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This archival content was written, edited, and published prior to LAist's acquisition by its current owner, Southern California Public Radio ("SCPR"). Content, such as language choice and subject matter, in archival articles therefore may not align with SCPR's current editorial standards. To learn more about those standards and why we make this distinction, please click here.

Arts & Entertainment

Video: Google's Animated Birthday Tribute to Freddie Mercury

2011-08_mercury.jpg

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Google produced its second ever animated Google doodle (the first was for Charlie Chaplin) with an exuberant one-minute thirty-eight-second piece for Freddie Mercury. The Queen frontman would have been 65 today.

According to NBC Bay Area, it took 3 months to create the work which is set to "Don't Stop Me Now." Jennifer Hom said, "Considering how colorful Freddie's career was, we wanted to create a doodle that was just as colorful." However, you may be wondering why you don't see it on the search page: CNET explains, "The Freddie Mercury doodle is live for most of the world on Monday but is being saved for Tuesday in America--in order not to make anyone see a gregarious side of life on the somber feast that is Labor Day."

On Google's blog, Queen guitarist Brian May writes, "Some people imagine Freddie as the fiery, difficult diva who required everyone around him to compromise. No. In our world, as four artists attempting to paint on the same canvas, Freddie was always the one who could find the compromise—the way to pull it through. If he found himself at odds with any one of us, he would quickly dispel the cloud with a generous gesture, a wisecrack or an impromptu present. I remember one morning after a particularly tense discussion he presented me with a cassette. He had been up most of the night compiling a collage of my guitar solos. 'I wanted you to hear them as I hear them, dear,' he said. 'They're all fab, so I made them into a symphony!'"

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