April Fool's Roundup

Brace yourself: April Fools' Day, the worst holiday of the year, is upon us again, with its annual onslaught of awkward political gags, careless media blunders, eye-roll-inducing ad campaigns, mean-spirited pranks and, if you're lucky, maybe an actual laugh.

But probably not.

How did we get into this mess? We asked Alex Boese, curator of the online Museum of Hoaxes. He says you can blame the Dutch (who first referenced April Fools' in a 16th-century text) or the French (who overhauled their annual calendar in the 1500s, confusing "fools" who didn't adapt). Or maybe the U.K., home of the first April Fools' Day prank on record, or Germany, which popularized fake April Fools' news stories. And certainly the good ol' U.S.A. - because who else would be tickled by the idea of renaming a national monument the "Taco Liberty Bell?"

He walked us through some of history's most influential April Fools' Day jokes - the notorious, the successful, the truly cringe-worthy.

1698: The washing of the lions at the Tower of London

In the first documented April Fools' prank, Brits handed out invitations to "see the lions being washed at the Tower of London," specifically targeting clueless out-of-towners and newcomers. Ha ha. And the joke was . . . no lions? Well, actually the Tower did have a royal menagerie then, but there was no public washing. But then they resurrected the gag in the 19th century - when there really weren't any more lions there at all! Ha ha? Maybe you had to be there.

1905: The robbery of the U.S. Treasury

The German newspaper Berliner Tageblatt decided it would be a laugh riot to print a story claiming that all the silver and gold had been stolen from the U.S. Treasury, in a highly coordinated heist orchestrated by American millionaires. Then the hoax snowballed when other newspaper editors across Europe believed the story and reprinted it without hesitation; to them, the idea of criminal millionaires hijacking America's government didn't seem so far-fetched, Boese says. He deems this a solid prank. "It caused a bit of a ruckus, but no one got hurt - just embarrassed."

1957: The Swiss spaghetti harvest

In an April 1 news segment, the esteemed BBC presented its viewers with a cheerful report: Swiss farmers were celebrating an unusually plentiful spaghetti crop, thanks to a balmy winter and the eradication of the menacing "spaghetti weevil." The story included staged footage of workers plucking limp pasta from trees. Amazingly, a lot of people believed it, and the prank is widely considered the most successful April Fools' Day joke of all time. "It fooled a lot of people, so it actually worked, but then in hindsight it didn't offend anybody," Boese says. "Everybody just had a good time with it. That's actually a pretty hard combination to get exactly right."

1977: The Republic of San Seriffe

Who wouldn't want to vacation on the exotic, semicolon-shaped islands of Upper Caisse and Lower Caisse in the Republic of San Seriffe? The fictional archipelago - detailed in a seven-page supplement in the Guardian newspaper, rife with droll typographical puns - tricked some gullible subscribers and convinced advertisers that the fool's holiday could be lucrative. "The supplement made a ton of money," Boese says.

1984: Resurrecting the woolly mammoth

Nearly a decade before "Jurassic Park," the concept of bringing animals back from extinction was so wild that any mention of it would obviously be a joke - at least, that was the thinking behind an MIT Technology Review article about Russian scientists who were planning to "retrobreed" the woolly mammoth. But the April Fools' Day fakery was picked up by the Chicago Tribune and other papers before everyone realized it was a prank. (Now, scientists really are talking about bringing extinct animals back to life.)

1992: Nixon's new presidential campaign

Remember that time former president Richard Nixon shocked the nation and gave NPR the exclusive scoop that he was running for office again? "I never did anything wrong, and I won't do it again," he insisted - except it was actually a comedian impersonating him, of course. Considering the general insanity of American politics, we can maybe forgive the many NPR listeners who believed the report and called the broadcasting company in horror. "People may not initially have been thrilled" by the prank, Boese says, "but it's definitely now regarded as an absolute classic."

