday was Jim Henson's birthday and Google had a special tribute for the master puppeteer. Collaborating with the Jim Henson Company, Google has graced their website with a Jim Henson tribute in the form of a doodle. Each creature was designed and created by the Jim Henson Company as a digital puppet for this special occasion. The doodle itself was created in HTML 5.
The puppets forming the word Google has buttons under them that makes them controllable by the user just like a puppet. The puppet would follow around the cursor with their head and by clicking the mouse or pushing the left mouse key, opens the mouth. While many has complained that unlike other interactive Google doodles have sound, the doodle itself has no sound to emphasize that Jim Henson was a puppeteer and the fact that Jim Henson voiced his puppets himself.
The doodle also has their own Easter eggs hidden with the first purple and the green puppet have a special animation that activates when the left mouse button is clicked 15 times in succession while in control of them. The first "o" puppet shakes its head then flips his glasses off his head with it landing safely again on his face while the green puppet moves up and down before it is eaten by the large "e" puppet. Another Easter egg is the underlying code of the doodle showing unused animations of the yellow and the purple puppet. The yellow puppet yawns and the purple puppet blows its trunk. If you right click on a puppet and click the option to see the image, you will see the PNG image of every frame of their animation.
This recent Google Doodle homage for Jim Henson has resulted in the many tributes by other users all around the internet with musical mash-ups, reviews and recreations of famous scenes. The doodle itself hasn't been archived in Google like the playable Pacman tribute it made last May 22, 2010. Who knows what would be the next interactive doodle for the whimsical creatives and engineers of Google.