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Happy Birthday Charlie Chaplin
Happy Birthday Charlie Chaplin

Hi guys, Ben here. Things got busy around Movie Advocate HQ this week, so my apologies for the relatively light amount of posts. To kick off your weekend right, I just wanted to share a link to Google's surprising, heartwarming ode to Charlie Chaplin on his 122nd birthday. Anybody who goes to www.google.com today sees this above the search bar:

This makes me happy on so many levels:

1. I'm reminded that it has been far too long since I've watched a Chaplin movie. I might have to throw on The Gold Rush this weekend.

2. How many people do you think will be exposed to Chaplin for the first time through Google's homage? Sometimes I wonder about the long term cultural impact of these sort of memes. But everybody uses Google, and if even a thousandth of a percent of those users follows one of the "Charlie Chaplin" Google search links the video forwards you to after it's finished and finds out what a treasure Chaplin was, it will have been worth it.

3. Damn, these guys really pulled the Chaplin mystique off surprisingly well.

4. As great a job as they did, there is still just no substitute for the real thing.

Happy birthday, Charlie.

-Ben