The Best April Fool's Day Pranks 2010 A comedy article
by Luke McKinney 11,193 112 04/02/2010 01:09 AM 16943 views
April Fool's Day on the Internet is a prankster's paradise, a world where even the biggest multinationals get in on the action, devoting hours of work (on company time) to make people smile. We won't list every prank, since that would mean re-hosting the entire Internet on ZUG, but here are a few of our favorite pranks from around the Web:
Big Business Pranks
You know these pranks were justified in some "Public Relations/Marketing Cost" line item in the annual report, but it doesn't matter. When a major brand bends its imagination -- and production budget -- to pranking, it's the customers who benefit.
Google
Google is well-known for its April Fool's Day pranks, and this year the prank spilled out of the logo and across the entire site. Their name change to "Topeka" is a fun shout-out to that town, whose mayor made an unofficial name-change to "Google" last month (that's not a prank). More distinctive was the Gmail error whereby a cascading vowel failure removed 19.2% of the letters from every message, turning almost everything into incomprehensible l33tspk. This was the perfect combination of "funny" and "anyone who believes it can't have been doing anything important anyway."
TechCrunch decided that simply messing around with letters wasn't quite enough, and so set up Google Nuclear - implying that they were getting into the uranium enrichment business to protect themselves against further aggression from China.
Kodak unveiled their latest upgrade: Aromatography!
They reskinned their entire site to sell it, and while the memory lives on in their blogs, the front page has already reverted to normal. (Though we're still waiting for last year's prank product, which would sell so hard.)
Starbucks
The best thing about Starbucks' prank is how at least half of it would actually sell:
Internet Companies
This is where things get seriously targeted -- the Internet audience is already exceptionally pandered to, and April 1st enables the entire Internet to act as a giant prank amplifier. You can put as much work as you want into an extremely specific joke, knowing for a fact that the right audience will find it.
ThinkGeek
Nerd e-commerce site ThinkGeek has an excellent habit of stocking spectacular products on April 1st. The best is the DHARMA alarm clock...
...because anyone still into LOST would easily sacrifice the remains of their tattered schedule to a randomised alarm clock. They should also click the link to read the full, hilarious product description, which manages to safely combine both LOST and anti-LOST by
a) knowing about the show and
b) knowing how he was going to end it at the start!
The second spoof keeps up their tradition of "Things that will really be built" (like last years Taun-Taun sleeping bag). Introducing the iCade:
Look at that. You want that. We know we do.
XKCD
Geek comic XKCD pulled off the impossible and made itself even more perfectly nerd-tuned to its target audience: anyone arriving was labelled "guest@xkcd" and navigated the page from a command line.
Wikipedia
The idea that a site stuffed with user-generated content could be great at pranks? What madness is that? It worked well, with the featured article on "Wife Selling" and an array of news articles which frankly kick the hell out of our boring, "fact-constrained" news.
TextTube
YouTube let users save them money by switching the resolution down to ASCII grade - proving to everyone still using those pictures in e-mail that it's easy to do it automatically, and nobody's impressed.
Gaming and Comics
The best bit about online pranking is messing with dedicated audiences, and they don't get much more intense than online gamers.
IGN
Another big budget movie blast from IGN, announcing an actual factual Halo movie trailer. Tip: play the video! Don't skip ahead to the text below!
Did we say Halo? We meant Bollyhalo! And if you skipped ahead without watching it first, you just eternally lost an immensely entertaining video moment.
Blizzard
Gaming company Blizzard is well known for pranking their own users, and extended that to their own game mechanics with the Equipment Potency EquivalencE Number.
Yes, the E-PEEN measures your worth as a character by the size of the great big throbbing bar calculated from the value of your equipment. Because size matters.
Finally, two pranks stand out as funny, just for who pulled them:
CERN
How can you even tell when a particle physicist's kidding? Well, when they start describing the new particle as "hideous" and "repulsive" that's a clue, and when they start talking about "an exponential increase in the statistics" -- with the key equation 2^2 = 4 proving everything -- the new "neutrinosaurus" might not be genuine.
Wheel of Fortune/Jeopardy!
Pat Sajak appeared as host of Jeopardy!, an excellent callback to 1997 when he and Alex Trebek swapped shows for a day. This year he was joined by an array of unlikely hosts including Neil Patrick Harris -- and anything that gives Neil Patrick Harris more screen time is automatically good. (And Wheel of Fortune had its own April Fool's Day special as well.)
What was your favorite prank this year? Did you see anything we should have mentioned? Let us know in the comments!
Awesome list! Thanks for sharing. I loved ThinkGeek's "iCade" and "My First Bacon". Even signed up to let them know I'd be interested in them if they became actual products.
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