1996: The Taco Liberty Bell

In a widely published full-page ad, the Taco Bell fast-food chain declared that it had purchased the Liberty Bell and was hereby renaming it the Taco Liberty Bell. Philadelphians freaked out, and baffled workers at the national park were flooded with outraged calls. Taco Bell declared it the "best joke of the day," which may be up for debate, but, Boese says, the prank did make history: Before then, companies mostly stuck to gimmicky wordplay in their April Fools' ads (e.g., "No fooling, we're having a great sale!"); Taco Bell paved the way for more elaborate corporate hoaxes.

1998: The Boston mayor's car crash

Common sense says that it's probably not a brilliant idea to announce the death of a public official in a serious-sounding radio report and expect people to guffaw. But Boston radio hosts Gregg "Opie" Hughes and Anthony Cumia went ahead with their prank anyway, telling listeners that Boston Mayor Thomas M. Menino had died in a car crash. He hadn't, but plenty of people - including members of his family - believed the broadcast, making the cruel prank a "notorious example of what you don't want to do," Boese says. The shock jocks laughed all the way to the unemployment office.

2000: Really, Romania?

What's the best way to celebrate April Fools' Day? If you're the Romanian edition of Playboy magazine, the obvious answer is: Publish a blatantly misogynist step-by-step guide titled "How to Beat Your Wife . . . Without Leaving Marks on Her Body." Beat her "hard and steady," the article advised, adding that "you will notice that the wife sometimes wants to be beaten again." Among those who didn't laugh: women, people who respect women and Playboy's international corporate brass, who were appalled and quickly apologized, the New York Times reported. (Also that year, a Romanian newspaper announced that prisoners would be released from the Baia Mare prison. Dozens of overjoyed relatives waited in vain at the prison gates. The joke is . . . inexplicably terrible, Boese says: "You wonder, what were they possibly thinking?")

2004: The dead chihuahua

Perhaps you recall the "hilarious" scene from "National Lampoon's Vacation" in which Chevy Chase accidentally drags Dinky the dog to his death after forgetting the animal was tied to the bumper of the car? Ugh. Well, a Florida man named Paul Goobie thought this scene was so terrific that he decided to prank his co-worker by tying a dead chihuahua he'd found on the street to the back of the man's truck. Hilarity did not ensue when a sheriff's deputy stopped the co-worker and charged Goobie with failing to properly dispose of a dead animal.

Researchers at the Large Hadron Collider just recently started testing the accelerator for running at the higher energy of 13 TeV, and already they have found new insights into the fundamental structure of the universe. Though four fundamental forces - the strong force, the weak force, the electromagnetic force and gravity - have been well documented and confirmed in experiments over the years, CERN announced today the first unequivocal evidence for Force. "Very impressive, this result is," said a diminutive green spokesperson for the laboratory.

"The Force is what gives a particle physicist his powers," said CERN theorist Ben Kenobi of the University of Mos Eisley, Tatooine. "It's an energy field created by all living things. It surrounds us; and penetrates us; it binds the galaxy together."

Though researchers are as yet unsure what exactly causes the Force, students and professors at the laboratory have already started to harness its power. Practical applications so far include long-distance communication, influencing minds, and lifting heavy things out of swamps.

Kenobi says he first started teaching the ways of the Force to a young lady who was having trouble revising for her particle-physics exams. "She said that I was her only hope," says Kenobi. "So I just kinda took it from there. I designed an experiment to detect the Force, and passed on my knowledge."

Kenobi's seminal paper "May the Force be with EU" - a strong argument that his experiment should be built in Europe - persuaded the CERN Council to finance the installation of dozens of new R2 units for the CERN data centre*. These plucky little droids are helping physicists to cope with the flood of data from the laboratory's latest experiment, the Thermodynamic Injection Energy (TIE) detector, recently installed at the LHC.

"We're very pleased with this new addition to CERN's accelerator complex," said data analyst Luke Daniels of human-cyborg relations. "The TIE detector has provided us with plenty of action, and what's more it makes a really cool sound when the beams shoot out of it."

