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Saul Bass: American flair, Soviet aesthetics, with a Brubeck beat

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Google paid animated homage Wednesday to iconic designer and artist Saul Bass with one of its more lively Doodles.

To mark what would have been the movie title designer’s 93rd birthday, the Google cartoon recaps several of Bass’ films using his signature jagged edges and scattered text to the tune of Dave Brubeck’s “Unsquare Dance.”

Bass, born in New York in 1920, worked in Hollywood with such film greats as Alfred Hitchcock, Stanley Kubrick, Otto Preminger and Martin Scorsese.

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The Oscar-winning designer revolutionized the look of opening credits by pairing American flair with 1920s Soviet aesthetics, from 1954’s opera-inspired “Carmen Jones” to the 1998 “Psycho” reboot.

So how many Bass movies was Google able to include? We counted nine in the 80-second montage.

From the top: Google’s logo first gets a lift from “Man With the Golden Arm,” then passes through the political stage of “Advise & Consent,” the Roman Republic of “Spartacus” and into “West Side Story’s” streets of New York.

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Next, the search-engine logo is seen in the swirling eye of “Vertigo,” the geometric rules of “North by Northwest,” the divided body from “Anatomy of a Murder,” the flashing marquee of “Ocean’s Eleven” and wraps with an “O” bouncing across continents from “Around the World in 80 Days.”

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Did we miss any? Let us know in the comments below.

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