Google is celebrating the 75th birthday of Muppets creator Jim Henson with an interactive homepage doodle that turns the average Web user into a puppeteer.
"Become a digital puppeteer today and tomorrow with our homepage tribute to Jim Henson!" Google tweeted.
Henson's birthday is on Saturday, September 24, but Google got the party started early Friday night. The doodle features six original characters crafted by the Jim Henson Digital Puppetry Studio and brought to life on the Web by Google engineers. Each colorful creature sits atop a small button; press it and the character will follow your mouse's movements. Clicking on the character, meanwhile, will make it "talk."
"It's so fitting since Jim was such a prolific doodler," Mel Horan, art director at the Jim Henson Company, said in a video (below) about the doodle project. "His creative process began with a single doodle and evolved into these amazing characters he brought to life. We tried to capture that and merge it with Google's logo."
The characters were designed at the Henson Company and modeled into a digital puppet in Jim Henson's Creature Shop before being handed over to Google.
"There are also special animations to discover as you play with the doodle," teased Kris Hom, a software engineer at Google.
Henson's son Brian wrote a guest post for the Google blog, in which he remembered his father as "one of those rare parents who was always ready to play again."
"Although he loved family, his work was almost never about 'traditional' families," Brian continued. "The Muppets were a family—a very diverse one. One of his life philosophies was that we should love people not for their similarities, but for their differences."
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