Doctor Who gets a UK Google doodle. Where's our Whodle?

Google celebrates Doctor Who's 50th birthday with an interactive doodle. But, for now at least, it's not available on the US Google page. Don't fret American Doctor Who fans – here's the skinny on how to access the Whodle today.

Today many Whovians down in Doctor Whoville, kids and parents too, woke to Google’s 50^th  Anniversary Doctor Whodle to play the Who game, while American families waited crying “Boo Who! Why isn’t it on our home pages too?”

“Mom, the WHOLE WORLD’s playing the Doctor Who doodle and our browser’s not showing it,” wailed Quin, 10, whose friends in England were crowing online about the largest doodle Google has done yet.

Shortly thereafter, I began to wail in frustration as my Internet tech skills completely failed me. I couldn’t find the doodle. It isn’t on my home page.

After getting some help from an editor, I can tell parents there’s nothing wrong with your browsers or Internet skills, the interactive Doctor Who doodle is just not available on the US site, but The Telegraph of London reports “it will soon be on home pages all over the world.” Impatient Whovians can find it now on google.co.uk. [Editor's note: The link to the British Google home page was misprinted in the original version of this article.]

Thanks to that foreign link, Quin is hopelessly addicted to the Doctor Who Time Lord game that’s part of today’s doodle.

Time Lords march along the top of word Google to mark the shows 50th anniversary and the second "O" has been transformed into a play button, which when pressed releases a "dalek."

The dalek “exterminates” the word and starts the game where users can choose which of the 11 Time Lords they want to be in a maze challenge traveling time and space in the Tardis (time machine) as you go up in levels. Every time the player loses a life they regenerate as the next doctor.

The highly quotable, inspiring and funny Doctor Who is a common thread in our family history that binds us together, as the Doctor (when played by David Tennant) would say, “from a non-linear, non-subjective viewpoint – it's more like a big ball of wibbly wobbly... time-y wimey... stuff.”

We’ve watched all the seasons together and on our own time-y wimey. Last year Ian, 18, was headed out the door to his senior year of high school in a bright red fez and bow tie.

“It's a fez. I wear a fez now. Fezzes are cool,” Ian quoted directly from a Doctor Who episode I’d missed in which the doctor (played by Matt Smith) says exactly that.

Here’s a little hit parade of the best Doctor Who quotes for kids to hear:

1.       “You want weapons? We’re in a library! Books! The best weapons in the world!”— The Doctor, Season 2, Episode 2

2.       “In 900 years of time and space, I’ve never met anyone who wasn’t important.”— The Doctor, Season 6, Christmas Special

3.       “When you’re a kid, they tell you it’s all… Grow up, get a job, get married, get a house, have a kid, and that’s it. But the truth is, the world is so much stranger than that. It’s so much darker. And so much madder. And so much better.”— Elton Pope, Season 2, Episode 10.

4.       “The way I see it, every life is a pile of good things and bad things. The good things don’t always soften the bad things, but vice versa, the bad things don’t always spoil the good things and make them unimportant.” — The Doctor, Season 5, Episode 10

5.       “There’s a lot of things you need to get across this universe. Warp drive… wormhole refractors… You know the thing you need most of all? You need a hand to hold.”— The Doctor, Season 6, Episode 6

Perhaps the most important quote doesn’t come from The Doctor at all, but from the character Rose Tyler who said, “You don’t just give up. You don’t just let things happen. You make a stand! You say no! You have the guts to do what’s right, even when everyone else just runs away.”

This may be the only visit to “the doctor” the kids will ever love and remember fondly because his practice is universal, he makes house calls right into your living room, prescribes books, hand holding, the value of life and the occasional fez.  

Time to make an appointment with the telly, the time machine, and your kids for the 50^th  season.