I'm quite taken with the Google Doodles this week, as though I was no fan of Sesame Street as a child, in my admiration for the late and truly great Jim Henson I am second to no man. Or gargoyle.I'm particularly fond of today's, which is very clever and which has the Count on it.
For all that, though, I'm a bit surprised at Google having chosen to commemorate so determinedly the fortieth anniversary of Sesame Street (and indeed the twentieth of Wallace and Gromit, seemingly), in the same week that everyone else is commemorating the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall.
I'm not complaining, but I am a bit puzzled. Why would you pick a children's programme over the end of the Cold War, indeed over what may have been the most important day in European if not world history since the end of the Second World War?
It's not as though it's because Sesame Street has lots of bright colours. The Berlin Wall had those too. And better music. Of course, you can kind of blur the two.
1 comment:
I actually rather like Google's quirky references to popular culture in its Google Doodles. Google's a quick-and-dirty reference guide for some lowbrow kinds of searches, and somehow celebrating the fall of the Berlin Wall seems a bit above its station. Plus there's the inevitable political fallout: can it celebrate significant anniversaries of Karl Marx's birth, for example, or the election of Margaret Thatcher or JFK, or the accession of Ayatollah Khomenei, without annoying some and inappropriately exciting others? Best it sticks to the fun and breezy, I say!
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