But the research community is divided over the discovery. Dark-matter researcher Dave Vader was unimpressed, breathing heavily in disgust throughout the press conference announcing the results, and dismissing the cosmological implications of the Force with the quip "Asteroids do not concern me".

Rumours are growing that this rogue researcher hopes to delve into the Dark Side of the Standard Model, and could even build his own research station some day. With the academic community split, many are tempted by Vader's invitations to study the Dark Side, especially researchers working with red lasers, and anyone really with an evil streak who looks good in dark robes.

"We hope to continue to study the Force, and perhaps use it to open doors with our minds and fly around and stuff," said TIE experimentalist Fan Buoi. "Right now, to be honest, I don't really care how it works. The theory department have some crackpot idea about life forms called midi-chlorians, but frankly I think that poorly thought out explanations like that just detract from how cool the Force really is."

With the research ongoing, many at CERN are already predicting that the Force will awaken later this year.

*Sources close to the Data Centre later revealed that these were not the droids they were looking for.

A couple of weeks ago, I said, " It's tough to make predictions, especially about the future of video marketing." Generally, this is true. But I'm fairly confident that I can predict that Google and YouTube are making their final preparations for their annual April Fools' Day hoaxes.

Now, this "tradition" goes back to 2000, when Google's first April Fools' Day hoax invited users to project a mental image of what they wanted to find while staring at the MentalPlex gif animation. After staring at the animated gif, clapping my hands three times, chanting "I believe," and then trying again, I remember finding that I wanted a couple of Tylenol.

16 Best YouTube April Fool's Day Pranks

#1 Rickrolling Fun: On April 1, 2008, YouTube joined its parent company by linking all the featured videos on its homepage to a video entitled, "Rick Astley - Never Gonna Give You Up," Rickrolling all of the users of the video sharing site.

#2 A Virgin Collab: That was also the first year that Google used a couple of YouTube videos for its big announcement of Virgle, a joint project with the Virgin Group to establish the first permanent human colony on Mars. One of the videos featured Richard Branson, the founder of Virgin Group, and the other video featured Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the founders of Google. Okay, so no hilarity ensues. But, this was a hoax. So, everyone was supposed to play it straight.

#3 A New Viewing Experience: On April 1, 2009, YouTube gave users a look at a new "viewing experience" when they selected a video within certain areas such as the "recommended for you" section. This new interface caused the whole layout including the video you were watching to flip upside down. A page on "tips for viewing the new layout" suggested users hang their monitors upside down from the ceiling.

#4 CADIE: Meanwhile, Google announced CADIE, a new "Cognitive Autoheuristic Distributed-Intelligence Entity," on March 31, 2009, at 11:59 p.m. And CADIE already had her own YouTube channel and several videos, including one featuring a Panda (two years before the first Panda update was announced). The Panda, which had a female voice, said, "Hello."

#5 TEXTp: On April 1, 2010, YouTube's logo was overlaid with ASCII text repeating the character "1". The YouTube logo was a reference to some videos having a new quality setting called "TEXTp". As Patrick Pichette, SVP and Chief Financial Officer, Google, said on the Official YouTube Blog, "For every person who selects TEXTp and keeps it on while you watch a video, you save YouTube $1 a second, resulting in potentially billions of dollars of savings for us. So if you care about YouTube, you'll use TEXTp today."

#6 Google Translate for Animals: At the same time, Google UK introduced Translate for Animals (beta), an Android application that allowed humans "to better understand our animal friends." The announcement included a modest little video entitled, "Introducing Google Translate for Animals."

#7 1911 Filter: On April 1, 2011, a button was added to the YouTube video player which, when clicked, would apply a video filter to the video and replace the audio with a recording of Rhapsody Rag, a piece typically played as background music to silent movies in 1911. If subtitles were enabled when watching the video, intertitles were displayed containing the dialogue. The upload page also featured an option to "send a horse-drawn carriage to me to pick [the video] up." In addition, YouTube unveiled the "Top 5 Viral Pictures of 1911."

