Internet fads come and go, but this is the only one we know of that breathed new life into a nearly forgotten pop star’s career. Have you ever been “Rickrolled”?
BACKGROUND
In May 2007, a user on the Internet forum 4chan posted what he claimed to be a link to the trailer for the new video game Grand Theft Auto IV. But the link didn’t take users to Grand Theft Auto; it took them, inexplicably, to a YouTube video of “Never Gonna Give You Up,” the 1987 hit by British pop singer Rick Astley.
Over the next year, the prank began popping up all over the Internet—people would send their friends (or post on Web sites) links to news stories, videos, or anything interesting that someone might want to see. But, of course, the link always went to “Never Gonna Give You Up.” Perhaps you were one of the 30 million people who got “Rickrolled.”
Rickrolling was one of the most talked-about items on the Internet in 2008 and ’09.
• As an April Fool’s Day prank in 2008, YouTube replaced all of its videos—more than 100 million of them—with “Never Gonna Give You Up.”
• In June 2008, political Web sites and blogs reported the uncovering of an amateur video secretly shot of future First Lady Michelle Obama delivering a bitter, antiwhite racist rant. When the video was finally presented it was…“Never Gonna Give You Up.”
• Shortly after the House of Representatives convened in January 2009, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi placed a video on Congress’s official YouTube page, promising a look at the day-to-day proceedings in her office. It was no such thing—Pelosi “catrolled” the world, and the link led to a video of a few cats playing in her Washington office. Then Pelosi Rickrolled the catroll when, halfway through the cat video, the footage abruptly changed to “Never Gonna Give You Up.”
Malaysian ants, when threatened, internally combust, causing their bodies to explode.
But then the Rickroll jumped from viral Internet videos into the real world.
• In September 2009, pranksters at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology managed to scale MIT’s Great Dome and surround it with white scaffolding. Then they hung up seven giant musical notes—the opening notes to “Never Gonna Give You Up.”
• The Cartoon Network enters a float in each year’s Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. In 2008, at the height of the Rickrolling fad, their float featured people dressed as characters from the show Foster’s Home for Imaginary Friends. The characters danced and sang to the theme song from The Courtship of Eddie’s Father (“People, let me tell you ’bout my best friend”) until a door on the float suddenly burst open and Rick Astley emerged. As the monsters continued to dance, he performed “Never Gonna Give You Up” live, bewildering spectators and the TV crew covering the event.
• The Ikee worm, an aggressive computer virus, affected thousands of iPhones in Australia. It replaced the device’s wallpaper image…with one of Rick Astley.
• In the spring of 2008, the New York Mets held an online poll to pick a rallying song to play at home games. The Mets Web site was flooded with five million write-in votes for “Never Gonna Give You Up.” (The Mets decided not to use the song.)
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Here’s another crazy Internet fad: “The Exploding Penguin.” It began as a five-second video clip of a penguin spontaneously combusting at a South Korean zoo, but in 2007, it started to appear on Internet message boards. People posted it when they wanted to express that something they read or saw was “mind-blowing,” or when they wanted to make fun of other message board-users for getting into a silly but “explosive” debate. Want to see the original footage of the exploding Korean penguin? (Warning: It’s graphic.) Go to http://tinyurl.com/2g9mqh.
“Insanity is often the logic of an accurate mind overtasked.”—Oliver Wendell Holmes