The novelty value of the Google Doodles is starting to wear thin. What used to be an amusing quirk of the company has now become a regular occurrence. It’s interesting to look at the kind of topics they choose to give the doodle treatment too: Nothing overtly religious (not even Christmas) and nothing likely to be at all controversial, but it’s fine to promote Scooby Doo or run a weeks worth of Sesame Street doodles.

Still, they do some good stuff, and today’s interactive 20,000 Leagues themed Jules Verne doodle is particularly nice. It’s also fantastic that they use web native technologies, and don’t just slap up some Flash movie. The geekier doodles are brilliant too, especially the Pac-Man one, if only because of the chaos it caused.

The above picture is not entirely accurate because I didn’t edit too much to account for the parallax effect. And here is the image sprite that makes up the frame:

UPDATE: Google have produced a special ‘HD’ version of the Verne doodle. Nice!

(Post edited 2011.10.19 to fix layout problems after migrating from Posterous.)