#8 Gmail Motion: Also on that day, Google introduced Gmail Motion, which used "your computer's built-in webcam and Google's patented spatial tracking technology to detect your movements and translate them into meaningful characters and commands." The announcement was accompanied by a video entitled, "Introducing Gmail Motion."

#9 The YouTube Collection: On April 1, 2012, YouTube added a small disc on the right side of the YouTube logo, which when clicked leads to a page about a service called "The YouTube Collection." It offered every YouTube ever uploaded on DVDs - dispatched in a fleet of 175 trucks. YouTube promoted the service with a video entitled, "The YouTube Collection: The Magic of YouTube in Your Hands."

#10 Google Maps 8-bit for NES: At the same time, Google Maps 8-bit for NES was finally launched. Although availability of Google Maps for 8-bit Nintendo Entertainment Systems (NES) was TBD, users could try it on their browser by going to Google Maps and clicking "Quest" in the upper right hand corner of the map.

#11 Best Video Ever: On March 31, 2013, Tom Liston, the Competition Director at YouTube, announced "YouTube's ready to select the winner." He said, "Tonight at midnight, YouTube.com will no longer be accepting entries." He added, "After eight amazing years, it is finally time to review everything that has been uploaded to our site and begin the process of selecting a winner." In order to do that, the site would be shut down and YouTube wouldn't return online until 2023 when users would finally be able to see what judges thought was the "Best Video" ever ... and nothing else.

#12 Gmail Blue: Also uploaded on March 31, 2013, was a video "Introducing Gmail Blue." It's Gmail, only bluer. Why blue? Well, Google had experimented with a lot of different colors. They tried orange, brown (brown was a disaster), and yellow. The inspiration for blue came from nature. Ocean, sky, blue whales.

#13 NewTrends: On March 31, 2014, YouTube announced "Upcoming Viral Video Trends #newtrends." As the description to the video below says, "Here at YouTube HQ, we write, shoot, and upload all of the world's most popular viral videos. Here's a sneak peek at what you'll be watching in 2014."

#14 Pokemon Maps: Meanwhile, Google joined forces with The Pokémon Company, Game Freak, and Nintendo to develop a new Google Maps app for the iPhone and Android, which allows users to capture Pokémon while exploring the real world using Google Maps.

#15 Sandstorm Takeover: On April 1, 2015, YouTube suggested "Sandstorm by Darude" on many song-related searches. It also adds its button to any video that plays its sequence.

#16 Smartbox: The day before, Google announced Smartbox by Inbox for your physical mail, with auto-sorting folders, push notifications, temperature control, spam protection and more.

What Can we Expect in 2016?

So, if past is prologue, what can we expect YouTube and Google to unveil on Friday, April 1, 2016? Well, my scientific wild-ass guess is that YouTube will announce UntrueView, a new video ad format that makes advertisers pay after a user watches the first three seconds of a video even if the user choses to skip it after five seconds. Hey, if some advertisers seem to want to buy the modern equivalent of "blipverts," then why should their options be limited to Facebook video?

As for Google, I'd bet dollars to donuts that they will announced that the search engine will offer " the right to be forgotten " to any candidate for President of the United in 2016. This includes the 14 Republican and 4 Democratic candidates who have already dropped out. But it will also extend to any unfortunate comments, disgusting remarks, or political gaffes made by the 3 Republican and 2 Democratic candidates who are still running. Hey, why should the right to be forgotten be limited to the European Union and Argentina?

I know, I don't have any unnamed sources to back up these predictions. But, I invite you to participate in a little idle speculation of your own. And then share it with other readers of ReelSEO in the comments below.

It's well-established that brands prank the public for publicity on April Fools' Day, but it's not always the companies doing the fooling around with their brand images. With social media and the breakneck news cycle, it's easier than ever for citizens to go rogue, David and Goliath-style, and quickly gain a worldwide audience.

The following 10 cases are not marketing, but someone messing around, whether for laughs, for change, or with malice. It sends the targets scrambling to do damage control, but sometimes these hoaxes can result in an increase in social media followers, and if handled with finesse, they can elicit praise from the fickle denizens of the Internet.