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."
Jim Henson "loved gadgets and technology," Brian wrote, and his company "continues to develop cutting-edge technology for animatronics and digital animation, like this cool Google doodle celebrating Jim's 75th birthday. But I think even he would have found it hilarious the way today some people feel that when they've got their smartphone, they no longer need their brain."
Tomorrow, meanwhile, YouTube will launch The Jim Henson Company's featured playlist, which includes a retrospective of Jim's performing career and rare behind the scenes clips. It will be introduced by puppets Bobby Vegan and Samson Knight, voiced Bill Barretta and Brian Henson, respectively.
From Sam and Friends to The Muppet Show
Henson was born in Mississippi in 1936 and later relocated to the Washington, DC area, where he got his start in 1954 performing puppets on a Saturday morning TV show. The following year, while studying at the University of Maryland, Henson earned his own own five-minute, twice daily TV show on a local NBC affiliate, Sam and Friends. The show, which Henson produced with his future wife Jane Nebel, featured an early version of Kermit the Frog.
Henson's first nationally known character, according to his company, was Rowlf the Dog, who was a regular on The Jimmy Dean Show in the early 60s. When public TV producer Joan Ganz Cooney was developing Sesame Street several years later, she asked Henson to create a cast of characters for the show, which resulted in such iconic creatures as Bert and Ernie, Big Bird, Oscar the Grouch, Grover, and Cookie Monster.
It was not until 1975, however, that Henson's Muppets got a show of their own, and the world was introduced to Kermit, Miss Piggy, Fozzie Bear, Animal, Gonzo, Scooter, Lew Zealand, and Rizzo the Rat. The show attracted a slew of celebrity stars, and produced a number of feature films, the next installment of which is scheduled to be released later this year.
Henson also brought his creations to the big screen with The Dark Crystal and Labyrinth. The staff who worked on those movies were the beginnings of the Henson Creature Shop. He did not leave TV behind, though, also working on Fraggle Rock, Jim Henson's Muppet Babies, Jim Henson's The Storyteller, and Jim Henson's Greek Myths.
Henson died in 1990 in New York City after a brief illness.
"Jim was clearly a great visionary. But he also wanted everyone around him fully committed creatively. If you asked him how a movie would turn out, he'd say, 'It'll be what this group can make, and if you changed any one of them, it would be a different movie,'" his son Brian wrote. "Every day for him was joyously filled with the surprises of other people's ideas. I often think that if we all lived like that, not only would life be more interesting, we'd all be a lot happier."
For more on Google's doodles, see the slideshow above. One of the company's more popular doodles was a playable image in honor of musician Les Paul, which eventually got its own standalone site. The search giant also celebrated the year's first total lunar eclipse with a doodle that included a live feed of the event.
Recently, it was revealed that Google obtained a patent for its popular homepage doodles, covering "systems and methods for enticing users to access a Web site."