Google pays homage to ‘Star Trek’ 46th anniversary with interactive Doodle

Élyse Betters | Sep 7 2012 - 11:24 am PT

Trekkies rejoice!

Google is celebrating the 46th anniversary of “Star Trek: The Original Series”, although the first episode’s anniversary is tomorrow, with an interactive Doodle on the homepage. Google told Mashable it launched the game-like Doodle a day early so “people would have time to play with it and discover the entire story.”

The Doodle spotlights the show’s primary characters as letters from the word “Google”. Spock, for instance, is the ‘G’, while Kirk is an ‘o’. It also combines many familiar sounds and sights from the iconic Sci-Fi series including scenery of the USS Enterprise and its Transporter.

Ryan Germick, a self-touted Trekkie and leader of the Google Doodle Team, sat down with Entertainment Weekly to discuss the design process behind today’s Doodle:

We went through lot of different iterations. 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].

Check out Entertainment Weekly for more inside details.

Can you identify the other characters in today’s Doodle? A gallery is below.