Google celebrates 46 years of Star Trek: The Original Series with an interactive doodle. (Google)Star Trek: The Original Series made its debut 46 years ago. In that time, the show created a media empire, inspired many rising scientists, and played a surprising role in the American Civil Rights movement.
Google honored the original series on Friday with an interactive doodle. The mini Star Trek episode follows a Googlized Captain Kirk from the bridge of the Starship Enterprise to the clutches of danger. Along the way, Google's design team hid many secrets.
Here's a complete guide to the winks, spoofs, and inside jokes tucked into doodle.
1. Meet the Trekkers
Welcome to the bridge, where so much of Star Trek: The Original Series takes place. Forgive appearances – the crew is not quite itself today.
Google swapped out our usual heroes for a band of alphabetical stand-ins. You may recognize the capital G as Mr. Spock, complete with pointy ears and thick eyebrows. Next, we have O playing the roll of Lt. Uhura, chief communications officer. Standing boldly in the center is Captain Kirk, with his blonde coif in perfect order. Filling out the right flank are Dr. McCoy, Sulu, and a nameless redshirt (more on him in a moment).
As Google designer Ryan Germick points out, few TV shows have such iconic characters that you can identifying them based solely on these cartoon features.
"We went through lot of different iterations," Mr. Germick told EW. "What we’re looking to do is show them. And it seemed like a way to double-down sort of silly, campy nature of what we’re doing with the doodle to put in Kirk’s block of hair, Spock’s ears. It’s a testament to the power of the show, and how iconic it is, that you can just put a couple details on anything, even a letter ‘G’ and know it’s a Vulcan. That was really fun to play with and informs the whole direction of [the silly style]."
The Google logo seems uniquely suited for such a gag. Sure, the search giant has a history of making creative doodles. But think about the colors. Star Trek uniforms come in blue, red, and yellow. Google's logo comes in blue, red, and yellow. The doodle cheats a little by swapping out the usual green L for Sulu's blue uniform, but the hues otherwise match up one-to-one.
The doodle team had plenty of time to think this through. Germick says they've been brainstorming for "the past couple of years" and "started putting it together in earnest three or four months back."
This effort shine through once you start exploring the bridge. Click on Uhura for a lovely close-up. Bang on the console for classic sound effects. And tap the door to continue your space adventure.
Star Trek: The Original Series' surprising role in US civil rights
The Google on Friday depicts cartoon versions of the crew of the Starship Enterprise – an homage to the legendary television show Star Trek: The Original Series, which celebrates its 46th anniversary on Saturday. In an interview with Entertainment Weekly, Google designer Ryan Germick said he intended the doodle (pictured above) to be the ultimate geek homage."For me, [Star Trek] was a vision for the future," Germick said. "I think it was also that it was multicultural, pro-science, and full of curiosity and passion. I think like a lot of good science-fiction, it sort of says a lot about its present era. We can really appreciate what Star Trek did in its time. As an adult, you can appreciate how progressive it was. You learned to be compassionate towards all kinds of people – even alien creatures."
Germick is right: As a television series, Star Trek was far ahead of its time. For starters, there was the multiethnic cast, which included Asian-American and African-American actors. And then in November of 1968, there was "Plato's Stepchildren," an episode that featured one of the first interracial kisses in television history. The participants? Captain Kirk, played by William Shatner, and Lieutenant Uhura, played by Nichelle Nichols.
"It didn't hit me at the time until somebody told me," Nichols told The Huffington Post earlier this year. "I splashed onto the TV screen at a propitious historical moment. Black people were marching all over the South. [Martin Luther King, Jr.] was leading people to freedom, and here I was, in the 23rd century, fourth in command of the Enterprise."
In fact, Nichols later revealed in an interview with NPR, King was actually a driving force in persuading her to stay on the show when she was mulling other career opportunities. This happened in the 1960s, at an NAACP fundraiser in Beverly Hills. Nichols was approached by King, who claimed to be a "Trekkie" himself, as well as her "greatest fan."
Nichols confessed she was thinking of leaving Star Trek.
" 'You cannot do that,' " King said, in Nichols' recollection. "And I was stunned. He said, 'Don't you understand what [series creator Gene Roddenberry] has achieved? For the first time, we are being seen the world over as we should be seen.' He says, 'do you understand that this is the only show that my wife Coretta and I will allow our little children to stay up and watch.' I was speechless," Nichols remembered.
In the end, she decided to stay – and the television world, nor the galaxy itself, was ever the same again.
Via:CSMonitor
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